Michael Ratcliffe is a commercial manager and systems engineer for Aquaponics Lab, a collective of developers, makers, designers and engineers committed to supporting technology for the production of healthy, sustainable and locally sourced food. 
He also works with many businesses and and establishments in the North West of England, including:
- Delivering crash courses in technology developments for local prisons
- Helping manufacturing businesses to achieve Six Sigma production
- Supporting engineering students in developing the required skills to pursue degree-level education.
He has previously taught Robotics at Lancaster University, is an active contributor to the element14 community and is an avid farmer.
What’s your earliest memory involving electronics or engineering?
Electrical engineering is a relatively new skill set of mine, I started as a mechanical engineer in the making, living on a farm and learning to weld and repair agricultural machinery.
It's only recently that I've started to expand my expertise into electrical engineering. A second year lab at Lancaster University building an Arduino-controlled robot was my first experience with electronics, bundled into a group with another mechanical engineer and two electrical engineers. It was a fairly basic automated project with many teams competing against each other, but seeing what the electrical engineers could do with those little Arduino’s was an eye opener.
Realising how powerful a tool Microcontrollers could be was my main motivation for adding programming to my skill set. Learning to use a computer and to code was extremely difficult at first, but slowly I started to build things that automated the task I needed and my tasks continue to progress in complexity, leading to a good understanding of automation.
What was your first job in the industry?
Teaching robotics at Lancaster University, it was great fun and I got to be one of the people delivering the lab exercise that got me hooked into electronics a few years earlier.
Who is your professional hero or biggest inspiration?
Carl Sagen:
Carl had a very successful scientific career, but he is here because of his ability to capture the interest of people outside of the scientific community. There's no doubt that Carl captured the imagination of thousands of people by popularizing science, many of whom later went on to do great scientific work. I highly recommend reading his books, my personal favourite is “Cosmos”.
Kimbal and Elon Musk:
Kimbal for his commitment to getting the next generation interested in healthy eating and resilient food production. Elon for being an industry-changer and for a long term vision that is likely to see the human race progress to an interplanetary species.
There are many more people I hold in highest regards, but I believe it is just as important to know who you don’t want to be.
What’s the best thing about your job?
Definitely the people - we are lucky enough to have a good mixture of skill sets for a young organisation, with the right ratio of committed people willing to think big to risk-conscious people, leading to a lot of well documented progress being made. That and we always have good coffee. (Meet the team)
What’s the worst thing?
Resource management - running many projects in parallel is always challenging, particularly coupled with the need to make medium sized batches of products for our partners around the world to test before release, which tends to put a strain on resources for other projects lower down the TRL scale.
What’s the most ridiculous job you’ve ever been asked to do?
People are always getting in touch because of the work I’ve shared on Element14. They often want help with the code writing or the engineering for their project and every so often you get some crazy projects. A particularly quirky one involved distilling the liquid of the kidneys for cosmetic products.
Name a book, paper or blog that you think everybody in your field should read.
Thats a hard one, I would recommend watching TedTalks, especially the ones not related to your field of work. Often a practice employed in another sector can be applied to your area of interest and massively change the industry.
Mikes three must-watch TedTalks:
Michael Rubinstein: See invisible motion, hear silent sounds - This is the video that got me hooked on learning about computer vision.
Riccardo Sabatini: How to read the genome and build a human being - A real eye opener into what machine learning can be applied to.
Adam Grant : The surprising habits of original thinkers - Something we all do, but subconsciously.
If you could speak to yourself five years ago, what would you tell him?
Take full advantage of university, You have access to state of the art facilities and some great minds to help you push projects forward. Don't learn to pass an exam, learn the basic theory of how things work, you can always open a maths book later, learning in this way will be of greater use later in life.
Where do you hope to be five years from now?
Technology has the potential to radically change the life of the world’s poorest farmers, I want to put cheap, reliable and efficient automation in the hands of these farmers.
This is something I have been working on for some time, making cheap automation technologies that outperform humans is the relatively easy part, but the real benefits will come later in the controller life when we can use big data analysis techniques to evolve the controllers year on year to produce more food using fewer resources.
In some cases open-source projects can grow rapidly [quadcopters is a great example], but for these controllers to find their way into the hands of people who really need them I think it will take a larger effort. I plan to pursue a career at the United Nations to push for policies that will provide developing world farmers with the tools that they need to solve the world hunger issue.
Aside from your own, what projects or innovations in the Engineering space are you most excited about right now?
I am very interested to see which industries machine learning and vision-based automation are going to revolutionise in the future, along with what will come from the UN’s 2020 goals.
The plan to go to Mars is a very interesting topic, it presents many engineering challenges:
- Transport and communications between planets
- BaseCamp for intermediate living
- Teraforming for long term habitation
Teraforming being the really interesting one; not only has mankind progressed to the point it can put a man on a celestial body beyond its home planet, but we are potentially going to embark on transforming a harsh lifeless planet into an earth like habitat for long term living. Many ways of achieving this have been proposed, changing a planet in this way will give a rise to much needed knowledge on managing the earth's ecosystem.
What are the biggest challenges facing engineering at the moment?
I think the biggest challenge is in directing engineering efforts to tackle big problems. We have some major issues in the world right now that can be solved by the engineering community, but a lack of resources for funding this work is holding progress back.
How can these challenges be tackled?
Policy change is going to be the main driving force in re-directing engineering. The United Nations 2020 goals are going to see a massive redirection of engineering efforts to tackle many of the big global problems.
How do you like to spend your time outside work?
I am addicted to projects, making most of the things I use from scratch and growing my own food. Travelling at any chance I get, mainly camping or overland type travelling. Elon should not be having all of the fun with the electric cars! I'm working on an Electric Land-Rover defender using a type of variable field BLDC motor I worked on a few years back to use for my day to day driving.
What does success mean to you?
There are lot of aspects to success and it hinges mainly on achieving a good balance between career, social and family.
Being successful in your career to me means waking up in the morning knowing you are going to be working on something you enjoy doing - not counting down the days until the weekend or retirement.
What advice would you give to an aspiring engineer?
Be resourceful, you can do a lot with very little if you are resourceful enough and apply your engineering skills to a problem/industry that you are passionate about.
Complete the following phrase: “If I wasn’t an engineer, I’d be...”
A farmer - but the great thing about being an engineer is you can apply your skills to just about any other industry.
