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Insights from the Alan Turing Institute Data Study Group

Women's Academic Network

Stepping into the world of data science at the Alan Turing Institute (ATI) Data Study Group from September 9-13, 2024 was an exhilarating experience. As the national institute for data science, the ATI’s strong connections to academia and industry set the stage for a week of intensive collaboration and problem-solving.

Joining the Transport for London (TfL) project within the hackathon-style event, I found myself amidst an eclectic team of 11 individuals, each bringing a unique set of skills and backgrounds to the table. The project’s challenge of identifying physical assets on the London Underground from point cloud data presented a thrilling opportunity to apply our collective expertise to a real-world problem.

The task at hand was no small feat – analysing point cloud data to pinpoint key track features along the London Underground network. With collected image data, our goal was to automate the detection and classification of critical track components such as sleepers, rails, signalling equipment, and more. Our team’s approach was multifaceted, involving rigorous preprocessing, segmentation model training, and advanced data analysis techniques. By leveraging tools like U-Net and SAM 2 for image segmentation and employing post-processing methods to extract valuable insights from the predicted masks, we made strides towards achieving our objectives.

As an individual who recently completed a PhD thesis on “Complex Urban Road Networks: Static Structures and Dynamic Processes,” this opportunity to apply my research expertise in a practical setting was both challenging and rewarding. The seamless blend of academic knowledge and hands-on problem-solving during the ATI Data Study Group not only expanded my technical skills but also reinforced the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in tackling complex data challenges.

Thanks to The Alan Turing Institute,  especially TuringDSG organisers for an incredible opportunity. I would like to extend my gratitude to my PhD supervisor Dr. Wei Koong Chai for supporting my professional and personal development.

Assemgul Kozhabek (Computing Department, SciTech  )

Understand what hate crime and discriminatory abuse are and how best to respond to them

Over the summer, Jane Healy (Principle Academic in Criminology at Bournemouth University) led an inter-disciplinary research team at Bournemouth University and Royal Holloway which has conducted a survey to evaluate approaches to safeguarding adults who experience hate crime and discriminatory abuse. 

Responses were received from across the UK, identifying challenges and providing examples of good practice. We are keen to share these findings as widely as possible.

The team are hosting a webinar where they will outline the context of hate crime and discriminatory abuse and discuss the anonymised findings and next steps, in a free online event on Tuesday 22 October 2024, from 12pm to 13:30pm. 

Please click on this link to reserve your tickets: Exploring restorative practice approaches to safeguarding adults Tickets, Tue 22 Oct 2024 at 12:00 | Eventbrite 

Please forward to anyone who might be interested in learning more about hate crime and discriminatory abuse, and the research findings.

We look forward to seeing you all at the online event.

Jane Healy and team

Research Connect – MSI Monthly Research Seminar Series Launched

On 11th September 2024, department of Marketing, Strategy and Innovation (BUBS) launched the Research Connect Seminar Series, a monthly event aimed at providing a supportive space for academics and PGRs to share their research and receive constructive feedback. The series is designed to help PGRs build confidence in presenting their work while encouraging collaboration among researchers.

The one hour long seminar format includes two presentations—one by a staff member and one by a PGR—each followed by a discussion. In the first session, Tim Gale presented his research on tourism, and Mukeh Kenneth shared his study on disaster risk governance in Sierra Leone.

The series will continue in the academic year until May 2025, offering a great opportunity for MSI staff and PGRs to engage, present, and collaborate.

Making Research More Inclusive: An Invitation to Health and Social Care Researchers for a Collaborative Event on 7th October

Calling all health and social care researchers! Are you seeking ways to design more inclusive research opportunities? You are invited to join us for our next stakeholder event on Monday 7th October, where we are collaborating with community groups and people who are homeless and vulnerably housed to design inclusive ways of involving people who do not typically engage in research.

Purpose: The aim of the I am more than…. project has been to create inclusive, shared spaces for people from the homeless community (people who are homeless or vulnerably housed, as well as the staff and volunteers who support them) to share with health and social care researchers and colleagues what having a voice and being involved in research means to them. This allows us to come together to understand the barriers and enablers to participation and to co-create inclusive opportunities in health and social care research.

This event will share updates on the learning so far and be used to co-design a sustainable model for researchers to harness the expertise of people with lived experience of homelessness and being vulnerably housed. Together, we will explore how to develop research collaborations with voluntary and community sector organisations.

Tickets are available via the link below.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/rend-2-research-engagement-with-people-who-have-experienced-homelessness-tickets-993657615677

Events taking place as part of UK National Postdoc Appreciation Week

Postdoc Appreciation Week logoUK Postdoc Appreciation Week (PAW) is an annual nationwide event celebrating the contribution postdocs make to research and academic life.

This year, Postdoc Appreciation Week runs from Monday 16 September to Friday 20 September with free events taking place to connect and support researchers.

The PAW flagship event this year, Into the Postdoc-verse: building relationships across dimensions, will explore how to authentically network and build long-lasting relationships across disciplines/sectors. This will include live networking sessions to practice and build connections right away as well as a keynote talk by Dr Steve Cross, founder of Bright Club.

The event takes place 10am – 12.15pm, Monday 16th September.  Register here: https://event-lab.co.uk/paw/

To celebrate the 5th anniversary of PAW,  free online 1-2-1 careers sessions are also available on Tuesday 17th September for those who do no have institutional support for careers/CV clinic. Sign up here: https://tinyurl.com/UKNPAWcareers

Find out more about UK Postdoc Appreciation Week on the PAW website. 

Congratulations to BU Visiting Faculty Dr Ans Luyben

international, Publishing, writing

Congratulations to Dr. Ans Luyben on the publication of her latest midwifery article ‘How to promote midwives’ recognition and professional autonomy? A document analysis study’ [1]. This latest paper will appear in the forthcoming November issue of the international scientific journal Midwifery, published by Elsevier. 

The paper identified challenges in Belgian midwives’ recognition and professional autonomy and provided recommendations to address them, emphasizing the importance of recognized authority in midwifery. Implementing these recommendations can positively impact midwives’ recognition and autonomy in Belgium as well as in other countries.  Ans has long been affiliated with the Centre of Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH) as Visiting Faculty and she works in the Frauenzentrum (Centre for Women’s Health), Lindenhofgruppe, Bern, Switzerland.

Well done!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

 

 

Reference:

  1. Vermeulen, J., Buyl, R., Luyben, A., Fleming, V., Tency, I., Fobelets, M. (2024) How to promote midwives’ recognition and professional autonomy? A document analysis study Midwifery, 138: 104138.  

Paper with a difference

international, open access, Publishing, writing

Last night ResearchGate informed us that our paper ‘Understanding health education, health promotion and public health‘ had reached 6,000 reads [1].  This reflective paper in an Open Access journal tries to bring a little more clarity in the confusion around the difference between the concepts of health education, health promotion and public health. We argue that such confusion does not limit itself to the individual terms but also to how these terms relate to each other. Some authors and public health practitioners use terms such as health education and health promotion interchangeably; others see them clearly as different concepts.

In this theoretical overview paper, we have first of all outlined our understanding of these individual terms. We suggest how the five principles of health promotion as outlined by the World Health Organization (WHO) fit into Andrew Tannahill’s model from 2009 [2] of three overlapping areas: (a) health education; (b) prevention of ill health; and (c) health protection. Our schematic overview places health education within health promotion and health promotion itself in the center of the overarching disciplines of education and public health. We hope our representation helps reduce confusion among all those interested in our discipline, including students, educators, journalists, practitioners, policymakers, politicians, and researchers.

The paper is co-authored by a primary school teacher based in Dorset, and four professors who have a combined experience in the wider public health field of over a century.

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health

 

References:

  1. van Teijlingen, K., Devkota, B., Douglas, F., Simkhada, P., van Teijlingen, E. (2021) Understanding health education, health promotion and public health, Journal of Health Promotion 9(1):1-7.
  2. Tannahill, A. (2009). Health promotion: The Tannahill model revisited. Public Health, 123(5),396-399. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2008.05.021

Presenting Studies on LLMs Reasoning Capabilities in Sentiment Analysis of Mass-Media texts at NLPSummit-2024

conferences, Knowledge Exchange

 

As a part of reseach studies in Natural Langauge Processing (NLP) field, this year I am delighted to present the most recent advances of Generative AI in it at NLPSummit-2024. The 5’th summit represents a free online conference September 24-26, hosted by JohnSnowLabs. The conference is dedicated to showcase the best practices, real-world case studies and challanges in Generative AI for Natural Language Processing.

By joining to my talk you become aware of how Large Language Models (LLMs) could be applied for retrieving implicit information from non-structured texts. Sentiment Analysis represent one of such problems, and as a task aimed at extraction of the hidden opinion of the author towards objects mentioned in text. We start by discovering reasoning capabilities of the most popular Large Language Models (ChatGPT, Mistral, Gemma, Microsoft-Phi, and more) out-of-the-box to show their limitations in retrieving authors opinion from Mass-media texts. To address the existed limitations in models reasoning capabilities 🧠 , we cover Chain-of-Thought technique and explore the way of its proper adaptiation in Sentiment Analysis. It is worth to note that the techniques, to be covered, could be distributed and adapted in the other domains that go beyond Mass-media. Such domains include but are not limited to: medical (adverse drug reaction), literature (fictional chatbot development), conversational (emotion extaction / empathy mapping).

These advances were achieved while at Centre for Applied Creative Technologies CfACTs+ by working on “Marking Medical Image Reports Automatically with Natural Language Processing (NLP-MMI)” project.

The keylinks realted to the event and presentation in particular, are as follows:

📍 Event page: https://www.nlpsummit.org/nlp-summit-2024/
⏰ When: 24-26 September 2024 (Online)
⭐ Project: https://github.com/nicolay-r/Reasoning-for-Sentiment-Analysis-Framework

Dr. Nicolay Rusnachenko
Research Fellow at Centre For Applied Creative Technologies PLUS (CFACT+)
Bournemouth University

RKEDF: Early Career Researcher Network – Introduction/New to BU

Training

RKEDF: Early Career Researcher Network – Introduction/New to BU

Weds 2nd Oct 14:00-15:00, Talbot Campus

 

This session is facilitated by BU Professors and ECRN conveners.  It is an open introduction to working, researching and thriving at BU where you will learn about key contacts and services, how to manage the expectations of your role, and share advice on developing your skills as an early career researcher.

It is open to all who identify as being in the early stages of their research career – whether a Postgraduate Researcher, newly-appointed academic, or returning to research.

Book your place here

If you are not already a member of the Early Career Researcher Network (ECRN) but would like to be, or if you have any questions, please contact: RKEDF@bournemouth.ac.uk.

 

BRIAN drop-in surgery – Talbot Campus

BRIAN

BRIAN drop-in surgery

Date: September 18th

Time: 10:00-12:00

Location: F203, Talbot Campus

 

Come along to this 2-hour drop in surgery if you have any questions or issues relating to BRIAN, or if you need a refresher on how to update your profile.

No booking is required, just come along with your laptop and questions!

Open and Engaged Conference at the British Library

open access

International Open Access week will take place this year on October 21 – 27, 2024. Open Access week is a global initiative which offers an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.

As part of the week, on 21 October 2024, the British Library will host a one-day conference, Open and Engaged 2024: Empowering Communities to Thrive in Open Scholarship.

This hybrid event will take place at the British Library’s Knowledge Centre in London, St. Pancras and will be streamed online for those unable to attend in-person.

More about the conference including the full programme and a link to the registration form are available at https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2024/08/open-engaged-2024.html

If you have any questions, please contact the British Library directly at openaccess@bl.uk.