/ Full archive

Using BRIAN to record your research activity

BU research, Guidance

BRIANWhen the new version of BRIAN is released later this month, a new Research field will be included.

The research field is intended to be used to capture information on your research projects, themes, areas of interest etc.  Use this field to provide up to date information on your current activities and future plans such as conference presentations, attendance etc.

It is important that you update your research information on a regular basis to ensure your profile page contains the most recent information.  Bi-weekly/weekly updates are ideal.  The research information will appear on the front page of the new staff profile pages so it will be easily visible outside BU.

The maximum number of characters for this information is 2,000.

Here is an example of how a research entry could look:

I am currently conducting a research study examining the use of digital imagery in news reporting during times of crisis.

My most recent book, Great Expectations, was published by Chapman and Hall, in June 2013.

My overseas work is largely based in Peru where I am involved in the evaluation of a community-based project funded by Amantani.  This involves connecting communities, and in particular, school aged children with global changes.  I will be visiting Lima and Arequipa in October ’13 to continue with my research and hope to establish a network with Guayaquil in Ecuador.

I am organising a conference to be held on 13th November 2013 on the ‘Transparency and accountability of journalism’.  Applications for papers to be submitted will be open on 1st October.  More details can be found here: www.journo.conf@BU.ac.uk

If you are interested in journalism in countries in conflict then please contact me for potential collaboration opportunities at joe.bloggs@BU.ac.uk

If you have time in the next couple of weeks, please prepare your research entry so that it can be pasted into BRIAN when the new Research field becomes available.

New look BRIAN

BU research, Guidance

When the new version of BRIAN is released on 23 September 2013, you will notice several improvements in the look and feel of the application.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BRIAN continues to provide information on your publications and professional activities,  With the new version, we will also be introducing the ability for you to enter information on significant grants that you have won.  Look out for more information on grants on Wednesday.

The new BRIAN homepage includes a new navigation menu on the left side of the screen.  The My Profile options presents the information in BRIAN in a CV format and importantly includes the ability to upload and maintain your own profile picture.  You will only be able to upload one picture at a time but you can change your profile pictures as often as you wish. Explore allows you to search the information in BRIAN and save searches for re-use.

We will be showcasing some of the new features of BRIAN in a series of posts this week.  We will also be organising some training in BRIAN on both campuses in early October to help any new or existing BRIAN users get to grips with the application and how it can help you.

If you have any comments, feedback or items you would like us to feature on the blog, please contact us at BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk

Tomorrow we will explain the changes being made to the recording of your current research activities in BRIAN.

Great potential for cross-School collaboration

BU research, Guidance, Research news

At BU, we subscribe to Research Professional, which enables you to find out what funding opportunities are available as soon as they’ve been published by the funder.  Research Professional have just launched a new ‘Expressions of interest’ feature which allows you to register your intent to apply for a funding opportunity.

You may think, what’s in it for me?  Well, this feature will list all users from BU who have already expressed interest in the call, which opens up the potential for cross-Collaboration of Schools.  It can also show you the possible level of demand from BU for a call and will be particularly useful when a call has a quota for each institution.  This will allow us to see who may apply and put in place processes to deal with quota calls (there may be a need for internal peer review if BU are only allowed to submit one application).

It couldn’t be easier to use either.  When viewing a funding opportunity you will find the “Express interest” button in the right column and just simply click this.  Clicking on this button will display your name in the right-hand column. This will be visible to other users at your institution, alongside a contact button allowing them to email you. All users from your instituion who have expressed interest in the funding opportunity will be listed here.

 

 

 

 

 

Expressions of interest will also be listed in the ‘Our institution’ section.  On our institution home page, you will find the ‘Expressions of interest’ tab.  Here you will be able to see the funding opportunities you have expressed interest in, as well as any expressions of interest from others at your institution, listed in chronological order.  Each Group has its own ‘Expressions of interest’ tab, listing expressions of interest made by members of that Group.

If you wish to revoke your expression of interest, view the relevant funding opportunity in the ‘Funding section’.  The ‘Express interest’ button will have changed to a ‘Revoke interest’ button.  Clicking this button will remove your expression of interest; it will no longer be displayed either on the opportunity itself or in the ‘Our institutin’ section.

Research Professional

BU research, Funding opportunities

Every BU academic has a Research Professional account which delivers weekly emails detailing funding opportunities in their broad subject area. To really make the most of your Research Professional account, you should tailor it further by establishing additional alerts based on your specific area of expertise.

Research Professional have created several guides to help introduce users to ResearchProfessional. These can be downloaded here.

Quick Start Guide: Explains to users their first steps with the website, from creating an account to searching for content and setting up email alerts, all in the space of a single page.

User Guide: More detailed information covering all the key aspects of using ResearchProfessional.

Administrator Guide: A detailed description of the administrator functionality.

In addition to the above, there are a set of 2-3 minute videos online, designed to take a user through all the key features of ResearchProfessional.  To access the videos, please use the following link: http://www.youtube.com/researchprofessional 

Research Professional are running a series of online training broadcasts aimed at introducing users to the basics of creating and configuring their accounts on ResearchProfessional.  They are holding monthly sessions, covering everything you need to get started with ResearchProfessional.  The broadcast sessions will run for no more than 60 minutes, with the opportunity to ask questions via text chat.  Each session will cover:

  • Self registration and logging in
  • Building searches
  • Setting personalised alerts
  • Saving and bookmarking items
  • Subscribing to news alerts
  • Configuring your personal profile

Each session will run between 10.00am and 11.00am (UK) on the fourth Tuesday of each month.  You can register here for your preferred date:

24th September 2013: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/882372120 

These are free and comprehensive training sessions and so this is a good opportunity to get to grips with how Research Professional can work for you.

VS-Games 2013, the fifth outing of the International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications will be hosted at Bournemouth University, UK between the 11th and the 13th of September 2013

BU research

 

VS-Games 2013, the fifth outing of the International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications will be hosted at Bournemouth University, UK between the 11th and the 13th of September 2013.

With the conference organized in previous years at locations such as Coventry (UK), Braga (Portugal), Athens (Greece) and Genoa (Italy), it will take place, for 2013, at the Kimmeridge House building of Bournemouth University, situated at the main Talbot campus of the institution.

The development and deployment of games with a purpose beyond entertainment and with considerable connotations with more serious aims is an exciting area with immense academic but also commercial potential. This potential presents both immediate opportunities but also numerous significant challenges to the interested parties involved, as a result of the relatively recent emergence and popularity of the medium. The VS Games 2013 conference aims to address this variety of relevant contemporary challenges that the increasingly cross-disciplinary communities involved in serious games are currently facing. This will be achieved by, amongst other ways, the comprehensive dissemination of successful case studies and development practices, the sharing of theories, conceptual frameworks and methodologies and, finally, the discussion of evaluation approaches and their resulting studies.

All accepted VS Games 2013 papers, full, short and posters, plus workshop ones, will be included (perpetually) in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library after the completion of the event. The conference is technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society. Also, the authors of the best papers will be invited to write an extended version for inclusion in the Elsevier Entertainment Computing journal and IGI Global’s International Journal of Game-Based Learning. Authors of selected technical articles with a focus on computer graphics will be invited to submit extended versions of their works to be considered for publication in Elsevier’s Computers and Graphics Journal.

As BU has been the main financial sponsor of the conference, all BU members of staff and research students are invited to attend VS Games 13 free of charge (you will need to display your staff card at the registration desk).

If you have a passing interest in game design and serious games, a very multi-disciplinary proposition in themselves which can offer impact/public engagement benefits for all kinds of scientific disciplines, then please by all means join us and sit through the talks! You may well find this sparks off new ideas for you in terms of your own research field and output and how computer/video games can be used to support and/or enhance it.

A full programme and more details can be found on the official conference website at http://www.vsgames2013.org/

International Day of the Disappeared 2013

BU research

Dr Melanie Klinkner studies the use of forensic science for investigation and prosecution of atrocities such as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Here she talks about the International Day of the Disappeared.

Today serves as a reminder of the number of people around the world who are missing as a result of armed conflicts. We remember the families who face a daily struggle to understand what has happened to their loved one.

Dr Melanie KlinknerEnforced disappearances have been and continue to be used by oppressive regimes in an attempt to dispose of political opponents secretly and to instil fear in the population. Article 2 of the Convention for the Protection for all Persons from Enforced Disappearance (2006) defines disappearances as ‘the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with authorisation, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law’.

The Red Cross work tirelessly to reunite families where possible and organisations such as the International Commission on Missing Person support identification of bodies.

In the aftermath of conflict and gross human rights violations, there is an overwhelming need of the families is to know the truth about the fate of their loved ones and, where the worst has happened, to receive their human remains as an absolute proof of death and to facilitate burial and commemoration rituals.

This need is mirrored in international human rights and international humanitarian law development, which has advanced the recognition of victim rights of national or international crimes and human rights abuses. The Basic Principles encompass the need for victims and their families to know the truth about what happened to their loved ones and demands that the bodies of those disappeared are recovered, identified and buried.

Melanie works alongside Ian Hanson and Paul Cheetham in the School of Applied Sciences, who have developed standard operating procedures for forensic investigation of mass graves. These have been used internationally in judicial and humanitarian contexts, bringing those responsible for atrocity crimes to justice and providing much needed answers to families.

Read more about the Red Cross

Dr Melanie Klinkner’s profile

International Commission on Missing Persons

BFX Final Films 2013

Research news

BFX, Bournemouth’s excting new Visual Effects and Animation Festival, has finished after 6 weeks and a lot of blood, sweat and tears.  The 10 competing teams have finished their films – and they are awesome!

You can watch all of the films here: http://www.bfxfestival.com/bfx-final-films-2013/

There has been a great variety of work, completed in such a small period of time and with only 6-7 machines between them to work and render on – so their time keeping had to be spot on.  Most of these students haven’t even graduated yet.

Truly astonishing what they have managed to produce.

If you like what you see, leave a vote on Youtube; for a bit of fun we have a ‘ Best Film – Public Vote’ category.

Once again thanks to all the feedback and mentoring from lecturers at the NCCA, Arts University Bournemouth and artists from Framestore, Double-Negative, The Mill, MPC, Realise Studios, Hibbert Ralph Animation, Outpost VFX and Cinesite.

If your interested in making similar films, or how the creative industries work – check out our September Festival in Bournemouth 

The BFX Festival is organised by the VFX Hub, funded by BU’s HEIF grant.

Money, Money …. Money Makes the World go Around?

News from the PVC

Now even I know that this is a line from a song – we have established previously my lack of musical education I think?  According to Google it is a song in the musical Cabaret and perhaps made famous by Liza Minnelli?  Who knows, but the line chimes (forgive the pun) with a point raised by a colleague in a recent promotion forum I was chairing; why does everything revolve around money?

I have been reflecting on this, as I do about most things, and think it deserves a fuller answer.  The context was that in any senior promotion discussion the amount of money one brings in becomes relevant whether it’s through educational innovation or research and why should this be true?  Why should it be up there with for example producing written output or delivering top quality education?  We have Performance Indicators within BU2018 that focus on money.  For example, we aspire that by 2018: every academic should generate at least £18k of Research and Knowledge Exchange (RKE) income; every Professor should be associated with at least one and half post-docs; and that every academic should supervise at least one PGR student.  As a community we dedicated ourselves as part of BU2018 to maintaining a similar sized student body and to increasing the proportion of postgraduate students to around 40%, something that will require a lot of portfolio innovation.  Let us be honest, all these PI’s revolve around generating income and we all need to play a role in bringing the cash in, so in this context cash does matter and yes it does make our University World spin.

However there is a huge but here; it is not about the income itself but about what it allows you to do that matters.  Some of you will have heard me use the line about ‘being a time lord’ before but, however corny it might be, it is the real justification for why academics need to work together to generate RKE income.  As academics we are limited by time, it is the elephant in the room whenever we talk about work load planning, it stalks us daily in our working lives.  But the way to cheat the clock is to build a team; a team of research students, of post-doc’s or visiting academics.  If you build a team then you cease to be limited by the clock but by inspiration and imagination!  That is why RKE income matters, because it allows you to build that team, to live beyond the clock!  That is why we have income targets around RKE not for the sake of the cash itself.

It is the same with education.  Innovation around new courses, units and delivery models ultimately brings in more students especially in the deregulated parts of the market (e.g. ABB+, international, postgraduate and CPD).  That income allows us to recruit more academics, to invest in better estate and, therefore, a better experience for our staff and students. Check out https://www.ilisters.com/cyprus/property/for-sale/in-troodos for properties in Troodos.  So yes income does matter, but not for the sake of cash itself, but what that cash allows us to do.

By way of example, a few years back I ran a small consultancy operation out of BU in the field of contaminated land.  Not an area that particularly interests me but one in which I could generate income for BU, part of which was invested back into my research.  In fact that income helped finance my work in East Africa, leading to my footprint paper in Science, and ultimately to my current NERC grant which finishes this September.  The income I generated helped me to get promotion and more importantly fulfil one of my most cherished research ambitions.  So yes income does make our University World spin and we all have a role to play.  The Grants Academy is there to help you get started and the staff of the Research Development Unit are there to help, so why not help to make our World spin this coming year?

BU Professor published in 20th Anniversary edition of leading journal

BU research

Steve Letza, a Professor in Accounting and Finance within the Business School , has been honoured to feature in the 20th Anniversary issue of Corporate Governance: An International Review; a leading journal at the forefront of research in this area. This special edition consists of articles from the past decade that have had the highest number of citations per year, and thus have been widely used in academic research.

Steve co-authored the article Shareholding Versus Stakeholding: a Critical Review of Corporate Governance alongside Xiuping Sun and James Kirkbride in 2004 and it offers a new perspective on the subject; identifying the need for organisations to adapt to the changing environments they operate in. 

Congratulations Steve!

First Impressions

BU research, Guidance, News from the PVC

Let’s face it when BRIAN was launched last year the staff profile pages, which drew information from it and were written in something called VIVO, were less than satisfactory!  Lots of technical problems with the input data from BRIAN and its presentation was not up to BU’s normal standard.  You expressed your concerns in no uncertain terms and we have now put it right.  Working with academic colleagues IT and M&C have worked hard over the summer to construct a completely new interface, not in an obscure computer code but in something we can maintain and evolve easily ourselves.  They have done a brilliant piece of work, so BRIAN has a new set of external clothes and they rock!

After all, first impressions count and the staff pages are a crucial portal through which we present our academic achievements and expertise; and in reverse it is a lens for the world to view and search the wonderful talent that exists here at BU.  The new pages go live at the start of October 2013; they are finished and ready but there is an upgrade to BRIAN due in September which needs to be installed first.

 The improvements include:

 –       A more professional look and feel

–       The opportunity to showcase selected publications

–       Users can upload their own photo (via BRIAN)

–       Improved searching by name, keyword

–       Closer integration with the research themes

–       Fixing the technical problems we have experienced

Since we have developed this interface ourselves here at BU we can develop it further and continue to respond to your feedback.  The BRIAN team are managing the development of the replacement.  If you would like to know more about the project, please email BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk.

 The staff profile pages will continue to use data drawn from BRIAN so please keep updating your content in BRIAN since a profile is only as good as the input!  There should be no impact on staff during the switch to the new pages, although there may be minor disruption to the availability of the profile pages during the transition.  Let me know what you think of the new pages?

Fusion Investment Fund Supported Exploration to Western China

BU research, Fusion

The project supported by BU fusion investment fund has enabled us to establish a strategic partnership between the National Centre for Computer Animation, Bournemouth University and the School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Engineering of China (UESTC). The UESTC is located in Chengdu, one of the largest cities in Western China. Such a relationship with a top ranked University in China benefits BU’s international strategy and boosts its influence to China, which is a fast growing market for international student recruitment.

The execution of the project has led to a range of successful networking activities including multi-disciplinary knowledge exchange and strategic meetings on the collaboration of two universities at different levels. Three bi-laterals visits took place: a group of UESTC delegates’ visit to BU led by Prof. Zhiguang Qin from China in January, 2013; Prof. Jian J. Zhang’s visit to UESTC in April, 2013; and Dr. Jian Chang’s visit to UESTC in May, 2013. During the visits, two research workshops were held at BU and UESTC respectively where new ideas were discussed on research collaboration and effective cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange, with focus on computer animation; distribute computing and social network computing.

The activities have been mapped to BU’s strategic international development, in particular to the development of long-term and self-sustainable relationships with universities in China. The initiated activities will further lead to multi-disciplinary research collaboration between both institutions and international student recruitment.

BU REF2014 preparations and BRIAN

Research assessment

The majority of the BU REF2014 Staff Selection was finalised last month, although the review of new and additional outputs is currently still on-going to maximise Bournemouth University’s REF2014 return.

Post BU REF2014 Staff Selection process, the BU REF Team are now currently working on gathering and collating all necessary information to be uploaded onto the external REF Submission System before the deadline of the 29 November 2013.

The University’s publications management system BRIAN is being used to help gather and collate relevant outputs data. If you notice that your REF2014 profile on BRIAN has changed, please don’t be alarmed – this is part of the process in getting all outputs data ready to be uploaded onto the REF Submission System.

If you would like to find out more about the current BU REF2014 progress, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me at pengpeng.ooi@bournemouth.ac.uk.

Latest Major Funding Opportunities

BU research, Funding opportunities, Research news

The following opportunities have been announced. Please follow the links for more information:

Please note that some funders specify a time for submission as well as a date. Please confirm this with your RKE Support Officer.

You can set up your own personalised alerts on ResearchProfessional. If you need help setting these up, just ask your School’s RKE Officer in RKE Operations or see the recent post on this topic