Category / Computer Science

Cyber Security Seminar: Everyday Security for Everyday Lives (Lizzie Coles-Kemp, Royal Holloway)

Our next Interdisciplinary Cyber Security Seminar will take place on Tuesday, 4th March at 5pm.
The seminar will take place in EB202 in the Executive Business Centre, and will be free and open to all. If you would like to attend, please register at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/interdisciplinary-seminar-in-cyber-security-tickets-10691914805

Our speaker will be Dr Lizzie Coles-Kemp. Lizzie is a qualitative researcher, interested in the everyday practices of information production, circulation, curation and consumption within a broad range of communities. She works in Possible Futures Lab within the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway University of London. Her main focus is the interaction between people and security and privacy technologies, how each influences the other and the communities of practice that emerge. As part of this focus, she explores topics such as identity and technology use, gender and information management and information control as a means of power. Current interdisciplinary work includes: value sensitive design in public service delivery, cultural analysis in institutional security and the use of visual research methods in interdisciplinary research.

Abstract: Over the last five years at the Information Security Group, Royal Holloway, a research group called Possible Futures Lab has been working on projects that explore what notions of information control mean in the context of everyday lives. We have two primary objectives: to improve designs related to everyday information production and control and to influence thinking on topics of everyday information security. Each of our projects has started with ethnographic research that has enabled us to identify and observe the relevant spaces and places. From there we have co-designed with each community discovery tools for seeing, experiencing and exploring these spaces. These tools help us to better understand the community viewpoints on information and its control and to design/re-design services and technologies to better support this position. This talk gives examples of this approach in two of our projects that focus on cyber security decision making.

Psychology Research Seminar: Laughing in the face of adversity – the influence of affective state on situation awareness

Venue & date: Thursday 30th January at 4pm in K103 (Kimmeridge House)

Situation awareness can be loosely defined as, ‘knowing what’s going on around you and what to do about it.’   In everyday life we make complex decisions – some good, some bad – on the basis of our awareness of what is going on around us.  Sadly situation awareness can sometimes be sub-optimal leading to catastrophic errors such as road traffic accidents and air crashes.  Such errors often appear to result from a ‘tunnelling down’ with available and useful information being ignored. This attentional tunnelling is widely reported by (amongst others) firefighters, medical staff and military personnel.

Dr Graham Edgar from the Centre for Research in Applied Cognition, Knowledge, Learning and Emotion at the University of Gloucestershire will present his research examining information-use in building and maintaining situation awareness, and the influence that affective state has on that process.

All are welcome and there is no need to book – just come along!

Password? Not another one!

Publishing

The increasing volume of academic activity on the internet coupled with a growing obsession about privacy and data protection means for many academics a rapidly expanding number of online accounts and associated passwords. This is, of course, over and above our regular dose of accounts and passwords as citizens of the virtual world. The average adult in the UK must have at least 25 internet accounts, for the bank/building society, supermarkets, phone companies, social media, airlines, trains, insurance companies, eBay, the website of the parents’ council of your children’s school, your electricity provider, the council tax, etc.

I feel as an academic, the burden is even worse. Every single time another scientific journal invites me to review a paper it opens an on-line account for me. Every time I apply for a grant from a funding body to which I have not previously applied, I am required to set up an account with a new password. When you apply for 20-odd grants every year and review manuscripts for a similar number of different journals the number of accounts and passwords add up rapidly. Then there are the other accounts and passwords related to work for sites such as this BU Research Blog, BRIAN, Survey Monkey, for the university for whom you act as external examiner, for Drop Box, the British Library, ORCIC, ACADEMIA.EDU, ResearchGate, Researchfish, Linkedin, and the list goes on.

These last few months I was reminded how non user friendly some systems are. First, I received new secure email account for my part on a REF sub-panel. The account name chosen for me is different from what I would have chosen and what I am used to at Bournemouth University. The importance of confidentiality for the REF work is clear so my password has to be different from anything I use elsewhere. Secondly, a few weeks later I attempted to put my name done for the tri-annual conference of the International Congress of Midwifery in Prague next year. It turns out you cannot join the conference without opening an on-line account first. The account name was automatically chosen for me and so was the password. Unfortunately, both are impossible to remember, neither the account name nor the password (which was case sensitive) were ones I would have selected personally.

There is some hope as some journals allow you to choose your own account name and password. Elsevier has brought most of its journals into one account, with your own email as the account name and all with the same password. Similarly a group of English-language journals in Nepal called Nepal Journals OnLine (NepJOL) use one account name for all participating journals. For the rest of my account names and passwords I can only follow the advice given by Stephen Fry on an episode of QI: “Write it down somewhere on a piece of paper”. The underlying idea is that the people who try to steal your internet account details sit in a bedsit in London or Hong Kong and won’t come to your office or living room to steal a piece of paper with computer addresses. The people who try to break into your house or office are looking for objects with a street value, such as your TV, phone or laptop, they are generally not interested in a piece of paper with some scribbles on it.

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health

Service Computing Seminar: Servicing Big Data

Fusion

As part of the Service Computing Seminar (SCS) project, funded by Bournemouth University Fusion Investment Fund, we would like to invite you to the Service Computing Seminar

Title: Servicing Big Data

Time: 14:00-16:00 Wednesday, 18 Dec. 2013

Venue: PG143 (Thomas Hardy Suite, Talbot Campus)

Speaker: Prof. Athman Bouguettaya, Head of School of Computer Science and Information Technology at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

 

Abstract

Big data is here and in a big way.  Big data is coming from all sorts of sources and means, including sensors, deep space, social media, smartphones, genomic, etc.  The cloud has been instrumental supporting the storage and processing of the ever increasing amount of data.  “Domesticating” the data, i.e., making it useful, however, has been a major challenge.  Service computing is the next major evolution of computing that aims at transforming massive data into artefacts that are acted upon, i.e., services. Service computing is increasingly being recognized as part of a broader agenda in Service Science. In that respect, service computing may be viewed as the “engineering” side of service science. Service computing broadly focuses at providing a foundational framework to support a service-centric view of designing, developing, and exposing data (and applications), whether it is in the enterprise or on the Web. In that respect, the Web is and will undoubtedly be the preferred delivery platform of service-based solutions. More specifically, Web services are currently without contest the key enabler for deploying service-centric solutions. Fully delivering on the potential of next-generation Web services requires building a foundation that would provide a sound design for efficiently developing, deploying, publishing, discovering, composing, trusting, and optimizing access to Web services in an open, competitive, untrustworthy, and highly dynamic environment. The Web service foundation is the key catalyst for the development of a uniform framework called Web Service Management System (WSMS). In this novel framework, Web services are treated as first-class objects. In this talk, I will first motivate the need for a uniform service management to service big data. I will then overview the core components of a typical WSMS. I will conclude by describing our latest research servicing sensor data.

 

Short Bio

Athman Bouguettaya is Professor and Head of School of Computer Science and Information Technology at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder (USA) in 1992.  He was previously Science Leader in Service Computing at CSIRO ICT Centre, Canberra. Australia. Before that, he was a tenured faculty member and Program director in the Computer Science department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (commonly known as Virginia Tech) (USA).  He is a founding member and past President of the Service Science Society, a non-profit organization that aims at forming a community of service scientists for the advancement of service science. He is on the editorial boards of several journals including, the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, the International Journal on Next Generation Computing, VLDB Journal, Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal, and the International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems. He is also on the editorial board of the Springer-Verlag book series on Services Science.  He served as a guest editor of a number of special issues including the special issue of the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology on Semantic Web services, a special issue the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing on Service Query Models, and a special issue of IEEE Internet Computing on Database Technology on the Web. He served as a Program Chair of the 2012 International Conference on Web and Information System Engineering, the 2009 and 2010 Australasian Database Conference, 2008 International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) and the IEEE RIDE Workshop on Web Services for E-Commerce and E-Government (RIDE-WS-ECEG’04). He has published more than 170 books, book chapters, and articles in journals and conferences in the area of databases and service computing (e.g., the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, the ACM Transactions on the Web, WWW Journal, VLDB Journal, SIGMOD, ICDE, VLDB, and EDBT). He was the recipient of several federally competitive grants in Australia (e.g., ARC) and the US (e.g., NSF, NIH). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM.

Cyber Security Seminars: Suggestions for Speakers and Topics

If you have been following my previous posts then you will know that today is the final Cyber Security Seminar for this semester.  We hope you have found the seminar series interesting so far.

We are currently planning the seminars for next semester.  Please get in touch if you have suggestions for potential speakers, or topics you would like to hear more about. Although the budget we have available is modest, we will do our best to accommodate your suggestions.

Cyber Security Seminar: Approaching the Measurement of User Security Behaviour in Organisations

Our final Interdisciplinary Cyber Security Seminar this semester will take place on Tuesday, 10th December at 5pm. The seminar will take place in EB202 in the Executive Business Centre, and will be free and open to all. If you would like to attend, please register at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/interdisciplinary-seminar-in-cyber-security-tickets-9688353125

Our speaker will be Dr. Simon Parkin from UCL. Simon is a Senior Research Associate in the Information Security group at University College London, contributing to the Productive Security project within the Research Institute in the Science of Cyber Security (RISCS). He was previously a member of the Innovation Team at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Security Services (HP ESS) until mid-2012. From 2007 to 2011, Simon was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Computing Science at Newcastle University, where he also obtained his PhD. His research interests include: IT-security policy management metrics, models and tools; holistic IT-security management principles, and; IT-security risk management approaches and knowledge formalisation.

Abstract: Individuals working within organisations must complete their tasks, and are often expected to do so using secured IT systems. There can be times when the expectations for productivity and security are in competition, and so how would an organisation measure the outcomes in practice? We will review a series of interdisciplinary research efforts that characterise the human factor in IT-security within large organisations, as part of a holistic view of security. There are furthermore a variety of modelling approaches and frameworks that have emerged and informed this view. We will consider the challenges that remain in affording measurement of the human factor in IT-security within organisations, and some of the changes that are required for such activities to be sustainable and effective.

Cyber Security Seminar: Shiny Expensive Things: The Global Problem of Mobile Phone Theft (David Rogers, Copper Horse)

Our next Interdisciplinary Cyber Security Seminar will take place on Tuesday, 3rd December at 5pm. Our seminars are approachable, and require nothing more than a general interest in security, and an enquiring mind.

Our speaker will be David Rogers, who is Founder and Director of Copper Horse Solutions Ltd: a software and security company based in Windsor, UK. Alongside this he teaches the Mobile Systems Security course at the University of Oxford and Chairs the Device Security Steering Group at the GSM Association. He has worked in the mobile industry for over 14 years in security and engineering roles. Prior to this he worked in the semiconductor industry. David’s articles and comments on mobile security topics have been regularly covered by the media worldwide including The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and Sophos’ Naked Security blog. His book ‘Mobile Security: A Guide for Users’ was published in 2013. David holds an MSc in Software Engineering from the University of Oxford and a HND in Mechatronics from the University of Teesside.

Abstract: Technology in mobile devices is continuing to advance at an incredible rate, but some of the old security themes continue to persist, mobile phone theft being one of them. This talk looks at the topic of mobile phone theft and what industry’s role has been in helping to prevent it and whether that has been entirely successful. The talk looks at what could happen next and whether it is possible to standardise usable anti-theft mechanisms within devices. It will also look at technologies such as biometrics for access control and whether Police and Government actions have been adequate in dealing with the modus operandi of thieves and fencers of stolen phones.

The seminar will take place in EB202 in the Executive Business Centre, and will be free and open to all. If you would like to attend, please register at http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/interdisciplinary-seminar-in-cyber-security-tickets-9564165677

Can We Sell Security Like Soap? A New Approach to Behaviour Change

Our next Interdisciplinary Cyber Security Seminar will take place on Tuesday, 19th November at 5pm. Our seminars are approachable, and require nothing more than a general interest in security, and an enquiring mind.

Our speaker will be Debi Ashenden, who is a Reader in Cyber Security and Head of the Centre for Cyber Security and Information Assurance at Cranfield University, based at the Defence Academy of the UK, Shrivenham. Prior to taking up her post at Cranfield University she was Managing Consultant within QinetiQ’s Trusted Information Management Dept (formerly DERA). She has been working in cyber security since 1998 and specialises in the social and behavioural aspects of cyber security. Her research is built on a socio-technical vision of cyber security that sees people as solutions rather than as the problem. Debi is the co-author of, ‘Risk Management for Computer Security: Protecting Your Network and Information Assets’, Butterworth Heinneman (2004).

Talk Abstract: Many organisations run security awareness programmes with the aim of improving end user behaviours around information security. Yet behavioural research tells us that raising awareness will not necessarily lead to behaviour change. This talk examines the challenge of changing end user behaviour and puts forward social marketing as a new paradigm. Social marketing is a proven framework for achieving behavioural change and has traditionally been used in health care interventions, although there is an increasing recognition that it could be successfully applied to a broader range of behaviour change issues. It has yet to be applied however, to information security in an organisational context. This talk will explore the social marketing framework in relation to information security behavioural change and highlight the key challenges that this approach poses for information security managers. We conclude with suggestions for future research.

The seminar will take place in EB202 in the Executive Business Centre, and will be free and open to all. If you would like to attend, we encourage you to register at http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/interdisciplinary-seminar-in-cyber-security-tickets-9336229915

Prof. Ben Azvine, Global Head of Security Research and Innovation at BT. Monday the 11th of November, PG16

BU Challenges, Funding opportunities, PG research

The next of our research seminars will take on Monday, the 11th of November, PG16 at 15:00.
Our distinguished guest is Professor Ben Azvine, the Global Head of Security Research and Innovation at BT; invited by our colleague Prof. Bogdan Gabrys.

Professor Azvine holds a BSc in Mechanical Engineering, an MSc in Control Engineering, a PhD in Intelligent Control Systems all from Manchester University and an MBA from Imperial College, London. Having held research fellowship and lectureship posts in several universities, he joined British Telecom Research in 1995 and set up a research programme to develop and exploit intelligent systems technologies within BT.
Since then he has held senior, principal and chief research scientist as well as head of research centre posts at Adastral Park, the head quarter of BT R&D. Ben has edited several books and published more than 100 scientific articles. He is an inventor on 50 patents, has won two BCS gold medals, and the IET award for innovation in IT, holds visiting professorships at Universities of Bristol, Cranfield and Bournemouth in the UK.

The title of his exciting talk will be “Industrial applications of novel Intelligent Systems”. Intelligent systems play an important role in industry for managing customer relationship, providing business intelligence, helping organisations analyse their data and protecting organisations against Cyber-attacks. In this talk I’ll present a number of case studies within BT where we have used intelligent system originating from within our research organisation and successfully downstreamed them into our operations.

I strongly encourage academics and PhD students not to miss the opportunity to attend to the seminar and to discuss potential collaborations.

Emili

Decreasing spatial disorientation: towards dementia-friendly environments: A progress report

Spatial disorientation is among the earliest indicators of dementia, an increasingly common condition in our ageing society that currently costs the UK £23 billion annually. With support of the Fusion-CCCP strand we have created ViRtUOS (Virtual Reality User Orientation System), a state-of-the-art eye-tracking and virtual environments research platform which will facilitate the study of factors that affect spatial disorientation in people with dementia. Data gathered using ViRtUOS will be used to formulate design principles for dementia-friendly care homes, reducing care costs, and leading to new knowledge with significance and reach.

To develop ViRtUOS we have brought together undergraduate RAs from Computing, Creative Technology and Computer Animation to work co-operatively and as part of a high-level, well-resourced multi-disciplinary team.

This video demonstrates the results of their excellent work:

 CLICK HERE TO VIEW; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1oo6JXWNuY

So far, this FIF project has been a great success and feedback from the students RAs suggests that they have enjoyed this unique student experience and that working in an inter-disciplinary team has helped them improve their skills.

Excerpts from students’ feedback:

“I enjoyed working on a project which is not exactly ordinary in my field, and working with people who come from different professional backgrounds. It was interesting to see how contrasting subjects tie into the same workflow to try and produce a coherent product. Personally, I am glad to take away new knowledge about my own study subject and the ones of my fellow colleagues; most of that knowledge I will surely apply in my last year of study.” Jurate Pozeraite (Computer Animation, Media School)

“I’ve learnt a lot in my time here, which will be invaluable for both my final year project and my future career. I’ve learnt not only about software development, but about modelling, developing reliable systems, working as a team to produce a joint system and error handling and bug fixing. I feel that working with other students, in a similar position to myself, really helped me in this project. They made me feel at ease and they helped me learn about their roles in developing this system, which otherwise I would have completely ignored. Overall I feel that for me personally this was a very worthwhile project, for expanding my experience and learning something new. I would love to continue my work with this project for as long as possible.” William Chappell (Computing, DEC)

“During the full length of the project I had learnt more and more, I think that this was the best opportunity I have had in a long time. This job gave me lots of experience with people from different schools, which have completely different perspectives. They are both brilliant in their profession and I have learned a lot from them. Also I hope they have learned some things from me. Generally, I have gained new skills including working with ‘Vizard 4.0’ software and ‘3DsMax’. In fact, the project was really interesting and I was glad to not only earn experience from it but also produce a good quality product at the end. Overall I am very happy that I get a chance to work with such a wonderful team. It was a great experience that improves my skills for future projects. If I had a chance to go back in time and redo this project again I will definitely do it.” Arkadiusz Szerszmidt (Creative Technology, DEC)

 We believe that ViRtUOS has great potential to also foster other inter-disciplinary collaborations within BU and we would like to invite academics and students from across BU to get in contact with us, visit the laboratory and explore its potential for their research interests.

The further development of ViRtUOS will be driven by two PhD projects that started in October this year and we are planning to run first experiments investigating spatial orientation in people with dementia soon.

The team, from left to right: Arkadiusz Szerszmidt (undergraduate RA, Creative Technology), William Chappell (undergraduate RA Computing), Mary O’Malley (PhD student, Psychology & BUDI), Mariela Gaete-Reyes (BUDI), Jurate Pozeraite (undergraduate RA, Computer Animation), Chris Ramsey (PhD student, CDE), Jan Wiener (Psychology & BUDI)

 CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE VIDEO !!!

By Mariela Gaete-Reyes & Jan Wiener

Capturing a yawn: initial observations – Dr Simon Thompson

Fusion, REF Subjects, Research assessment, Research themes

Yawning presents scientists and clinicians with an intriguing phenomenon. There is continued uncertainty over its neuroanatomical origin, the neuro-chemicals involved, mechanisms involved, and its reasons of functionality. Apart from being able to visually (and aurally) observe a person yawning, it has been difficult to quantify until now.

Researchers suggest that yawning may play an important role in the protection of our immune system, by regulating hormones, and particular reflexes, when we are exposed to psychological or physical stress or fatigue (Thompson, & Zisa, 2012).

The stress hormone, cortisol may be a part of this complex response because of its involvement in the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis (Wikipedia, 2013). Cortisol, known systematically as 11-beta-11, 17, 21-trihydroxypregn-4-ene-3, 20-dione (IUPAC, 2013), is measured reliably in saliva as well as in the blood. The exact relationship between cortisol and yawning is thought to be either as a precursor to the yawn or as a result of yawning since, curiously, cortisol is found to be elevated after yawning (Thompson, & Bishop, 2012).

The yawn is produced by stretching the muscles along the jaw-line; however, the extent of stretch and volume of yawn varies between people. Measuring the level of electrical muscle activity using electromyography (EMG) at the muscle site during the yawn phase is in the region of millionths of a volt and may be sustained for several seconds.

Male and female volunteers aged between 18-53 years were exposed to conditions that provoked a yawning response in a randomised controlled trial here at Bournemouth University. For the first time, the yawn was quantified and a profile of EMG data (sine wave) was obtained.

Initial observations find that of a sample of yawners and non-yawners, induced by presentation of yawning stimuli, the people who yawned had elevated nerve activity from 50 (at rest) to 175 (after stimuli presentation and yawning) (see Photo) compared with those who did not yawn who exhibited 10 (at rest) to 80 (after stimuli presentation). Yawners generally had higher level of electrical muscular jaw activity both before and after yawning.

Further research is continuing into the “yawning envelope” (EMG wave) with the hope that, together with cortisol measurement, this new information may form part of a potential diagnostic tool to identify untoward early neurological sequelae that are indicative of neurological disease.

IUPAC – International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry., 2013. www.iupac.org/home/about.html, Accessed 18.08.2013

Thompson, S.B.N., & Bishop, P., 2012. Born to yawn? Understanding yawning as a warning of the rise in cortisol levels: randomized trial. Interactive Journal of Medical Research 1(5);e4:1-9. Doi: 10.2196/ijmr.2241

Thompson SBN, Zisa L., 2012. Ill-health, stress, cortisol levels and yawning. In SBN Thompson (Ed.), Psychology of trauma: clinical reviews, case histories, research. Portsmouth: Blackwell-Harvard-Academic: 125-132

Wikipedia, 2013b. Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothalamic%E2%80%93pituitary%E2%80%93adrenal_axis, Accessed: 18.08.2013

 

 

 

Inventions and Intellectual Property Law comes alive at the Festival of Design and Innovation 2013

Fusion

The annual Festival of Design and Innovation (FoDI) opened on Thursday 20 June 2013.  It was an opportunity for students from the School of Design, Engineering and Computing (DEC) to exhibit their innovations and creations. “A cake icing pen, a computer game controlled by brain power and a glamping pod were just some of the ground-breaking ideas and inventions on display at this year’s FoDI.”

During the academic year, final year students from DEC are paired off with final year students from the Law Department studying Intellectual Property (IP) Law.  The law students are tasked with advising their DEC clients on the protection and exploitation of their innovative creations.  The DEC clients then incorporate the advice which they have received from the ‘lawyers’ into their final year projects.

The IP-DEC Project brings Intellectual Property law to life.  It gives an opportunity for law students to apply IP Law to real-life inventions and in turn it helps the DEC client to understand the importance of strong IP protection when preparing to protect, market and exploit their various creations.

The IP-DEC Project culminates with Awards for the Best DEC Student; Best IP Student and Best IP-DEC Group sponsored by Paul Turner, a retired Patent Attorney.

The Paul Turner Prize for the best IP-DEC Group was awarded at the opening night of the Festival.  The prize was awarded to Law Students Danielle Foster and Luke Trim and DEC Students Benjamen Armstrong, George Burge, Joseph Carter, Markko Reinberg, Nicholas Cron, Thomas Clements and Thomas Reynolds.

Paul Turner with two of the winning DEC students and law students Luke Trim and Danielle Foster.

The Paul Turner Individual Prize for the Best IP Student went to Gemma Jefferies whilst the Paul Turner Prize for the Best DEC Student was awarded to Coco Canessa.  The Individual Prize winners will officially receive their awards at the Graduation Ceremony in November 2013.

The opportunity to apply Intellectual Property Law to real-life scenarios and to real-life innovations together with helping the DEC clients to grasp the importance of IP law, makes this project truly unique.

The IP-DEC Project is co-ordinated by Dr. Dinusha Mendis (Law); Dr. Tania Humphries (DEC); and Dr. Reza Sahandi (DEC).

 

CEMP Conversations this week and next

PG research

An extract from this morning’s conversation is here: CEMP conversation Tom Stacey

Tom Stacey shared an article about second language acquisition and related this to his own PHD research into coding as language acquisition.

He also talked about the practice-based element of his research, of which this robot is an example.             

Next week – on Friday 5th July, at 11.30 – 12.30, in the CEMP office, our final CEMP conversation of the academic year will take place.

We’ll be discussing two related items:

(1) Marketa Zezulkova’s book chapter on a holistic approach to media literacy education:  Marketa Book Chapter

(2) Richard Wallis’s recently published article, co-authored with David Buckingham, on the construction of media literacy within the policy context of the Communications Act: European Journal of Communication-2013-Wallis-0267323113483605

It should be a cracker, and,as always, all colleagues are very welcome to join us, in the current CEMP office, for the last time!

BU Research Blog Exclusive: Design & Look of eBU leaked

PG research, Publishing, Research themes

The first screenshot of the eBU interface has been exclusively leaked to the BU Research Blog, and is expected to go viral across the BU community over the next week.

eBU will provide both an internal and external forum for the development of research papers by undergraduate to Professor around the eight BU research themes:

–          Creative & Digital Economies

–          Culture & Society

–          Entrepreneurship & Economic Growth

–          Environmental Change & Biodiversity

–          Green Economy & Sustainability  

–          Health, Wellbeing & Ageing 

–          Leisure & Recreation

–          Technology & Design

Submissions will be open to immediate publication (in a safe internal environment) and open peer review by 2 appropriate BU academics. Authors will be encouraged to act upon these reviews by either reworking papers for submission to an external journal or by opting for publication on the external eBU site.

For BU academics this is a great opportunity to get critical appraisal on your research papers or ideas from colleagues. For academics it also an opportunity to encourage the submission of high quality student output, and possibly to facilitate the co-creation and co-production of publishable material to an external journal or to publish externally with eBU. For students, this is a fantastic opportunity to turn high quality essays or dissertations into scholarly outputs, which will be attractive to employers across many sectors and industries.

If you have any questions or would like to become involved in this exciting venture, please get in touch with me via email aharding@bournemouth.ac.uk or by telephone 01202 963025.

Seminar on Autonomous Systems & Robotics for Future Cities

We would like to invite you to our next Software Systems Research Centre seminar given by Prof. Carsten Maple on “Autonomous Systems & Robotics for Future Cities”

Room: P410 (Poole House, Talbot Campus)

Time: 14:00 – 15:00

Date: Friday, 15-March-2013

Title: Autonomous Systems & Robotics for Future Cities

Abstract. Autonomous and robotic systems provide technical aids in the modern living environment. Considerable effort and investment have been made in blending sensing, control and feedback, user interfaces, information processing and hardware for such systems. This talk will present an overview of the current development. Examples will be demonstrated from research conducted at the University of Bedfordshire through EU funded projects (e.g. shadow robot systems to assist the elderly / disabled at home). Discussions will be made on future perspectives of these systems for modern city life.

Biography.  Professor Carsten Maple is Pro Vice Chancellor – Research and Enterprise, University of Bedfordshire, UK. He graduated with a BSc in mathematics and a PhD in numerical analysis from the University of Leicester. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS) and a Chartered IT Practitioner (CITP).  Professor Maple is editor / guest editor for several international journals such as International Journal of Grid Computing, International Journal of Modelling, Identification and Control. He has been chairman for a number of international conferences such as IEEE International Conference on Parallel Computing, International Conference on Information Visualisation, and International Symposium on Applications of Graph Theory. He has been invited to present keynote speeches to various international conferences. He has published over 150 papers internationally. He has been invited to talk on security, syberstalking, robotics and applied computing on UK Parliament, radio and TVs.

 

Fusion Investment Fund – Decreasing spatial disorientation: towards dementia-friendly environments

Awarded & submitted bids, Fusion

Dr Jan Wiener (DEC) and myself are delighted to have been awarded Fusion funding to develop a student driven research programme to investigate navigation and orientation skills in people with dementia.

Spatial disorientation is among the earliest indicators of dementia, an increasingly common condition in our ageing society that currently costs the UK £23 billion annually. We aim to develop an inter-disciplinary eye-tracking research programme to investigate factors that affect spatial disorientation in people with dementia. Data gathered will be used to formulate design principles for dementia-friendly care homes, potentially reducing care costs, and leading to new knowledge with significance and reach.

To record gaze when solving wayfinding tasks, we will combine eye-tracking, head tracking and virtual reality (VR) technology. Participants will stand or sit in front of an array of large monitors arranged in a semi-circle that subtends their entire horizontal visual field and affords natural viewing behaviour. In order to create this unique and technically advanced research environment, students from DEC, HSC and the Media School will collaborate as researchers, increasing their skills through immersive experience on a well-designed, cutting-edge research programme.

This will give ambitious students with different backgrounds a unique opportunity to work co-operatively as part of a high-level, well-resourced multi-disciplinary team. We will share the knowledge we gain on improving dementia care home design with the academic community, practitioners, service providers, and the general public. These links will in turn enable us to form strategic local and national partnerships to ensure that the knowledge gained has an impact on professional practice.

Dr Mariela Gaete Reyes (HSC/BUDI) & Dr Jan Wiener (DEC)

Ant Colony Optimization for Dynamic Optimization Problems

Research themes

This interesting talk will take place next Wednesday the 5th of December, 16:00-17:00 at P302.
Our external guest is Dr Michalis Mavrovouniotis from the University of Leicester, an specialists in evolutionary algorithms, ant colony optimization, memetic computation and dynamic optimization.

Dr Mavrovouniotis will discuss very recent advances in nature-inspired computational intelligence. These ideas have also relevant implications for optimization problems, knowledge transfer and meta-learning; thus I think may be of great interest of many students, PhD candidates and senior researchers of the three centres in our school.
Abstract: In the last decade, there is a growing interest to apply nature-inspired metaheuristics in optimization problems with dynamic environments. Usually, dynamic optimization problems (DOPs) are addressed using evolutionary algorithms. Recently, ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms proved that they are also good methods to address DOPs.

However, conventional ACO algorithms have difficulty in addressing DOPs. This is because once the algorithm converges to a solution and a dynamic change occurs, it is difficult for the population to adapt to a new environment since high levels of pheromone will be generated to a single trail and force the ants to follow it even after a dynamic change. A good solution to address this problem is to increase the diversity of solutions via transferring knowledge from previous environments to the pheromone trails of the new environment.

Best wishes, Emili

Emili Balaguer-Ballester, PhD

School of Engineering & Computing, Bournemouth University

Center for Computational Neuroscience, University of Heidelberg