Category / Computer Science

Subjective Evaluation of High-Fidelity Virtual Environments for Driving Simulations

We would like to invite you to the latest research seminar of the Centre for Games and Music Technology Research.

Title: Subjective Evaluation of High-Fidelity Virtual Environments for Driving Simulations

Speaker: Dr Carlo Harvey
Birmingham City University

Time: 2:00PM-3:00PM
Date: Wednesday 14 March 2018
Room: PG10 (Poole House)

Abstract:

Virtual environments (VEs) grant the ability to experience real-world scenarios, such as driving, in a virtual, safe, and reproducible context. However, to achieve their full potential, the fidelity of the VEs must provide confidence that it replicates the perception of the real-world experience. The computational cost of simulating real-world visuals accurately means that compromises to the fidelity of the visuals must be made. This talk presents a subjective evaluation of driving in a VE at different quality settings. Participants (n = 44) were driven around in the real world and in a purposely built representative VE and the fidelity of the graphics and overall experience at low-, medium-, and high-visual settings were analysed. Low quality corresponds to the illumination in many current traditional simulators, medium to a higher quality using accurate shadows and reflections, and high to the quality experienced in modern movies and simulations that require hours of computation. Results demonstrate that graphics quality affects the perceived fidelity of the visuals and the overall experience. When judging the overall experience, participants could tell the difference between the lower quality graphics and the rest but did not significantly discriminate between the medium and higher graphical settings. This indicates that future driving simulators should improve the quality, but once the equivalent of the presented medium quality is reached, they may not need to do so significantly.

We hope to see you there.

First kick offf

The “vF Interoperation suppoRting buSiness innovaTion” (FIRST) project provides new technology to describe manufacturing assets and to compose and integrate existing services into collaborative virtual manufacturing processes.

The project kick-off meeting took place in March 16-17 2017 at Bournemouth University UK. In attendance were the academic and industrial representatives from the partner institutions.

The FIRST Project kick-off meeting participants at BU[/caption]

The project combines partners from China, Germany, The Netherlands and Germany in the academic and industrial sectors. Together we work on processes in manufacturing context.

The kick-off meeting initiated the projected start from March 2017. Topics discussed at the the kick-off meeting included

  • Deeper knowledge of consortium partner, research agenda​
  • Implementation of working packages and Deliverables
  • Presentations of partners
  • Discussing Consortium Agreement

Please find more details about the project at

research.bournemouth.ac.uk/2016/09/horizon-2020-funding-for-virtual-factory-research-at-bu/

BU commissioned to analyse future energy needs in UK homes

Awarded & submitted bids

  • Bournemouth University and Baringa selected to deliver data analysis and algorithm development to the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI).
  • The High Frequency Appliance Disaggregation Analysis project will analyse real world data from the ETI’s Home Energy Management System (HEMS) in five homes to gather detailed energy data from water, gas and electricity use.
  • This data will help develop algorithms to forecast domestic energy needs of the future and provide industry with valuable insight into consumer energy use to develop efficient energy services.

Bournemouth University, under the lead on Professor Hamid Bouchachia, and  specialist energy advisors Baringa Partners have both been selected by the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) to undertake data analysis in a new knowledge building smart energy project that will investigate domestic energy use.

The High Frequency Appliance Disaggregation Analysis (HFADA) project builds upon work undertaken in the Smart Systems and Heat (SSH) programme delivered by the Energy Systems Catapult for the ETI, to refine intelligence and gain detailed smart home energy data.

The project will analyse in depth data from five homes that have been trialling the SSH programme’s Home Energy Management System (HEMS) to identify which appliances are present within a building and when they are in operation. The main goal of the HFADA project is to detect human behaviour patterns in order to forecast the home energy needs of people in the future. In particular the project will deliver a detailed set of data mining algorithms top help identify patterns of building occupancy and energy use within domestic homes from water, gas and electricity data.

Bournemouth University and Baringa, working in partnership with ASI Data Science, will work independently to provide information derived from the water, gas and electricity use in these UK homes, from the end of 2017 to middle of 2018.

Should anyone be interested in further details, please contact Prof Hamid Bouchachia at abouchachia@bournemouth.ac.uk.

Fake conferences are not fake news: beware predatory conferences

conferences, international, open access, PG research, Publishing, REF Subjects, Research assessment, Research Ethics, Research Integritiy, Research themes, writing

Introduction

Academic have been warned for a decade about predatory Open Access publishers (van Teijlingen 2014). These are commercial organisations charging academics a publication fee on submission of their manuscripts with a promise to publish their work quickly online. The problem is twofold: first, these commercial organisations don’t offer proper peer-review and editorial quality assurance; and secondly, academic are being tricked into believing the journal is a legitimate scientific publication.  The second author receives on average six to eight invitations a week to publish in this kind of predatory journals – see below for examples. The first author, who despite having not worked in an academic institution for over three years, still receives such invitations to publish in ‘Journal X’.

Predatory conferences

A similar phenomenon to predatory journals is the predatory conference (Moital 2014; Nobes 2017; Grove 2017). These are pretend academic conferences of questionable value, established first and foremost to make money, not for the greater good of the academic discipline.

Both authors have received bogus and legitimate invitations to attend conferences. A predicament with such an invitation, which 99% of time arrives by email, is that it is not easy to distinguish between fake and real offers. For example, the first author recently received an offer (at short notice), to attend a conference in Miami in November 2017 (see below). This was on the back of an editorial he had published couple of months earlier. For a career researcher going from contract to contract, the appeal of being invited to present a keynote at a conference can be flattering, far less an honour and a boost for one’s career. Therefore, while the idea that if it seems too good to be true, is a prudent one to hold; there is also a temptation to follow through.

The author replied to the request quizzing the reason for the invite out of the blue. The answer was less than convincing, and a swift email by the author saying “Don’t tell me… You are offering me a keynote with travel and accommodation… Lol!!” called their bluff and ended correspondence.

But digging a little deeper he found there was a webpage dedicated to taking payments to attend the conference. In the digital world, a fool can be easily and quickly separated from his or her money.

Of course, it may have been a real conference at a real venue, and they really wanted him to speak. But discerning this is not easy at first…

Some of the warning signs/What to look out for

  • The conference email invitation looks very convincing (if not don’t even read it!).
  • The venue is good location as Nobes (2017) highlighted, “the organizers are more interested in marketing the tourist destination rather than the academic value of the conference”.
  • The conference covers too many different aspects or topics, as if the advert is designed to catch the eye of many people as possible who are vaguely connected to the discipline.
  • Mentions on associated predatory journals and ‘important’ organisations in the discipline.
  • Email and bank accounts that don’t look professional/ official.
  • Little mention of attendance fees, but after acceptance emails demanding a high conference fee and other charges.
  • Conference organisers are not academics, or unknown names.
  • Conference does not peer-review submission/ not provide proper editorial control over presentations
  • Signs of copying of names of existing academic conferences or scientific organisation and even copying of their webpages
  • Even more advertising than normal at a scientific conference.

Furthermore, Andy Nobes (2017) offered some helpful advice on quality of the conference websites in the list below. Andy is based at AuthorAID, a global network providing support, mentoring, resources and training for researchers in developing countries.

Who is at risk of falling for predatory conferences?

Academics need to be aware of money-making conferences and meetings without a true commitment to science. But some academics might be more at risk than others. Young researchers, PhD students and fledgling academics, living from contract to contract may feel any conference attendance is a potential career boost. Thus, such an invitation might seem flattering and an opportunity to good to miss. A way to show that he or she is a capable and independent academic.

Final thoughts

Most academics go to conferences for a combination of presenting their work to get critical feedback, making new contacts, sharing ideas and to be inspired. With such broad combination of motivating factors, the exact purpose of conferences is difficult to ascertain because there is no a priori agreed role and value of conferences (Nicolson, 2017a). However, there is evidence that academic conferences function to facilitate commodity transactions, be that knowledge, tools, skills, reputations, or connections, which reflects the neoliberal ethos in the modern academy (Nicolson 2017b). The predatory conference can be viewed in this light, where academia is more and more focused on generating revenue. It is at best scurrilous, and worst, criminal, for organisations to make money using such a confidence trick.  Always check which conferences are organised and advertised by recognised scholarly organisations in your own discipline. If uncertain ask a more experienced academic, a senior colleague or mentor.

 

 

Donald J. Nicolson

(Health Services Researcher, NHS Fife, and Independent Scholar; twitter @_mopster )

Edwin R. van Teijlingen

(Centre Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health)

 

References:

Moital, M. (2014) Ten Signs of a Bogus/Fake Conference.

Grove, J. (2017) Predatory conferences ‘now outnumber official scholarly events’  (26th Oct.)

Nicolson, D.J. (2017a) Do conference presentations impact beyond the conference venue? Journal of Research in Nursing. 22(5), pp.422-425.

Nicolson, D.J. (2017b) Academic Conferences as Neoliberal Commodities, Palgrave Macmillan

Nobes, A. (2017) What are ‘predatory’ conferences and how can I avoid them?

van Teijlingen, E. (2014) Beware of rogue journals.

 

Psychology PGR Sarah Hodge presents at two prestigious USA conferences and wins prize

PG research, Research Ethics, student research

Representing the research team from Bournemouth University, Sarah Hodge presented cross-disciplinary PhD research at two conferences in Las Vegas (April) and Denver (May).

The first conference Broadcast Education Association (BEA) included a symposium organised and attended by key academics in the area of psychology and gaming and within this Sarah won top paper in the symposium track and 2nd place student paper. The research presented was funded by the University Student Research Assistant (SRA) scheme, which involved collaboration between departments and faculties. The research involved creating a game to measure in-game moral decisions. The research team included Jacqui Taylor and John McAlaney from the Department of Psychology, Davide Melacca and Christos Gatzidis from the Department of Creative Technology, and Eike Anderson from the National Centre for Computer Animation.

 

At the second conference Computers in Human Interaction (CHI), Sarah had a workshop paper accepted on Ethical Encounters in Human Computer Interaction and this naturally stimulated many interesting questions about ethics in research. Sarah was a student volunteer at the conference. Sarah was a Chair student Volunteer at British HCI 2016 that was held at Bournemouth University last summer and this experience supported being accepted as a Student Volunteer at CHI. From this experience Sarah was assigned the role of Day Captain, which involved supporting and overseeing the other student volunteers with their duties. Sarah found it to be a great experience and highly recommends other students to consider being a student volunteer as a great chance to network and it also helps with funding conferences as the registration fee was waived.

 

Hodge, S. Taylor, J & McAlaney, J (2017). Restricted Content: Ethical Issues with Researching Minors’ Video Game Habits Human in Computer Interaction (CHI) May, Denver USA

If you would like more information about the research please contact: shodge@bournemouth.ac.uk

Policy and political scene this week: 25 May 2017

Welcome to this week’s political scene within research. Here is a summary of the week’s generic policy reports and releases, alongside new niche consultations and inquiries.

The role of EU funding in UK research and innovation

This week the role of EU funding in UK research and innovation has hit the headlines. Its an analysis of the academic disciplines most reliant on EU research and innovation funding at a granular level.

Jointly commissioned by Technopolis and the UK’s four national academies (Medical Sciences, British Academy, Engineering and Royal Society) it highlights that of the 15 disciplines most dependent on EU funding 13 are within the arts, humanities and social science sphere.

Most reliant on the EU funding as a proportion of their total research funding are Archaeology (38% of funding), Classics (33%) and IT (30%).

The full report dissects the information further considering the funding across disciplines, institutions, industrial sectors, company sizes and UK regions. It differentiates between the absolute value of the research grant income from EU government bodies, and the relative value of research grant income from EU government bodies with respect to research grant income from all sources, including how the EU funding interacts with other funding sources.

There are also 11 focal case studies, including archaeology and ICT. Here’s an excerpt from the archaeology case study considering the risks associated with Brexit and the UK’s industrial strategy:

“As archaeologists are heavily dependent on EU funding, a break away from EU funding sources puts the discipline in a vulnerable position. This is exacerbated by the fact that the UK is short of archaeologists and/or skilled workers active in the field of Archaeology because of the surge in large scale infrastructure projects (e.g. HS2, Crossrail, and the A14), which drives away many archaeologists from research positions.” Source

See the full report page 25 for particular detail on ICT and digital sector, and page 39 for archaeology. For press coverage see the Financial Times article.

Bathing Water Quality

The European Environment Agency published European Bathing Water Quality in 2016. It sees the UK as second to bottom in the league table for quality of bathing water. While 96.4% of British beaches were found safe to swim in last year 20 sites failed the annual assessment. Only Ireland had a higher percentage of poor quality bathing waters at 4%.

Report link: https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/european-bathing-water-quality-in-2016

How and when to submit evidence to policy makers

This week Research Professional ran a succinct article encouraging researchers to think more about when and how they submit evidence to policy makers. Timing is key, policy makers often want information instantaneously and the article urges researchers to be responsive but pragmatic, including a pro-active approach of gently keeping key policy makers informed of new developments.

Researchers wanting to have a political impact may consider attending a UK Parliament Outreach and Engagement Service events.

 

Consultations and Inquiries

Responding to a select committee call for evidence is a great way for academics to influence UK policy. If you respond to a consultation or inquiry as a BU member of staff please let us know of your interest by emailing policy@bournemouth.ac.uk at least one week before you submit your response.

This week there are three new inquiries and consultations that may be of interest to BU academics.

Sports

A Scottish Parliament inquiry is seeking individual’s views on community-based approaches to removing barriers to participation in grassroots sport and physical activity, including how to promote volunteering. The committee is asking for views and examples on a range of questions, including:

  • Examples where a community based approach has been successful in removing barriers to participation in sport and physical activity?
  • Approaches that were particularly successful in increasing participation among certain social groups, like women, ethnic minorities, certain age-groups?
  • The barriers facing volunteers and how can they be overcome? The aim is to inform how Scotland might increase participation rates across all groups and sectors of society, respondents can select to answer only the most relevant questions.

The call for evidence closes on 30 June.

Body Image

The British Youth Council has opened an inquiry into body image and how the growth of social media and communications platforms has encouraged attitudes that entrench poor body image. Included among the inquiry questions are:

  • Has the growing use of social media and communications platforms amongst young people encouraged practices and attitudes that entrench poor body image? What is the link between “sexting” and body dissatisfaction?
  • Do internet companies, social media platforms or other platforms have a responsibility to tackle trends which entrench poor body image? What are they already doing in this area? What more should they be doing?
  • Are particular groups of young people particularly prone to poor body image, or less likely to seek help? What causes these trends?
  • In relation to young men and boys, minority ethnic groups, and those who self-identify as transgender: what are the specific challenges facing young people in these groups? How effective is existing support?
  • To what extent is dissatisfaction with body image contributing to the increase in mental health problems amongst children and young people?

The call for evidence closes on 16 June.

Drainage & Flooding

The Welsh government has opened a consultation on the implementation of sustainable drainage systems on new developments (schedule 3 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010).

The consultation closes on 11 August.

 

HE Policy Update

You can also sign up to receive BU’s separate weekly HE policy update delivered direct to your inbox each Friday by emailing policy@bournemouth.ac.uk

 

Sarah Carter

Policy & Public Affairs Officer

Using user-customized touch gesture for fast accessing installed apps on smartphones

PG research

We would like to invite you to the latest research seminar of the Centre for Games and Music Technology Research.

 

Speaker: Chi Zhang (Creative Technology PhD Student)

 

Title:     Using user-customized touch gesture for fast accessing installed apps on smartphones

 

Time: 2:00PM-3:00PM

Date: Wednesday 17th May 2017

Room: PG11, Poole House, Talbot Campus

 

Abstract:

 

User-defined touch gesture is a common method for fast interacting with smartphones, it enables a user to define a touch gesture for a particular task, such as, “-” for volume down and “+” for volume up. But, the user-defined touch gesture method is typically provided as a “user-defined touch gesture set” aiming for countable commonly used tasks. These approaches are aiming to build a gesture set, include a limit number of universal gesture-task pairs developed by the users.  Existing user defined touch gesture sets supported a wide range of tasks on the smartphones, however, they: (1) still need learning; (2) cannot cover every task that user wants to active; (3) lack of the evaluation on the speed performance. To overcome these limitations and better understand the speed advantage of user-defined touch gesture method, we presented a novel user-customized touch gesture approach and conducted an experiment to evaluate its speed advantages. The experiment demonstrates a significant speed advantage of using our approach and the accuracy performance is evaluated as well. In particular, our findings include: (1) our approach has a significant speed advantage than traditional interaction method; (2) our approach has no significant accuracy differences between frequent and infrequent used apps; (3) analysed what caused the failure accessing in our experiments. Based on these findings, we offer (1) further evidence of the speed benefits of using user self-defined gesture for accessing tasks; (2) design implications for the future gesture-based interface for fast accessing on smartphones.

 

We hope to see you there.

 

 

PhD student from Creative Technology got a paper accepted in a premium conference

PG research

Jing WANG, a PhD student in the department of Creative Technology, SciTech, just got a paper accepted by 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAi 2017). IJCAi (http://ijcai-17.org/), is a premier AI conference in the world. Jing’s paper, co-authored with Feng Tian (SciTech), Hongchuan Yu (FMC) and Changhong Liu (SciTech), “Multi-Component Nonnegative Matrix Factorization”, is one of the papers accepted, out of 2540 submissions, after going through an extremely selective review (acceptance rate: ~25%).

Congratulations to Jing, who is currently a 3rd year PhD student. Apart from this paper, she has also published several papers in the journals like IEEE Trans. on Cybernetics, Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation, etc. and the top conferences like IJCNN, ICONIP, etc.

Deadline Extended: Machine Learning in Medical Diagnosis and Prognosis

conferences, international, open access, Publishing

The deadline has been extended to the 14th of April , 2017.

This is a call for papers for the Special Session on Machine Learning in Medical Diagnosis and Prognosis at IEEE CIBCB 2017.

The IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (IEEE CIBCB 2017) will be held at the INNSIDE Hotel, Manchester from August 23rd to 25th, 2017.

This annual conference has become a major technical event in the field of Computational Intelligence and its application to problems in biology, bioinformatics, computational biology, chemical informatics, bioengineering and related fields. The conference provides a global forum for academic and industrial scientists from a range of fields including computer science, biology, chemistry, medicine, mathematics, statistics, and engineering, to discuss and present their latest research findings from theory to applications.

The topics of interest for the special session include (but are not limited to):

  • Medical image classification
  • Medical image analysis
  • Expert systems for computer aided diagnosis and prognosis
  • Pattern recognition in the analysis of biomarkers for medical diagnosis
  • Deep learning in medical image processing and analysis
  • Ethical and Security issues in machine learning for medical diagnosis and prognosis

Up-to-date information and submission details can be found on the IEEE CIBCB 2017. The submission deadline is the 14th of April, 2017.

Please e-mail srostami@bournemouth.ac.uk with any questions.

Developing a novel self-optimising femtocell network for indoor communication with mobile devices

PG research

We would like to invite you to the latest research seminar of the Centre for Games and Music Technology Research.

 

Speaker: Haseeb Qureshi (Creative Technology PhD Student)

 

Title:     Developing a novel self-optimising femtocell network for indoor communication with mobile devicesFemtoCell

 

Time: 2:00PM-3:00PM

Date: Wednesday 15th March 2017

Room: PG11, Poole House, Talbot Campus

 

Abstract:

The need for a fast and reliable wireless communication system has increased with the development of social and business activities around the world. A promising cost and energy efficient way of meeting the future traffic demands is the idea of very dense deployment of low cost, low power and self-organizing small base stations i.e. Femtocells. Self-configuring, self-optimizing and self-healing base stations have the potential to significantly increase the capacity of mobile cellular networks in the future 5G while reducing their energy consumption. The aim of this research is to consider the integration of Femtocells as Self Optimising Networks for the future communication network. An extensive and thorough research has been carried out to investigate what drawbacks of the existing communication 4G network are and whether Femtocells as a Self-Optimising network can improve the current network. In order to evaluate the algorithms for self-optimising Femtocells that have been proposed by other authors in the existing literature an evaluation criteria has been developed, and a simulating environment has been constructed. The evaluation is performed by measuring the effect that changing parameters has on the output of the environment. From the results of the evaluation a new algorithm to enhance the self-optimisation of the network will be designed and developed in a simulating environment.​

 

We hope to see you there.

Deadline Extended: Machine Learning in Medical Diagnosis and Prognosis

conferences, international, open access, PG research, Publishing

The deadline has been extended to the 14th of April , 2017.

This is a call for papers for the Special Session on Machine Learning in Medical Diagnosis and Prognosis at IEEE CIBCB 2017.

The IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (IEEE CIBCB 2017) will be held at the INNSIDE Hotel, Manchester from August 23rd to 25th, 2017.

This annual conference has become a major technical event in the field of Computational Intelligence and its application to problems in biology, bioinformatics, computational biology, chemical informatics, bioengineering and related fields. The conference provides a global forum for academic and industrial scientists from a range of fields including computer science, biology, chemistry, medicine, mathematics, statistics, and engineering, to discuss and present their latest research findings from theory to applications.

The topics of interest for the special session include (but are not limited to):

  • Medical image classification
  • Medical image analysis
  • Expert systems for computer aided diagnosis and prognosis
  • Pattern recognition in the analysis of biomarkers for medical diagnosis
  • Deep learning in medical image processing and analysis
  • Ethical and Security issues in machine learning for medical diagnosis and prognosis

Up-to-date information and submission details can be found on the IEEE CIBCB 2017. The submission deadline is the 14th of April, 2017.

Please e-mail srostami@bournemouth.ac.uk with any questions.

High Dynamic Range Point Cloud Rendering

We would like to invite you to the latest research seminar of the Centre for Games and Music Technology Research.

RSImg

Speaker: Dr Carlo Harvey

 

Title:     High Dynamic Range Point Cloud Rendering

 

Time: 2:00PM-3:00PM

Date: Wednesday 15th February 2017

Room: PG11, Poole House, Talbot Campus

 

Abstract: As a new member of staff, I feel it useful to use this opportunity to briefly present my previous research in the field of physically based rendering.

This seminar however, will be mainly focussed upon introducing the challenges that enshrine my current research into synergising High Dynamic Range and Point Cloud data. Specifically the work presented will introduce a technique in development to flip the standard paradigm of geometry triangulation and re-topologisation from Point Cloud data. Instead, this fairly laborious, and often manual process, is optimised away from the rendering pipeline and rendering is instead conducted on a set of generated point lights and estimated surfaces reconstructed from a sparse set of points.

 

We hope to see you there.

HE policy update w/e 27th January 2017

conferences, innovation, international, Student Engagement, Training

Industrial Strategy Green Paper

The Government launched the Industrial Strategy Green Paper and consultation this week. The paper focuses on improving Britain’s innovation and productivity in key areas alongside upskilling the workforce to become world leading. The government suggest a number of areas of industry specialism that should be supported:

  • clean energy
  • robotics
  • healthcare
  • space technology
  • quantum technology
  • advanced computing and communications

The document frequently references the role of Universities as innovation leaders pushing for commercialisation and greater productive cooperation with business. It states that the ‘neglect of technical education’ should be redressed and insinuates that higher-level technical education will be pushed towards the new Institutes of Technology (£170 government investment announced – see below). There is an emphasis on rebalancing the difference in Britain’s economic geography through infrastructure investment. In addition, it criticises how UK research funding is currently heavily invested in the ‘golden triangle’ (Oxford, Cambridge, London) and calls to build on research strengths in businesses as well as other universities. The strategy has a strong focus on STEM and Wonkhe have reported that The British Academy are urging the government not to forget investment in social sciences and humanities teaching and research, which they argue are vital to the continued development of the UK’s services sectors.

The consultation ends in April, we’ll be in touch shortly about how you can contribute to a BU response.

While the strategy has only just been launched it was preceded by the announcement of the new Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (Nov 2016) and consultative workshops. The workshops aimed to ensure that the challenges identified match UK business capability and are based on the best available evidence for scientific and commercial success on the global stage. The challenges mirror the industry specialisms proposed in the green paper but also mention the creative industries and integrated cities. The workshops conclude this week, implementation plans are expected to follow from the government and the first challenge is expected to be announced in March.

In an interesting article in The Conversation Graham Galbraith, VC at Portsmouth, urges Universities to shun new institutions for innovation and instead form a network of hubs building on relationships with employers, skills organisations and FE colleges. Furthermore he resists the government’s distinction between academic and technical education, seeing the productivity answer through flexible routes to university study and developing skills courses that employers need in accessible ways. He believes the university sector would deliver this far more quickly than new Institutes of Technology. Galbraith also criticises REF 2021: “The government wants the UK to be better at commercialising its world-class, basic research. But the… require[ment]…to include all academic staff…will have the effect of making universities re-balance their staff’s priorities so that there is more focus only on peer-reviewed research and less on outward-facing activities like business collaborations.”

Brexit –The Supreme Court has ruled that Parliament must vote to trigger Article 50 which begins the Brexit process. The government timescale is to trigger Article 50 by end of March and to this end they have introduced a European Withdrawal Bill (EWB). The European Withdrawal Bill gives the PM the power to notify the European Council of the UK’s intention to withdrawn from the EU through the required Act of Parliament. It is being fast tracked through Parliament. Parliamentary time is scheduled for 31 Jan, 1 Feb, 6-8 Feb.  The House of Commons Education Select Committee continues visits to Universities (Oxford, UCL) to examine impact of Brexit on HE. At the UCL visit (Wednesday) Michael Arthur (Provost) broke the UCAS data embargo revealing a 7% drop in EU applicants in the current cycle. The Guardian leads with ‘first decrease after almost a decade of unbroken growth blamed on… Brexit’. Committee Chair, Neil Carmichael is reported on Twitter as asking whether HE needs a sector-specific Brexit deal – panel response ‘yes absolutely!’

Higher Education and Research Bill (HERB) – The Lords continue to scrutinise the HERB carefully with the long list of amendments.  The list has stopped growing quite so quickly but new amendments proposed this week include one to set up a new UKRI visa department that will sponsor academics (507ZA). So far apart form the first one, no amendments other than government amendments have been passed, but the level of debate and the length of the list suggests that there may have to be some concessions by the government. James Younger, the government lead on the Bill in the Lords, wrote to Peers on 25th January about the bill.

Given the timing of the Brexit discussions, Wonkhe speculate that to achieve the timescales for the Bill and to clear sufficient parliamentary time for the European Withdrawal Bill to be passed the government may make concessions on HERB.  Key discussions this week:

  • NSS statistically unfit for TEF – Lord Lipsey discussed the statistical inadequacies of NSS and the implication for this as a TEF metric. “The NSS in the TEF is using—or rather, abusing—statistics for a purpose for which the NSS was never designed.” Lipsey acknowledged that the Government have gently retreated from the emphasis on NSS scores – in their latest instructions to assessors they stated: “assessors should be careful not to overweight information coming from the NSS“. This was reinforced by Chris Husbands, Chair of TEF, who informed a meeting at the House of Commons this week that his team would “not be overweighting the NSS” when awarding ratings this year.  The proposed amendment was withdrawn after Viscount Younger: stressed the NSS was not the primary source of information for the TEF and that the framework was about much more than metrics. “Providers submit additional evidence alongside their metrics, and this evidence will be given significant weight by the panel”. HE continued: “we cannot ignore the only credible, widely used metrics that captures students’ views”.
  • There were also debates about the gold/silver/bronze ratings and the government provided reassurance that Bronze was “above a high quality baseline”. This contradicts statements made by some in DfE before the final specification was agreed about Bronze institutions “needing improvement”. The panel have praised positive communication on this subject.
  • Validation – The government have issued a factsheet for the Lords on Validation which provides explanation from the perspective of an alternative provider seeking to enter a validation arrangement. It describes Clause 46 of HERB, which gives the Office for Students (OfS) power to commission authorised HE providers to provide validation if other providers decline. It states such authorised providers are free to choose whether they wish offer this service, however once an arrangement is in place the OfS could require them to validate award) delivered by other registered HE providers. The commissioned arrangement would be made public.  The controversial Clause 47 which appoints OfS as the validator of last resort was also discussed. The controversy arises as OfS isn’t an academic institution and doesn’t hold Degree Awarding Powers. The OfS will advise the Secretary of State (SoS) if intervention is required (likely through an evidence based report and stakeholder consultation) and the SoS would then authorise the intervention through regulation which is subject to parliamentary scrutiny.
  • Contract Cheating – The amendment proposed by Lord Storey on contract cheating was withdrawn following Government reassurance. Lord Storey provided a passionate discourse including detailed sector information and cheating statistics. Baroness Goldie confirmed that the Government were addressing cheating referencing the (Aug 2016 published) QAA investigation and Jo Johnson’s commitment to close working to progress the recommendations. She revealed that the Minster would shortly announce a new initiative to tackle cheating in conjunction with QAA, Universities UK, NUS and HEFCE.

TEF

The 15 page written submissions for year 2 of the TEF were finalised and submitted this week, and this was the final opportunity for institutions to opt out of the TEF. Although there may have been others who have not published their positions, most Scottish Universities have opted out, as well as the Open University. Given the difference in the Scottish funding system they have less to gain from the TEF – but the 4 who have opted in have noted international reputation as a crucial factor. The OU explain their non-participation is due to the poor fit of the metrics with their social mobility demographic.

And the future of the TEF? According to Research Professional, a German academic has criticised the way that teaching excellence funding is being used in Germany.

“Whereas lower-ranked universities have tended to spread their funding from the programme thinly across faculties and courses, higher-ranked institutions have had the luxury of being able to focus on priority areas, the analysis found.

“You are starting to see emerging differences between disciplines taught at different universities,” Bloch told Times Higher Education on 17 January. For the first time, elite universities are starting to build up strong institutional identities when it comes to teaching, in an effort to get further ahead.

“It will be a long time before we reach the stratification that you see in the American system [around teaching], but we are seeing a difference for the first time in how resources in teaching are distributed,” he said.

UCAS 2016 entrants report – this data includes applications, offers and placed rates by sex, area background (LPN-polar 3), and ethnicity. BU’s report can be selected from the drop down menu towards the end of the webpage. The Guardian reports on the lower offer rates to black applicants. Wonkhe covers the HEIs that have a significant upward or downward trend in acceptances

Research Impact training: Parliament are running a Research, Impact and the UK Parliament event in Bristol on Wednesday 1 March. It covers the basics of the Parliamentary process and how academics can engage with parliament through their knowledge and research to inform scrutiny and legislation, including the impact of influencing policy to support REF submissions.

Wanted! External Bid Writers

Funding opportunities, Grants Academy, international, Knowledge Exchange, REF Subjects, Training

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As part of the Research and Knowledge Exchange Development Framework, Bournemouth University is expanding its pool of external bid writing expertise, through a tendering process.

If you have worked with a good bid writer or, as an external subscriber to this blog, you have written successful research funding applications, please contactus in the Research & Knowledge Exchange Office

We are particularly interested in those who can provide short courses, one-to-one support, bid writing retreats, application review or a range of these and related activities.

Examples of key funders include:

  • British Academy
  • European Commission funds including Horizon 2020
  • Innovate UK
  • Leverhulme Trust
  • National Institutes of Health and other US Federal funders
  • Research Councils
  • Royal Society
  • Wellcome Trust
  • etc.

We look forward to hearing from you.