Category / REF Subjects

Broadening horizons: Network Science at Utrecht Summer School

Women's Academic Network

We are thrilled to announce that Assemgul Kozhabek, one of our  PhD candidates, recently had the opportunity to participate in the Utrecht Summer School on “Data Science: Network Science” from July 10-14, 2023. Assemgul’s research, under the guidance of Dr. Wei Koong Chai, is centered around understanding and optimizing urban road networks. By attending this course, she was able to gain a deeper understanding of network science and its relevance to her research goals. The course covered various topics, including network modeling, analysis techniques, and practical application of network science in real-world scenarios.
The Utrecht Summer School provided Assemgul with a unique learning experience. Through interactive lectures, hands-on workshops, and networking opportunities with experts in the field, she was able to broaden her knowledge and enhance her skills in analyzing urban road networks. She expresses her gratitude to Dr. Wei Koong Chai for his support and guidance throughout this journey. Assemgul also immensely grateful for the OpenBright Award that made this opportunity possible.
Assemgul’s participation in the Utrecht Summer School on “Data Science: Network Science” has undoubtedly equipped her with valuable insights and tools that will contribute to her ongoing research. Stay tuned for exciting updates on her research journey!

Grant of international patent for invention at BU

Industry collaboration, innovation, international

It comes as a great news for both BU and academic staff that a major international patent has been granted by China National Intellectual Property Administration who have confirmed that it will record the grant of the patent right in the Patent Register, issue the patent certificate for invention, and announce the grant. The patent right shall take effect from the date of announcement, July 4, 2023.

This is a predictive and prognostic invention as a remote probing system to monitor corrosion of conductive or nonconductive coatings and subsurface degradation.

The EIS measurement is resistant to interference and has a high corrosion resolution which produces stable and reliable results. Protective properties of a coating can be learned from an impedance spectroscopy obtained via the measurement that reflects changes in the coating and at the interface of coating-substrate system.

Project lead Professor Zulfiqar Khan has congratulated their co-inventors Dr Mian Hammad Nazir and Dr Adil Saeed for their hard work, dedication and passion over the years. This is the result of years of collective work spanning over several research programmes, Professor Khan added.

This invention will enable, a diverse portfolio of industry sectors and applications in aerospace, automotive industry, shipyards, petrochemical, process, infrastructures, high value assets including Reinforced Concrete (RC) elements of marine structures such as piled jetties, marine installation, gas pipelines, motorways structures and mobile assets such as large vehicles, to monitor, predict and prognose a complex failure initiation and propagation mechanism in real time. This will result in significant cost savings, reducing downtime, enhancing reliability and service life.

Further details and media coverage with a short video about the background of work is available here.

Keywords: Condition monitoring, corrosion, coating, sensor, impedance, electrochemical, spectroscopy, materials, composites.

Fitness to Practise paper published

NHS, Publishing, writing

Congratulations to Megan Jadzinski, Sara White, Sue Way and Dominique Mylod on the acceptance of their paper ‘How are Fitness to Practise processes applied in UK Higher Education Institutions? – A systematic review’ by the international journal Nurse Education in Practice.  All authors are based in the Faculty of Health and Social Science, or were as Prof. Sue Way retired recently.

Well done,

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health

Dr Heidi Singleton receives Sigma Europe’s Emerging Nurse Researcher 2023 Award

Congratulations to Dr Heidi Singleton, who has received Sigma Europe’s Emerging Nurse Researcher 2023 Award.

Heidi Singleton holding a cardboard Google glasses device

Dr Heidi Singleton

The Sigma Emerging Nurse Researcher Award recognises early career nurse researchers whose work has significantly influenced the nursing profession. Dr Singleton won this award for her work combining evidence-based practice with innovative ideas to adapt to the changing nursing landscape.

During her PhD at BU, she researched how technology can improve student nurses’ understanding of complex concepts, such as diabetes. Her work focused on blending real-world practice methods with emerging technologies to develop nursing education in line with how the world is developing and changing.

Other research areas Dr Singleton has explored include how technology can be used therapeutically, for service improvement, mental health and anxiety – especially in children and young people. This includes the psychological impacts of eczema, innovation in nurse-led skin cancer clinics, improving early intervention services, and vaccination and hospital appointment anxiety.

Dr Singleton said: “I feel very honoured to win the Emerging Nurse Researcher Award for the Europe Region. As a new academic, I have looked up to seniors who have demonstrated excellence in their research and publications. It’s a privilege to share my research and that of my brilliant team with the world. Hopefully, this can be a good building block for my future research plans.”

Violence Against and Women and Girls: Social Justice in Action Conference – 29 June

conferences, Fusion, Knowledge Exchange

A chance to showcase your Research

Dear all,

We are holding a conference at BU: Violence Against and Women and Girls: Social Justice in Action Conference – Event Date: 29 June at BGB, Lansdowne.

The Soroptimist International Bournemouth and Bournemouth University are facilitating a conference with the focus upon Violence Against Women and Girls. The aim of the day is to raise awareness of issues relating to violence against women and girls, bringing together diverse professionals, NGOs, charities and interested others to share knowledge, explore limitations and seek solutions to sustain social justice. This event is open to all those who are engaged in working with Violence Against Women and Girls and those who care about reducing this global injustice.

At the event in the lunch room we will be running an automated PowerPoint presentation, where we hope to showcase BU research that is relevant to the professional audience.

This is open to all BU academics and PGRs – and all you need is for your research to be relevant to the intended audience it does not have to be focused on the main conference topic.

If you would like to showcase your work to this audience, please send a PowerPoint slide to Orlanda Harvey by 26th June 2023.

Please do pass this opportunity on to colleagues across the University


The Impact of the Cost-of-Living Crisis on Carers

On 5th June, the first day of carers week 2023, six carers from Dorset met for the first time and shared experiences of the effect of the cost-of-living crisis on their caring role. During the previous two weeks, each carer had taken photographs to capture the impact the cost-of living crisis was having on them, and their caring role.

A huge thank you to Moonmoon, Kim, Aiden,Jason, Katya, and Lesley for all your most generous contributions to this project so far, and for sharing your important experience, insight, and expertise.

Using the qualitative research method of photovoice and working in partnership with the carers, this Bournemouth University project in collaboration with Bournemouth University PIER (Public Involvement in Education and Research) Partnership will translate these experiences of caring during the cost-of-living crisis into actionable knowledge, a call for change and to identify future research priorities.

At the workshop, facilitated by Professor Lee-Ann Fenge (Professor of Social Care) and Dr Kate Jupp (PIER Officer), and supported by co-researchers Pete Atkins (PIER Officer) and Angela Skeparovska (student research assistant) each carer shared the story and meaning behind each of their five chosen photographs; the photographs being the catalyst for the stories that emerged.

The workshop was incredibly powerful, and the images, and the experiences, thoughts, and feelings they represented were both hard to hear and important to share.  Experience of homelessness, insolvency, losing the family home, using foodbanks, soup kitchens, community pantry and searching through bins for food were all shared. The hidden costs of health appointments, additional energy use for laundry and cooking to meet special dietary requirements were highlighted. Each of the carers shared how the current guidance to reduce energy consumption in the home was often in conflict with meeting the needs of the person being cared for. Underlying all these experiences was the personal cost of, and personal losses associated with caring. The carers articulated clearly and repeatedly the amplifying effect the cost-of-living crisis was having on their own well-being and the quality of life they were able provide for the person they were caring for.

The carers reported how important it was for them to share their stories and to be amongst others who understood. One carer reported “feeling lighter” when they left, and another said they “felt the session was rewarding and (they were) glad to have shared some insight of our support of loved ones”. All six expressed the wish to continue with this project.

The following images were taken from the 30 images shared during the workshop.

The first images captured the feelings and experience of being “completely overwhelmed” whilst falling further and further into debt:

This image is of food salvaged from a private dustbin on a driveway. The carer went on to explain the choice they subsequently faced, whether or not to toast the cheese, using energy on the grill, in an attempt to reduce the risk of food poisoning.

 

Dr Kate Jupp, PIER Officer: kejupp@bournemouth.ac.uk
Public Involvement in Education and Research (PIER) Partnership: www.bournemouth.ac.uk/pier

BU and University of Cambridge Collaboration on Traffic Prediction

Fusion, Knowledge Exchange, REF Subjects

Bournemouth University (BU) has collaborated with the University of Cambridge on network wide road traffic prediction. The work, led by Dr. Wei Koong Chai in BU, address the problem of traffic prediction on large-scale road networks and propose a novel deep learning model, Virtual Dynamic Graph Convolution Neural Network and Transformer with Gate and Attention mechanisms (VDGCNeT), to comprehensively extract complex, dynamic and hidden spatial dependencies of road networks for achieving high prediction accuracy. The work advocates the use of a virtual dynamic road graph that captures the dynamic and hidden spatial dependencies of road segments in real road networks instead of purely relying on the physical road connectivity.

The team designed a novel framework based on Graph Convolution Neural Network (GCN) and Transformer to analyse dynamic and hidden spatial–temporal features. The gate mechanism is utilised for concatenating learned spatial and temporal features from Spatial and Temporal Transformers, respectively, while the Attention-based Similarity is used to update dynamic road graph.

Two real-world traffic datasets from large-scale road networks with different properties are used for training and testing the model. VDGCNeT is pitted against nine other well-known models in the literature. The results demonstrate that the proposed VDGCNeT is capable of achieving highly accurate predictions – on average 96.77% and 91.68% accuracy on PEMS-BAY and METR-LA datasets respectively. Overall, our VDGCNeT performs the best when compared against other existing models.

Reference:

G. Zheng, W. K. Chai, J. Zhang and V. Katos, “VDGCNeT: A novel network-wide Virtual Dynamic Graph Convolution Neural network and Transformer-based traffic prediction model,” Knowledge-based Systems, 110676, June 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2023.110676.

Using participatory asset mapping and PhotoVoice in Nepalese alcohol study

international, open access, Publishing, writing

This week we received an email from the editorial office of  Perspectives in Public Health with congratulations on the acceptance of your paper ‘Participatory asset mapping and photovoice interviews to scope cultural and community resources to reduce alcohol harm in Chitwan, Nepal’ [1].  The lead researcher on this public health alcohol research project in Nepal is Dr. Ranjita Dhital, Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Health Studies in the Arts and Sciences Department at UCL (University College London).

The World Health Organization (WHO) suggests that in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) like Nepal, morbidity and mortality risks are greater per litre of pure alcohol consumed than in higher-income countries. This is largely due to poverty, poor nutrition, adverse living conditions, and poor access to care. These inequities are made worse by the dearth of understanding of the most appropriate and cost-effective approaches to reduce alcohol-related harm in LMICs.  Our study aims to stimulate new thinking on how cultural and community assets could be integrated to co-designed alcohol interventions for future evaluation in LMICs, through scoping the breadth of cultural and community assets in relation to alcohol use and to exploring attitudes towards alcohol and people experiences with it.

The journal Perspectives in Public Health is published by SAGE and the paper will be Open Access when it appears online.  My previous alcohol studies have focused on students [2], Nepalese migrants living in the UK [3], and Public Health measures to reduced alcohol misuse in Scotland [4].

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health

 

Reference:

 

  1. Dhital, R., Yoeli, H., Adhikari, A., Luitel, N.P., Nadkarni, A., van Teijlingen, E., Sin, J. (2023) Participatory asset mapping and photovoice interviews to scope cultural and community resources to reduce alcohol harm in Chitwan, Nepal, Perspectives in Public Health (accepted).  DOI: 10.1177/17579139231180744).
  2. Engs, R.C, van Teijlingen E (1997) Correlates of alcohol, tobacco & marijuana use among Scottish post-secondary helping profession students, Journal of Alcohol Studies, 58:435-44.
  3. van Teijlingen E, Simkhada, P., Adhikary, P. (2009) Alcohol use among the Nepalese in the UK BMJ Rapid Response: bmj.com/cgi/eletters/339/oct20_1/b4028#223451
  4. Ludbrook A, Godfrey C, Wyness L, Parrott S, Haw S, Napper M, van Teijlingen E. (2002) Effective & Cost-Effective Measures to Reduce Alcohol Misuse in Scotland: Lit Review, ISBN: 0755932803 www.alcoholinformation.isdscotland.org/alcohol_misuse/files/MeasureReduce_Full.pdf