Category / Research themes

Third Edition of the EU Falls Festival in Amsterdam (8-9 May 2017)

EU, Student Engagement, Uncategorized


Natalia Adamczewska and Yolanda Barrado-Martín represented the Psychology Department and Ageing & Dementia Research Centre (ADRC) at the Third Edition of the EU Falls Festival in Amsterdam on 8th and 9th May 2017. The theme of the congress was: Developing Collaborations across Professions and throughout Europe.

This festival brought together over 200 professionals from multiple disciplines (such as Nursing, Physiotherapy, Occupational Therapy, Medicine, Psychology and Technology) working under a common target: The prevention of falls amongst older adults. It was a great opportunity to see how different countries in Europe, but also researchers in America, represented by Dr. Robin Lee, US Lead Home and Recreation Team; and Australia, represented by Kim Delbaere, Falls Balance and Injury Centre, NeuRa; are working under this objective, the resources different countries invest on this and the different approaches used from different disciplines. A variety of interventions were presented from educational to exercise, and a debate was organised regarding the relevance of the role of technologies to prevent falls and support research.

Falls are the first external cause of death amongst older adults which explains the importance of researchers, practitioners and policy makers working together.​ Members of the World Health Organisation and the European Commission were also attending this meeting and sharing their views on the relevance of falls prevention.

Yolanda’s PhD project looks into the acceptability and adherence of participants living with dementia to a Tai Chi exercise intervention. Adherence to falls interventions was one the main concerns of the congress, however, the experiences of those living with dementia remain mostly under-explored.

Natalia focuses on the psychological adjustment to falls in her PhD project and she looks at fall-related PTSD. Various interventions presented at the festival could possibly be applied in order to enable participants to cope with psychological consequences of falling, such as virtual reality treatment presented by Jeff Hausdorff that he originally developed for fall prevention in idiopathic fallers.

Intelligent Transportation Analytical Model for SMEs Coach Operators

BU research, PG research

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

Speaker:             Siti Aishah Mohd Selamat

(Bournemouth University PhD student based at County Coaches UK LLP, Luton)

Title:     Intelligent Transportation Analytical Model for SMEs Coach Operators

Time: 2:00PM-3:00PM

Date: Wednesday 31st May 2017

Room: PG11, Poole House, Talbot Campus

Abstract: The transportation industry is the key economic driver of any country and also an essential component in one’s daily routine. The evolution of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) in the last two decades has helped the authorities in solving underpinning traffic challenges such as curbing road congestion, road safety, road surveillance and much more.

 

With the advancement of technology in the 21st Century, data is increasingly collected every hour, every minute and every second causing a data explosion era. The International Data Corporation (IDC) forecast that the volume of data is expected to grow up to 50 Zettabytes globally by the year 2020. Extracting strategical information from the data can revolutionize the development of ITS, by shaping a traditional technology-driven system into a more robust ITS ecosystem.

 

According to Eurostat, the transportation and the storage enterprise made up of 5% of the 22.3 million of the non-financial business economy in 2012.  Despite the momentous potential benefits of big data analytics utilization, the transportation SMEs are lagging behind in their adoption efforts. In a volatile economic environment, SMEs in the transportation sector needs to be proactive in utilizing its data asset at hand to pre-empt future circumstances in order to remain competitive and relevant.

 

We hope to see you there.

Re-elected to the Board!

Dr John Oliver, from the Advances in Media Management research cluster (FMC/FoM) has been re-elected to the European Media Management Association Board. Following his election at the association’s recent Annual General Assembly in Ghent, Belgium, Dr Oliver will now serve a 3rd term on the board and be responsible for the Doctoral Summer School in 2018.

Nutrition and Dementia care workbook now ebook!

This week is Dementia Awareness Week and the Ageing and Dementia Research Centre (ADRC) is engaging with a number of initiatives to raise awareness of dementia.

In 2016 we launched our nutrition and dementia care workbook, a research informed training tool informed by our project led Professor Jane Murphy with Joanne Holmes, funded by the Burdett Trust for Nursing. This has been very well received across health and social care, enabling staff to make quality improvements and impact on the delivery of nutritional care for people living with dementia.

This week we are excited to release an online version of our workbook and will have a much wider reach to support people living with dementia. It is freely available to everyone and can be accessed from our website http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/nutrition-dementia

For more details contact Michelle O’Brien: mobrien@bournemouth.ac.uk

The European Media Management Association Conference

Graham Goode, from the Advances in Media Management (AiMM) research cluster recently presented his doctoral research at the European Media Management Association conference in Ghent, Belgium. Under a conference theme of “collaboration in the value chain”, Graham presented data from a multi-year content analysis of strategic collaborations of UK broadcast, production and distribution organisations between 2010 and 2016. The findings show that equity participation, a form of collaboration, where one partner provides finance and expertise to gain access to the other partner’s capabilities in content, formats, talent, people and production facilities, accounted for a substantial and growing proportion of collaborations over the last three years, replacing acquisitions, as the here-to (since 2010) main form of collaboration.

Biodiversity on Talbot Campus

Knowledge Exchange, Student Engagement

The NUS Green impact Bee Friendly event was held in the fusion building on the 16th May showcasing what BU is researching and implementing for biodiversity on Talbot campus. The event had a strong emphasis on pollinators and as a community we have realised 17 new bee hotels and over 100m2 of wild flowers to improve our homes and campus for a wider diversity of bees.

Top James Appleby and Dr Liz Franklin – Emma and Isatu Placement students from Poole college not in shot Bottom the edible herbs in planters on campus (see Campus Biodiversity Map)

The event showcased the work of the Co-creative Student Environment Research Teams (SERTS) for biodiversity on Talbot campus including: James Appleby that is leading the Bee Zoopla SERT for making better bee homes and raising awareness of solitary bees and the Campus Bulbs SERT planting and monitoring the success of bulbs on campus. For more information see the hyperlinks within.


Top James and bottom the Campus Bulbs team Dr Anita Diaz, Alessandra, Amy, James, Ellie, Cara, Jake, Leon and Damian Evans

During the event there was a great deal of knowledge exchange about campus biodiversity with the University community being made aware of the bird boxes, bat boxes, bee hotels, wildflowers, bulb planting, edible herbs and fruit trees on campus. The handy link below takes you to a PDF of the campus biodiversity map if you missed the event.

Campus Biodiversity Map

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

BU research, 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.

 

 

BU Research on Event Evaluation featured at the Meeting and Events Australia National Conference

BU research, Business Engagement, Events, Impact

Dr Nicole Ferdinand, Senior Academic in the Department of Events and Leisure recently presented at a three-day conference (April 30th – May 2nd 2017) at the International Convention Centre in Sydney hosted by Meeting and Events Australia (MEA). She was one of twelve plenary speakers who were part of the association’s national conference which featured the theme “Reboot” as delegates were treated to a number of presentations and workshops which were geared towards pushing the boundaries and challenging delegates to open their minds to the possibilities to improve the delivery of events. The conference celebrated its 40th year this year and is considered Australia’s “ultimate conference” for the events industry.

MEA Conference Opening Ceremony Featuring Australian Dance Troupe

Dr Ferdinand’s plenary session was entitled 360 Degree Post-event Evaluation and featured cutting-edge research developed with fellow BU researcher Dr Nigel Williams on using social media data in evaluating events.

Dr Nicole Ferdinand on the main stage at the MEA National Conference

She followed her plenary session with a hands-on workshop. Feedback from both sessions was extremely positive as event evaluation is considered crucial for event success.

“Hands-on” Post-event Evaluation Workshop Led by Dr Nicole Ferdinand

For more information on the conference and the other speakers featured at the event, have a look at the conference website.

AiMM Awarded Doctoral Summer School!

Research news

The Advances in Media Management (AiMM) research cluster have been awarded the European Media Management Association’s Doctoral Summer School 2018.

AiMM is a cross faculty research collaboration between the Faculty of Media & Communications and the Faculty of Management and this award follows on from AiMMs success in hosting the association’s annual conference at BU in 2013.The Doctoral Summer School will be held at BU between the 2-4th July 2018 and is targeted at PhD students at all stages of their research, as well as early-stage post-docs.

Congratulations go to the bid team: Dr John Oliver, Dr Chris Chapleo, Dr Joyce Costello, Graham Goode, Melanie Gray and Conor O’Kane.

Public lecture on ‘Getting the message across about Zika’

BU research, PG research, Research news

Public Lecture by Professor Jane Noyes, Bangor University

Date: Friday 12 May 2017
Time: 10.50 -12:00
Venue: B321, Bournemouth House

Getting the message across about Zika: using qualitative evidence to inform the global WHO risk communication guidelines for public health emergencies, and lessons learned for intervention development.

Jane is the Professor of Health and Social Services Research and Child Health at Bangor University. She specialises in child health and social care research. She is also an expert in methodology, including complex intervention development and evaluation, and qualitative and mixed method systematic review methodology.  Jane is Lead Convenor of the Cochrane Qualitative and Implementation Methods Group and Editor of the Journal of Advanced Nursing.

Jane’s talk will be followed by a short lecture by of Queen’s University Belfast on ‘Social technology solutions to postnatal care in Brazil’.

Fiona is a Lecturer in the School of Nursing and Midwifery and the Centre for Evidence and Social Innovation, Queen’s University Belfast. Her research focuses on enhancing maternal and child health and wellbeing. Her expertise includes conducting economic evaluations alongside intervention-based studies.

Complimentary lunch will be served at 12.30pm

Please RSVP to Sam Porter at porters@bournemouth.ac.uk

This lecture is part of the ‘Social technology solutions to postnatal care in Brazil’ project funded by the British Council through the Newton Fund.

Please share with your networks, this Flyer is available to send out.

CEMP research published by Samsung

BU research, Post-award, Research news

CEMP’s Digital Capability study has now been published by Samsung.

ABOUT THIS RESEARCH
In 2015, Samsung funded a six-month research project on the Isle of Portland in Weymouth, exploring the
impact of technology on participants’ engagement with community services, schools and family learning.
We partnered with the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice (CEMP) at Bournemouth University.
The project has given us a rich set of findings on which to build further work, and we hope this summary will be
of help to schools, community organisations, policy makers, employers and even parents – anybody
who shares our interest in enabling communities to benefit from the power of digital technology.

Intelligent Image Understanding

PG research

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

Title: Intelligent Image Understanding

Speaker: Jing Wang

Time: 2:00PM-3:00PM

Date: Wednesday 10th May 2017

Room: PG11, Poole House, Talbot Campus

Abstract: Real data are usually complex and contain various components. For example, face images have expressions and genders. Each component mainly reflects one aspect of data and provides information others do not have. Therefore, exploring the semantic information of multiple components as well as the diversity among them is of great benefit to understand data comprehensively and in-depth. However, this cannot be achieved by current nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF)-based methods, despite that NMF has shown remarkable competitiveness in learning parts-based representation of data. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel multi-component nonnegative matrix factorization (MCNMF). Instead of seeking for only one representation of data, MCNMF learns multiple representations simultaneously, with the help of the Hilbert Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) as a diversity term. HSIC explores the diverse information among the representations, where each representation corresponds to a component. By integrating the multiple representations, a more comprehensive representation is then established. Extensive experimental results on real-world datasets have shown that MCNMF not only achieves more accurate performance over the state-of-the-arts using the aggregated representation, but also interprets data from different aspects with the multiple representations, which is beyond what current NMFs can offer.

We hope to see you there.