Category / Research themes

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS Two-day workshop: Politics in a post-truth era

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

Two-day workshop: Politics in a post-truth era

10th – 11th July 2017, Bournemouth University

The concept of post-truth, where facts are deemed less important than beliefs, is one that has recently been frequently invoked when making sense of the modern political campaigning environment. The suggestion is that political campaigns exploit and reinforce strongly held beliefs, encouraging the disavowal of contrasting facts, in order to undermine support for the arguments of opponents.

Post-truth has become most associated with campaigns that invoke more populist arguments. Such arguments give voice to privately held beliefs, often hidden by norms of societies which reinforce pejorative stereotypes based on religious and racial differences, gendering of roles and discussing myths of us (as a nation and people) and the others whose differences mark them as not us. Hence there are far-reaching implications of such practices for democratic societies.

The workshop will explore the underlying themes and implications of this phenomenon.

KEY QUESTIONS

1) Is post truth really new, or simply a synonym for the exaggerations and spin long associated with the techniques of political campaigns? Or have political campaigns been proven to lie more?

2) What does a post-truth campaign look like, how is the communication constructed to tap into belief systems and feed the dynamics of a post-truth (belief-based) political environment?

3) Why might beliefs have more power in influencing voting behaviour than more fact, logic or reason based arguments?

4) How does post-truth link to the models of a marketised and professionalised campaign environment?

5) What does post-truth tell us about the current and future state of democratic engagement and of democracy itself?

CONTRIBUTIONS

Contributions need not be full papers, rather informed arguments that promote discussion – although they should have the potential to be full or part papers. The workshop seeks to tease out what post-truth means, how this is encouraged during political campaigns, its root causes, impacts on election outcomes and, importantly, what are the implications for democracy.

PUBLICATION

The longer-term aim is to develop an edited collection of work that would include solo-authored or joint publications from participants that address these questions. The volume will be published in the Palgrave series Political Campaigning and Communication.

DATES

The event will be held on July 10th and 11th with a workshop dinner on the evening of the 10th. There will be no attendance costs – the venue, refreshments and evening meal will be covered jointly by funding from the Centre for Politics and Media Research and the PSA Political Marketing Group.  Participants should expect to cover travel and accommodation. The venue will be the Bournemouth University’s Executive Business Centre close to Bournemouth train station.

ABSTRACTS

Interested participants should propose their participation by offering a short 200-300 word abstract that summarises the main points of the argument, case studies and evidence drawn upon and the broader socio-political implications into which their argument offers insights. The deadline for abstracts is 1600hrs GMT on Friday 6th April 2017. Please email them to dlilleker@bournemouth.ac.uk ​

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.

British Academy Visit – reserve your place now!

Funding opportunities

british_academy_logoThe British Academy is returning to BU on 8 March 2017.  This is an invaluable opportunity to find out more about the international and domestic funding available through the organisation.  For those of you who are not familiar with the British Academy, it is the UK’s leading independent body for the humanities and social sciences, promoting funding, knowledge exchange and providing independent advice within the humanities. 

The session will last just over  1 hour (13:00-14:15) and will comprise a presentation focusing on international and domestic funding opportunities along with an overview of the British Academy, followed by a Q&A session.

Representatives of the British Academy will be available to answer any individual queries not covered in the presentation or Q&A session, and members of the Research and Knowledge Exchange Office will be on hand should you wish to discuss BU’s processes for bidding to the organisation.

Places for this event can be reserved through Organisational Development here.

 

New paper published by CMMPH’s Dr. Susan Way

Publishing, Training, writing

This week saw the pre-publication of ‘Core principles to reduce current variations that exist in grading of midwifery practice in the United Kingdom’ in Nurse Education in Practice.  This paper is co-authored by Dr. Susan Way in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH).  The authors argue that these core principles could contribute to curriculum development in midwifery and other professions internationally.

Congratulations!

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

 

Reference:

  1. Fisher, M., Way, S., Chenery-Morris, S., Jackson, J., Bower, H. Sue Way Feb 2017(2017) Core principles to reduce current variations that exist in grading of midwifery practice in the United Kingdom, Nurse Education in Practice (forthcoming) see: http://www.nurseeducationinpractice.com/article/S1471-5953(17)30092-6/abstract

 

BU staff, students and alumni celebrate the launch of Events Management: An International Approach

student research

Editors

Dr Paul Kitchin, Lecturer Sports Management, Ulster University and Dr Nicole Ferdinand, Senior Lecturer Events Management, Bournemouth University, Editors for Events Management: An International Approach

On January 25th 2017, Bournemouth University staff and students celebrated the launch of Events Management: An International Approach. The text brings together the work of 22 authors boasting 11 nationalities. At the launch event, which was hosted at King’s College London, leading Editor for the publication, Dr Nicole Ferdinand, Senior Lecturer in Events Management at Bournemouth University was joined by BU colleagues, current students and alumni as well as staff and students from a range of universities and other organisations – including Goldsmiths University, University of East Anglia, University of East London, University of West London, Set Square Staging Limited and Vodafone.

Ms Emelie Forsberg, Event Manager for British Private Equity and Venture Capital, Panel Member, Author and BU Alumnus

Ms Emelie Forsberg, Event Manager for British Private Equity and Venture Capital, Panel Member, Author and BU Alumnus

 

Mr Christian White (pictured left), BU alumnus and Youngest Author of Events Management: An International Approach

Mr Christian White (pictured left), BU Alumnus and Youngest Author of Events Management: An International Approach

 

The event started with an international networking reception in which attendees from 15 different countries were given the opportunity to meet individuals from a variety of cultural and also professional backgrounds. At the end of the reception two lucky attendees received free copies of the text.

Networking session in full swing

Networking session in full swing

Dr Paul Kitchin hosted the book launch, providing an overview of the text and facilitating the academic versus industry panel discussion which was the highlight of the evening’s proceedings.

Author panel members (from left to right) Academics: Professor Stephen Shaw, Emeritus Professor, York University, Dr Nicole Ferdinand, Senior Lecturer, Events Management and Dr Nigel Williams, Senior Lecturer Project Management both at Bournemouth University, Industry: Mr Bruce Johnson, Manging Director, Bruce Johnson Consultancy, Ms Emelie Forsberg, Event Manager, British Private Equity and Venture Capital and Mr Michael Chidzey, Marketing Director, Chillisauce Events

 Events Management: An International Approach is available for purchase from Amazon.co.uk:  https://goo.gl/c8rZ3O

 

 

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.

NIHR webinar: How nurses can build a career in research – 11am on Wednesday 22 Feb

Nurses are in a unique position on the frontline to see where the gaps are in delivering care and what questions need answering. Pursuing a clinical academic career can provide a stimulating and rewarding career pathway.

Training and career development awards from the National institute for Health Research (NIHR) range across all levels, are open to a wide range of professions and are designed to suit different working arrangements and career pathways.

This special one hour webinar, specifically for nurses, will explore the opportunities available to nurses from the NIHR to pursue a clinical academic career.

This webinar will cover:

  • An overview of the funding opportunities available from the NIHR for nurses to pursue a clinical academic career
  • Details about the HEE/NIHR Integrated Clinical Academic Programme (for non-medical professions) – including advice and guidance on applying
  • Some of the challenges nurses can face and tips on how to overcome them
  • A live Q&A session

The webinar will be presented by Dr Pete Thompson, Assistant Director at the NIHR Trainees Coordinating Centre and HEE/NIHR Senior Clinical Research Fellow Kirsty Winkley, Specialist Diabetes Nurse.

You can register for the webinar via the following link: http://bit.ly/researchcareersfornurses

If you have any issues when registering please email tcc@nihr.ac.uk.

Don’t forget, your local branch of the NIHR Research Design Service is based within the BU Clinical Research Unit (BUCRU) on the 5th floor of Royal London House. Feel free to pop in and see us, call us on 61939 or send us an email.

CEMP awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship.

Awarded & submitted bids, REF Subjects

MarieCurie-fellowship     cemp-logo

CEMP’s Richard Berger has been awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship. The Fellowship seeks to provide professional development opportunities for an early careers researcher in an innovative research environment. The award is a recognition of CEMP’s recent activities, specifically its international conference, two journals and unique Doctor of Education (EdD) programme – which the Fellow will join as a tutor and supervisor.

To that end, Dr. Annamaria Naeg (currently at the University of Nottingham’s China campus) will join CEMP and the EdD programme in September 2017. Over the next two-years, Annamaria will work on the EU funded project ‘MediaLitRefYouth’, supervised by Richard.

In 2015 alone, almost 90.000 unaccompanied minor asylum seekers registered in the EU. Mass media reported intensely on how smart phones became crucial tools for young people during their journey. Unaccompanied children and teenagers have to navigate through European public systems, cultures, languages and institutions. The ‘MediaLitRefYouth’ project aims to discover and aggregate how unaccompanied minor refugees are using digital technology after receiving asylum in their host countries. Moreover, the project will use the results of the study to design creative educational interventions aiming to develop young refugees’ media literacy as the EU has stressed media literacy’s vital importance for digital engagement, economic growth and job creation. To achieve this, Annamaria will collaborate with an NGO which works with young refugees through creative arts and participatory action research (PAR). The tangible outputs of this project will be educational materials for civic engagement through media.

Tags:

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.

Augmented Reality Technology for Minimally Invasive Surgery

student research

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

 

Speaker: Long Chen

 

Title:     Augmented Reality Technology for Minimally Invasive Surgery

ARSurgery

 

Time: 2:00PM-3:00PM

Date: Wednesday 1st February 2017

Room: PG11, Poole House, Talbot Campus

 

Abstract:  This research presentation will demonstrate a novel approach of using augmented reality technology to provide rich additional information in for Minimally Invasive Surgery. The research addresses a number of challenges in terms of dealing with monocular visual sensor, and 3D surface reconstruction via state of the art computer vision algorithm. In recent years, laparoscopic scene tracking and surface reconstruction has been a focus of investigation to provide rich additional information to aid the surgical process. In this project, we developed an AR framework to compensate the depth perception issue of monocular laparoscopic scenes. Monocular laparoscopic techniques are arguably the most common techniques used in minimally invasive surgical paradigm. Yet, it is one of the technically demanding procedures from surgeons, and in which information is provided primarily through the video outputted from endoscopes. The major challenge in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) such as laparoscopy is the lack of depth perception. We developed a robust 3D surface reconstruction and augmented reality with depth perception on the reconstructed scene by using the state-of-the-art visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithm for the sparse salient point clouds detection. We then develop a robust global 3D surface reconstruction framework to obtain smooth surfaces from the unstructured sparse point cloud. The evaluation results illustrating the potential of our algorithm for depth augmentation and depth-correct augmented reality in Minimally Invasive Surgery.

 

We hope to see you there.

 

#realworldresearch Campaign

Great news for the Faculty of Management and Department of Tourism and Hospitality, this month, Emeralds #realworldresearch follows the theme of ‘Happy New You’ and includes a paper published in the British Food Journal:

Lorraine Brown, John Edwards, Heather Hartwell, (2013) “Eating and emotion: focusing on the lunchtime meal”, British Food Journal, Vol. 115 Iss: 2, pp.196 – 208

Further information on the campaign can be seen here:

http://bit.ly/2jDVl53

This article will be on free access until the 17th February 2017

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