‘Can you convey the impact of your research in a single image?’ That’s the challenge we set BU academics and students this year. The overwhelming response saw researchers from across the university getting creative and utilising their photography skills. The photos give just a small glimpse into some of the fantastic work our researchers are doing both here at BU and across the globe.
Researchers from across the university, working in areas as diverse as science, marketing, health and forensic investigation submitted images to the competition. Now we want your help to pick the winners!
To vote click on the ‘Vote’ button below your favourite image on this page. Or vote by liking an image via our Facebook album. Perhaps a particular research subject strikes a chord with you, or you find a certain image especially evocative – whatever your reason, the competition winners are for you to decide!
The deadline for voting is 3 March and the winners will be announced in the Atrium Art Gallery on 9 March, by Vice-Chancellor Professor John Vinney.
The full exhibition will then be on display in the Atrium Art Gallery from Thursday 9 March until Wednesday 22 March, so drop by and take a look.
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.
Michel Foucault, who died more than 30 years ago, has something to tell us about Donald Trump. The French philosopher once delivered a famous lecture which sought to explain why the people of Europe had done away with the warrior kings of the past and embraced a whole new way of running things. The US now has a president whose advisers announce that he has “a mandate to blow up norms of good governance”.
The extraordinary events of the past few weeks also brought to mind something I heard in private while working as a financial reporter. The CEO of a major multinational happily declared: “No one ever accused this company of being a democracy.”
The corporate sphere and the state have unique characteristics, of course, but Trump is bringing the preoccupations of one into the other. On his first full day in office, the White House CEO invited the CEOs of major US corporations to discuss the future governance of America. They of course come from a world where establishing good corporate governance has sometimes felt like pulling teeth. It will be intriguing to discover what good governance means for Trump.
Immigration rhetoric
We have an early clue. Trump’s executive order closing the border to citizens of seven, mainly Muslim states was quickly set aside by the courts. And like a CEO annoyed by an underling, Trump ranted on Twitter against judges. Was he not the “Leader of the Free World”? Was he not, as president of the first democracy of the modern era, carrying out the will of the people?
This vignette brings to mind Foucault’s view of governance, and that extraordinary dismantling of the concept of divine right for Europe’s monarchies.
The new form of governance that emerged was based on central administration, guided notionally by rational processes. Foucault recalled Machiavelli’s The Prince, where right choices sustain faith in the ruler’s absolute authority. Poor decisions might destroy it. In the Enlightenment, the start of the modern era, such faith transferred to the state.
What happened between Machiavelli in the 16th century and the Enlightenment in the 18th, of course, was the Thirty-Years’ War of 1618-1648. Protestants and Catholics slaughtered each other over articles of faith that disguised the territorial ambitions of kings and princes. It sapped the legitimacy of monarchies, setting the stage for the unenlightened French Revolution. Democratic at first, it reverted to pre-modern barbarism, which ended only when Napoleon conquered much of Europe and declared himself Emperor.
But before that, modernism – what scholars like Foucault called the turn towards rationalism and scientific method in the Enlightenment era – had ushered in a truly enlightened revolution, the American one. The US Constitution adopted broad enfranchisement, which broadened further over the decades that followed, and created three co-equal branches of government to constrain a president from ruling by divine right.
Hacked off
Reading Foucault’s lecture a few years ago, I reflected on a big news story of that time: The News of the World, a British newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and directed by his son James, had hacked into the mobile phone messages of celebrities. Their protests did little to halt the practice.
But then its journalists hacked the mobile phone of a child who had vanished and was feared dead. Deleting voicemails, they led the family and police to conclude the girl was still alive – a runaway, not a victim.
After a popular outcry, the Murdochs closed the newspaper. They appeared before a parliamentary committee, on what the elder declared, ungrammatically, the “most humble day of my life”.
At that moment, I saw Rupert Murdoch as a Foucault-like version of Machiavelli’s prince, at great risk of forfeiting his “divine right” through the clumsy slaughter of his legitimacy. But Murdoch did not disintegrate. Indeed, he has retained and grown his empire. Now we learn that this corporate emperor was observing events as Trump gave an interview with Michael Gove for one of Murdoch’s titles, The Times.
Trump knows that many successful CEOs are indeed imperious. Murdoch built a small Australian newspaper into a global news and entertainment giant. The lack of external constraint – coupled with ambition, ideas and personal self-control – can create superior outcomes. But the evidence is mixed. Think of accounting scandals at Enron under CEO Jeffrey Skilling, or at Bernie Ebbers’ WorldCom.
And public governance is different from corporate governance. Consider this: markets constrain imperious CEOs when board structures and guidelines cannot – shareholders can sell and walk away. But the market in nationalities is very narrow, as the migrants controversy has underlined.
Trump has so far acted like the CEO of pre-modern corporate governance. He has sought to assert the “unfettered power” which the 1992 UK Cadbury Code sought to constrain at British companies. How it works in the boardroom echoes the checks and balances in the US Constitution.
Trump’s executive orders suggest a wilful, self-absorbed and self-justifying mentality of governance. It has clear echoes of the world of princes and the divine right of kings which the Thirty Years’ War destroyed and to which Foucault drew our attention. But the protests we have seen suggest many are not willing to return to governance that accepts anything like divine right.
There are large parts of US society – Trump’s supporters and doubtful but loyal Republicans – who think differently. Perhaps the “strong man”, with answers to all ills, still has an allure in our unfathomably complex world.
But if Trump pursues this path, he will find that dissatisfaction with both the rationalism of modernism and the intricacies of postmodernism isn’t strong enough to revert to pre-modern governance. Trump’s election may be a big moment in history; just not that big. We can hope so, at least. To put it another way, democracy rules: our ancestors’ rejection of the war-mongerers of 400 years ago is a legacy that will not be easily overturned.
The Research and Knowledge Exchange Office (RKEO) invite all ‘new to BU’ academics and researchers to an induction.
This event provides an overview of all the practical information staff need to begin developing their research plans at BU, using both internal and external networks; to develop and disseminate research outcomes; and maximising the available funding opportunities.
Objectives
The primary aim of this event is to raise participants’ awareness of how to get started in research at BU or, for more established staff, how to take their research to the next level
To provide participants with essential, practical information and orientation in key stages and processes of research and knowledge exchange at BU
Indicative content
An overview of research at BU and how R&KEO can help/support academic staff
The importance of horizon-scanning, signposting relevant internal and external funding opportunities and clarifying the applications process
How to grow a R&KE portfolio, including academic development schemes
How to develop internal and external research networks
Key points on research ethics and developing research outputs
Getting started with Knowledge Exchange and business engagement
The sixth induction will be held on Tuesday, 7th March 2017 on the 4th floor of Melbury House.
Title
Date
Time
Location
Research & Knowledge Exchange Office (R&KEO) Research Induction
Tuesday 7th March 2017
9.00 – 12.00
Lansdowne Campus
9.00-9.15 – Coffee/tea and cake/fruit will be available on arrival
9.15 – RKEO academic induction (with a break at 10.45)
11.25 – Organisational Development upcoming development opportunities
11.30 – Opportunity for one to one interaction with RKEO staff
12.00 – Close
There will also be literature and information packs available.
If you would like to attend the induction then please book your place through Organisational Development and you can also visit their pages here. We will directly contact those who have started at BU in the last five months.
We hope you can make it and look forward to seeing you.
Next week Interreg are coming to BU to run sessions on their funding application process and how to develop a successful application.
Interreg is an economic development programme that funds research and innovation, social inclusion, employment, climate change and resource efficiency projects which take place across EU countries and regions. These projects aim to find common solutions to common problems which exist in multiple countries. BU has been awarded and is involved in projects from the Channel, 2 Seas and Atlantic schemes.
The event will include a number of sessions including;
An Introduction to Interreg:The Interreg programmes, how they are different from each other and from other EU funds. This will also cover the types of project that are funded.
Tips on How to Develop a Good Interreg Project: Lessons from the selection process by Sallyann Stephen from The Department for Communities and Local Government, based on her experience on the Interreg project selection panel.
How to Apply: the two stage process going through the selection criteria and the key documents involved.
The opportunity to discuss your own ideas and get advice on how to develop them.
This event is open to staff from other universities and company’s across the south, if you have a network or partner that you think would be interested please invite them to book onto the event.
Three tales of sexual intrigue from Kip Jones. A story, a reminiscence, and a scene from a film.
By means of several auto-ethnographic stories (including a scene from a working script for a proposed film), the author interrogates numerous ideas and misconceptions about gay youth, both past and present.
Being straight or being gay can be viewed within the wider culture’s need to set up a sexual binary and force sexual “choice” decision-making for the benefit of the majority culture. Through the device of the fleeting moment, this essay hopes to interrogate the certainties and uncertainties of the “norms” of modernity by portraying sexuality in youth.
There are new projects in the Student Project Bank in the following subject areas:
Business, management and marketing
Computing and information technology
Games and music technology
Media and communications
Social studies
Tourism, hospitality and events
Shortened briefs are listed below. Send us an email to request a full project brief and an application form.
SPB032: Create an app for Royal Bournemouth Hospital’s 2017 open day
Create an app Royal Bournemouth Hospital visitors can use to find out more about the Open Day and sign up to the different health talks, tours and activities as well as see what time activities are scheduled for.
SPB040: Impact evaluation for We Do Ethical Fashion’s annual gala event
We Do Ethical Fashion run Love Dorset, an exciting annual gala event celebrating the county’s local businesses, natural capital and people. The aim of the gala is to start a conversation about making Dorset a fairtrade county within the next 5 years. Design a method for We Do Ethical Fashion to measure the impact of their event. This will be used evaluate the impact that they are making through the annual gala event and these data will be used to improve their methods year on year.
SPB044: Crowdfunding feasibility study and campaign design for charities
Help connect millions of people to the help they need when they need it and allow millions to offer their help to those less fortunate or in need. Help-in is a charity that aims to create a new social media platform designed to increase volunteering both hands on and virtually. Carry out a feasibility study into crowdfunding models for charitable organisations and use your findings to design a three week campaign with a soft launch. There will be the opportunity to implement the campaign if desired.
SPB045: Social media marketing and management plan for a local charity
Help connect millions of people to the help they need when they need it and allow millions to offer their help to those less fortunate or in need. Help-in is a charity that aims to create a new social media platform designed to increase volunteering both hands on and virtually. Design a social media marketing plan for a crowdfunding campaign and create a management plan for the marketing plan.
SPB046: Brand development for Help-in
Help connect millions of people to the help they need when they need it and allow millions to offer their help to those less fortunate or in need. Help-in is a charity that aims to create a new social media platform designed to increase volunteering both hands on and virtually. Work with Help-in to develop their brand. This will be used to influence the look and feel of their platform and across social media, the website and any printed materials.
SPB047: Social media platform prototype development for Help-in
Help connect millions of people to the help they need when they need it and allow millions to offer their help to those less fortunate or in need. Help-in is a charity that aims to create a new social media platform designed to increase volunteering both hands on and virtually. Work with Help-in to develop the above social media platform. All aspects must be scalable to cope with additions to details, projects, tick boxes and ultimately users. The Platform will be global, so there is a need to search for companies or project types in any part of the world.
Apply now
Projects are available to all undergraduate and postgraduate students at BU and can be used for their dissertation, assignment, unit or group work. Members of staff may also choose a project to set to their students. A complete list of projects is available here.
If you would like to find out more and apply for one of the above projects, send us an email to request a project brief and an application form.
The latest service to be revolutionised by drones might not be package delivery or internet connections but the far more valuable service of pollination. Researchers in Japan have been exploring the potential of using miniature drones covered with sticky hairs to act like robotic bees to counter the decline of natural pollinators.
Writing in a paper in the journal Chem, the team demonstrated their drone on an open bamboo lily (Lilium japonicum) flower. With a bit of practice, the device could pick up 41% of the pollen available within three landings and successfully pollinated the flower in 53 out of 100 attempts. It used a patch of hairs augmented with a non-toxic ionic liquid gel that used static electricity and stickiness to be able to “lift and stick” the pollen. Although the drone was manually operated in this study, the team stated that by adding artificial intelligence and GPS, it could learn to forage for and pollinate plants on its own.
But it takes more than just sticky hairs to be a good pollinator. As someone who studies pollinating insects, I think these drones have a lot of catching up to do to match our existing pollinators, which include bees, butterflies and even some larger animals, in all their diversity. But it is always good to see science learning from nature and these studies also help us to appreciate the wonders of what nature has already provided.
Pollination is complex task and should not be underrated. It involves finding flowers and deciding if they are suitable and haven’t already been visited. The pollinator then needs to successfully handle the flower, picking pollen up and putting it down in another plant, while co-ordinating with its team and optimising its route between flowers. In all of these tasks, our existing pollinators excel, their skills honed through millions of years of evolution. In some cases, our technology can match them and in others it has some way to go.
The three major factors that make insect pollinators such as bees so good at what they do are their independent decision making, learning and teamwork. Each bee can decide what flowers are suitable, manage their energy usage and keep themselves clean of stale pollen.
Sticky hairs. Dr. Eijiro Miyak
Modern drones can already achieve this level of individual management. As they have the technology to track faces, they could track flowers as well. They could also plot routes via GPS and return to base for recharging on sensing a low battery. In the long run, they may even have a potential advantage over natural pollinators as pollination would be their sole function. Bees, on the other hand, are looking to feed themselves and their brood, and pollination happens as a by-product.
The areas where drones need development, however, are learning and teamwork. Flowers are also not always as open and simple as those of the bamboo lily and quite a few of our commercially pollinated food resources have much trickier flowers (such as beans) or need repeated visits (such as strawberry flowers) to produce good fruit.
To solve this, bees learn and specialise on a specific flower so they can handle them quickly and efficiently. They also learn the position of rewards to learn the best routes. With all individuals in the team doing this, they divide their labour and get a lot more done. To replicate this in drones would involve some serious programming and the ability of the drone to change its behaviour or shape to adjust to flowers, or having different drones for different jobs as we have different species of pollinator.
Having more than one drone requires co-ordination and preferably non-centralised control, whereby individual drones can make their own decisions based on information from their colleagues and a set of simple rules. Honeybees have the ability to recruit others to rich floral rewards using movements known as the waggle dance. Bumblebees can tell if a flower has already been visited by the smell of the footprints left by previous visitors. All these adaptations make our pollinators very efficient at what they do. Similar skills would have to be developed into a team of pollinating drones in order for them to work as efficient pollinators.
Although I feel that these robots are a long way away from becoming the optimal pollinators, they may well have a place in our future. I could see these drones being used in the environments that are unsuitable for natural pollinators, such as a research lab where precision is needed in the crossing of plant breeds. Or even in a biodome on Mars where a swarm of honeybees may not be the safest solution. It will be interesting to see what else robotics can learn from our insect pollinators and what they can improve upon.
The 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.
On Wednesday, 1st March 2017, the Medical Research Council (MRC) will be visiting BU between 1.30pm and 3.30pm. The presentation will provide:
tips on writing a good application, including such documents as ‘pathways to impact’;
an overview of the peer review process for all types of application
how to respond to your reviewer comments
an overview of MRC fellowship schemes
The presentation is open to the regional university network, known as the M3 group, which includes: AUB, Bournemouth, Brighton, Portsmouth, Reading, Southampton, Southampton Solent, Surrey, Sussex and Winchester. All academics and research offices are welcome to attend. If you are interested in applying to any of the research councils then this will be useful to you.
BU will host a pre-event networking lunch for all attendees from 12 noon. This is a great opportunity to learn about the inner workings of the research councils and how you can strengthen your applications for funding. If you would like to attend, then please book through Eventbrite.
About the MRC: The Medical Research Council improves human health through world-class medical research. They fund research across the biomedical spectrum, from fundamental lab-based science to clinical trials, and in all major disease areas. Their research has resulted in life-changing discoveries for over a hundred years. They are the largest research council with a budget expenditure of £927.8m in 2015/16.
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:
Fisher, M., Way, S., Chenery-Morris, S., Jackson, J., Bower, H. (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
The first 14:Live of 2017 features BU’s Orthopaedic Research Institute (ORI) on Thursday 16 February.
Healthcare professionals will play a major role at some point in our lives.
BU’s ORI is working to make a real difference both locally and globally, in orthopaedic surgery, related diseases and treatments.
One particular area of expertise for ORI is osteoarthritis, which is a common form of joint disease. Clinicians in Dorset are frequently faced with the disease, owing to the large numbers of older people living in the region. This is an areas that ORI is currently working to make a real difference in.
They’re also experts in hip replacements and are currently looking at how blood flow can help post surgery recovery. As well as having a chance to hear about the life changing research and work from ORI, you’ll be able to test out the Laser Speckle Contrast Imager (LSCI) which is used to visualise blood flow and measure micro circulation just below the skin’s surface.
Join us on Floor 5, Student Centre at 14:00-15:00 to hear from ORI’s Project Manager, Shayan Bahadori and test out the LSCI.
Festival of Learning on-tour is taking BU’s research and expertise to some exciting locations this year so if you are interested in engaging with the public look no further!
The Poole Maritime Festival will run from 15 – 21 May this year, and Festival of Learning on-tour will join the festivities on Saturday 20 May at Baiter Park in Poole. We’re expecting lots of interested members of the public with Poole Harbour Boat Showand the Seven Seas Festivalforming part of Poole Maritime Festival’s exciting programme. The Boat Show alone attracted over 15,000 people in 2015!
The Festival is linked withEuropean Maritime Day, originally created in 2008 to give Europe’s community of maritime professionals a forum to meet, exchange knowledge and forge partnerships. It is a unique opportunity to promote Poole, local businesses and Bournemouth University’s research to an international audience!
We are looking for public engagement activities that fit into the theme of maritime heritage and environment, but if your activity is not directly related we’d still love for you to be involved. You can express your interest in running an activity by dropping me an email on jpawlik@gbournemouth.ac.uk and I will be able to provide you with more details and help you develop your activity.
This year’s Bournemouth Research Chronicle explores the ways in which our academics are working with students, our local community and with partners abroad. In the latest edition Shelley Ellis, Lecturer in Performance Analysis, shares her story of working with South Coast Canoes to tackle the problem of adapting sporting equipment to fit women. Below, Simon Rham, owner of South Coast Canoes explains his company’s involvement in the project.
“I first got to know more about this subject after Shelley applied to become a South Coast Canoes Team Paddler. Shelley represents us on and off the water and has helped grow our profile with her coaching and expertise,” explains Simon.
“Shelley told me about the subject she was researching and to help her with this we have held talks both at the shop and at a charity paddling event in Devon which we run. These talks were extremely interesting and helped to increase the awareness within the paddling community of what Shelley is trying to achieve. We’ve given Shelley access to our social media accounts to help her raise the profile of her research area.”
“One of the other ways we’ve been able to help Shelley is by supporting her to find particular pieces of equipment which she needs for her research. For example, Shelley was trying to purchase paddle shafts from New Zealand, which have power meters built in. These are great for measuring performance and are a good tool for Shelley’s research.”
“She needed some blades to go with the paddle shafts, so I put her in touch with AT Paddles, who are based in the USA. They kindly sent over some samples for her to use as part of her research. With this equipment, Shelley has been able to gather more data out on the water to help her better understand how subtle differences in seat height can affect paddling performance. We will continue to work with Shelley on this as it is an extremely interesting area of research.”
To find out more about Shelley’s research and her work with South Coast Canoes, take a look at the latest edition of the Bournemouth Research Chronicle.
The 2017 Bournemouth Research Chronicle can be seen in full here.
The 3rd Workshop for EU IRSES project on Next Generation Computer Animation Techniques
Chair: Dr. Jian Chang – The National Centre for Computer Animation, Bournemouth University
Co-Chairs: Prof Nadia Magnenat Thalmann – MIRALab, University of Geneva, Switzerland and NTU, Singapore.
Prof Jian J Zhang – The National Centre for Computer Animation, Centre for Digital Entertainment, Bournemouth University
The “AniNex” (www.aninex.org) is an EU FP7 funded exchange project, which is designed to prepare and lead the development of next generation techniques related to computer animation and its applications. The workshop will be coordinated as part of the Edutainment conference programme at Bournemouth in June 2017.
Authors are welcome to send their queries through email to Dr Jian Chang at: jchang@bournemouth.ac.uk
We would like to invite you to participate in the workshop on Computer Animation Techniques, which will be held in Bournemouth in June 23, 2017. We would also like to invite you to join the international conference Edutainment 2017 in June 26-28.
The event will publish a post proceeding in Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.
Submission of extended abstracts (up to 2 A4 pages): 23rd Apr, 2017
Notification of results (successful submissions will be invited to be presented as either full papers or posters at the workshop, all of which will be invited to submit a full version to be considered for the LNCS): 2nd May, 2017
Submission of full papers for the LNCS proceeding: 7th Jun, 2017
The LNCS proceeding notification: 16 Jun, 2017
Camera ready version for publication: 10 Aug, 2017
In July 2016, a group of undergraduate students travelled to Indonesia as part of the ‘Landscape Ecology and Primatology’ (LEAP) research project. For many it was their first experience of living and working in the tropics. Below, Ecology and Wildlife Conservation student, Ewan Hitchcoe shares some insights into the trip.
The first part of the trip was based at the Ketambe Forest research centre, located in Aceh province. The forest here is part of the network of forests that makes up the Gunung Leuser National Park. The Ketambe research centre was built by Dr. Herman D. Rikjsen, a Dutch researcher, in 1971 and was the first Orang-utan research station in the world. Since its inception, the station has provided a base for many scientific studies carried out by well-known Orang-utan field researchers and their collaborators. The long-term nature of the station means that it’s been possible to carry out studies that help both the public and scientific community with an understanding of adaptive strategies, life history variables and social behaviour of animal populations.
Our group of BU students spent a total of 4 days at Ketambe, one half of the group staying at the research station for two days and the other half staying across the nearby river at a guesthouse, before swapping over. Ketambe was our first introduction to the rainforest and much of our time was spent on extended treks through the forest where we were lucky enough to experience a multitude of flora and fauna including many old growth trees, insects, birds and primates, as well as stunning forest landscape features such as rivers and waterfalls. Both groups were lucky enough to see wild Orang-utans at Ketambe – a mother and a young infant.
Here at Ketambe, we learned field skills, such as how to use the audio array method (spatial explicit capture-recapture) for assessing primate population density. This involved a 4am start and trekking into the forest, where we set up 3 different listening stations from which to record the morning calls of Orang-utans, Siamangs, Gibbons and Thomas leaf monkeys. We took note of the time, species, bearing and approximate distance, so that we could triangulate primate group positions later back at camp. We also learned some other techniques for monitoring bio diversity such as butterfly trapping and handling under the instruction of MRes student and LEAP team member Emma Hankinson.
After a pit stop back at Medan our next destination was at Serbajadi Aceh Timur to meet with Tezar Pahlevie and the elephant handlers of the Aceh Conservation Response Unit (CRU). Here we learned how this dedicated team use low tech methods such as fireworks or planting citrus crops to try to dissuade elephants away from people and crop plantations. We also learned how as a last resort the CRU uses trained elephants (taken from the wild as ‘problem’ elephants that would have most likely come to harm from farmers trying to protect their crops) to fight and effectively scare off wild herds. We were also privileged enough to be able to engage with the elephants by helping to wash and feed these magnificent creatures, becoming acutely aware of how truly powerful they are.
The next day we were invited to Leuser Conservation Forum offices, where Rudi Putra and Tezar Pahlevie gave us a presentation about the excellent work being carried out in Aceh and beyond. The presentation stressed the importance of and many reasons for protecting the rain forest. We learned about their success stories, as well as some of the problems that hinder the team’s progress. The biggest recurring theme is a severe shortage of and sometimes misappropriation of government funds. In a developing nation often struggling to provide housing, water, healthcare and education for its citizens, habitat and wildlife conservation is understandable not at the top of the government’s priority list. It quickly became clear that the issues faced here and throughout Indonesia are daunting and are not going to be resolved easily.
We would like to invite you to the latest research seminar of the Centre for Games and Music Technology Research.
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.
Early career researchers- this is your chance to find out how your voice can be heard in the media!
Sense about Science will be running Standing up for Science media workshops for early career researchers to learn from scientists who have or are actively engaged with the media. You can also hear from respected science journalists who will teach you how the media works, how to respond and comment. As well as hearing what journalists want and expect of scientists. The first workshop of 2017 will be on Friday 7 April, at the University of Manchester.
The workshop is open to early career researchers and scientists (PhD students, post-doctoral fellows or equivalent) in all sciences, engineering and medicine and is free to attend. The event will discuss science-related controversies in media reporting with practical guidance tips for working with the media.
Event Date: Wednesday the 1st March 2017
Festival of Learning on-tour is taking BU’s research and expertise to some exciting locations this year so if you are interested in engaging with the public look no further!
April’s Café Scientifique – Should we help machines understand and respond to our emotions?
Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) 2024 – 2 WEEKS LEFT
Working with The Conversation: online training session – Wednesday 8th May
Apply for up to £1,000 to deliver an event and take part in a national festival of public engagement with research
MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships 2024
Horizon Europe News – December 2023