Category / Featured academics

Intranasal inhalation of oxytocin improves eye-witness identification: RDF grant report

BU research, Featured academics, Post-award, Research news

In 2011 myself and Ben Parris from the Psychology Research Centre were awarded a small RDF grant to investigate whether intranasal inhalation of the hormone oxytocin can improve eye-witness identification.  We designed an experiment where participants viewed a short video-clip of a perpetrator stealing a wallet from someone’s bag.  Participants then inhaled either an oxytocin or placebo nasal spray, and after a 45 minute interval to allow central oxytocin levels to plateau, were presented with a line-up of ten faces from which they had to either select the perpetrator or state that he was absent.  To date we have tested 70 participants and found a facilitation in the oxytocin condition.  In a second experiment, we asked participants to complete the ‘One-in-Ten’ task, a test of spontaneous eye-witness memory that has been well-used in previous work.  Again, we found a clear facilitation in performance in the oxytocin condition.

These findings follow recent work that has demonstrated that oxytocin can improve face recognition performance in standard cognitive tasks in lab-based settings.  In addition, work from our lab is currently under review for publication demonstrating that oxytocin can improve face recognition in individuals with prosopagnosia (face blindness).  This RDF grant has therefore given us the funding to carry out key investigations demonstrating novel applications of oxytocin inhalation in more applied settings.

I also presented findings from the oxytocin project at the April meeting of the Experimental Psychological Society, and was delighted to meet Dr Markus Bindemann from the University of Kent who is something of an expert in eye-witness identification.  We are now collaborating with Markus, and have plans to develop a bid to the Leverhulme Trust on the back of the publications that we hope will result from these investigations.  We are also about to welcome a new PhD student to our lab, who will be further developing the forensic aspect of this work in more real-world national security settings.

The pump-priming that was made available to us via the RDF scheme has provided us with the opportunity to collect the initial data and publication basis that we need to develop a large external bid, and we hope that this is the beginning of a fruitful line of research for our laboratory.

BU Centre for Face Processing Disorders featured in the Independent

BU research, Featured academics, Fusion

Bournemouth University’s new Centre for Face Processing Disorders (supported by HEIF and Fusion funds) was recently featured in an article in the Independent newspaper,  together with quotes from BU’s Dr Sarah Bate.

Sarah’s work to date has explored the cognitive presentation and treatment of face processing deficits in adults and children with a range of neuropsychological conditions, such as developmental or acquired prosopagnosia (face blindness), autistic spectrum disorder, and Moebius syndrome.  The Face Centre was launched in response to the large amount of media attention generated by Sarah’s research.  After Sarah’s work was featured in The Guardian newspaper and in a BBC1 documentary last year, she has been contacted by over 700 people who believe they have prosopagnosia and would like to participate in her research.  Given that most investigations into prosopagnosia to date have examined relatively small numbers of cases, Sarah now has the unique opportunity to develop large-scale academic and societal impact by having the resources to test this large patient group.

You can read the full article in the Independent here.

Follow the events in the Centre on their webpage or via Twitter (@BUfacecentre).

Luisa Cescutti-Butler’s Purrrrr-fect PhD

BU research, Featured academics

‘Miniature’ cat and my PhD

Luisa Cescutti-Butler, Senior Midwifery Lecturer, Part-time PhD student, School of Health and Social Care

I have two cats but only one of them is the subject of this blog. It is ‘Mini Cat’ who takes centre stage and she is a black moggy. Despite myths and folklore surrounding black cats, Mini is nothing but a delight. She is a voracious killer of birds (I don’t like that characteristic), will eat anything and everything and is very friendly and loving towards her human parents. Why am I blogging about her you may ask, and what has she got to do with my doctoral studies?

I recently had time out from work to catch up on important elements of my research (such as transcribing interviews and getting to grips with NVivo) and would spend all day at my laptop in my study. The photos show Mini sitting beside me whilst I am trying to input data onto NVivo, a computer assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS). Ah ‘cute’ you might be thinking! Not so cute when she walks over the keys trying to gain your attention as it’s now ‘three o’ clock human mommy’ and ‘I want feeding’ – “purr purr”. If I ignore her because I’m in the middle of coding and am concentrating and don’t want to lose momentum, she will find other ways of attracting my attention. Her next tactic is to jump up onto the window-sill which is directly behind the laptop and start knocking things off it!  If that doesn’t work, she will jump down and start walking over the laptop again– “purr”, and eventually sit and look at me with her big green eyes and give a little meow! It’s no good now; I give up, go downstairs and feed her and Nutmeg, cat no 1.

On the other hand when Mini’s stomach is full she will often come up to the study, find a comfortable spot and sleep. She keeps me company and I find myself talking aloud to her, there’s nobody else I can share my thoughts with. I am not a sad and mad ‘cat woman’ but my other half is out at work as well. It is said that cats can help with studies, I would love Mini to stop murdering all the delightful birds and instead put those hunting skills to good use, such as helping me to find those elusive themes from all the data I have thus collected, but unfortunately her talents do not extend that far.

She is a nuisance sometimes, demanding my attention either for feeding or stroking but I wouldn’t have it any other way. People always say that cats are aloof but until you have one as a pet you will discover that is not true, they like to be with their owners even if their human mommy is battling with the intricacies of NVivo. However if any other PhD researcher knows of a cat with ‘transcribing skills’ give me a call!!!! I have to end this blog because Mini is hungry, ‘meow, meow’!!!

The Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and Management explain UK copyright law through animated videos

BU research, Featured academics

If somebody creates a parody or spoof based on a popular original work, does the spoof infringe the copyright of the original artist?

These videos explain the current status of expressions such as parody under UK copyright law.  Parodies use elements of an original work to create a new, humorous or critical expression.  Some countries, such as the USA, Australia and France, already allow the creation of parody without the need to obtain permission from the original copyright owner.

Currently, the UK government is considering making some changes to the existing Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA 1988). These videos explore those proposals and the arguments on both sides of the debate.

In 2011, the government initiated an independent review of intellectual property, carried out by Professor Ian Hargreaves: http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/hargreaves.htm
The report recommended adding an exception to copyright for the purposes of parody, which would allow users to create and share parodies without infringing copyright in certain circumstances.

A Bournemouth University report on the proposed copyright exception for Parody, authored by Dr Kris Erickson, Dr Dinusha Mendis, and Professor Martin Kretschmer, will be available in September 2012:
http://www.cippm.org.uk/publications.html

It is hoped that these videos will be helpful to all users of copyright:  teachers, librarians, artists, producers, journalists and members of the public.

The videos were created by research assistant Bartolomeo Meletti, with support from the Department of Law at Bournemouth University. 

Animation and editing by Marco Bagni – http://www.lostconversation.com
Filming, voice over and animation sound design by Nathan Revill @ Creative http://www.dorsetcreative.co.uk
Illustration by Danilo Rečević – http://www.danilor.it/
Music: Progressive — IB Audio
Interviewee: Dr Kris Erickson
Contributors: Professor Martin Kretschmer; Dr Kris Erickson; Dr Dinusha Mendis; Professor Ruth Towse.

Stepping stones to the north: ‘citizen science’ reveals that protected areas allow wildlife to spread in response to climate change

BU research, Featured academics

Pippa Gillingham from the School of Applied Sciences has co-authored a new study, led by scientists at the University of York, which has shown how birds, butterflies, other insects and spiders have colonised nature reserves and areas protected for wildlife, as they move north in response to climate change and other environmental changes.

Adonis blues can only colonise new sites which already contain horse-shoe vetch, the plant species that their caterpillars eat. These plants are restricted to grassland on chalk and limestone, most of which have been converted into agricultural crops; by S. J. Marshall (http://www.flickr.com/photos/16155010@N04/)

The study of over 250 species is published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS). The conclusions were based on the analysis of millions of records of wildlife species sent in predominantly by members of the public.

The work represents a major new discovery involving collaborators in universities, research institutes, conservation charities, and regional and national government but – crucially – fuelled by ‘citizen science’.

Many species need to spread towards the poles where conditions remain cool enough for them to survive climate warming. But doing this is complicated because many landscapes across the world are dominated by human agriculture and development, which form barriers to the movement of species.  The mainstay of traditional conservation has been to establish protected areas and nature reserves to provide refuges against the loss of habitats and other threats in the surrounding countryside. 

But this method of nature conservation has been questioned in recent years, partly because of continuing degradation of habitats in reserves in some parts of the world.  Increasingly, however, the value of protected areas is being question because climate change is taking place – wildlife sites stay where they are while animal species move in response to changing conditions.

However, the new research shows that protected areas are the places that most animal species colonise as they spread into new regions. “Protected areas are like stepping stones across the landscape, allowing species to set up a succession of new breeding populations as they move northwards,” said lead author Professor Chris Thomas, of the University of York.

Co-author Dr Phillipa Gillingham, now a Lecturer in the School of Applied Sciences at Bournemouth University, calculated that species are on average around four times more likely to colonise nature reserves than might be expected.  “For the seven focal species of birds and butterflies that we studied in greatest detail, 40% of new colonisations occurred in the mere 8.4 per cent of the land that was protected,” she said.  “Similar patterns were observed among more than 250 invertebrate species.”

But the study showed that species vary greatly in how much they need reserves.

“Some species, such as the Dartford Warbler and Silver-Spotted Skipper butterfly, are largely confined to nature reserves,” said Dr David Roy, of the NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. “Whereas others like the Nightjar and Stone Curlew are less dependent on these sites.” 

Dr Richard Bradbury, of the RSPB, said: “Sites of importance for wildlife stand out like beacons in otherwise impoverished landscapes. This study shows that the hugely important role they play now will continue undiminished in the future. Protecting these arks, as well as restoring and re-creating new ones where we can, will provide the vital network enabling more species to survive the spectre of climate change.”

 “This study is a great example of how volunteer recorders and national monitoring schemes together provide the information to answer key conservation questions of global importance, such as how we can help wildlife cope with climate change,” said James Pearce-Higgins of the British Trust for Ornithology. “Only through the dedicated effort of so many people can we undertake the scale of long-term monitoring required.”

BU’s ECOSAL Team visiting Northern Ireland to investigate the coastal salt working site at Ballycastle, Co Antrim

BU research, Featured, Featured academics

BU’s ECOSAL Team recently visited Northern Ireland to investigate the coastal salt working site at Ballycastle, Co Antrim. ECOSAL is a multi-national EU-funded project that is recording the archaeological evidence for salt working around the Atlantic Coast of the UK, France, Spain and Portugal. It is also recording the ecology and biodiversity of these sites, many of them located in fragile environments such as lagoons. Key sites will be included on a European Salt Route, linking sites from all four countries while telling the story of salt production, the uses of salt, its economic history, etc.

The photo shows that it’s not all sunshine and celebrity media events, but on this occasion we found some excellent evidence for the 17th to 19th century salt-workings at Ballycastle, a once thriving industry now completely gone.

From left to right in the photo: David Cranstone, Wes Forsythe, Mark Brisbane, Michael Fradley and Danny McGill.

You can find out more about ECOSAL at our BU website: http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/applied-sciences/research/ecosal-atlantis/index.html

School of Tourism’s Dr. Debbie Sadd undertaking an ethnographic study of volunteering at the Olympics

BU research, Featured, Featured academics

Dr. Debbie Sadd, from School of Tourism, had the fantastic opportunity to work as a volunteer with the world’s photographers and journalists covering the basketball at the London Olympic Games. Her duties varied from day to day but involved sitting court side with the photographers making sure they don’t stray from their allotted areas to working ‘backstage’ ensuring all the required technical material is available for them to transmit their stories/photos back to their respective editors. Some days the sports specialists rang through whilst the transmissions were live on US television asking for facts and figures, which have to be available immediately for broadcast in the US. Debbie’s group had their own system called info+ which contained all the necessary information and they were required to be proficient in its use pretty quickly.

In Debbie’s own words, the experience was “quite stressful and tiring but gosh have I seen some exciting games and met some wonderful people and I even got to see my hero Kobe Bryant!”

School of Tourism’s Ivana Rihova gets ‘stuck in’ with her research fieldwork at this year’s summer festivals!

BU research, Featured, Featured academics

School of Tourism’s Ivana Rihova – a PhD Student at the John Kent Institute in Tourism – certainly experienced what ‘getting stuck in’ with fieldwork can feel like at this year’s summer festivals. As part of her research project entitled “Consumers as producers: customer-to-customer co-creation in the context of festival experiences” Ivana is visiting five multi-day outdoor festivals in England and Wales this summer. Through participant observation and interviews with festival goers she aims to explore how value is co-created in the context of festival participants’ social practices and experiences. Ivana’s research, supervised by Prof. Dimitrios Buhalis, Dr. Miguel Moital and Dr. Mary Beth Gouthro (all based at the School of Tourism), highlights various issues related to customer co-creation in socially dense festival contexts. The findings will not only contribute theoretically to our understanding of how people co-create value with each other, but could also help turn event and festival experiences from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Animating Stillness: The convergence of painting, animation and photography

BU research, Featured academics

BU’s very own Artist in Residence and Lecturer in the Media School, Susan Sloan, recently had her exhibition of motion capture portraits displayed on The Wall at The Photographers Gallery in London.  Susan’s work raises issues in terms of data object relations and computer animation – or ‘animatography’.  

Using motion capture data as the core material, Susan’s work explores the portrait through the medium of animation, focusing on the simple gestures and movements of her subjects.  Framed as a single shot and composed around the head and torse of the sitter, the work refers to the traditions and conventions of portraiture, but raises questions concerning the convergence of painting, animation and photography.

Susan’s Me and Mrs Sloan (2007) – pictured above – explores data object relations in the form of a motion captured portrait of her mother synthesized with motion captured movement by herself. It is a work about the potential space itself.  In this instance, Susan has modelled the head and upper torso of her mother, in 3-D animation software, and then animated the head and shoulders, based on subtle motion captured material of herself.  In this way, the data object is her mother combined with herself in terms of the motion captured material. It is Sloan’s work, and therefore the dialogue with what is ‘not-me’ is a fascinating one.  The motion captured material is also ‘not-my-mother’, and instead it is a record of Sloan’s slight movements.  A full review of Susan’s show is available here.

Huge congratulations to BU researcher, Andy Harding, for his award winning dissertation!

BU research, Featured academics

BU researcher, Andy Harding, has been awarded the ‘The Politics & International Relations MSc Dissertation Prize 2011/12’, on graduating with a distinction in MSc (SocSci) Governance and Policy, University of Southampton which is awarded to the student who has gained the highest mark in the MSc dissertation (in this case 85%!).

The dissertation sought to enquire how people are prepared to act in order to access and engage with healthcare provision by examining whether a dichotomy exists between consumerist and citizenship models of behaviour. It did this by eliciting and comparing attitudes between making a choice of treatment (i.e. concepts of consumer choice) and participating on a citizens’ jury (i.e. being involved in the governance of the provider). Feedback on the dissertation noted that:

“It addresses skilfully an interesting and topical issue on the basis of a strong, independent piece of research. This research is extremely well explained and organised and generates some genuinely interesting findings… Overall, therefore, this was a bravura performance which is clearly of high distinction level.”  This is fantastic feedback and we wish Andy many congratulations!

Andy is currently editing the dissertation for submission to a peer reviewed journal, and we eagerly await the opportunity to read it.

For those of you that don’t already know Andy, he is a Research Assistant in the School of Health and Social Care’s professional practice development community, and is principally involved in research that is aimed at better informing health and social practice. Andy is particularly interested in how people want to, and the means by which people can, access and engage with health and social care provision. If you would like to learn more, please contact Andy directly on aharding@bournemouth.ac.uk or via twitter @andrewjeharding.


BU celebrates Digital & Creative Economies at the Olympics

BU research, Featured academics

The excitement of the London 2012 Olympic games is starting to be felt in many corners of the UK, including Dorset. BU will join in with these celebrations with UKTI and the Dorset Olympic Group who are staging a weeklong programme of sector-focused business events in Weymouth. One such event will be the Creative & Digital Economies showcase which is designed to celebrate the strength of the UK in digital media innovation and content production in a global market.

 

BU will promote their Creative & Digital Economies Research Theme by curating an exhibition of work by leading South West based Creative & Digital Economies practitioners.  This event will provide a unique opportunity to associate BU with an enviable and well-respected collection of successful innovators, whilst showcasing our engagement with the Creative & Digital Economies and positioning us as a centre for research, knowledge exchange and business services in this sector.

New Economic Models for the Digital Economy

BU research, Featured academics

Advances in Media Management (AiMM) researchers, Dr John Oliver, Dr Sukhpreet Singh and Conor O’Kane recently hosted a nano-symposium on New Economic Models for the Digital Economy. The event was attended by the likes of Prof. Robert Picard, one of the world’s leading authorities on Media Economics, as well as researchers from Brunel and Westminster universities and practitioners from Virgin Media  and Freemantle Media.

The group explored various aspects of ‘existing business models that are being adapted’ and the variety of ‘new business models at that are emerging’ in the media. A raft of research project ideas were also generated in a brainstorm session with the intention of working up one of these ideas as a funding application to the EPSRC.

Visit and STRC seminar not to miss next Tuesday: Image and Signal Processing Group of University of Valencia (26th June at 15h 30’ in PG16)

BU research, Featured academics, REF Subjects

Dear Colleagues,
I would like to draw your attention to the visit of two members and a postdoc researcher of the Image and Signal Processing Group of University of Valencia, Spain.
This group is very influential in several areas like for instance Image Processing (in Geosciences, Medical Brain Imaging, etc.) and Kernel Machines; and they will be in Talbot Campus just for one day.
They will deliver a couple of short talks and after that they will stay for an hour for discussing ideas or future plans with anybody interested in BU.
The special seminar will take place next Tuesday, the 26th of June in PG 16 Lecture Theatre at 15:30 h (Ground floor, Poole House)
After that, you are very welcome to join us in an informal Discussion Panel from 16h 30’ to 17h 15’ approx.
I would like to encourage DEC PhD researchers, senior research fellows and staff to attend; particularly those who work or what to get into image/signal processing and kernel machines because they are leading experts in these areas. Kindly check out, for instance,
http://www.uv.es/gcamps
http://www.uv.es/jmalo/
The agenda of the visit is the following:
• 15h 30’. Short intro by Dr. Malo (Associate Prof): “Research at the Image and Signal Processing Group”. Jesús Malo. A brief overview of our research interests and lines.
• 15h 40’. Short talk by Dr Laparra (Postdoc): “Gaussianization Framework for Signal Processing”
Abstract: We generalize a class of projection pursuit methods to transform arbitrary multidimensional data into multivariate normal data, thus attaining statistical independence of its components. The proposed analysis enables a number of novel ways to solve practical problems in high-dimensional scenarios, such as those encountered in image processing, speech recognition, array processing, or bioinformatics. Our framework extends Independent and Principal Components Analyses-based methods, which are typically not applicable to data generated from nonlinear, non-independent or non-Gaussian sources. The performance is successfully illustrated in a number of multidimensional data processing problems such as image synthesis, classification, saliency analysis, and de-noising.
• 16h. Short talk by Dr. Camps (Associate Prof): “Extended Kernel Methods”.
Abstract: I will talk about our love story with kernel methods for the last 10 years. Kernel methods constitute a simple way of translating linear algorithms into nonlinear ones. I will revise several interesting developments for 1) time series analysis, regression and function approximation; 2) classification problems; 3) nonlinear feature extraction; and 4) dependence estimation. The introduced methods extend previous standard algorithms to deal with non-stationary environments and structured domains, and the presence of non-Gaussian noise. Additionally, I’ll briefly talk about a way to learn the kernel function directly from the data via clustering or graphs. Examples in signal and image processing will guide this overview.
• 16h 25’. Discussion Panel.
Please, feel free to show up or leave any time during this event on your convenience. I hope you consider this program attractive and that you find a slot to come in.
Best Wishes, Emili

Adele Ladkin joins the EPSRC workshop ‘Sustainable Society: Achieving work-life balance on a digitally dependent world’

BU research, Featured academics

EPSRC issued an expression of interest in April for applicants to participate in a virtual workshop on the topic of Sustainable Society.

Adele Ladkin, Professor of Tourism Employment, from the School of Tourism has been accepted to join the workshop to be held in two stages, in July.  Adele’s application focused around work-life balance in the tourism and hospitality sectors.  These sectors raise two issues, the first is the long hours culture and shift work characteristic of many jobs that invariably leads to reduced leisure time for employees, compounded with the emotional and physical strain of irregular working hours.  Second, in the accommodation sector, particularly small accommodation providers such as B&B’s, there is often no physical separation of work from home.  Business takes place within the home resulting in the boundaries between work and home becoming blurred, creating another dimension to work life balance.

Adele is looking forward to participating in the two events that will give her the opportunity to potentially work across different disciplines.

Good luck Adele!

Introduction to Adaptive Learning from Streaming Data by Dr Zliobaite, Wednesday 30th of May:

BU research, Featured academics, Research news, Research themes, Uncategorized

Kindly announce that our next speaker of the STRC seminar series will be Dr Indrė Žliobaitė. The talk will take place next Wednesday, 30th of May in Lawrence Lecture Theatre at 16:00 h (please click for a map)

Indrė (Lecturer in BU as most of us know) will present novel angles of her work in a highly didactic fashion. She will talk about an exciting topic, strategies for predicting streaming data. This is particularly attractive for instance for those of us involved in projects in real-time industrial settings.

Please feel free to show up if you like it regardless you background!

The talk title is:

“Introduction to Adaptive Learning from Streaming Data”

Short description:

Changing data over time presents one of the major challenges in predictive modelling applications, for example automated movie recommendation, bankruptcy prediction, spam categorization, food sales prediction and many more. In such situations predictive models need to have mechanisms to update or retrain themselves using recent data, otherwise they will quickly lose accuracy. This talk will give an introductory overview of settings and algorithms for adaptive predictive modelling.

Best Wishes, Emili

Business School’s Ven Tauringana wins award for outstanding reviewer!

BU research, Featured academics

BU’s Business School’s Dr Ven Tauringanahas been chosen as an Outstanding Reviewer at the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2012.

Each year Emerald names and rewards the Outstanding Reviewers who contribute to the success of the journals.  Each journal’s Editor nominates the Reviewer they believe has been that title’s most Outstanding Reviewer. This year Ven received this nomination due to his role as Reviewer for the Journal of Accounting in Emerging Economies throughout 2011, his efforts described as ‘very impressive’ and making a ‘significant contribution’.

Well done Ven!

Tourism’s Richard Shipway wins award for Outstanding Reviewer

Featured academics

BU’s School of Tourism Richard Shipway has been chosen as an Outstanding Reviewer at the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2012 .

Each year Emerald names and rewards the Outstanding Reviewers who contribute to the success of the journals.  Each journal’s Editor nominates the Reviewer they believe has been that title’s most Outstanding Reviewer. This year Richard received this nomination due to his role as Reviewer for the International Journal of Event and Festival Management throughout 2011, his efforts described as ‘very impressive’ and making a ‘significant contribution’.  

Well done Richard!