Category / Fusion

Come to the Cabaret

Awarded & submitted bids, BU research, Fusion

 

1st Year swedish students with Sara Stride(centre) and myself, Sue Mant (right)

1st Year swedish students with Sara Stride(centre) and myself, Sue Mant (right)

Thanks to an Erasmus mobility award myself and a colleague were able to engage in a teaching exchange with the Karolinska Institute (KI) in Sweden. For the midwifery team, this is an annual reciprocal arrangement which fosters education/practice links and ensures the continuation of a programme of support for exchanges between Bournemouth University (BU)  midwifery students and KI midwifery students. A very comprehensive itinerary allowed us to visit midwife led units, clinics, birthing units, and hospitals. We were enabled to spend time with student midwives in the classroom and with clinical teachers in practice.

This was my first visit, and a personal objective was to explore practice education. Student midwives in Sweden study midwifery for 18 months prior to qualification and this contrasts with the three year course mainly offered at home. Notably, the direct entry route to midwifery is not yet available in Sweden and even though this is an approach that KI is considering for the future, current applicants to the course have to be qualified nurses. KI student midwives move around various placements and student support mechanisms there were very similar to BU. Where things begin to differ is that there is no formally recognised mentor system. At the Sodra BB birth unit I learned from the Chef Barnmorska (Lead Midwife), that clinical teachers have often been qualified for a minimum of 5 years and though very experienced, they receive no formal preparation for their clinical teaching role. This perhaps reflects the lack of any formal ongoing post-registration development programme.  At Danderyds birth centre we met a midwife who has recently taken on a role similar to that of Practice Educator. She has adopted a progressive programme of regular meetings between clinical teaching midwives and the Institute link allowing them an opportunity to discuss individual student’s needs and achievements. Attending one meeting, we were invited to contribute to the discussion and as a cohesive group we were able to discuss strategies and share ideas. Issues arising with learners seem to bear common threads internationally

Helena Lindgren (our host representative) with Sara Stride

.

Finally, if you are wondering what ‘Come to the Cabaret’ has to do with this blog…. Our visit happily coincided with end of course celebrations, a chance for the cohort to dress as characters from that very musical. I learned….. Swedish midwives know how to party!

Hurry! Only 4 weeks until the deadline for applications to the Fusion Investment Fund

Funding opportunities, Fusion

If you haven’t already sent in your application, don’t panic! There’s still time. With three funding strands available for staff there are a wealth of opportunities for both academic and professional support staff to take advantage of:                                                                            

 

We are holding two drop-in sessions for anyone who has questions or requires more information about the Fund on:

                 Monday 17 June, 12-1pm in P411, Poole House, Talbot Campus

                Tuesday 18 June 1-2pm in EB705, EBC, Lansdowne Campus

 Joining Samantha and myself will be members of the strand committees and Moritz Ehlen, BU’s International Mobility Officer, who can provide guidance with regards to Erasmus .

For all the updated strand policy documents, Fund FAQ’s and information about applying, please visit the FIF intranet pages.

 

The Fusion Investment Fund is managed by Samantha Leahy-Harland and is administered by Natalie Baines. Please direct all initial enquiries to Natalie Baines.

Could the SMN Strand of the Fusion Investment Fund be the one for you?

Funding opportunities, Fusion

The Staff Mobility and Networking strand (SMN) may seem like your normal, everyday standard strand but look carefully and you’ll see it’s a strand with a difference. It has 3 elements meaning even more opportunities for you! Not only is there a Standard element but there are also Erasmus Staff Mobility and Santander elements too!

The standard scheme is most appropriate for supporting staff UK or overseas travel and subsistence in pursuit of any aspect of Fusion – research, education, and/or professional practice – with no minimum or maximum duration and also includes inward mobility. Awards made will be between £1k and £10k.

The Erasmus Staff Mobility part of the strand is most appropriate for enabling academic and professional staff based at higher education institutions (HEIs) to spend a period of training or teaching between 5 working days and 6 weeks in a European HEI or enterprise. There are also opportunities to invite staff from enterprises to Bournemouth University to give presentations and provide teaching.

Please be aware that this scheme differs quite significantly from the other FIF strands. More information is on the Erasmus intranet page.

Santander, through Santander Universities, works to encourage the international exchange of students and lecturers with respect to the development of projects linked to research, education or professional practice. Support will be available in the form of subsistence and travel costs for staff. Five awards of £5k will be made.

 Has this whetted your appetite? Are you hungry for more? Then go, go, go to the FIF intranet pages.

The Fusion Investment Fund is managed by Samantha Leahy-Harland and is administered by Natalie Baines. Please direct all initial enquiries to Natalie Baines.

Erasmus Teaching Visit to Pisa

Fusion

Between May 11 and May 17 Howard Davis (Law Department, Business School) made a teaching visit to the Faculty of Law (Facoltà di Giurisprudenza) at the University of Pisa (Università di Pisa). The visit was paid for under the Erasmus teaching exchange scheme which complements a student exchange programme.

The teaching was based around four two hour lectures and discussion on the theme of human rights law. There were two lectures on themes related to UK law: the post coalition government changes to UK counter-terrorism law and recent changes to the right to a fair trial (including the use of closed material procedures in civil cases involving national security). The other two lectures reflected Howard Davis’ current research interests: the rights of victims of international crimes to gain an account of the truth of what happened to them or their relatives. The lectures are given in English to (mainly) Italian law students taking an English languge course. In Pisa there is an interdisciplinary language department (Centro Linguistico Interdipartimentale) which provides these courses and the lecture programme is part of one of these.

Howard Davis has done these lectures for a number of years and it is always a pleasurable and interesting experience. Pisa University is ancient and prestigious. It was founded in 1343 and jurisprudence was one of its original subjects. Gallileo (laws of physics and mathematics rather than civil or natural law!) was one of its famous pupils (the experiment on mass and acceleration, if it happened at all, involved dropping balls off the Leaning Tower). At last, however, the old building which has housed the law faculty for centuries, is in a state of collapse and the law faculty has had to be distributed at different sites around the city. This did not prevent Howad Davis’ visit from being a success and, it is hoped, an effective way of promoting the good name of Bournemouth University abroad.

An opportunity for study leave, secondment or placement? Thank FIF for that!

Funding opportunities, Fusion

I know, it’s unbelievable! BU is actually paying staff to take a period of study leave. Amazing!

The Study Leave strand (SL) now has three sub-strands: Academic Study Leave, Internal Secondments and Industrial Staff Placements.

 

  •  Academic Study Leave provides academic staff with a period of paid academic study leave normally up to 6 months in duration for the purposes of undertaking research, educational development or professional practice.  A period of Study Leave can be undertaken while at BU, but normally the expectation is that an individual would be based for part or all of the time at another academic institution either within the UK or overseas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • Internal Secondments:  In order to drive interdisciplinary research at BU a limited programme of internal secondments is available.  Secondments may last up to a maximum of 6 months.

 

  •  Industrial Staff Placements:  Commencing from December 2013 only a series of short placement and internship opportunities will be available– typically 2 to 6 months – for BU staff with local and regional businesses/organisations will be advertised internally.  Staff will have the opportunity of applying for these placements with the selection panel involving a representative from the host and at least two BU Deans.  In addition to the placements that will be advertised centrally staff will still be invited to submit funding applications for industrial placements arranged through their own networks.

 

Read more about some of the projects we’ve previously funded under this strand:

Zulfiqar Khan’s blog post

Lai Xu’s blog post 

Lorraine Brown’s blog post

 

Need to know more? Your wish is my command! Go now to the FIF intranet pages.

The Fusion Investment Fund is managed by Samantha Leahy-Harland and is administered by Natalie Baines. Please direct all initial enquiries to Natalie Baines.

 

To co-create and co-produce – what life (and FIF) is all about!

Funding opportunities, Fusion

We humans love nothing more than to co-create and co-produce so it seems rather appropriate, don’t you think, that we have a strand of the Fusion Investment Fund dedicated to just that!

The Co-Creation and Co-Production strand (CCCP) is most appropriate for activities with specific emphasis on research and / or professional practice of between 6 and 12 months duration. Awards made will be between £2k and £75k.  Previously funded projects include the re-launch of The Rock community newspaper and the creation of the Poole and Purbeck community consortium to establish a fusion platform based on regional natural and heritage assets to service students across BU.

 Read about some of the projects we’ve funded under this strand:

Rick Fisher – CCCP funded project: An educational game for nursing student engagement in caring for people with dementia

Jan Wiener, Mariela Gaete-Reyes – CCCP funded project: Decreasing spatial disorientation: towards dementia-friendly environments

 Want to know more? Of course you do! Follow this link to the FIF intranet pages.

The Fusion Investment Fund is managed by Samantha Leahy-Harland and is administered by Natalie Baines. Please direct all initial enquiries to Natalie Baines.

Fusion funding supports sharing student research at conference, in journal

Fusion

Last week, 35 advertising, marketing and public relations undergraduates presented their dissertation research at the Promotional Communications Annual Conference at the Executive Business Centre.

The event, held 15 May, was part of a Fusion bid by The Media School’s Dr Dan Jackson, Dr Richard Scullion, Dr Carrie Hodges, and Dr Janice Denegri-Knott to expand the conference and open a journal. This is the third year for the conference run by the Corporate and Marketing Communications (CMC) group within The Media School, and with the Fusion funding the organisers were able to expand the conference to include additional students and guests.

“The CMC Student Conference was a terrific success; the presentations were extremely professional, student engagement was very high and the commitment shown by the staff was exceptional,” said Colin Merrett, associate dean for the academic group. He called it “one of the highlights of the year” for CMC.

Industry guests who attended the event echoed the sentiment, calling the work of students ‘thought provoking’ and ‘challenging’. In total some 80 students, academic staff, alumni, and industry professionals attended the conference, which offers students an opportunity to share their dissertation research and for the academic group to showcase research-led teaching.

CMC students can choose to write a traditional dissertation of 10,000 words or write a research paper in the style of an 8,000-word journal article and deliver a 20-minute paper at the student conference. The 35 students who presented at the conference make up 17 per cent of the dissertation students on the three degree programmes. That’s the highest proportion of student take-up of this option for the dissertation.

“The quality of what I have seen in these dissertations is some of the best I have seen,” said Dr Heather Savigny, who joined BU at the start of the academic year.

The research that students presented ranged from asking questions about how second-generation African immigrant women negotiate culture and identity through hair care rituals to the impacts to pub and restaurant brands as a result of negative word-of-mouth online to whether advertising today represents a return of a sexist visual culture.

“I thought the best papers could have claimed space in some international conferences,” said Prof Barry Richards of CMC.

Now, the team turns its attention to the inaugural issue of The Journal of Promotional Communication. Once the dissertations are marked, the team will shortlist the top research papers and begin the (by all accounts based on the presentations from last week) arduous task of choosing seven papers to appear in the journal.

After the first edition is published, the journal will begin accepting submissions from undergraduates and postgraduates from BU and beyond. The journal represents a variety of disciplines, such as marketing, advertising, PR theory, consumer culture and behaviour, political communications, media studies, sociology, cultural studies, and management.

Fusion Diary: High-Speed Train to China Universities

Fusion

7:55am, 14th April.

BA168 landed in Shanghai Pudong International Airport. I was sponsored by Santander Fusion Investment Fund and would visit 4 top China Universities in five days. In order to board a high-speed train to Beijing, I only had five hours to have a shower, unpack my luggage, eat a Chinese lunch and then drive through Shanghai, a metropolitan city with a population of 20- million. The distance is less than that from Bournemouth to Brockenhurst. The traffic is as same as Oxford circus and Regent Street.

China High-speed Train

Mission nearly impossible. But I made it. With the help of a Chinese high-speed train, I travelled 914 miles in less than 6 hours and arrived in Beijing in time. Efficient trains like these can also be built in other countries with the help of a third rail train equipment manufacturer and many other engineers and contractors.

Next morning, I visited Renmin University, a Chinese equivalent to LSE, and gave a talk in the Psychology Department. Remin’s Psychology Department, established in 2008, is a fast-paced booming institute and has 30 staff members in total, similar in size to BU Psychology. Internationalisation was a highly frequent word I picked up from our conversation.  During my talk, I showed them the photos of Bournemouth University with beach and sunshine as well as telling about our research and courses. I met Prof Du Peng (his surname first in the Chinese way), the university research director, and Prof Hu Ping, the deputy head of Psychology Department. The discussion was successful and fruitful. and afterwards, in accordance with tradition, they hosted me a delicious Chinese lunch dinner, rather than the usual sandwiches and tea that we might have here.

 

Office of the President, Peking University

After saying blesses and goodbye to my kind hosts, I walked back to Peking University. Before moving to England I had spent eight years in Peking University. This was the second time I came back in the last ten years. I wandered on the  campus which was crowded with classical Chinese architectures and modern cars. There was no meeting arranged for me this time but it was lovely to be back visiting my old haunts. and to meet with old friends, all of whom have previously studied or worked in the UK. In Chinese they are called haigui, which means coming back from overseas. It is interesting that most of them are working in universities and public sector now.

My next journey on another high speed train meant travelling about 750 miles in 6 hours to Xian, the ancient Chinese capital in Han and Tang dynasties.  Since I last visited as a teenager the city has been expanding faster and more massively than I could ever have imagined. Again, it was a great opportunity to catch up with older friends before visiting  Shaanxi Normal University, a prestigious national university. I was welcome by Prof Wang Yong Hui. Prof Wang is the Deputy Head of Psychology School. We have been friends since we studied in Beijing. Now we had the opportunity to share what we have done in each other’s research areas over the years.

To be continued…..

Fusion Investment Fund – 2013/14 round one now open to applications!

Funding opportunities, Fusion, Research news

 


 

The Pro Vice-Chancellor is delighted to invite you to apply for this round of the Fusion Investment Fund. It provides fantastic opportunities for you to grow as a researcher, an educator and practitioner and there are a range of options for you to choose from, depending on your needs. Three funding strands are available for staff at BU:

Co-Creation and Co-production strand (CCCP)

Study Leave strand (SL) – There are three elements of this: Academic Study Leave, Internal Secondments and Industrial Staff Placements.

Staff Mobility and Networking strand (SMN) – There are also three elements to this strand: Standard, Erasmus, Santander

Successful bids will need to have benefits to the student experience at the core and be able to demonstrate how this will occur, so hitting the Education point in the BU Fusion triangle is important. For all the updated strand and policy documents, Fund FAQs and information about applying, please visit the FIF intranet pages.

The Fusion Investement Fund is managed by Samantha Leahy-Harland and is administered by Natalie Baines. Please direct all intial enquiries to Natalie Baines.

 

 

 

eBU: Online Journal

BU research, Fusion, PG research, Publishing, Research news, Research themes

Following on from my last post ‘Developing a Working Paper at BU’ in January of this year, we are now within sight of having an exciting new online journal at BU. eBU will provide both an internal and external forum for the development of research papers by undergraduate to Professor around the eight BU research themes:

 

–          Creative & Digital Economies

–          Culture & Society

–          Entrepreneurship & Economic Growth

–          Environmental Change & Biodiversity

–          Green Economy & Sustainability  

–          Health, Wellbeing & Ageing 

–          Leisure & Recreation

–          Technology & Design

Submissions will be open to immediate publication (in a safe internal environment) and open peer review by 2 appropriate BU academics. Authors will be encouraged to act upon these reviews by either reworking papers for submission to an external journal or by opting for publication on the external eBU site.

For BU academics this is a great opportunity to get critical appraisal on your research papers or ideas from colleagues. For academics it also an opportunity to encourage the submission of high quality student output, and possibly to facilitate the co-creation and co-production of publishable material to an external journal or to publish externally with eBU. For students, this is a fantastic opportunity to turn high quality essays or dissertations into scholarly outputs, which will be attractive to employers across many sectors and industries.

It is anticipated that author guidelines will be circulated in the coming weeks, and staff and students alike should begin to think about how they could submit to eBU.

If you have any questions or would like to become involved in this exciting venture, please get in touch with me via email aharding@bournemouth.ac.uk or by telephone 01202 963025

Service Computing Seminar Slides

BU research, Fusion

Ontology-based Software Architecture Documentation by Dr. Peng Liang

Speaker: Dr. Peng Liang, Free University Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Slides: Ontology-based Software Architecture Documentation

Abstract. A common approach to software architecture documentation in industry projects is the use of file-based documents (e.g., Word documents). This documentation approach offers a single-dimensional perspective on the software architectural knowledge contained. Knowledge retrieval from file-based architecture documentation is efficient if the perspective chosen fits the needs of the readers; it is less so if the perspective does not match the needs of the readers. In this talk, I will describe an approach we developed aimed at addressing architecture documentation retrieval issues. We employed software ontology in a semantic wiki optimized for architecture documentation. We also evaluated this ontology-based documentation approach in a controlled industry experiment involving software professionals. The efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach is found to be better than that of the traditional file-based approach.

 

The Smart Grid’s Big Data Generating Potentials by Prof. Marco Aiello

Speaker: Prof. Marco Aiello, University of Groningen, the Netherlands
Slides: The Smart Grid’s Big Data Generating Potentials

Abstract. The Smart Power Grid promises to not only provide for a more reliable distribution infrastructure, but also give the end-users better pricing, information, and freedom. The promise is fuelled by a pervasive digitalization of the energy production and distribution network that will finally involve utilities, governments, and end-users. The real advantages of the smart grid will be available to all, only if the physical infrastructure of energy distribution is supported by adequate information systems. In this talk, I will review the current state and possible evolutions of the concept of a smart grid, I will point to the (big) data that future information systems will need to manage and, finally, indicate possible uses for such information.

Image Quality Assessment

Image Quality Assessment by Prof. Xinbo Gao

Speaker: Prof. Xinbo Gao, Xidian University, China

Slides: Image Quality Assessment

Abstract. With the development of imaging technologies, visual information, recorded by images and videos, has become the main source for knowledge acquisition. In the process of image acquisition, processing, transmission, and storage, some artefacts or noise maybe introduced to images, which will degrade the visual quality. To improve the performance of image processing, it is necessary to assess image quality. Therefore, image quality assessment (IQA) is the prerequisite and foundation of imaging or image processing system optimization. The objective of IQA is to provide computational models to measure the perceptual quality of a given image. Recently, a large number of methods have been designed to evaluate the quality of images. In this talk, I will introduce some popular IQA metrics, especially several IQA metrics proposed by my group. They are organized into 3 categories, full-reference metrics, reduced-reference metrics and no-reference metrics.

Fusion Investment Fund application deadlines

Funding opportunities, Fusion, Research news

Application deadlines for the Fusion Investment Fund have been confirmed as 1 July and 1 December. The next call for applications will soon be launched. It provides fantastic opportunities for you to grow as a researcher, an educator and practitioner and there are many options for you to choose from, depending on your needs. Please keep checking the blog for details.

 

FIF Staff Mobility and Networking award helping me fly

BU research, Funding opportunities, Fusion

Early in January I received the good news that my application to the Fusion Investment Fund SMN strand was successful. What a great way to start the New Year!

The main aim of my FIF SMN project is to consolidate newly developed partnerships with European and non-European researchers and stakeholders. Planned activities include visits to colleagues who were involved in the development of the research proposal “Living with Extreme Events at the Coast” (LEEC), submitted to the EU FP7 call on Environment (Challenge 6.4 Protecting citizens from environmental hazards). LEEC successfully passed stage 1 and we are now waiting for the outcome of stage 2, so keep your fingers crossed.

As my FIF SMN proposal builds from LEEC, I decided to call it “Living with Extreme Events at the Coast Grant Development” (LEEC GraDe). Not very creative, but it reflects well the main objective, which is to explore opportunities for collaborative research in topics related to LEEC. LEEC aims to better understand how extreme storms and climate change in coastal areas will affect flood risk and impact on society, infrastructure, economic activities and the natural environment throughout the 21th century.

Besides, the development of collaborative research proposals, I will also be exploring opportunities for enhancing students’ experience, e.g. through work placements. By the time I submitted the FIF SMN proposal, I had just taken the role of ApSci’s Academic Lead for Placements. In this role, one of my objectives is to increase the offer of research-based placements to our students. So I thought my networking visits would be a great opportunity to discuss with colleagues from organisations in Europe and abroad whether they are interested in offering to our students a research-based working experience. Many researchers systematically plan their fieldwork campaigns or dedicate larger proportion of their time to research in the summer, so a work placement can be mutually beneficial.

I so much believe in the benefits of this arrangement that I am offering two placements this summer to undergrad ApSci students. If you are interested in doing the same, please contact me.

LEEC partners are from 13 organisations spread across eight countries (Estonia, Spain, France, Belgium, Denmark, UK, Mexico and Vietnam). The FIF SMN award will allow me to visit some of these organisations and engage in other networking opportunities. I will be very busy networking throughout 2013! Hopefully the effort will result in the submission of more collaborative research proposals and a number of arrangements made to enrich students’ experiences through placements or exchanges.

The first of my planned activities was to attend the 12th International Coastal Symposium (ICS) in Plymouth (http://ics2013.org/) earlier this month. This is the largest international conference focused on coastal research with over 500 participants, so a great venue to disseminate research results, to keep updated with research progress worldwide and to network! I was invited to be the convener of the Coastal Evolution and Geomorphology session, so worked very hard evaluating abstracts and full papers before the conference! I also presented a paper on the Coastal Management session, entitled “Is managed realignment a sustainable long-term coastal management approach?” You can find a copy of the paper on BRIAN.

ICS offered the opportunity to meet many ‘old’ friends and make new contacts worldwide, including from countries I had none before, such as Trinidad & Tobago and South Africa. I have already exchanged email with a few of the new (and old) contacts and there are very exciting prospects for future collaboration. I have discussed the preparation of a joint paper with a colleague from the University of Rostock (Germany), explored ways to collaborate with practitioners from a government agency in Trinidad & Tobago and I am already working on a proposal with colleagues from South Africa. The most immediate result from networking during ICS was the invitation to visit five different organisations in Mexico, which is planned to happen in June.

Networking is also about maximising the opportunities and I will be doing exactly that next month in Brazil. I was invited to give a keynote talk in the National Symposium of Coastal Vulnerability. As the hosts are taking me to Brazil, I will extend my stay and visit two universities using SMN funds. The plan is to start building a joint research proposal to submit to the Science without borders programme (funding source from Brazil) with the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco and discuss exchange of postgraduate students and other opportunities with the Universidade do Vale do Itai.

Please watch this space for upcoming news!

Luciana Slomp Esteves (Lecturer in Physical Geography, ApSci)

Fusion in Action Conference 2013

Fusion

Thank you to all who attended last week’s Fusion in Action Conference and celebrated BU’s success in Fusion initiatives.

The Fusion presentations from staff and students were inspirational and I am pleased to have had such good feedback on these. Several of the presentations are available at I:\R&KEO\Public\Fusion in Action .

The Fusion surgery sessions provided a key opportunity to ask about Fusion Investment Funding and the posters provided excellent examples of projects already funded under the scheme.

Finding (and defining) Friendly in New York City

Fusion, Research themes, Uncategorized

‘Dementia Friendly’ is a sound bite used frequently at the moment in my field. This is in part due to the Prime Ministers 2012 Dementia Challenge which has a particular component aspiring to the creation of 20 dementia friendly towns/cities by 2015. But what does dementia friendly actually mean? and how do we know when we have an example of something that is dementia friendly? A colleague and I spent a week in New York City earlier this month and we were truly ‘wowed’ by the dementia friendly initiatives we witnessed. The first was at MOMA where they have an established programme for people with dementia that we were lucky enough to be able to join one afternoon. What made this programme dementia friendly? Three things in my view; first the educators (their term) made no attempt to ‘dumb down’ their offering to those with dementia (too often people with dementia are treated as less able without first having tested the waters to see if  just because the label of ‘dementia’ applied means that the person is unable to participate in various everyday activites ‘as usual’ or if it needs modified in some way, in this case participating in an arts appreciation programme). Two it was extremely difficult to tell who might have dementia and who were the accompanying family members and finally the contributions from the group reflected the individual perspective different people have on what is ‘art’, what they like, or in the case of one man what was ‘trash’ (every piece we stopped at!). We were also invited to join a choir rehearsing in a cathedral (an extremely modern building that we walked by twice before realising this was the cathedral, another story…) for the final time before performing at MOMA the following week (we didn’t get to see the real performance as back at BU by then). This choir group, known as ‘The Unforgettables’, was amazing, the two directors created an unbelievable energy in the room, there was laughter, fun, serious points made about music/signing. Individuals who could barely walk took their turn to stand by the piano and sing heart rending solos which brought a tear to the eye, a lump to the throat. By contrast, other couples sang humourous duets. This was an inspiring group to witness. The choir directors had again made a conscious decision not to ‘dumb down’ their approach but to encourage and challenge, in the same way that they would any other choral group. The results were incredible. We were offered hospitality by the group members, the only tell tale sign that one particular man had dementia was his bringing us 5 cups of iced tea and numerous plates of fruit/cake/biscuits as he didn’t remember that he had already been up to the table and brought us over some goodies. We also visited the Metropolitan Museum, again with long established groups for people with dementia. Some involve art making, others art appreciation, others tours of different parts of the museum. Again the underpinning philosophy is one of ability to engage, to promote intellectual stimulation, social interaction and also the programmes encourage a degree of physical activity by choosing exhibits at various places throughout the building (mental, physical and social stimulation being key to reducing risk of developing dementia, but also to maintaining well-being once diagnosed).

We went to New York because we had heard about the programmes and wanted to see if possible to learn and implement back here in Dorset but also to meet with academic colleagues, present at NYU, meet with the US Alzheimer Association (which has really made us think about donations and fund raising to support our work) and these were also very productive parts of the trip and reinforced that the approach we are taking at BU Dementia Institute is one that we should continue (mainly that engagement and collaboration with the range of stakeholders that has been guiding our work should continue). But what stands out for me is the energy and enthusiasm of those running groups for people with dementia and the huge engagement and enjoyment this approach created. The US might not have a ‘dementia friendly agenda’ being driven at a national policy level,  and New York might not immediately spring to mind as a place where one could live well with dementia, but the initiatives we saw clearly demonstrate the possibility to create dementia friendly environments even in places where sign posting might not be clear, transport busy and where the assumption that services ‘cost’ can be challenged (all the programmes we joined are free to those with dementia).

Success of FIF application within SMN strand

Fusion

Developing an International Face of Fusion

Following the success of  FIF SMN application two mutual visits were made. Professor Ramesh visited BU during Nov-Dec 2012 for 5 weeks. This was followed by a week visit by Dr Zulfiqar Khan during Feb 2013 to PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore, India. This activity resulted in significant achievements over all areas of FUSION in research, education and professional practice. Both Prof. C S Ramesh and Dr Zulfiqar Khan participated in teaching activities at BU and PES IT Bangalore respectively.

Education

Participation in education has resulted in enhanced students’ experience at level C and H. Level H students have produced journal publications, a major achievement of this activity and has provided example of engaging UG students in research activities through research informed education. Students’ engagement with research has enhanced their experience at BU, awareness of the international activities and advancement in nano-technology and nano materials. Publications by UG students will play a very significant role in the promotion of BU and raising its academic profile at international stage as leader in FUSION.

Research/Professional Practice

This programme provided opportunity of developing research proposals and bidding for external funding in collaboration with external academic and industrial partners.

One research proposals was developed in collaboration with academic partners as PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore, India, Visvesvaraya Technological University and industrial partners National Aerospace Laboratories India, Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd India, Gas Turbine Research Establishment India and Ingersoll Rand India to target EPSRC-DST initiative. Through the development and submission of research proposal for the EPSRC-DST (BU/PESIT India) application significant industrial links have been initiated and will be further strengthened in near future, through the formation of an International Consortium in Renewable Energy & Renewable Technology (RERT).

A second research proposal was developed with PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore, India to target World Bank initiative  in Technical Education Quality Improvement Programme (TEQIP).

A joint research proposal to Erasmus Mundus JASMINE Techno III has been submitted as part of the fusion activity and has provided opportunity to increase and further strengthen collaborative links with cross-channel (France), EU & Indian partners.

In addition the proposed programme within FIF SMN resulted in publications of three journal papers of which two were published with the final year Design Engineering students. Four conference papers were submitted/ published of which 1 conference paper was submitted with UG final year Design Engineering student and PGR.

Further Plans

It is aimed to form an international consortium and strengthen exiting partnerships around the world including key academic partners such as PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore, India, Visvesvaraya Technological University, India, GIK Institute of Technology, Pakistan and Wisconsin-University Milwaukee, US.

This partnership will pave way for exploring future opportunities of tapping into external funds e.g. National Science Foundation (NSF), The World Bank, EPSRC-DST (Department of Science and Technology India), developing and submitting joint research proposals, developing case studies for UG and PGT taught provisions and staff/students exchanges.

Fusion in Action Conference

During the Fusion in Action Conference on Thursday April 18, 2013 the highlights of the programme in terms of activities in research, education and professional practice and successes to date were presented, which has been uploaded Fusion in Action 180413.

Finally I would like to thank BU for providing such a fantastic opportunity within FIF and the School for their continued support during the programme.

Dr Zulfiqar Khan

Director Sustainable Design Research Centre

DEC