Category / Knowledge Exchange

Harvesting big data could bring about the next transport revolution, right now

Knowledge Exchange

Marcin Budka, Bournemouth University and Manuel Martin Salvador, Bournemouth University, write for The Conversation

The future of transport appears full of fun and flashy possibilities. From super-fast hyperloop transport systems, to self-driving cars and hovering taxis, new technology promises to move us further and faster than ever before. Yet for cities facing everyday problems such as congestion, air pollution and under capacity, the most effective solution could be the humble bus – coupled with the power of data. The Conversation

Of course, in many cities, technology has already begun replacing printed timetables with live departure boards, using real-time data about buses’ locations sourced from GPS monitoring. But this is just the beginning. There’s one source of data which could offer a live overview of a city’s entire transport network without a single penny of investment. And you’ve probably got it on you right now.

Modern mobile phones contain an array of sensors, including GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope, digital compass and more, which are capable of producing a constant stream of data. Individual units of movement, tracked by a phone’s GPS and processed on mass, can give detailed information on journey times, speed and destinations.

Fair trade

Of course, using this data without compromising users’ privacy is a challenge. When dealing with location information, anonymisation can only take you so far. But there is a neat solution. In exchange for their data, passengers could receive a wealth of benefits, including more flexible routes and timetables, predictive of need at any given hour. The level of service could be directly linked to the amount of data a passenger chooses to share.

By combining these data with efficient ticketing across a range of transport modes, including bus, tram, train, taxi and others, it would be possible to create a flexible and responsive system, which can tailor transport solutions to every person’s needs.

Individuals would be able to dial in their destination as they leave home, to be guided by the fastest, cheapest, healthiest or most environmentally friendly route to their destination on a given day, by whatever means, at a standard unit of price per distance. The routes would be responsive to changing weather and road closures, with flexible timetables and services, to cater for a wet Tuesday when everyone wants to take the bus rather than walk or cycle. Overcrowding could be reduced by balancing the load of commuters across different modes of transport.

Breath in.
Emily Lindsay Brown, Author provided

The best thing is, the system would constantly be learning and improving. It is relatively straightforward to automatically schedule extra services in real time if, say, there’s an unusually large number of people waiting at a particular stop. But, with sophisticated machine learning, which processes large amounts of historical data to detect patterns, slumps and hikes in demand could be preempted. Allowing a transport network to self-learn using data from its consumers can help it to evolve a better service, while maintaining the modest margins of the provider.

The transport system can also be used as a tool to promote social good. For one thing, price can be used as a powerful influence for positive behavioural change: discounts could be offered for getting off a stop earlier and walking the remaining distance. The bus or tram itself can also be enhanced by making it a place for culture, education and information. Advertising could be complemented or even replaced by community television, public art and educational information, which offer a more positive experience for the captive audience.

Here today?

All of this potential can be unlocked today: not in the future, but in the here and now. The main challenges are overcoming tradition, using a single ticket across various transport modes and apportioning revenue between a complex tapestry of transport providers within the domain of a single transport authority.

Alongside Bournemouth University, a small digital technology company, We Are Base, is attempting to do exactly that. Together, we are finding ways to leverage data to make public transport a better option than private vehicles in terms of punctuality, flexibility and comfort. We are also collecting and analysing real-time data to demonstrate how a transport network could use machine learning to optimise its customer transport efficiency.

The technology is the relatively easy part; negotiating local politics often proves more difficult. For instance, finding a fair way of distributing ticket revenues among operators involved in a journey which uses more than one mode of transport, potentially across a number of zones and boroughs. Gaining consumer trust is also essential. For such systems to work, the consumer must choose to follow journey suggestions, even though they might not seem to be optimal at the time. This is particularly difficult; after all, how many of us can say that we trust our local bus companies when some still struggle to run the services to a static timetable?

The opportunity for a transport revolution is here – but for it to work it must be aspired to. This starts with consumers and local authorities understanding and seeing the benefits of a self-learning, adaptable and truly flexible local transport system. And given that it’s within reach, they shouldn’t put up with anything less. So, next time someone proposes a flashy new solution to transport woes, just remember that true innovation lies in the hands of the commuters themselves – locked inside their mobile phones.

Marcin Budka, Principal Academic in Data Science, Bournemouth University and Manuel Martin Salvador, PhD Candidate, Bournemouth University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Understanding panic attacks

Knowledge Exchange

This week is Mental Health Awareness Week (#MHAW17), which is an opportunity both to increase our knowledge about mental health and learn about ways to improve our well being.  Professor Roger Baker, a clinical psychologist and researcher in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences has carried out extensive research into emotional processing, which includes work to help people overcome trauma and understand panic attacks.  Around 10% of people will experience a panic attack in their lives and understanding what’s happening can help in coping with and overcoming them.  Below he explains what happens during a panic attack and why it’s not a mental illness.

For more information, see Professor Baker’s website.

UUK publish industrial strategy and universities regional briefings

innovation, Knowledge Exchange, Knowledge Transfer

Universities UK have published regional briefings to examine how and why universities have an important link to the UK’s industrial strategy.

The briefings show that at the local and regional level, universities support growth by providing and creating jobs, and lead on local economic and social issues.  Areas of focus include local businesses, big businesses, communities, school leavers and local services.

Bournemouth University is included in the south-west briefing.

 

 

Free Peer Review Workshop for Early Career Researchers

Knowledge Exchange, open access, writing

Find out about peer review.

Debate challenges to the system.

Discuss the role of peer review for scientists and the public.

 

Friday 12th May, 2pm– 6pm

Workshop to be held at Informa’s Offices, 5 Howick Place, London

 

Peer Review: The nuts and bolts is a free half-day workshop for early career researchers and will explore how peer review works, how to get involved, the challenges to the system, and the role of peer review in helping the public to evaluate research claims.

 

Should peer review detect plagiarism, bias or fraud? What does peer review do for science and what does the scientific community want it to do for them? Should reviewers remain anonymous? Does it illuminate good ideas or shut them down?

 

To apply to attend this workshop, please fill out the application form by 9am on Tuesday 25 April: http://bit.ly/2mCFsyr

 

For more details, get in touch with Joanne Thomas jthomas@senseaboutscience.org.

More information: http://senseaboutscience.org/activities/peer-review-workshop/

Workshop: Building resilience in Research and Knowledge Exchange 27/4/17

Funding opportunities, Knowledge Exchange, Research Integritiy

Professor Heather Hartwell will be delivering a workshop on April 27th 2017 that will help participants gain insight into how it is possible to build resilience in the area of Research and Knowledge Exchange.

This session will explore how it may be possible to build resilience in the area of research and knowledge exchange, where rejection for funding and from publishers is common. The speaker will offer their views of how resilience can be built and how to overcome obstacles. There will be the opportunity for discussion around the topic.

For those interested in booking onto the course, please follow the link here.

If you would like further information about the workshop, please contact Ehren Milner (emilner@bournemouth.ac.uk)

 

What hospital catering could learn from the prison system – BU published in the Conversation

Knowledge Exchange

Jeff Bray, Bournemouth University and Heather Hartwell, Bournemouth University

Prisoners eat better than hospital patients in Britain. Our research found that prisoners consume around three times more calories than patients and their diet is more in line with government nutritional recommendations. The Conversation

Eating more isn’t always healthier, but when you consider that malnutrition is a big problem in hospitals, it can be. We found that the average male hospital patient consumes just 1,184 calories a day – even though the NHS recommends 2,500. Male prisoners, however, consume an average of 3,042 calories. The situation is similar for women. Female patients consume on average 1,134 calories (the recommended amount is 1,940). But female prisoners consume 3,007 calories, on average.

The patients’ food intake was measured three days before they were discharged from hospital, so we can be fairly sure that they weren’t consuming less due to ill health. And they weren’t consuming less because they were served fewer calories. All menus could provide for dietary recommendations, but it simply wasn’t eaten.

Malnourished patients have a weakened immune system, delayed wound healing and muscle wasting. There are also psychological effects from malnutrition including apathy and depression leading to loss of morale and the will to recover. Studies have also shown that inadequate nutrition can lengthen patients’ hospital stays by 50% (an average of six days) and triple mortality rates.

Hospitals face a number of difficulties in providing high-quality food. Dishes are prepared on a tight budget. They are cooked at a central hospital kitchen and often have to travel a considerable distance to the wards. But prison food is also prepared on a tight budget and often has to travel considerable distances from the kitchen to the prison wing.

Four years of data gathering

During our four-year study, we visited four prisons for men and two for women. In each, we carefully noted how food was prepared, delivered to the prison wing and served to the prisoners. We analysed the menu and interviewed prisoners and catering staff. We conducted four hospital studies with a similar method of data collection, which helped us to assess and compare the dietary intakes of hospital patients and prisoners. Through this we were able to identify the main differences in catering.

In hospitals, kitchen staff prepare the meals and hand them to porters who complete the delivery when they have time, between doing other tasks. Once the food reaches the ward, the responsibility for serving the food is handed to nurses. The various teams have to cooperate to ensure that food is delivered while it’s still fresh. However, providing food is not the main priority of a hospital. We noted tension between catering staff, who cared about food quality, and medical staff, who didn’t consider it a priority.

At least you’ll be well fed.
Adrian Reynolds/Shutterstock.com

We found that the food prepared by hospital and prison kitchens – although not fine dining – has a similar nutritional quality and is presented in a similar manner. (Typical fare might include meat and two veg, a pudding or yogurt, and a piece of fruit.) In prison, food was transported quickly and food quality was maintained up to the point of service to the prisoners. The food arrived hot, comparatively fresh and could be consumed immediately without distractions. By contrast, hospital food was delayed between kitchen and patient.

A fragmented process

In the hospitals that we studied, getting food from the kitchen to the patient was a fragmented and badly coordinated process. Meals were often delayed and disrupted by medical ward rounds, tests and treatments.

The result of these delays? Food was left for too long in warming trolleys prior to being served. Hot food cools down and cold food warms up to the temperature of the ward. Food dries out and discolours. Meat curls and gravy congeals. Compared with prisons, the temperature, texture and appearance of food were all worse in hospitals by the time the food was served. Nutrients may also have diminished and the food became less palatable. Differences that are likely to account, at least in part, for the marked difference in intake between prisoners and patients.

But this is not inevitable. Delays could be reduced. Hospitals could adopt a more coordinated approach and have a dedicated team responsible for the preparation, delivery to the ward and service to the patient. The team responsible for catering would not have the conflicting priorities that clinical teams have. Although a few hospitals do have a dedicated catering team that delivers food directly to the patient, this is the exception, not the rule.

In many hospitals, nutrition is often an afterthought. Priority is given to medical tests and treatments and often ignores the role that food plays in improving the patient’s health. One governor told us that if meals were delayed or missed in prison there would be a riot.

Jeff Bray, Principal Academic Consumer Behaviour, Bournemouth University and Heather Hartwell, Professor, Bournemouth University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The strange science of odour memory – BU published in the Conversation

Knowledge Exchange

Andrew Johnson, Bournemouth University and Andrew Moss, Bournemouth University

Smell is a powerful sense. It can improve alertness, reduce anxiety and influence self-confidence. Certain odours can even prime people to have safe sex. The Conversation

Odours provide a richness to our perception of the world. But, despite the ubiquity of smell, we understand less about smell memory than we do about visual and auditory memory.

The classic example of smell memory is what has become known as a Proustian memory (or involuntary memory). For this phenomenon, mere exposure to a stimulus can automatically trigger a strong memory from the past. For Proust, it was tea-soaked madeleine that activated a detailed memory of his aunt’s house.

A simple madeleine plunged Proust back to his youth.
vm2002/Shutterstock.com

As a researcher of odour memory, people often tell me stories of smells that triggered vivid autobiographical memories. This might be the smell of hospital food, a certain alcoholic drink or the shampoo of a former lover. This strong relationship between odour and emotion is thought to result from the part of the brain involved in processing odours being positioned within the limbic system – an area of the brain integral to emotion.

Testing short-term memory for smells

Not all smell is stored in long-term memory, though. Some smells are only retained in memory for short periods. Imagine you’re shopping for a new aftershave or perfume. You wouldn’t smell two products at the same time as it would be difficult to distinguish between the two. To decide which one you prefer, you need to smell them one after the other. This means you have to temporarily store the smell and then recall it to make a comparison. We have been examining how people store odours in short-term memory and the extent to which odour memory works differently from other types of memory.

The simplest explanation is that people perform smell memory tasks by verbally labelling the odours (for example: “smells like cheese”). But using this kind of verbal strategy results in the memory task being a test of verbal rather than olfactory memory, because we’re storing the word “cheese” in verbal memory not the actual smell of cheese in odour memory. As researchers, we can limit the use of this strategy by selecting odours that are hard to name. For example, non-food odours are typically harder to label.

Another trick we use is asking participants to repeat words that are irrelevant to the task during the test; this is called “concurrent articulation”. Concurrent articulation disrupts the participant’s ability to name the odours and their ability to silently rehearse the names during the task. For example, if you’re repeating “the, the, the” while sniffing something that smells like new-mown grass, you won’t be able to store the words “new-mown grass” in your verbal memory. It’s a bit like trying to read a book while listening to the news.

It has been shown that people can perform short-term olfactory memory tasks when the odours are hard to name,
and when undertaking concurrent articulation. These findings suggest that while verbal labelling can improve the memory for an odour, people are also able to store the actual odour within memory. This is supported by research showing that different parts of the brain are activated when remembering easy-to-name and hard-to-name odours; specifically, the inferior frontal gyrus and the piriform cortex, respectively.

One method by which olfactory short-term memory has been compared with other types of memory is by examining how well people can remember a list of odours. Depending on the specifics of the memory task, people are typically good at remembering the first and last item on a list (a phenomena known as primacy and recency). There is some evidence that, for some tasks, smell memory produces different primacy and recency effects to that of other stimuli. These differences might indicate that your smell memory works in a different way to other types of memory.

Smell memory as a diagnostic tool

You might, quite reasonably, ask why you should be interested in testing smell memory, since most of the time we use our olfactory perception to make judgements about odours (that smell is nice/horrible). But research has shown that an impaired sense of smell memory is a predictor of developing dementia.

To further emphasise this link, people with the ApoE gene (a genetic risk factor for developing Alzheimer’s), who show no signs of dementia, have impaired odour identification. These findings suggest that an olfactory memory test could potentially be used as part of the armoury in detecting the early stages of dementia. Early detection is important, as the earlier the intervention, the better the outcome.

Andrew Johnson, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Bournemouth University and Andrew Moss, PhD Student in Cognitive Psychology, Bournemouth University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.