BU Research Blog

The 13th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, hosted by the Doctoral College.

Faisal Alsubaie (PhD, BUBS) with this poster entitled: The effect of cultural tightness-looseness on tourism destination choice for Western Europeans: Evidence from Saudi Arabia.

Click the poster below to enlarge.

This study addresses the question “How do the changes in cultural tightness–looseness (CTL) influence the perceptions of Western European tourists and their willingness to visit Saudi Arabia (SA)”? To answer this research question, the study adopts a research design of two phases sequential mixed method; (1) first phase employs a quantitative survey to measurement the tourists’ perceptions of the recent changes in cultural tightness (i.e., the strength of cultural norms and tolerance for deviant behaviour) and their impacts on their intention to visit SA. (2) the second phase employs a qualitative semi-structured interviews to get an in-depth explanation of the findings of the first phase of the study. This study contributes to the literature by developing a framework using CTL theory to investigate the effects of CTL on tourism destination choice in a Saudi context which has not been examined before.

You can view the full poster exhibition and pre-recorded presentations on the conference webpage.

If this research has inspired you and you’d like to explore applying for a research degree please visit the postgraduate research web pages or contact the Doctoral College dedicated admissions team.

The 13th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, hosted by the Doctoral College.

Ceyda Kiyak (MRes, FST) with this poster entitled: Minimising online gambling related harm through persuasive technologies.

Click the poster below to enlarge.

How effective are the various types of interactions in breaking through disassociation of at-risk and social gamblers?  After identifying whether the participant is at-risk or social gambler with The Problem Gambling Severity Index on an online survey, fifty participants will be invited to the lab experiment. Participants will be given two tablet devices: on the first device they will play the gambling session with virtual money for 20 min; on the second device, participants will be randomised to five different interactions (experimental groups: cognitive tasks, interactive dialogue, infographic; control groups: neutral interaction, no interaction). Participants will then complete Jacob’s Disassociation Questionnaire, acceptability, and demographic questionnaire. The results of this research may enable prevention and intervention strategies in problem gambling. Moreover, it will allow gambling industry and policymakers to better develop responsible gambling applications and may even lead a policy change.

You can view the full poster exhibition and pre-recorded presentations on the conference webpage.

If this research has inspired you and you’d like to explore applying for a research degree please visit the postgraduate research web pages or contact our dedicated admissions team.

The 13th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, hosted by the Doctoral College.

Daniel Dimanov (PhD, FST) with this poster entitled: MONCAE: Multi-Objective Neuroevolution of Convolutional Autoencoders.

Click the poster below to enlarge.

With this poster, we present a novel neuroevolutionary method to identify the architecture and hyperparameters of convolutional autoencoders, which has been published in an ICLR workshop. Remarkably, we used a hypervolume indicator employing neuroevolution for in the context of neural architecture search for autoencoders, for the first time to the best of our knowledge. We rely on novel decoding of the architecture to automatically reconstruct the decoder from the encoding. We tested our approach with MNIST, Fashion-MNIST and CIFAR10 to verify the performance of the approach. Results show that images were compressed by a factor of more than 10, while still retaining enough information to achieve image classification for the majority of the tasks. Thus, this new approach can be used to speed up the AutoML pipeline for image compression and much more.

You can view the full poster exhibition and pre-recorded presentations on the conference webpage.

If this research has inspired you and you’d like to explore applying for a research degree please visit the postgraduate research web pages or contact the Doctoral College dedicated admissions team.

The 13th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, hosted by the Doctoral College.

Abier Hamidi (PhD, FHSS) with this poster entitled: HIV epidemic in Libya: Identifying gaps.

Click the poster below to enlarge.

HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) became a public issue in Libya after the infection of 400 children in El-Fatih Hospital in 1988. Due to the civil war, social and religious barriers, HIV prevalence is hard to establish, but it is generally believed to be increasing.  This review (a) assesses the size and scope of the available literature on the HIV epidemic in Libya; and, (b) identifies the nature and extent of research conducted to date. A comprehensive search was performed using PubMed, Medline, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, Scopus, Academic Search Ultimate, Cochrane Library and Google Scholar.  Primary research studies and official reports that are exclusively on Libya published during 1988 -2021 were considered.  In total 25 studies were included. The literature suggests there is an increase in HIV infection rates in Libya.  Culturally sensitive research will assist in reducing HIV stigma and decreasing infection rates.

You can view the full poster exhibition and pre-recorded presentations on the conference webpage.

If this research has inspired you and you’d like to explore applying for a research degree please visit the postgraduate research web pages or contact the Doctoral College dedicated admissions team.