Category / Creative, Digital & Cognitive Science

Prof. Ben Azvine, Global Head of Security Research and Innovation at BT. Monday the 11th of November, PG16

BU Challenges, Funding opportunities, PG research

The next of our research seminars will take on Monday, the 11th of November, PG16 at 15:00.
Our distinguished guest is Professor Ben Azvine, the Global Head of Security Research and Innovation at BT; invited by our colleague Prof. Bogdan Gabrys.

Professor Azvine holds a BSc in Mechanical Engineering, an MSc in Control Engineering, a PhD in Intelligent Control Systems all from Manchester University and an MBA from Imperial College, London. Having held research fellowship and lectureship posts in several universities, he joined British Telecom Research in 1995 and set up a research programme to develop and exploit intelligent systems technologies within BT.
Since then he has held senior, principal and chief research scientist as well as head of research centre posts at Adastral Park, the head quarter of BT R&D. Ben has edited several books and published more than 100 scientific articles. He is an inventor on 50 patents, has won two BCS gold medals, and the IET award for innovation in IT, holds visiting professorships at Universities of Bristol, Cranfield and Bournemouth in the UK.

The title of his exciting talk will be “Industrial applications of novel Intelligent Systems”. Intelligent systems play an important role in industry for managing customer relationship, providing business intelligence, helping organisations analyse their data and protecting organisations against Cyber-attacks. In this talk I’ll present a number of case studies within BT where we have used intelligent system originating from within our research organisation and successfully downstreamed them into our operations.

I strongly encourage academics and PhD students not to miss the opportunity to attend to the seminar and to discuss potential collaborations.

Emili

Decreasing spatial disorientation: towards dementia-friendly environments: A progress report

Spatial disorientation is among the earliest indicators of dementia, an increasingly common condition in our ageing society that currently costs the UK £23 billion annually. With support of the Fusion-CCCP strand we have created ViRtUOS (Virtual Reality User Orientation System), a state-of-the-art eye-tracking and virtual environments research platform which will facilitate the study of factors that affect spatial disorientation in people with dementia. Data gathered using ViRtUOS will be used to formulate design principles for dementia-friendly care homes, reducing care costs, and leading to new knowledge with significance and reach.

To develop ViRtUOS we have brought together undergraduate RAs from Computing, Creative Technology and Computer Animation to work co-operatively and as part of a high-level, well-resourced multi-disciplinary team.

This video demonstrates the results of their excellent work:

 CLICK HERE TO VIEW; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1oo6JXWNuY

So far, this FIF project has been a great success and feedback from the students RAs suggests that they have enjoyed this unique student experience and that working in an inter-disciplinary team has helped them improve their skills.

Excerpts from students’ feedback:

“I enjoyed working on a project which is not exactly ordinary in my field, and working with people who come from different professional backgrounds. It was interesting to see how contrasting subjects tie into the same workflow to try and produce a coherent product. Personally, I am glad to take away new knowledge about my own study subject and the ones of my fellow colleagues; most of that knowledge I will surely apply in my last year of study.” Jurate Pozeraite (Computer Animation, Media School)

“I’ve learnt a lot in my time here, which will be invaluable for both my final year project and my future career. I’ve learnt not only about software development, but about modelling, developing reliable systems, working as a team to produce a joint system and error handling and bug fixing. I feel that working with other students, in a similar position to myself, really helped me in this project. They made me feel at ease and they helped me learn about their roles in developing this system, which otherwise I would have completely ignored. Overall I feel that for me personally this was a very worthwhile project, for expanding my experience and learning something new. I would love to continue my work with this project for as long as possible.” William Chappell (Computing, DEC)

“During the full length of the project I had learnt more and more, I think that this was the best opportunity I have had in a long time. This job gave me lots of experience with people from different schools, which have completely different perspectives. They are both brilliant in their profession and I have learned a lot from them. Also I hope they have learned some things from me. Generally, I have gained new skills including working with ‘Vizard 4.0’ software and ‘3DsMax’. In fact, the project was really interesting and I was glad to not only earn experience from it but also produce a good quality product at the end. Overall I am very happy that I get a chance to work with such a wonderful team. It was a great experience that improves my skills for future projects. If I had a chance to go back in time and redo this project again I will definitely do it.” Arkadiusz Szerszmidt (Creative Technology, DEC)

 We believe that ViRtUOS has great potential to also foster other inter-disciplinary collaborations within BU and we would like to invite academics and students from across BU to get in contact with us, visit the laboratory and explore its potential for their research interests.

The further development of ViRtUOS will be driven by two PhD projects that started in October this year and we are planning to run first experiments investigating spatial orientation in people with dementia soon.

The team, from left to right: Arkadiusz Szerszmidt (undergraduate RA, Creative Technology), William Chappell (undergraduate RA Computing), Mary O’Malley (PhD student, Psychology & BUDI), Mariela Gaete-Reyes (BUDI), Jurate Pozeraite (undergraduate RA, Computer Animation), Chris Ramsey (PhD student, CDE), Jan Wiener (Psychology & BUDI)

 CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE VIDEO !!!

By Mariela Gaete-Reyes & Jan Wiener

CIM Dorset Event – Brand Purpose – Richard Calvert from Bright Blue Day

Training

Join us on Tuesday 12 November 2013 for the latest in our series of events held by the CIM Dorset branch.

Richard Calvert from Bright Blue Day is joining us to tell us about Brand Purpose.  As marketers we’re finding new ways to integrate Social, Local and Mobile communications into our customers day-to-day lives – invariably introducing complexity and unnecessary hassle into our lives.

There has been an explosion in the tools, techniques, strategies and tactics available to the SO LO MO marketer – each promising to deliver just the right message at the right time in the right place to the right person.  How do we apply SO LO MO thinking to deliver real value to customers, prospects and to our businesses?

How do we deliver real brand purpose and cut through everything that we can do in order to deliver just what we should?

Arrival from 6pm for a 6:30pm start.  Networking from 6pm until the event start. To book please visit http://bit.ly/1idcvi5

The Journal of Promotional Communication – Inaugural Issue and a Call to Action!

Fusion

We are delighted to launch the first edition of the Journal of Promotional Communication, an open-access; peer-reviewed, online journal edited by Corporate and Marketing Communications (CMC) academic group in the Media School, which publishes original research produced by undergraduate and postgraduate students. We welcome you to read the six papers selected for publication in the inaugural issue after a rigorous review process, and share them with your students, academic colleagues and practitioner contacts.

 http://promotionalcommunications.org/index.php/pc/issue/view/3

 Manuscripts published in Volume 1, Issue 1 of the Journal of Promotional Communication broadly speak to the theme of ‘People and Promotional Communication’, including an exciting mix of methodological and conceptual approaches which bring to the fore the humanness and everydayness in the production and consumption of promotional communications.

Our aim with this journal is to provide a platform for students from BU and other universities to publish work that demonstrates a critical understanding of their subject, whilst being creative, imaginative and interesting to read for academic and practitioner audiences alike. We are looking for examples of work which has the potential to challenge existing ideas and practices and seeks to inspire new ways of understanding and practising promotional communications.

The Journal of Promotional Communications is published two times per year (April, October) and the call is now open for papers for the next issue – deadline Friday March 7th, 2014. Submissions should be made online via http://promotionalcommunications.org/index.php/pc/about/submissions, where full ‘Author Instructions’ can also be found. If you have recently supervised work that you think should be considered for publication in the journal, why not encourage your students (UG, PG or PhD) to submit a manuscript for review? Diverse perspectives and approaches to the study of promotional communication are welcomed. Papers published in the Journal of Promotional Communication will draw on a variety of disciplinary areas covering, but not exclusive to, Marketing, Advertising and PR theory as well as Consumer Culture and Behaviour, Political Communications, Media Studies, Sociology, Cultural Studies and Management. From within BU, students submitting papers might come from a broad range of Academic Schools and subject areas; the Journal of Promotional Communication is not Media School exclusive!

We look forward to receiving submissions.

Dr Janice Denegri-Knott

Dr Carrie Hodges

Dr Dan Jackson

Dr Richard Scullion

 

 

CEMP Bulletin

Awarded & submitted bids, Funding opportunities, PG research

 

Here is the latest CEMP Research & Innovation bulletin. CEMP bulletin 10.10.13

New for this year:


(1) A more targeted approach to identifying funding opportunities;

(2) Funding calls aligned to research themes;

(3) If you would like to come and chat about anything in this bulletin, your own research or other projects / ideas that CEMP can help with, our monthly ‘CEMP Coffee Morning’ is at 9.30-10.30 on Thursday October 17th in the new CEMP office (CAG02).

 

CEMP Research & Innovation

Funding opportunities, Publishing

      At the open forum last week, we agreed the following actions for the coming year:

Research & Innovation Bulletin – to continue for information only, once a fortnight, via the research blog, from October 10th;
CEMP meetings – for CEMP staff only, once a month, to include bidding and income monitoring;
CEMP Coffee Mornings – once a month, ‘drop in’ for anyone in the MS who wants to talk to us about funding applications or other research / innovation opportunities. The first of these will be Thursday October 17th;
CEMP workshops – a series of supportive events to help people get started with research, bid writing, publishing, networking;
CEMP Associates – a proposal will be submitted to facilitate more experienced colleagues working with CEMP in a more structured fashion – to collaborate on bid writing, projects and making connections across academic groups.

Reminder – CEMP open meeting this Thursday

    Reminder about this Thursday’s meeting which is an open invitation for people to come along, have a coffee and tell us how we can support collaborative approaches to pedagogic research & innovation.

The background:

This academic year CEMP will continue to publish a fortnightly research & innovation funding bulletin via this blog, like so:  CEMP bulletin 26.9.13

The Research & Innovation meetings will also continue, but we want to invite colleagues from the rest of the Media School and across BU to tell us how we can increase engagement and collaboration in all aspects of pedagogic / educational research and innovation related to media / technology.

Previously, the model has been like this –

The bulletin is posted on a Thursday – this contains information about funding calls and also monitors live projects and reports on the outcomes of all bids.

The next Thursday, we meet to discuss the calls in the bulletin and report on bids in progress.

The next Thursday, the updated bulletin is posted

….and so on.

So far, we’ve been successful in one of our two key objectives – increasing CEMP bidding activity, but less successful in the other – developing collaboration with other people in BU, either in response to the funding calls in the bulletin or to try to match peoples’ ideas for projects / innovation to funding opportunities. This second objective is a service / function CEMP can offer to the University, and we’d like more colleagues to access this.

So – we’d like to review how we do this, in order to get better at the second objective, and to this end the first R&I meeting of this year is an open forum and everyone is invited to either come along and contribute to the discussion or to add a comment to this post if you have ideas but can’t make the meeting.

Meeting details:

Thursday 26th September 10-12

CEMP’s new office (CAGO2) – with tea, coffee and pastries!!!

Key issues for discussion:

  • How can CEMP support people in developing research / innovation projects?
  • What are the structural obstacles and how can we overcome them?

When we’ve got everyone’s ideas / requests for how to proceed, we’ll decide how to go ahead.

I hope we’ll see you there or read your ideas on the blog.

Julian

Find out about the Creative, Digital and Cognitive Science research theme

Research themes

As we start the new academic year, this is an opportune moment to reflect on the activities within this theme over the past 12 months and consider how the theme will develop in the future.

We held several meetings with mixed results. On the upside, we introduced ‘elevator pitches’ from staff who had ideas for funding applications/research papers and wanted to work collaboratively with other members of staff. This format worked extremely well with staff being able to cross-pollinate ideas, knowledge and skills in order to get some forward momentum in their projects.

We also held a number of these sessions with the Entrepreneurship & Economic Growth research theme. This proved to be a real winner and ensured that research themes were not seen as silos.  On the downside, this theme stills lacks a certain amount of staff engagement to develop real critical mass.

In terms of developing this theme in the future, two opportunities stand out. Earlier this year BU signed a ‘Manifesto for our Creative and Digital Economy’ with local businesses and councils. The aim of this initiative is to enhance the creative and digital economy of Bournemouth, Christchurch, Poole and Dorset. We hope that staff working within this research theme will play a major role in helping to create a thriving international hub driving economic growth. Secondly, this theme has now incorporated the research centres of the School of Design, Engineering & Computing and hopes to integrate  research into Design Simulation, Sustainable Design, and Smart technology to name but a few.

We will be running a number of research meetings during the coming academic year, so please come along and make your contribution to a thriving and societally import research theme.

Dr John Oliver

The Media School

 

Sign up to the Creative, Digital and Cognitive Science research themes here:

    Your Name (required)

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    Staff or PGR student? (required)

    StaffPGR

    Please select the themes that you are interested in (required)

    CEMP Research and Innovation meetings: an invitation

    Funding opportunities

         This academic year CEMP will continue to publish a fortnightly research & innovation funding bulletin via this blog.

    The Research & Innovation meetings will also continue, but we want to invite colleagues from the rest of the Media School and across BU to tell us how we can increase engagement and collaboration in all aspects of pedagogic / educational research and innovation related to media / technology.

    Previously, the model has been like this –

    The bulletin is posted on a Thursday – this contains information about funding calls and also monitors live projects and reports on the outcomes of all bids.

    The next Thursday, we meet to discuss the calls in the bulletin and report on bids in progress.

    The next Thursday, the updated bulletin is posted

    ….and so on.

    So far, we’ve been successful in one of our two key objectives – increasing CEMP bidding activity, but less successful in the other – developing collaboration with other people in BU, either in response to the funding calls in the bulletin or to try to match peoples’ ideas for projects / innovation to funding opportunities. This second objective is a service / function CEMP can offer to the University, and we’d like more colleagues to access this.

    So – we’d like to review how we do this, in order to get better at the second objective, and to this end the first R&I meeting of this year is an open forum and everyone is invited to either come along and contribute to the discussion or to add a comment to this post if you have ideas but can’t make the meeting.

     

    Meeting details:

    Thursday 26th September 10-12

    CEMP’s new office (CAGO2)

    Tea, coffee and pastries to be served!

    Key issues for discussion:

    • How can CEMP support people in developing research / innovation projects?
    • What are the structural obstacles and how can we overcome them?

    When we’ve got everyone’s ideas / requests for how to proceed, we’ll decide how to go ahead.

    I hope we’ll see you there or read your ideas on the blog.

    Julian

     

    Bangkok conference plans progressing well

    Fusion

    Planning for the 1st International Corporate and Marketing Communication in Asia Conference to be held in Bangkok on November 18-19 is progressing well, reports Prof Tom Watson.

    He has just returned from meeting his co-organisers Assoc Prof Jirayudh Sinthuphan and Assoc Prof Saravudh Anantachart of Chulalongkorn University.

    The conference, organised in collaboration by Chula’s Faculty of Communication Arts and BU’s Media School, has attracted interest from across Asia and the Middle East. BU’s involvement is supported by FIF.

    The international review panel has chosen 30 abstracts from ten countries with a broad range of topics and approaches.

    “At our meeting in Bangkok, the conference schedule was finalised and other arrangements confirmed. The facilities at Chula are very good and enable us to run parallel streams of papers on both days”, said Prof Watson. “We are really pleased with the response which is far more positive than expected. Already almost all speakers are confirmed to attend and registered.”

    The audience will also include Thai and regional academics and representatives of the national advertising, marketing communications and public relations sectors. The conference schedule will be published shortly on the conference website: http://cuprimcconference.net/

    Tom Watson (l), Saravudh Anantachart (c) and Jirayudh Sinthuphan (r)

     

    Conference venue at Chulalongkorn University

    BFX Final Films 2013

    BFX, Bournemouth’s excting new Visual Effects and Animation Festival, has finished after 6 weeks and a lot of blood, sweat and tears.  The 10 competing teams have finished their films – and they are awesome!

    You can watch all of the films here: http://www.bfxfestival.com/bfx-final-films-2013/

    There has been a great variety of work, completed in such a small period of time and with only 6-7 machines between them to work and render on – so their time keeping had to be spot on.  Most of these students haven’t even graduated yet.

    Truly astonishing what they have managed to produce.

    If you like what you see, leave a vote on Youtube; for a bit of fun we have a ‘ Best Film – Public Vote’ category.

    Once again thanks to all the feedback and mentoring from lecturers at the NCCA, Arts University Bournemouth and artists from Framestore, Double-Negative, The Mill, MPC, Realise Studios, Hibbert Ralph Animation, Outpost VFX and Cinesite.

    If your interested in making similar films, or how the creative industries work – check out our September Festival in Bournemouth 

    The BFX Festival is organised by the VFX Hub, funded by BU’s HEIF grant.

    New submission to eBU

    Publishing

    Dr Philip Long, Associate Dean, from the School of Tourism has submitted a paper to eBU.

    The abstract is as follows:

    This paper suggests that there may be insufficient recognition of critical ideas, professional and cultural practices associated with the ‘creative industries’ among tourism destination management researchers, practitioners and policy-makers in England. The paper considers the relationships between academic and practitioner knowledge and practice that potentially connect tourism destination management with creativity and the arts. The paper argues that more research is needed on the contrasting backgrounds, education and occupational discourses of tourism and arts / creative practitioners and how these may be addressed in the curriculum at postgraduate and continuing professional development (CPD) levels. The article suggests that there is a need for destination managers to explore contrasting agendas, knowledge needs and interests, and occupational discourses among creative industry practitioners and likewise for creative industry practitioners concerning tourism and destination management.

    This paper can be viewed, reviewed and commented on by following this link – http://ebu/index.php/ebu/article/view/11 – alternatively when on campus just type in ‘ebu’ into your web browser address bar.

    eBU is now live with papers for comment!

    PG research, Publishing, Research themes

     

    eBU can now be accessed

    I am delighted to announce that eBU, the online BU journal that operates on the basis of immediate publication and open peer review, is now live with two papers ready for comment.

    Jane Murphy (HSC), Louise Worswick (HSC), Andy Pullman, Grainne Ford (Royal Bournemouth Hospital) and Jaana Jeffery (HSC PhD student) suggest that e-learning is a great way to deliver nutririon education and training for health care staff who are involved in the care pathway for cancer survivors. The abstract can be found below:

    Health care professionals are in a prime position to provide diet and lifestyle advice, but there are gaps in their own knowledge and education highlighting the need for improvements in teaching and learning approaches. This paper presents the rationale for the design, implementation and evaluation of an e-learning resource to deliver nutrition education and training for health care staff who are involved in the care pathway for cancer survivors. The findings of the evaluation are discussed and the importance of the resource in terms of its impact upon the provision of nutrition, diet and lifestyle advice in practice for the delivery of care and support of cancer survivors.

    This paper can be accessed here –

    http://ebu.bournemouth.ac.uk/index.php/ebu/article/view/9

    Dorothy Fox (ST) uses original research to discuss the dynamics of doctoral supervision and provides recommendations for improving supervisory practice. The abstract can be found below:

    Abstract:

    This article reports an exploratory study of the professional relationships between supervisors who co-supervise management doctoral students in England. It draws on the concept and theoretical framework of emotional geographies (Hargreaves 2001) to understand the affective elements of these relationships. Team supervision has become mandatory in many Western universities and whilst the advantages and disadvantages of this development have been identified, the relationship between supervisors has not received the same attention. This is despite the evidence from students that positive or negative relationships within the supervisory team are of critical relevance to a successful outcome. Data from 13 in-depth interviews with supervisors was analysed and the emotional geographies are revealed. Further analysis showed that differences within the relationship are resolved in ways that are either ‘autocratic’, ‘overtly democratic’ or ‘covertly democratic’. With the aim of improving the quality of supervisory practice, the implications for doctoral supervision are discussed.

    This paper can be accessed here –

    http://ebu.bournemouth.ac.uk/index.php/ebu/article/view/8

    CEMP Research and Innovation Bulletin

    Funding opportunities, PG research, REF Subjects, Research themes

    The updated CEMP bulletin is here.

    CEMP Cluster bulletin and agenda 25.7.13

    Whilst there is no cluster meeting to review this, due to annual leave colleagues are encouraged to have a look since there are a number of good ‘leads’ here and several imminent deadlines for calls people have identified for applications.

    Next academic year, we’d like to encourage colleagues to approach CEMP to provide support for developing research ideas into projects or matching proposals to funding, as well as responding to the bulletin items.