Category / Creative, Digital & Cognitive Science

BU research recognised by The Renal Association Investigator Award at UK Kidney Week 2017

student research

BU research, (led by me, Dr Paul Hartley), was recognised at UK Kidney Week in Liverpool last week. We were invited to speak about our fruit fly model of human renal disease, work that has been variously supported by grants from the British Heart Foundation and Kidney Research UK. The conference was an excellent opportunity to showcase the model and highlight our current collaborations with consultant-scientists based at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital as well as a number of different groups at the University of Bristol, the University of Osnabruck in Germany, Harvard Children’s Hospital and the University of Edinburgh. The research work is based in Dorset House labs and is supported by a wide network of talented people within BU as well as our undergrad and post-grad students.

Psychology PGR Sarah Hodge presents at two prestigious USA conferences and wins prize

PG research, Research Ethics, student research

Representing the research team from Bournemouth University, Sarah Hodge presented cross-disciplinary PhD research at two conferences in Las Vegas (April) and Denver (May).

The first conference Broadcast Education Association (BEA) included a symposium organised and attended by key academics in the area of psychology and gaming and within this Sarah won top paper in the symposium track and 2nd place student paper. The research presented was funded by the University Student Research Assistant (SRA) scheme, which involved collaboration between departments and faculties. The research involved creating a game to measure in-game moral decisions. The research team included Jacqui Taylor and John McAlaney from the Department of Psychology, Davide Melacca and Christos Gatzidis from the Department of Creative Technology, and Eike Anderson from the National Centre for Computer Animation.

 

At the second conference Computers in Human Interaction (CHI), Sarah had a workshop paper accepted on Ethical Encounters in Human Computer Interaction and this naturally stimulated many interesting questions about ethics in research. Sarah was a student volunteer at the conference. Sarah was a Chair student Volunteer at British HCI 2016 that was held at Bournemouth University last summer and this experience supported being accepted as a Student Volunteer at CHI. From this experience Sarah was assigned the role of Day Captain, which involved supporting and overseeing the other student volunteers with their duties. Sarah found it to be a great experience and highly recommends other students to consider being a student volunteer as a great chance to network and it also helps with funding conferences as the registration fee was waived.

 

Hodge, S. Taylor, J & McAlaney, J (2017). Restricted Content: Ethical Issues with Researching Minors’ Video Game Habits Human in Computer Interaction (CHI) May, Denver USA

If you would like more information about the research please contact: shodge@bournemouth.ac.uk

Intelligent Transportation Analytical Model for SMEs Coach Operators

PG research

We would like to invite you to the latest research seminar of the Centre for Games and Music Technology Research.

Speaker:             Siti Aishah Mohd Selamat

(Bournemouth University PhD student based at County Coaches UK LLP, Luton)

Title:     Intelligent Transportation Analytical Model for SMEs Coach Operators

Time: 2:00PM-3:00PM

Date: Wednesday 31st May 2017

Room: PG11, Poole House, Talbot Campus

Abstract: The transportation industry is the key economic driver of any country and also an essential component in one’s daily routine. The evolution of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) in the last two decades has helped the authorities in solving underpinning traffic challenges such as curbing road congestion, road safety, road surveillance and much more.

 

With the advancement of technology in the 21st Century, data is increasingly collected every hour, every minute and every second causing a data explosion era. The International Data Corporation (IDC) forecast that the volume of data is expected to grow up to 50 Zettabytes globally by the year 2020. Extracting strategical information from the data can revolutionize the development of ITS, by shaping a traditional technology-driven system into a more robust ITS ecosystem.

 

According to Eurostat, the transportation and the storage enterprise made up of 5% of the 22.3 million of the non-financial business economy in 2012.  Despite the momentous potential benefits of big data analytics utilization, the transportation SMEs are lagging behind in their adoption efforts. In a volatile economic environment, SMEs in the transportation sector needs to be proactive in utilizing its data asset at hand to pre-empt future circumstances in order to remain competitive and relevant.

 

We hope to see you there.

Re-elected to the Board!

Dr John Oliver, from the Advances in Media Management research cluster (FMC/FoM) has been re-elected to the European Media Management Association Board. Following his election at the association’s recent Annual General Assembly in Ghent, Belgium, Dr Oliver will now serve a 3rd term on the board and be responsible for the Doctoral Summer School in 2018.

The European Media Management Association Conference

Graham Goode, from the Advances in Media Management (AiMM) research cluster recently presented his doctoral research at the European Media Management Association conference in Ghent, Belgium. Under a conference theme of “collaboration in the value chain”, Graham presented data from a multi-year content analysis of strategic collaborations of UK broadcast, production and distribution organisations between 2010 and 2016. The findings show that equity participation, a form of collaboration, where one partner provides finance and expertise to gain access to the other partner’s capabilities in content, formats, talent, people and production facilities, accounted for a substantial and growing proportion of collaborations over the last three years, replacing acquisitions, as the here-to (since 2010) main form of collaboration.

Using user-customized touch gesture for fast accessing installed apps on smartphones

PG research

We would like to invite you to the latest research seminar of the Centre for Games and Music Technology Research.

 

Speaker: Chi Zhang (Creative Technology PhD Student)

 

Title:     Using user-customized touch gesture for fast accessing installed apps on smartphones

 

Time: 2:00PM-3:00PM

Date: Wednesday 17th May 2017

Room: PG11, Poole House, Talbot Campus

 

Abstract:

 

User-defined touch gesture is a common method for fast interacting with smartphones, it enables a user to define a touch gesture for a particular task, such as, “-” for volume down and “+” for volume up. But, the user-defined touch gesture method is typically provided as a “user-defined touch gesture set” aiming for countable commonly used tasks. These approaches are aiming to build a gesture set, include a limit number of universal gesture-task pairs developed by the users.  Existing user defined touch gesture sets supported a wide range of tasks on the smartphones, however, they: (1) still need learning; (2) cannot cover every task that user wants to active; (3) lack of the evaluation on the speed performance. To overcome these limitations and better understand the speed advantage of user-defined touch gesture method, we presented a novel user-customized touch gesture approach and conducted an experiment to evaluate its speed advantages. The experiment demonstrates a significant speed advantage of using our approach and the accuracy performance is evaluated as well. In particular, our findings include: (1) our approach has a significant speed advantage than traditional interaction method; (2) our approach has no significant accuracy differences between frequent and infrequent used apps; (3) analysed what caused the failure accessing in our experiments. Based on these findings, we offer (1) further evidence of the speed benefits of using user self-defined gesture for accessing tasks; (2) design implications for the future gesture-based interface for fast accessing on smartphones.

 

We hope to see you there.

 

 

AiMM Awarded Doctoral Summer School!

The Advances in Media Management (AiMM) research cluster have been awarded the European Media Management Association’s Doctoral Summer School 2018.

AiMM is a cross faculty research collaboration between the Faculty of Media & Communications and the Faculty of Management and this award follows on from AiMMs success in hosting the association’s annual conference at BU in 2013.The Doctoral Summer School will be held at BU between the 2-4th July 2018 and is targeted at PhD students at all stages of their research, as well as early-stage post-docs.

Congratulations go to the bid team: Dr John Oliver, Dr Chris Chapleo, Dr Joyce Costello, Graham Goode, Melanie Gray and Conor O’Kane.

CEMP research published by Samsung

Post-award

CEMP’s Digital Capability study has now been published by Samsung.

ABOUT THIS RESEARCH
In 2015, Samsung funded a six-month research project on the Isle of Portland in Weymouth, exploring the
impact of technology on participants’ engagement with community services, schools and family learning.
We partnered with the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice (CEMP) at Bournemouth University.
The project has given us a rich set of findings on which to build further work, and we hope this summary will be
of help to schools, community organisations, policy makers, employers and even parents – anybody
who shares our interest in enabling communities to benefit from the power of digital technology.

Intelligent Image Understanding

PG research

We would like to invite you to the latest research seminar of the Centre for Games and Music Technology Research.

Title: Intelligent Image Understanding

Speaker: Jing Wang

Time: 2:00PM-3:00PM

Date: Wednesday 10th May 2017

Room: PG11, Poole House, Talbot Campus

Abstract: Real data are usually complex and contain various components. For example, face images have expressions and genders. Each component mainly reflects one aspect of data and provides information others do not have. Therefore, exploring the semantic information of multiple components as well as the diversity among them is of great benefit to understand data comprehensively and in-depth. However, this cannot be achieved by current nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF)-based methods, despite that NMF has shown remarkable competitiveness in learning parts-based representation of data. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel multi-component nonnegative matrix factorization (MCNMF). Instead of seeking for only one representation of data, MCNMF learns multiple representations simultaneously, with the help of the Hilbert Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) as a diversity term. HSIC explores the diverse information among the representations, where each representation corresponds to a component. By integrating the multiple representations, a more comprehensive representation is then established. Extensive experimental results on real-world datasets have shown that MCNMF not only achieves more accurate performance over the state-of-the-arts using the aggregated representation, but also interprets data from different aspects with the multiple representations, which is beyond what current NMFs can offer.

We hope to see you there.

A Cloud-Based Collaborative Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) for the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the Sultanate of Oman

PG research

We would like to invite you to the latest research seminar of the Centre for Games and Music Technology Research.

Title: A Cloud-Based Collaborative Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) for the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the Sultanate of Oman.

 

Speaker: Mohammed Al hajri

Time: 2:00PM-3:00PM

Date: Wednesday 3rd May 2017

Room: PG11, Poole House, Talbot Campus

 

Abstract: It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the demand to migrate or to adopt cloud computing into not only companies but also educational institutions. New trends in this promising field have been playing significant and critical roles in delivering educational services and applications to stakeholders.

Oman and other developing countries could benefit from a cloud-based collaborative VLE where students and faculty members could have access to online facilities to collaborate effectively achieving the potential aims of their courses and programs. HEIs especially in Oman spend high portions of their budgets to establish and maintain IT systems while not all HEIs can afford to have their separate IT systems network due to its unaffordable cost.

This research critically assesses the current ICT infrastructure and any cloud-based collaborative initiatives used in Universities and Colleges in Oman and attempt to explore the existing VLEs in HEIs in Oman. Furthermore, the research will develop a framework which will adopt the contribution from analysing any related frameworks and models in the field or in adjacent areas. The proposed framework is aiming to make a unified and collaborative VLE that can be shared and utilised by several HEIs in Oman which will enable them to exchange and share educational resources among themselves and to reduce the cost of IT expenses in software, hardware and technical support. Thus, this research is aiming to get the maximum benefits of cloud computing to be applied in collaborative VLEs and use it as a model to improve the current IT infrastructure implemented in this environment. Also, the proposed framework can be adapted and adopted by similar developing countries.

 

We hope to see you there.

Deadline Extended: Machine Learning in Medical Diagnosis and Prognosis

conferences, international, open access, Publishing

The deadline has been extended to the 14th of April , 2017.

This is a call for papers for the Special Session on Machine Learning in Medical Diagnosis and Prognosis at IEEE CIBCB 2017.

The IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (IEEE CIBCB 2017) will be held at the INNSIDE Hotel, Manchester from August 23rd to 25th, 2017.

This annual conference has become a major technical event in the field of Computational Intelligence and its application to problems in biology, bioinformatics, computational biology, chemical informatics, bioengineering and related fields. The conference provides a global forum for academic and industrial scientists from a range of fields including computer science, biology, chemistry, medicine, mathematics, statistics, and engineering, to discuss and present their latest research findings from theory to applications.

The topics of interest for the special session include (but are not limited to):

  • Medical image classification
  • Medical image analysis
  • Expert systems for computer aided diagnosis and prognosis
  • Pattern recognition in the analysis of biomarkers for medical diagnosis
  • Deep learning in medical image processing and analysis
  • Ethical and Security issues in machine learning for medical diagnosis and prognosis

Up-to-date information and submission details can be found on the IEEE CIBCB 2017. The submission deadline is the 14th of April, 2017.

Please e-mail srostami@bournemouth.ac.uk with any questions.

Developing a novel self-optimising femtocell network for indoor communication with mobile devices

PG research

We would like to invite you to the latest research seminar of the Centre for Games and Music Technology Research.

 

Speaker: Haseeb Qureshi (Creative Technology PhD Student)

 

Title:     Developing a novel self-optimising femtocell network for indoor communication with mobile devicesFemtoCell

 

Time: 2:00PM-3:00PM

Date: Wednesday 15th March 2017

Room: PG11, Poole House, Talbot Campus

 

Abstract:

The need for a fast and reliable wireless communication system has increased with the development of social and business activities around the world. A promising cost and energy efficient way of meeting the future traffic demands is the idea of very dense deployment of low cost, low power and self-organizing small base stations i.e. Femtocells. Self-configuring, self-optimizing and self-healing base stations have the potential to significantly increase the capacity of mobile cellular networks in the future 5G while reducing their energy consumption. The aim of this research is to consider the integration of Femtocells as Self Optimising Networks for the future communication network. An extensive and thorough research has been carried out to investigate what drawbacks of the existing communication 4G network are and whether Femtocells as a Self-Optimising network can improve the current network. In order to evaluate the algorithms for self-optimising Femtocells that have been proposed by other authors in the existing literature an evaluation criteria has been developed, and a simulating environment has been constructed. The evaluation is performed by measuring the effect that changing parameters has on the output of the environment. From the results of the evaluation a new algorithm to enhance the self-optimisation of the network will be designed and developed in a simulating environment.​

 

We hope to see you there.

Interreg Opportunities

Funding opportunities, innovation, international

interregFollowing the successful visit by UK Interreg Territorial Facilitators to BU on 21st February 2017, please find out more about the current Interreg call, which is open from 1 March until 30 June 2017.

It is targeted at public authorities and non-profits

  • National, regional or local authorities
  • Other organisations in charge of defining and implementing regional policy instruments
  • Non-profits

Projects must focus on one of these topics

  • Research and innovation
  • SME competitiveness
  • Low-carbon economy
  • Environment and resource efficiency

Support is available on the call website, including instructional videos, partner search, online project self-assessment, project feedback before submission and a demo of the application form.

If BU academics are interested in applying for this call, please contact Emily Cieciura, RKEO’s Research Facilitator: EU & International

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS Two-day workshop: Politics in a post-truth era

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

Two-day workshop: Politics in a post-truth era

10th – 11th July 2017, Bournemouth University

The concept of post-truth, where facts are deemed less important than beliefs, is one that has recently been frequently invoked when making sense of the modern political campaigning environment. The suggestion is that political campaigns exploit and reinforce strongly held beliefs, encouraging the disavowal of contrasting facts, in order to undermine support for the arguments of opponents.

Post-truth has become most associated with campaigns that invoke more populist arguments. Such arguments give voice to privately held beliefs, often hidden by norms of societies which reinforce pejorative stereotypes based on religious and racial differences, gendering of roles and discussing myths of us (as a nation and people) and the others whose differences mark them as not us. Hence there are far-reaching implications of such practices for democratic societies.

The workshop will explore the underlying themes and implications of this phenomenon.

KEY QUESTIONS

1) Is post truth really new, or simply a synonym for the exaggerations and spin long associated with the techniques of political campaigns? Or have political campaigns been proven to lie more?

2) What does a post-truth campaign look like, how is the communication constructed to tap into belief systems and feed the dynamics of a post-truth (belief-based) political environment?

3) Why might beliefs have more power in influencing voting behaviour than more fact, logic or reason based arguments?

4) How does post-truth link to the models of a marketised and professionalised campaign environment?

5) What does post-truth tell us about the current and future state of democratic engagement and of democracy itself?

CONTRIBUTIONS

Contributions need not be full papers, rather informed arguments that promote discussion – although they should have the potential to be full or part papers. The workshop seeks to tease out what post-truth means, how this is encouraged during political campaigns, its root causes, impacts on election outcomes and, importantly, what are the implications for democracy.

PUBLICATION

The longer-term aim is to develop an edited collection of work that would include solo-authored or joint publications from participants that address these questions. The volume will be published in the Palgrave series Political Campaigning and Communication.

DATES

The event will be held on July 10th and 11th with a workshop dinner on the evening of the 10th. There will be no attendance costs – the venue, refreshments and evening meal will be covered jointly by funding from the Centre for Politics and Media Research and the PSA Political Marketing Group.  Participants should expect to cover travel and accommodation. The venue will be the Bournemouth University’s Executive Business Centre close to Bournemouth train station.

ABSTRACTS

Interested participants should propose their participation by offering a short 200-300 word abstract that summarises the main points of the argument, case studies and evidence drawn upon and the broader socio-political implications into which their argument offers insights. The deadline for abstracts is 1600hrs GMT on Friday 6th April 2017. Please email them to dlilleker@bournemouth.ac.uk ​