Category / Technology & Design

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships – Current Associate Vacancies

Business Engagement, Knowledge Exchange, Knowledge Exchange and Impact Team, Knowledge Transfer, Knowledge Transfer Partnership

Following on from recent success, we have had five Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) awarded over the past few months.  Several of these are in recruitment, with a few more coming into the recruitment stage shortly.  It’s been a rather busy time within the world of KTP at BU!

We have two vacancies at local Poole-based business, TDSi and one in Southampton with civil engineering company, R&W Engineering.

As we have a large cohort of final year students finishing their exams shortly, this is an ideal opportunity to advertise these positions to our final year students.

 

Poole-based vacancies at TDSi

Software Test Engineer – Salary up to £25,000 – 13 month fixed term contract with a possibility of the offer of permanent employment

Firmware Development Engineer – Salary up to £25,000 – 11 month fixed term contract with a possibility of the offer of permanent employment

 

Southampton-based vacancy at R&W Engineering

IT Systems Engineer – Salary of £25,000 (negotiable) – 25 month fixed term contract with a possibility of the offer of permanent employment

 

I encourage colleagues to share these job adverts amongst their networks as these are fantastic projects and will provide excellent personal and professional development for the successful candidates.

 

For KTP enquiries, please contact Rachel Clarke, KE Adviser (KTP) on 61347 or email clarker@bournemouth.ac.uk

 

BU SDRC Contributions to WIT Contact & Surface 2015 International Conference

BU research, PG research, Publishing, Research communication, Research news, student research

BU SDRC Director Dr Zulfiqar Khan (Associate Professor) organised a special session on “Surface Engineering” at the WIT 2015 Contact and Surface International Conference and contributed as a member of the International Scientific Advisory Committee (ISAC) as a reviewer during 2014-15.

SDRC Professor Mark Hadfield chaired the special session and also helped the conference as a member of the ISAC to support review process.

BU academics and researchers along with the SDRC international partners from Gazi University Turkey contributed presentations and have submitted the following extended full length papers to the WIT International Journal of Computational Methods & Experimental Measurements (CMEM), which are all currently under review for publication.

  1. Khan, Z., Pashaei, P., Bajwa, R., Nazir, M. H., & Cakmak, M. (2015). Fabrication and characterisation of electrodeposited and magnetron sputtered thin films. In Contact and Surface 2015. València, Spain. Retrieved from http://www.wessex.ac.uk/15-conferences/contact-and-surface-2015.html
  2. Saeed, A., Khan, Z., & Hadfield, M. (2015). Performance Evaluation of Surface Protection Applied to Large Vehicles. In Contact and Surface 2015. València, Spain: Wessex Institute, UK. Retrieved from http://www.wessex.ac.uk/15-conferences/contact-and-surface-2015.html
  3. Gultekin, A., Pashaei, P., Khan, Z., Ozturk, M. K., Tamer, M., & Bas, Y. (2015). X-ray and ab initio study of structural, electronic, elastic and optical properties in Be1-xZnxS alloys depending on Vegard’s law. In Contact and Surface 2015. València, Spain. Retrieved from http://www.wessex.ac.uk/15-conferences/contact-and-surface-2015.html
  4. Nazir, M. H., Khan, Z. A. (2015). Maximising the Interfacial Fracture Toughness of Thin Coatings and Substrate through Optimisation of Defined Parameters. In Contact and Surface 2015. València, Spain: WIT. Retrieved from http://www.wessex.ac.uk/15-conferences/contact-and-surface-2015.html

WIT is currently collaborating with BU in Corrosion research through a post doc programme Mark Hadfield (PI), Zulfiqar Khan (Co-I) led by Dr Adil Saeed as a post doc researcher.

Corrosion (experimental, modelling and simulation) and Surface Engineering (nano coatings) research within BU SDRC is conducted in collaboration with multinational industrial partners through match funding with significant in-kind experimental support.

For further details on current research activity in SDRC please visit the Centre webpage. If you have interests in these areas and would like to find more please contact Dr Zulfiqar Khan

CEMP / CEL Research Bulletin April 2015

BU research, Funding opportunities, Publishing, REF Subjects, Research assessment, Research news

 

               

 

The latest CEMP bulletin, now combined with the Centre for Excellence in Learning, is now available as a PDF  CEMP CEL bulletin April 15  or word doc  CEMP CEL bulletin April 15

The bulletin provides a ‘top 20’ of research funding opportunities related to education, learning and pedagogy research and grouped into the the three BU learning research sub-themes: Media and Digital Literacies, Practitioner Enquiry and (Higher) Education Dynamics.

To follow up any of these opportunities, please contact Julian or Richard in CEMP or Marcellus Mbah in CEL.

BU is leading research in areas identified in the top 10 emerging technologies

BU research, PG research

The top 10 emerging technologies will significantly influence the future landscape of research council funding, its initiatives, collaborative opportunities and formation of consortiums on global level.

Although service and product based economy is on the rise in the South and South East Asian countries, core Engineering and Technological disciplines have conventional and strategic importance in terms of education and research mainly due to higher employability both in academic and industrial sectors. The number of UG/PG students is usually high with highest tariff points in medicine and engineering.

Key BU partners such as PES University (MoU has been signed, joint Journal and Conference publications, funding proposals have been developed, mutual visits), National University of Science & Technology (match funded PhD studentships), National Institute of Technology (joint publications and organising international conference) and Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences & Technology (MoU has been signed, mutual research visits, and education activity through British Council funding) are some, which are a window, to their research and education activity.

SDRC has been leading research and research informed education in collaboration with national and international higher education and industrial partners in major themes of the top 10 emerging technologies.

Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMs):

Research in this area is conducted through a PhD programme entitled “In-situ corrosion health monitoring and prediction in military vehicles” in collaboration with a major industrial partner.

Nanomaterials:

This research is performed through two PhD programmes entitled “Developing thin film nano-composite coatings for advanced applications” and “Electroplated composite coatings with incorporated nano particles for tribological systems with the focus on water lubrication”. Both these programmes are in collaboration with international HEI and industrial partners.

Advanced Energy Storage And Generation:

Research in this area is supported by industrial and HEI partners through “Energy recovery at thermodynamic expansion and thermal boosting through convection in flat plate solar thermal systems”, “Experimental investigation and mathematical modelling of dynamic equilibrium of novel thermo fluids for renewable technology applications” and “Research and development in novel alternative renewable energy technology”.

BU is best placed in terms of the above themes that provide a strong foundation to further enhance international collaborations for research and education.

If you would like further information or have interest in any of the above areas please contact Dr Zulfiqar Khan.

EU Radar – Societal Challenges – Secure societies – protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens

BU research, EU, Funding opportunities, Research news

The following EU Horizon 2020 Societal Challenges’ calls are all closing after April 2015. If you are thinking of applying to any of these calls, please contact RKEO Funding Development Team as soon as you are able, so that we can help you with your submission.

The date given is the funder’s deadline with all closing at 17:00 Brussels local time, unless stated otherwise

Secure societies – protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens
Digital security,: Cyber security, privacy and trust – please check the specific topics – 27/8/15
Fight against terrorism and crime – please check the specific topics – 27/8/15
Border security and external security – please check the specific topics – 27/8/15

 

General / Multiple Topics

Horizon 2020 dedicated SME instrument phase 1 and phase 2 –  deadlines – 17/6/15, 17/9/15 and 25/11/15

Please check the specific topics within this call which may meet your research funding needs.

For more information on EU funding opportunities, contact Paul Lynch or Emily Cieciura, in the RKEO Funding Development Team.

£7m funding competition open for registration

Business Engagement, Funding opportunities, Knowledge Exchange, Knowledge Exchange and Impact Team

 

Wave Energy Scotland (WES) is launching four new SBRI funding competitions with up to £7m funding available.

The aim of this funding competition is the development of new innovative energy conversion solutions that are applicable to the wave energy sector. More information on this funding opportunity.

Competition Briefing event, 31 March 2015.

This event is an excellent opportunity for you to receive first hand information about the competition – its scope, application process, key dates etc. More information on the briefing event.

BU Academic’s Major International Engagement and Esteem

Featured academics, Fusion

Dr Zulfiqar Khan FIMechE, CEng, SFHEA

Dr Zulfiqar Khan (Associate Professor), Director Sustainable Design Research Centre SciTech has been invited to Chair Surface Engineering Track at the STLE (Society of Tribologists & Lubrication Engineers) 70th Annual Meeting & Exhibition May 2015.

Zulfiqar is leading the Surface Engineering Technical Committee as Vice-Chair. He is also Technical Editor of Tribology & Lubrication Technology (TLT), STLE’s official membership publication. Around 126 STLE members were invited to submit a case for support to become technical editor, only 17 were selected, of whom Zulfiqar is the only non-US member of the technical committee.

He has been actively engaged and making significant contributions to the STLE since May of 2008, as conference track Chair, Vice-chair, Paper Solicitation Chair and is currently leading the selection process of the Surface Engineering 2015 best paper award.

SLTE mission is “to advance the science of tribology and the practice of lubrication engineering in order to foster innovation, improve the performance of equipment and products, conserve resources and protect the environment.” [STLE website].

STLE is serving the needs of more than 10, 000 members and over 150 industrial partners within the Tribology & Lubrication Engineering sector. STLE has a 24 member elected board with elected president (annual) who leads STLE as CEO and heads the board as Chair, 23 technical committees and councils and has an annual budget of around 2.25 million USD [STLE website].

If you would like to know more or have interests to get involved please contact Dr Zulfiqar Khan directly.

Latest Major Funding Opportunities

Funding opportunities

The following funding opportunities have been announced. Please follow the links for more information:

Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council

FLexible Interchange Programme (FLIP). This fund supports the movement of people from one environment to a different one to exchange knowledge/technology/skills, developing bioscience research/researchers. Awards last up to 24 months, can cost up to £150k.  Closing Date: 15/7/15

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

Early Career Researchers bursaries. This fund covers travel expenses and accommodation costs to allow post-doctoral research fellows and academic staff in the first three years of their first academic appointment to attend Dial-a-Molecule events. Closing Date: Any time.

Funding for meetings. We welcome proposals for meetings to fund, or co-fund in relation to developing new collaborations. Closing Date: Any time.

Interdisciplinary mobility fund. The fund promotes collaborations by short term visits and exchanges. We expect a typical award to be £1-2000 and we aim to fund up to 40 exchanges over 3 yrs. Closing Date: Any time.

Medical Research Council
UK-Thailand: Joint Health Research Call. It is expected that this funding will support up to four joint projects at a level of up to £389k per project for infectious diseases, and three joint projects at a level of up to £444k per project for non-communicable diseases. Closing Date: 2/6/15 at 16:00

The Royal Society
Royal Society Research Professorship. The scheme provides salary costs, a one-off start-up grant and research expenses to world-class scientists. Appointments are usually made for up to 10 years. Closing Date: 3/11/15

Wellcome Trust

Health Innovation Challenge Fund. This fund aims to stimulate the creation of innovative healthcare products, technologies and interventions and to facilitate their development for the benefit of patients in the NHS and beyond for each £10m funding round. Closing Date: 5/5/15

Pathfinder Awards. This scheme, offering pilot funding to catalyse innovative early-stage applied research and development projects in areas of unmet medical need. The average award amount is envisaged to be in the region of £100,000, but up to £350,000 will be considered in exceptional circumstances. Closing Date: 29/6/15 at 17:00

Please note that some funding bodies specify a time for submission as well as a date. Please confirm this with your  RKEO Funding Development Officer

You can set up your own personalised alerts on Research Professional. If you need help setting these up, just ask your School’s/Faculty’s Funding Development Officer in  RKEO or view the recent blog post here.

If thinking of applying, why not add notification of your interest on Research Professional’s record of the bid so that BU colleagues can see your intention to bid and contact you to collaborate.

Bournemouth University Computer Human Interaction (BUCHI) talks by Microsoft (Seattle, US) and University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany)

BU research, Fusion

Bournemouth University Computer Human Interaction (BUCHI) initiative received funding from the Fusion Investment Fund (Staff Mobility and Networking) to host two prestigious researchers who will deliver a talk on Tuesday, 17th March, 1pm. These two talks will take place in the Executive Business Centre (EB708) and will be free and open to all.

Our first speaker will be Jürgen Ziegler who is a full professor in the Department of Computer Science and Applied Cognitive Science at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.  Jürgen directs the Interactive Systems Research Group and will talk about “interactive recommending” i.e. increasing user control and transparency in recommender systems.

Our second speaker will be Stephen Giff who is the Head of User Experience (UX) Research and Design at Microsoft Advertising, Seattle, USA. Stephen will talk about “trust as a design problem”.

You can read the abstracts below for more details:

Interactive Recommending (Prof Jürgen Ziegler, University of Duisburg-Essen), 13.00-14.00

Recommender systems have come to play an important role in helping users search for information items or products of interest in very large information spaces. While algorithmic recommender techniques have reached a high level of maturity in recent years, they often fail to the support the situational needs of the user and typically lack user control and transparency, resulting in reduced effectiveness and trustworthiness. Interactive approaches to recommending aim at overcoming some of these issues, allowing users to express their preferences in a more flexible fashion and to control how recommendations are generated. In this talk, I will discuss the concept of interactive recommending and present some recent developments in our group that combine interactive filtering techniques with recommender algorithms.

Trust as a Design Problem (Stephen Giff, Microsoft), 14.00-15.00

To ensure anything more than superficial engagement with customers, an organization needs to establish and maintain trust. But trust is complex – it’s hard to build, and extremely easy to lose. In terms of trust in a software or online setting, there are three key factors that contribute to a decision to trust an organization, and decide to share data with them: (1) Role of Individual; (2) Role of Context; and Role of Experience. Designing for trust is a fairly straightforward problem if considered from an engineering and legal perspective – we need to protect user data, and notify what data is being gathered, and how it will be used. However, it is much more complex if considered from a human perspective – what data are users comfortable sharing, and in what context? When is the right moment to ask for data? What is the appropriate value exchange? How can we design experiences that are trustworthy? This talk will provide an overview of online trust factors as they relate to opt-in, and will recommend that instead of focusing on  technological and legal aspects of trust, the industry needs to pivot to focus on the user – ultimately viewing trust as a design problem to be addressed by a rigorous design process.

You can contact Dr Huseyin Dogan (hdogan@bournemouth.ac.uk) for more information about these two talks.

News from the Learning Research Group

BU research, Fusion, Publishing, REF Subjects

BU’s new Learning Research Group held its second workshop last week, so here is a quick update on activities so far since the group formed.

                

The group is convened by the Centre for Excellence in Learning and CEMP and meets in the CEL space with two objectives –

1. To bring people together for research into learning, pedagogy and education, related to the broader work of CEL;

2. To develop research strategically for a submission to the Unit of Assessment for Education in REF 2020.

Researchers in the group are working on projects and towards outputs in three related areas – Media and Digital Literacies; Practitioner Enquiry and (Higher) Education Dynamics. Impact case studies are in development in each of these areas and a strategy for capacity building, demonstrating impact and research environment has been produced.

In the first workshop, Professor Alex Kendall from Birmingham City University talked to the group about REF 2014 and gave advice for working across disciplines and faculty structures. In the second workshop, Julian shared sub-panel feedback with a focus on how BU’s research can be distinctive in the changing landscape, Isabella Rega ran a workshop activity to bring us together around research themes, methods and beneficiaries, and the group worked together to refine the plans for the group’s direction of travel, discussing development needs and targets for outputs and impact.  The next time we meet, we will be guided by Professor Becky Francis from KCL.

The learning research group will continue to do two things in tandem – work towards a REF submission and support the research element of CEL’s work. To get involved, contact julian@cemp.ac.uk or just come along to the next workshop (after Easter, date will be circulated on the research blog).

 

 

 

£6m funding – ‘Creating smart products from smart materials’

Funding opportunities, Research news

 

£6m funding opening soon for registration – 16 March 2015

Innovate UK in partnership with Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) will invest up to £6 million in collaborative research and development (R&D) projects. Information on briefing events.

 The aim of  this funding competition is to encourage the development of smart products that use a combination of functional, hybrid and multiple materials. More information & Competition registration page. 

Competition Briefing & Consortia Building Events, 9th March onwards at several locations

The event is an excellent opportunity for you to receive first hand information about the competition – its scope, application process, key dates etc. as well as meet and network with peers, potential partners, market leaders & innovators in the industry. More information & event registration pages. 

For queries about this competition, please contact support@innovateuk.gov.uk. For queries about the events, please contact steve.morris@ktn-uk.org or Andy Sellars – andy.sellars@innovateuk.gov.uk
​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Taylor & Francis one of the most read publications

Publishing, Research news

Corrosion in large vehicles in the museum environment

Corrosion in large vehicles in the museum environment

Sustainable Design Research Centre recent publication “Modelling of metal-coating delamination incorporating variable environmental parameters” by Hammad Nazir (PhD student), Dr Zulfiqar Khan and K Stokes (Defence Science & Technology Laboratory Ministry of Defence industrial partner) has made it to the most read articles list on the Taylor & Francis website.

This research is co-funded by BU and Defence Science & Technology Laboratory Ministry of Defence, with in-kind support from The Tank Museum at Bovington and other industrial partners.

This paper has been available online since December 15th 2014 with 338 downloads/views recorded on Feb 28th 2015.

Keywords

cathodic delamination, coating delamination, degradation, mathematical modelling, diffusion, adhesion

Digital Briefing is out now!

Business Engagement, Funding opportunities, Knowledge Exchange

 

 

 

The February/March edition of the Digital Business Briefing is now live. This is a monthly publication that provides a digest of useful information about funding, financing, support and events to assist digital businesses with their innovation and growth strategies. This includes public funding calls, financing mechanisms, support, reports and events from leading organisations including Innovate UK, IC tomorrow, Nesta and Tech City UK. 

This has been combined  into one briefing document published monthly. A quick and easy way to keep up to speed with what is happening in the digital, creative and design sector.