30 December 2015

New paper by BU PhD student Preeti Mahato

open access, PG research, Publishing, student research, writing Edwin van Teijlingen

Today saw the publication of an academic paper in the World Health Organization’s WHO South-East Asia Journal of Public Health by FHSS’s PhD student Mrs Preeti Mahato. The paper ‘Access to free health-care services for the poor in tertiary hospitals of western Nepal: a descriptive study’ [1] based on work conducted prior to commencing her PhD thesis in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal and Perinal Health (CMMPH). The journal is Open Access and the paper is freely available across the globe, to access online manuscript click here!

Congratulations!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

Reference:

Mahato,P.K, Paudel, G.S. (2015) Access to free health-care services for the poor in tertiary hospitals of western Nepal: a descriptive study. WHO South-East Asia Journal of Public Health 4(2): 167–175.

15 December 2015

Upcoming ‘Ageing Well Photographic Exhibition’ supported by British Society of Gerontology

Awarded & submitted bids, Knowledge Exchange, PG research, Public engagement, student research cfarrance

Public engagement and impact are important to consider if we want our research to make a difference. In response to this, one PhD student from the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences will use photographs to creatively disseminate research findings. The ‘Ageing Well Photographic Exhibition’ will share about the role community based exercise programmes play in adding to the health and wellbeing of older people. It will also be a great opportunity to showcase the positive aspects of active ageing.

To support the event Michele Board and Clare Farrance have been successful in securing a grant from the British Society of Gerontology. The support of the BSG for the event is a valuable endorsement of the important topic of positive ageing and enhancing our understanding of later life.

More details will be posted closer to the time of the event launch. In the meantime if you have any questions feel free to contact Clare at cfarrance@bournemouth.ac.uk

8 December 2015

Researcher Development

student research, Training sastringer

Vitae is an organisation set up to promote career development in both postgraduate researchers and academic staff. Their Researcher Development Framework is intended to help people monitor their skills and plan their personal development. At BU we will be using this framework to format the training on offer for the postgraduate research students and academic staff.

The Vitae website is an excellent resource and the organisation regularly runs free training events for researchers, PGRs and those involved in research development. Upcoming events include Vitae Connections: Supporting Open Researchers.

The Researcher Development Framework (RDF) is the professional development framework to realise the potential of researchers. The RDF is a tool for planning, promoting and supporting the personal, professional and career development of researchers in higher education. It was designed following interviews with many successful researchers across the sector and articulates the knowledge, behaviours and attributes of a successful researcher.

There is a planner available on the Vitae website to help you assess which stage you are at with your skills and a tutorial providing guidance on how to use the framework.

Top 10 tips from researchers on using the Researcher Development Framework (RDF):

1. You might choose to use the RDF for short term as well as long term development. The RDF can be used in planning for your long term career ambitions but also to make a feasible short term plan. It can be useful to imagine your long term ambitions in order to focus your career path however the reality of progressing through to the higher phases may be more difficult to plan. In the short term, making decisions about how to progress to the next phase or what sub-domains are most important for you will be easier. Try to be realistic when setting these short term goals.

2. Use the RDF to highlight your strengths and areas for development and how these might be used to benefit/influence your personal, professional and career development.

3. Use the RDF to highlight your applicable and transferable skills. This is important for career progression within or outside academia.

4. Prioritise those areas which are most relevant. You don’t have to try to develop in all the areas of the RDF at once. There may be some sub-domains/descriptors where there is less relevance in progressing through the phases for you.

5. Draw on experiences outside of work to evidence your capabilities.

6. Progression to the highest phase in a descriptor will not be applicable to everyone but being aware of the possibilities can aid personal and career development.

7. Talk to others to get their views about your strengths and capabilities. Your supervisor, manager, peers, family and friends are a great source of information to find out more about yourself. Talk to them about how they perceive your capabilities. By understanding how others view you, you will be able to make more informed choices about your future.

8. To move from one phase to the next why not explore attending courses. These courses may be run at a local level (within your University) or may only be run nationally or internationally so awareness of opportunities for training is important. Vitae also run a wide range of courses which address many aspects of personal and career development.

9. Some phases may only be reached through experience and practice however good self-awareness and professional development planning will aid the process.

10. Networking is likely to enable you to reach more experienced phases.

7 December 2015

BU student quoted in The New York Times!

international, Knowledge Transfer, PG research, Publishing, student research Edwin van Teijlingen

FHSS PhD student Rachel Arnold has been quoted in of one world’s most famous newspapers The New York Times. Late last week on Dec. 4th The New York Times published an article under the heading ‘Reported Gains in Afghan Maternal Health Are Found to Be Implausible’ [1]. Rachel Arnold was interviewed since her PhD study, based in CMMPH, focuses on maternity care in one of the larger hospitals in the Afghan capital Kabul. Rachel has also published an excellent paper from her research in Afghanistan in the scientific journal BJOG [2]. Her paper analyses the culture of a Kabul maternity hospital to understand its impact on the care of perinatal women and their babies. The paper is published in Gold Open Access, hence freely available to audiences across the globe,

Congratulations.

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health

References:

Nordland. R. ‘Reported Gains in Afghan Maternal Health Are Found to Be Implausible’ The New York Times Dec 4th, 2015, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/05/world/asia/afghanistan-maternal-mortality-rate.html
Arnold R, van Teijlingen E, Ryan K, Holloway I. Understanding Afghan health care providers; a qualitative study of the culture of care in a Kabul maternity hospital. BJOG 2015: 122(2): 260–267.

25 November 2015

Ethnographies of West Howe: student research projects and community collaboration

Fusion, Knowledge Exchange, Knowledge Transfer, Public engagement, student research Rosie Read

BASA students at West Howe’s Henry Brown Centre.

Over the past few weeks, students on BA Sociology and Anthropology (Faculty of Health and Social Sciences at BU) have been carrying out ethnographic studies in West Howe, Bournemouth. As part of a focus on expanding undergraduate opportunities to conduct first hand research, students have designed their research projects collaboratively with local groups and organisations based in West Howe.

A short drive from Talbot campus, West Howe comprises a large post-war council estate, and faces a number of contemporary challenges in terms of employment, education, health and well being. It is also a green, spacious and welcoming community, with many active local initiatives aiming to improve quality of life for people in the area. Some aspects of its pre-World War Two history as a rural farming community remain present in its contemporary physical environment, combining with the modernist 1950s vision of suburban public space expressed in the architecture and street design. Local people’s experiences of the transition of the area from a largely rural hamlet to a modern housing estate, involving rapid population increase and large scale construction, was captured beautifully in two oral history books published in the 1980s – West Howe Proper and West Howe Too!

From an early point in their research projects, BU students invested time in building relationships with people in West Howe, working collaboratively with local schools, churches, children’s centres and volunteer groups to identify their key research questions, think through issues of research ethics, and use appropriate methods to gather relevant data, including participant observation, interviews, surveys and focus groups. Many student projects were inspired by the activities of local organisations, residents and volunteers, and the possibilities of engaged ethnography to produce findings that are locally useful and make a difference to people’s lives.

Next Thursday 3rd December students will be presenting their research findings to the community and inviting their engagement, comment and discussion. Themes of the research projects include: primary school education, children’s play and recreation, access to employment, perceptions of addiction, wellbeing and social support, social mobility and transport. Interested BU colleagues are also welcome to attend – please email Dr Rosie Read know if you plan to come (email: rread@bournemouth.ac.uk).

Event details:

Thursday 3rd December, 10am-1pm. Fernhealth Play, Verney Road, Bournemouth BH11 8DA.

24 November 2015

‘Vulnerable Warriors: Counter-terrorism and the rise of Militarised Policing’ seminar by Dr Anna Feigenbaum and Daniel Weissman,

conferences, Fusion, Knowledge Exchange, student research, Women's Academic Network Mastoureh Fathi

Dr Anna Feigenbaum

Daniel Weissman

2^nd December 2015, Royal London House, R303, 1-1:50 pm

All staff and students welcome to the last Social Science seminar in 2015.

Abstract:

This paper seeks to better understand the cultural and material processes of police militarization and its relationship to security infrastructures and geo-political practices of social control. In this paper we trace the rise the ‘Warrior Cop’ through an analysis of changes in the circulation of advertisements of policing and policing products at security expose between the late 1990s and the present, taking our analysis up through the recent Paris attacks and the Milipol Security expo held days after.

This analysis is framed against the backdrop of existing research on the shift in the post-Cold War period from a security focus on the threat of the nation-state to the threat of insurgency and non-state actors. This period was characterized by national and transnational changes to policing: intelligence gathering and information sharing, as well as equipment supply and transfer and knowledge exchange around training and operations.

We begin this paper with an overview of the key shifts in the military and policing sectors that gave rise to the phenomenon of ‘Warrior Cops’. In contrast to dominant narratives of police militarisation that see power and tactics shift directly from the military to the police, we outline what we refer to as the militarization of security, a process through which not only the police, but also judicial and emergency response services, infrastructures, feelings and attitudes become transformed in ways that position the need for warriors against the threat of risky spaces and vulnerable bodies.

For any enquiries regarding the Social Science seminar series please contact Dr Mastoureh Fathi: mfathi@bournemouth.ac.uk

24 November 2015

Institute of Global Health Innovation – Student Challenges Competition 2015

Funding opportunities, innovation, Knowledge Exchange, student research jcodling

The vision at Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI) is to support the identification, development and widespread diffusion of healthcare innovation and in doing so to sustainably reduce global health inequalities across the globe.

The Student Challenges Competition offers students a key opportunity to showcase their research idea and to win prize money of up to £5,000 to develop this further. Runners-up prizes will also be awarded.

This year, it is also compulsory for all applications to be accompanied by a 2-3 minute promotional video illustrating the project idea and how it works.

As part of the Audience Choice Award, £500 is up for grabs to shortlisted candidates for those who produce the best video. The winners will be announced at the Dragon’s Den event with the rest of the prizes.

The competition is open to all UG & PG students based in the UK and can be on any aspect of global health innovation.

For more information click here.

19 November 2015

Research from the Department of Psychology in the New Scientist

HEIF, Knowledge Exchange, open access, student research Sarah Bate

Research resulting from a BU-funded PhD studentship is featured in this week’s edition of the New Scientist, and was also recently covered by the Independent. Under the supervision of Dr Sarah Bate from the Department of Psychology (Faculty of Science and Technology), Anna Bobak has spent the last three years investigating so-called “super recognisers”, or people with extraordinary face recognition skills. It appears that only a small proportion of the general population have these skills, yet they may be incredibly useful in forensic and security tasks, such as the identification of perpetrators from CCTV footage or in passport control. While super-recognisers have previously been identified via laboratory tests of face recognition, Anna’s work demonstrates that only some of these individuals also excel at more applied face recognition tasks. In a recent paper published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, she demonstrates that more real-world tasks are required to identify the super recognisers who can truly be of value to the Police Force and in national security settings.

Anna has recently moved into a PDRA position where she continues to work with Sarah in the field of super recognition. Her post is part of a HEIF5+1 initiative that aims to generate knowledge exchange with the Police. The team are currently working directly with Dorset Police to create screening tools that can identify officers who may be particularly suited to certain face recognition tasks, and to make a series of recommendations for best practice that are extracted from excellent performance. They are also creating resources that educate officers about the limitations and biases that act upon the human face recognition system, and how these may influence core policing activities.

14 November 2015

Successful ESRC Festival of Social Sciences in EBC today

Knowledge Exchange, Knowledge Transfer, PG research, student research, Women's Academic Network Edwin van Teijlingen

This afternoon Prof. Jonathan Parker introduced the final of three session in the Executive Business Centre under the title ‘Enhancing social life through global social research: Part 3. Social science research in diverse communities’. This session was well attended and coveredwas a wide-range of interesting social science research topics.

Professor of Sociology Ann Brooks started off the session with her presentation on ‘Emotional labour and social change.’ She was followed by Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen who gave an overview of research in Nepal. FHSS PhD student Andy Harding introduced his thesis research into ‘Information provision and housing choices for older people.’ At this point Prof. Brooks gave her second talk on ‘Risk and the crisis of authenticity in cities’. Social Anthropologist Dr. Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers spoke about her research on ‘Reconciliation and engaged ethnography in the Balkans.’ Dr. Hyun-Joo Lim highlighted her study on ‘North Korean defectors in the UK’ and the session was completed by Dr. Mastoureh Fathi who presented her analysis of parenting books for Muslim parents in the UK.

This was the last day of the ESRC Festival of Social Science at which Bournemouth University was extremely well presented!

Thank you to my colleagues for organising this and the ESRC for funding the events!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

(medical sociologist)

13 November 2015

BioStars – Business Plan Competition

Funding opportunities, innovation, student research jcodling

BioStars, a biotech business plan competition aimed at enabling the bio-entrepreneurs of tomorrow to turn their scientific ideas into commercial products!

BioStars is open to postgraduates, MBA, professionals, with a scientific background and an eye for business, who can participate as individuals or in teams. Participants can apply with already a project in mind (Open stream section) or can collaborate with our partners on outlined high impact projects (Structured stream section). After the Kick-off meeting on the 14th of November, there will be two workshops with senior mentors (among our partners: Astra Zeneca, OBN, Stevenage BioScience Catalyst, Imperial Innovations, ISIS Innovation, CrowdCube, to mention some).

The final prize for the winners are 30,000£+ funding, facilitated lab & office spaces, 4D mentoring, waiving CrowdCube legal and administrative fees, as well as free admission to the BioTrinity 2016 conference.

More details about the programme can be found at: http://www.oxfordbiotech.org/biostars-about/

Key dates:
14th November 2015 – Kick-start workshop (Said Business School, Oxford-Eventbrite tickets)
29th November 2015 – Application deadline
7th December 2015 – Notification of Finalists
12th December 2015 – Mentoring Workshop I
16th January 2016 – Mentoring Workshop II
19th March 2016: Grand Finale

The applications are open until the 29th of November!

For any question don’t hesitate to get in touch with Vinton Cheng (OB Biostars Project Manager) -vinton.cheng@oxfordbiotech.org!

8 November 2015

BRAD: Robust adaptive predictive modelling and data deluge workshop

student research, Training apekalski

To book your place on this workshop- CLICK HERE

We are currently experiencing an incredible, explosive growth in digital content and information. According to IDC [11], there currently exists over 2.7 zetabytes of data. It is estimated that the digital universe in 2020 will be 50 times as big as in 2010 and that from now until 2020 it will double every two years. Research in traditionally qualitative disciplines is fundamentally changing due to the availability of such vast amounts of data. In fact, data-intensive computing has been named as the fourth paradigm of scientific discovery [10] and is expected to be key in unifying the theoretical, experimental and simulation based approaches to science. The commercial world has also been transformed by a focus on BIG DATA with companies competing on analytics [12]. Data has become a commodity and in recent years has been referred to as the ‘new oil’.

There has been a lot of work done on the subject of intelligent data analysis, data mining and predictive modelling over the last 50 years with notable improvements which have been possible with both the advancements of the computing equipment as well as with the improvement of the algorithms [1]. However, even in the case of the static, non-changing over time data there are still many hard challenges to be solved which are related to the massive amounts, high dimensionality, sparseness or inhomogeneous nature of the data to name just a few.

What is also very challenging in today’s applications is the non-stationarity of the data which often change very quickly posing a set of new problems related to the need for robust adaptation and learning over time. In scenarios like these, many of the existing, often very powerful, methods are completely inadequate as they are simply not adaptive and require a lot of maintenance attention from highly skilled experts, in turn reducing their areas of applicability.

In order to address these challenging issues and following various inspirations coming from biology coupled with current engineering practices, we propose a major departure from the standard ways of building adaptive, intelligent predictive systems and moving somewhat away from the engineering maxim of “simple is beautiful” to biological statement of “complexity is not a problem” by utilising the biological metaphors of redundant but complementary pathways, interconnected cyclic processes, models that can be created as well as destroyed in easy way, batteries of sensors in form of pools of complementary approaches, hierarchical organisation of constantly optimised and adaptable components.

In order to achieve such high level of adaptability we have proposed a novel flexible architecture [5-6] which encapsulates many of the principles and strategies observed in adaptable biological systems. The main idea of the proposed architecture revolves around a certain degree of redundancy present at each level of processing represented by the pools of methods, multiple competitive paths (individual predictors), their flexible combinations and meta learning managing general population and ensuring both efficiency and accuracy of delivered solution while maintaining diversity for improved robustness of the overall system.

The results of extensive testing for many different benchmark problems and various snapshots of interesting results covering the last decade of our research will be shown throughout the presentation and a number of challenging real world problems including pollution/toxicity prediction studies [8-9], building adaptable soft sensors in process industry in collaboration with Evonik Industries [6-7] or forecasting demand for airline tickets covering the results of one of our collaborative research projects with Lufthansa Systems [3-4] will be discussed.

Given our experiences in many different areas we see that truly multidisciplinary teams and a new set of robust, adaptive tools are needed to tackle complex problems with intelligent data analysis, predictive modelling and visualisation already indispensible. It is also clear that complex adaptive systems and complexity science supported and driven by huge amounts of multimodal, multisource data will become a major endeavour in the 21^st century.

We will hold discussions surrounding:

Rapidly expanding digital universe
New decade of advanced/predictive analytics
General Fuzzy Min-Max (GFMM) Neural Networks as an example of early realisation of flexible predictive system
To combine or not to combine? – Multiple classification and prediction systems
Water quality monitoring based on biomarker data – can it be done?
Revenue management for airlines – can we forecast anything?
Adaptive soft sensors for process industry – here’s a real problem!
Self-adapting architecture for predictive modelling
Complex adaptive systems and complex networks

Professor. Bogdan Gabrys

To book your place on this workshop- CLICK HERE

8 November 2015

Researcher Development Framework

Guidance, student research, Training sastringer