November 19, 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.

November 14, 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)

November 13, 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!

November 8, 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

November 8, 2015

Researcher Development Framework

Guidance, 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.

November 5, 2015

International Longevity Centre host blog by HSS PhD student Andy Harding

PG research, student research aharding

The following was hosted by the International Longevity Centre:

The Future of Welfare Consumerism: Future challenges and opportunities of welfare consumerism in health and social care

The rationale for the creation of the welfare state in the post war period was, in large part, because a market approach to welfare had failed. So how can the market and consumerism now be the solution? Despite this philosophical question, for more than two decades welfare consumerism and markets has been and continues to be at the heart of UK health and social care policy. This presents many challenges and opportunities for practitioners, policymakers and researchers alike – particularly concerning older people. Older people are the largest ‘customer’ of welfare services, thus any welfare policy has major ramifications for us all in later life. But what are the important issues? The important issues are basic, but at the same time complex. There is not one welfare market, and with older people not a homogenous group, there are different types and cohorts of consumers.

The basic issue is simple. It is perhaps not comfortable to label welfare as a commodity. A commodity implies a good or service that we purchase to suit a desire. Yet, rarely does welfare satisfy a desire. On the other hand, we access welfare provision because we have a need. Indeed, it is a commodity and market unlike mainstream markets. Whereas mainstream consumers can use their ‘invisible hand’ to navigate markets and access the type or brand of tea, coffee, tablet or laptop that they like, the need to access welfare is characterised by significant information asymmetries, and often complex, vulnerable and emotional circumstances.

Considering these relative complexities, we know remarkably little about how older people act in welfare markets. Although the welfare consumer might have little in common with the mainstream consumer, nevertheless consumer theory provides a platform to outline the more complex challenges for future research and policy.

Implicit in using markets as a means to allocate resources is that consumers are informed and make good quality choices. This in turn requires us to focus on how older welfare consumers become informed – are they adequately informed? Do they seek impartial and independent information and advice (I&A)? How do they act on and use I&A? How can we ensure that I&A services are funded properly and have adequate coverage? These are just some of the broader future challenges and questions that must be addressed.

These are challenges for both health and social care, where the consumerist landscape created by individual budgets and direct payments, first trail blazed in social care (and mostly lobbied for by younger groups), is now being introduced for increasing numbers of older people with chronic and longer term health conditions. Choices of provider and care package/pathway are now and will increasingly be the norm in health and social care.

In addition, my own on-going doctoral study with FirstStop, a third sector provider of information and advice on housing and care issues in later life, acts to highlight another under looked area – housing. Housing may have a longer association with markets and consumerism, yet it is nevertheless a central pillar of welfare. And for good reason – the appropriateness of housing (e.g. preventing falls and fractures in the home as the stereotypical and archetypal example) in later life can be a key determinant of health and wellbeing. In other words, appropriate housing can reduce the likelihood that an older person needs to access health services and social care.

This final point should also chime with the fiscally minded – informed older welfare consumers, through accessing good quality I&A equates to older people making more informed choices about welfare and enables independence. By implication, this means less dependency on welfare – something which, as consumers who will all grow old one day, should be desirable to us all.

November 3, 2015

NVivo Introduction

student research, Training apekalski

NVivo Indtroduction offers focuses on the requisite management decisions one should make at the beginning of one’s project such as what is my data?

Should I code audio or transcripts and what are the advantages and limitations of either approach? How does the software work?

Why should I integrate my background information or demographics and what is auto-coding and how might it help to better understand my data and prepare it for the cycles of manual interpretive coding to follow?

How do I integrate my chosen methodological approach in using NVivo and reconcile it with the philosophical underpinnings to apply such methods as Grounded Theory, Discourse Analysis, Content Analysis, Thematic Analysis or Narrative Interpretive Methods as just some examples.

Day 1 has an emphasis on the conceptual although the afternoon session is more rooted in the practical. By the end of day 1, participants should be able to set-up an NVivo database, back it up, import their data, setup a coding structure and code their data to it and set up and integrate their demographics.

We have hired the services of an external facilitator to offer support in this for academic staff as part of the BRAD programme. Ben Meehan worked in industry for twenty six years. For the past thirteen years he has worked as an independent consultant in support of computer aided qualitative data analysis projects (CAQDAS). He is a QSR approved trainer and consultant. He has worked in all of the major universities and Institutes of Technology in Ireland and Northern Ireland. His work outside of the educational sector includes major global companies such as Intel where he consults in support of their on-going ethnographic research and the Centre for Global Health where he has recently worked in Tanzania, Malawi and Mozambique (2009) and in Ghana, Burkina Faso and Tanzania with the University of Heidelberg (2010) and Ethiopia for the Ethiopian Public Health Association (2011) and the Population Council, Zambia (2012). Apart from Africa, Ben regularly conducts workshops in Germany, France, UK, Northern Ireland, the US (Maryland, 2011, Yale, 2012) and Australia.

The session is on Wed 18^th Novemeber 2015 09:00 – 16:00 on Talbot campus. There are limited spaces so please do ensure you get one by booking on the Organisational and Staff Development webpages.

October 26, 2015

BU Represented at the 8th European Public Health Conference

international, student research cfarrance

BU had two representatives from FHSS attending with over 1000 delegates at the European Public Health Conference in Milan last week. Ben Hayes, winner of the best oral presentation at SURE (Showcasing Undergraduate Research Excellence) BU Conference 2015 presented the results of his undergraduate dissertation entitled ‘Investigating the effect of lifestyle interventions to reduce risk factors for Metabolic Syndrome’. Clare Farrance shared the preliminary results of her PhD study around the area of older people’s adherence to exercise.

It was a great opportunity to learn from experienced researchers and hear about the current topics most relevant in the world of Public Health. Many thanks to Bournemouth University for their funding assistance which allowed us to attend.

If you’d like to hear more about our research please feel free to get in touch with Ben at: benhayes01@gmail.com or Clare at: cfarrance@yahoo.co.uk

October 23, 2015

Undergraduate Research Assistantship Programme – staff application deadline this Sunday.

Funding opportunities, student research Rachel

The current round of applications for the Undergraduate Research Assistantship (URA) programme is closing on Sunday 25th October.

To apply for funding to recruit a URA, please email your application to urap@bournemouth.ac.uk

If you have any questions about the scheme, please contact Rachel Clarke, KE Adviser (KTP) on 01202 961347 or email clarker@bournemouth.ac.uk

October 18, 2015

Knowledge Exchange and Impact Team: how have we been flying the KEIT for you this month?

Festival of Learning, Knowledge Exchange, Public engagement, student research Rachel Bowen

Student engagement with research

Student engagement with research is well underway now that students are back at BU. Our Student Engagement Coordinator ran our research photo competition exhibition at Fresher’s Fair and was on hand to talk to students about our activities and events over the coming year.

Our new research spotlight film has just been released, featuring the work of Dr Anna Feigenbaum and our photo of the week series continues – take a look and learn about our inspiring research!

This week will see our first 14:Live of the semester where Dr Edward Apeh will be discussing the cyber-landscape: you, your data and the dark web. The line between our physical existence and the cyber-landscape is becoming increasingly blurred and the majority of our transactions are now being carried out online. Our personal data underpins these transactions and help to sustain the idea of a ‘free’ internet. But are we paying for ‘free’ apps and information with our valuable personal data?

Come along to find out more! Free pizza will be available to the first 30 attendees.

Student Project Bank

Our student engagement doesn’t stop there. A proposal for a new Science Shop initiative – the Student Project Bank – is underway. Science Shops carry out research for free, usually for local businesses or not-for-profit organisations, with the aim of sharing knowledge and expertise. They are often based in universities, where research is undertaken by students under the supervision of academic staff which has the added benefit of providing students with real-life work experience and skills to underpin their future careers.

For more information, contact Rachel Clarke, Knowledge Exchange Advisor.

Undergraduate Research Assistantships

Over the last academic year, BU ran its first Undergraduate Research Assistantship scheme, where undergraduate students undertook paid, short-term placements to support academic staff in their research. Feedback has demonstrated the value of the scheme to both staff and students.

The scheme is currently open to applications from academics. Once the projects have been confirmed, students will be able to apply for placements.

For more information, see this blog post.

Research communication

Our new Orthopaedic Research Institute (ORI) was officially launched last week. ORI will be working with academics across the university, partners in industry and clinicians in hospitals to develop research that will enhance patient treatment and outcome.

ORI is being led by Professor Rob Middleton and Associate Professor Tom Wainwright, who are already established researchers in their field and have worked for many years in clinical practice. ORI is being funded by the Dorset Local Enterprise Partnership, which will enable ORI to purchase state-of-the-art gait analysis equipment and establish new research labs at BU.

For more information about ORI, visit their website.

Public engagement

The Festival of Learning dates for 2016 are now confirmed as 25^th – 29^th June and we will soon be putting out a call for event proposals. This year saw over 5,500 visits to the Festival, so it’s a great way to share your research and ideas with our local community.

This month’s Café Scientifique saw Tom Cousins talking about the hidden maritime archaeology of Poole Harbour. The next Café Scientifique will take place on Tuesday 3 November, where audience members will have the chance to debate ‘fear in childbirth: is the media responsible?’

Business engagement

Business engagement continues to gather pace, with meetings being held with a number of businesses, who are keen to further develop their links with BU. Members of KEIT also attended the recent Association for University Research and Industry Links (AURIL) conference in London. This was a great opportunity to learn about the latest developments in knowledge exchange and meet with colleagues in industry and the higher education sector.

Business services and marketing materials

New marketing materials for business engagement are being developed, based on some of the images submitted as part of the research photo competition from earlier this year. They are a great way to showcase our research and encourage businesses to tell us their story. Exhibition banners, presentation folders and flyers are being produced and are suitable for any business audience.

Please contact Jayne Codling, Knowledge Exchange Advisor if you’d like to borrow or use any of them.

If you’re feeling inspired by our blog post and would like to get involved with some of our projects then feel free to get in touch:

Genna West – Knowledge Exchange and Impact Manager

Rachel Bowen – Research Communications Manager

Rachel Clarke – Knowledge Exchange Adviser (KTP)

Jayne Codling – Knowledge Exchange Adviser

Naomi Kay – Public Engagement Officer

Katie Breadmore – Public Engagement Event’s Organiser

Oliver Cooke – Student Engagement Coordinator

To find out more about us and what we do, take a look at our team page.

October 15, 2015

Undergraduate Research Assistantship programme – staff application deadline extended

student research Rachel

Staff are invited to submit applications for an undergraduate research assistant (URA).

The Undergraduate Research Assistantship programme aims to support at least 50 undergraduate students to work under the guidance of an experienced academic in a research position that is directly related to their career path and/or academic discipline.

The staff application deadline has been extended to Sunday 25th October.

To apply for a URA, please complete the following URA Application and send to urap@bournemouth.ac.uk by midnight on Sunday 25th October. The following selection criteria will help your application.

If you have any questions, please contact Rachel Clarke, KE Adviser (KTP) on 01202 961347 or email clarker@bournemouth.ac.uk

October 12, 2015

Undergraduate Research Assistantships – academic applications deadline extension – 25th October 2015

Funding opportunities, student research Rachel

The Undergraduate Research Assistant (URA) programme academic applications are live.

If you need any assistance with your research projects, a URA could help your project greatly. If your application is approved, you will recruit a student work with you on your research project for either 75 or 100 hours between 18th January 2016 and 21st March 2016. Alternatively, there is an option to apply for the summer programme now. The summer programme features support from a URA, full time for 6 weeks over the summer.

Academics who took part in the programme last year had experienced a variety of achievements, some highlights include:

“The process will likely inform a case study for my Teach@BU portfolio as well as future bids and I hope to continue working [with the URA] together by co-creating outputs”
“Based on their [URA] more than satisfactory performance and competence, my co-investigator and I have invited her [URA] to continue working on the study to write up (co-author two academic articles) and disseminate the findings”
“We have been invited to present the findings at the FoM research seminar, an ESRC seminar in September and we are also looking to publish this work and apply for follow-on funding”
“[URA] has contributed immensely to the advancement of both project”

Please submit your completed URA Application to urap@bournemouth.ac.uk by midnight on Sunday 25th October 2015.

If you have any queries, please contact Rachel Clarke, KE Adviser (KTP) on 01202 961347 or email clarker@bournemouth.ac.uk

October 8, 2015

Vitae and the Researcher Development Framework

Guidance, PG research, 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.