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Dr. Anna Feigenbaum Wins AAG Enrichment Grant

Awarded & submitted bids

The Association of American Geographers (AAG) has awarded an annual meeting grant to Dr. Anna Feigenbaum, lecturer in Media and Politics at the Media School. AAG Enrichment Funds “support participation of distinguished non-geographers in the annual meeting,” helping to promote cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange between geography and other fields of study. Dr. Feigenbaum will travel to Tampa, Florida in April 2014 to deliver a presentation on her Tear Gas project in preparation for her monograph on the subject due out with Verso in 2015. She will also participate in the ‘subconference’–a set of meetings within the meeting focused on collaboration and skill-sharing. As part of the ‘Professional and intellectual triage for emerging and early career scholars’ panel, Dr. Feigenbaum will offer guidance on moving through the first years of academia in these times of precarity and change in the HE sector.

Password? Not another one!

Publishing

The increasing volume of academic activity on the internet coupled with a growing obsession about privacy and data protection means for many academics a rapidly expanding number of online accounts and associated passwords. This is, of course, over and above our regular dose of accounts and passwords as citizens of the virtual world. The average adult in the UK must have at least 25 internet accounts, for the bank/building society, supermarkets, phone companies, social media, airlines, trains, insurance companies, eBay, the website of the parents’ council of your children’s school, your electricity provider, the council tax, etc.

I feel as an academic, the burden is even worse. Every single time another scientific journal invites me to review a paper it opens an on-line account for me. Every time I apply for a grant from a funding body to which I have not previously applied, I am required to set up an account with a new password. When you apply for 20-odd grants every year and review manuscripts for a similar number of different journals the number of accounts and passwords add up rapidly. Then there are the other accounts and passwords related to work for sites such as this BU Research Blog, BRIAN, Survey Monkey, for the university for whom you act as external examiner, for Drop Box, the British Library, ORCIC, ACADEMIA.EDU, ResearchGate, Researchfish, Linkedin, and the list goes on.

These last few months I was reminded how non user friendly some systems are. First, I received new secure email account for my part on a REF sub-panel. The account name chosen for me is different from what I would have chosen and what I am used to at Bournemouth University. The importance of confidentiality for the REF work is clear so my password has to be different from anything I use elsewhere. Secondly, a few weeks later I attempted to put my name done for the tri-annual conference of the International Congress of Midwifery in Prague next year. It turns out you cannot join the conference without opening an on-line account first. The account name was automatically chosen for me and so was the password. Unfortunately, both are impossible to remember, neither the account name nor the password (which was case sensitive) were ones I would have selected personally.

There is some hope as some journals allow you to choose your own account name and password. Elsevier has brought most of its journals into one account, with your own email as the account name and all with the same password. Similarly a group of English-language journals in Nepal called Nepal Journals OnLine (NepJOL) use one account name for all participating journals. For the rest of my account names and passwords I can only follow the advice given by Stephen Fry on an episode of QI: “Write it down somewhere on a piece of paper”. The underlying idea is that the people who try to steal your internet account details sit in a bedsit in London or Hong Kong and won’t come to your office or living room to steal a piece of paper with computer addresses. The people who try to break into your house or office are looking for objects with a street value, such as your TV, phone or laptop, they are generally not interested in a piece of paper with some scribbles on it.

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health

Information Days for Horizon 2020 calls!

An information day organised by Defra, BBSRC, NERC and FSA is open for registration – places are allocated on a first come, first served basis.

The day is aimed at academic and business organisations interested in exploring funding opportunities in two key areas of the new European Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme – climate change and society & culture.

The event will feature presentations from the European Commission’s DG Research and Innovation on funding opportunities in the 2014 work programmes for the Societal Challenges; information on the opportunities available in other Horizon 2020 and European Research Area activities, including under the ‘Excellent Science’ and ‘Industrial Leadership’ Pillars; and a presentation by the Technology Strategy Board on European funding sources for business organisations (SME Instrument) and business-academia collaboration opportunities under Horizon 2020.

UK National Contact Points will be available on the day to provide advice and support for business and academic organisations on participation in Horizon 2020.  This event is also an excellent opportunity to network with others interested in EU collaborative projects.

The application form is here: Info Day registration. The deadline for registration is January 14, but as the places are allocated on a first come first served basis, I would submit asap!

Have your say in shaping BU’s RKE strategy

As part of the delivery planning process in 2013, a draft institutional development plan for research and knowledge exchange (RKE) at BU was produced. The aim of the document was to set out a long-term plan for developing and supporting RKE activity to meet the objectives of the BU2018 strategy. The aim is to instigate the plan from early 2014.

The plan has been drafted and has been road tested with UET, URKEC and around 20 academics to date. We are now seeking views from the academic community on the plan as a whole and on specific elements of the plan. Your feedback, comments and ideas will feed into the final version which will be the blueprint for how RKE activity is supported and developed in the long-term.

Feedback and discussion will be facilitated online. Upon accessing the site you will be able to read the plan in its entirety and see the key elements on which we are seeking views and suggestions.

Click on one of the topics and you will be presented with a brief summary of what is being proposed as part of the institutional development plan. Beneath this text you will see the previous comments that have been left by colleagues. You are strongly encouraged to add a reply stating your own views and suggestions. This is especially important and will ensure that the academic community has shaped the support and development mechanism put in place. If you wish to feedback confidentially then please send your comments to Julie Northam.

The aim of this website is to provide a forum to facilitate the discussion of the plan as a whole and the identified key elements. Providing feedback works in the same way as adding a comment to the Research Blog, i.e. you can add a comment and this will be visible to all other viewers. The site is password protected and the password is only available to BU staff from the Staff Intranet.

This feedback exercise will run from 28 November until 10 January. A final version of the plan will be circulated to all staff in early 2014.

The site is password protected to ensure only BU staff are able to contribute.  To access the password please see the story on the Staff Intranet: https://staffintranet.bournemouth.ac.uk/news/news/thismonth/rkefeedbackneeded.php

EC promotes Open Access as part of €15 billion Horizon 2020 fund

This week the European Commission outlined its support for Open Access (OA) as part of its Horizon 2020 fund launch.  Worth more than €15 billion over the first two years, the funding is intended to help boost Europe’s knowledge-driven economy, and tackle issues that will make a difference in people’s lives.

The Horizon 2020 model agreement (p.58, Section 29.2) requires researchers to ensure open access (free of charge, online access for any user) to all peer-reviewed scientific publications.  Researchers must either:-

  1. deposit an electronic copy of the published version or final peer-reviewed manuscript in a repository e.g. BURO (Green OA)
  2. ensure open access — via the repository — to the bibliographic metadata that identifies the deposited publication on a publisher website (Gold OA)

There is also a useful Open Access Factsheet which summarises expectations for Green and Gold Open Access and suggests that there will be some kind of mechanism for paying some of the Article Processing Costs (APCs) incurred after the end of a grant.

Jib Acharya awarded funded place on Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) workshop in Morocco

PG research, Training


Congratulations to Health & Social Care PhD student Mr. Jib Acharya who has been offered a funded place at the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) workshop. The SUN workshop will be held in Morocco in early February 2014. The British Council and CNRST have launched a new five-year programme to encourage international research collaboration between ambitious young researchers from the UK and eighteen countries around the world. The forthcoming SUN workshop is a part of this programme. One leading team of researchers from the University of Southampton and from Morocco proposed this bilateral workshop to be held in Morocco to bring together early career researchers to discuss their research and start to build international relationships.

The selection committee wrote to Mr. Acharya: “the selection was challenging. The selection panel (UK and Moroccan coordinators and mentors), has chosen 16 applications that would contribute to and benefit from the workshop most”. The British Council and CNRST will cover the costs related to the participation to the workshop, including: travel (both international and local), visa, accommodation and meals.
Jib is delighted with his award. He commented: “It will give me a chance to build up networks with participants at this workshop. It will help to establish personal and institutional relationships.”

Jib’s PhD thesis is based on A comparative Study on Nutritional Problems in Preschool Aged Children of Kaski District of Nepal. His research applies a mixed-methods approach and he is supervised by a team of three BU supervisors: Dr. Jane Murphy, Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen, and Dr. Martin Hind.

It’s deadline day for Fusion Investment Fund applications

Funding opportunities, Fusion

If you would like to apply to any strands of the FIF please make sure you submit your application by the deadline which is 2pm today! No exceptions will be made to this deadline.

For all the updated strand policy documents, Fund FAQ’s and information about applying, please visit the FIF intranet pages.

 The Fusion Investment Fund is managed by Samantha Leahy-Harland. Please direct all initial enquiries to the Interim Fusion Administrator, Dianne Goodman, at Fusion Fund.

Congratulations and Good Luck

November saw a steady level of activity for bids being submitted and a number of awards were won with congratulations due to Schools for winning research grants, consultancy contracts and organising Short Courses. 

The most notable success for this month was in the Media School and congratulations go to Jian Jun Zhang and the Centre for Digital Entertainment (a joint Centre for Doctoral Training run in collaboration with the University of Bath), which has received 8.5 years additional funding for 50 new doctoral students from the EPSRC.

For ApSci, congratulations are due to Richard Stillman for his contract with Natural England, to Adrian Pinder for his consultancy with Beacon Hill Touring Park, to Anita Diaz for her contract with the Higher Education Academy, and to Jonathan Monteith for his consultancies with SolarTech Ltd and Mark Sanderson.  Good luck to Richard Stillman for his consultancy to HR Wallingford, to Emma Jenkins for her short course on ‘Outreach Archaeology’, and to Jonathan Monteith for his consultancy to T Ingram Building Contractors Ltd.

For the Business School, congratulations are due to Grants Academy member Dinusha Mendis and Davide Secchi for their contract with the Intellectual Property Office, and to Chris Chapleo for his consultancies with DevelopMyPlan Ltd and Nigel Reed Smith Ltd.  Good luck to George Filis for his ESRC application on ‘Modelling the efficient allocation of marketing and trade expenditure in the UK firms’, and to Lukman Aroean for his application to the British Council.

For DEC, congratulations to Grants Academy member Christopher Richardson and Hongnian Yu for their KTP with TDSi.  Good luck to Lai Xu, Paul de Vrieze and Keith Phalp for their application to the European Commission – ‘FITMAN – Business Process Servers in the Virtual Factory’.

For HSC, congratulations are due to Caroline Ellis-Hill for her research with The Stroke Association, to Ahmed Khattab for his award with Weill Medical College of Cornell University – Qatar, to Anthea Innes for her consultancy with Shelbourne Senior Living Ltd, and to Vanora Hundley, Zoe Sheppard and Edwin van Teijlingen for their conference on Midwifery and the post MDG agenda.  Congratulations are due for a number of short courses to Keith Brown with Cheshire West and Chester Council, to Luisa Cescutti-Butler with Great Western Hospital NHS Trust and with Eastbourne District General Hospital, to Grants Academy member Michele Board with Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust, to Clive Andrewes and Sarah Gallimore with the University of Iceland, and to Vanora Hundley, Grants Academy member Marilyn Cash and Edwin van Teijlingen for their Masterclass in Systematic Reviews.  Good luck to Lee-Ann Fenge for her application to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and to Anthea Innes and Clare Cutler for their application also to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, to Jaqui Hewitt-Taylor for her KTP to Five Rivers Child Care Trust, and to Maggie Hutchings for her contract to the Department of Health.

As mentioned above, congratulations to the Media School for Jian Jun Zhang’s continued funding for the Centre for Digital Entertainment from the EPSRC.  Congratulation are also due to Tom Watson for his contract with the British Council, to Melanie Gray for her consultancy with Captec Ltd, to Liam Toms for his consultancy with WISH (Women in Social Housing), to Stephanie Farmer for her consultancy with THAT Bournemouth Company Ltd, and to Anthony Minto for his consultancy with the iHeed Institute.  Good luck to Stephanie Farmer for her consultancy with 4com, to Anna Feigenbaum for her application to the Wellcome Trust, to Jian Chang and Jian Jun Zhang for their European Commission application on ‘Animated platform for closed-loop virtual experiments of neurobots’, to Liam Toms for his consultancy to Craft Realities Ltd and for his joint consultancy, together with Mike Molesworth, to Cammegh Davies Flemming.

For School of Tourism, congratulations to Richard Gordon for his consultancy with the British High Commission, to Ehren Milner for his contract with Dorset Clinical Commissioning Group (NHS) and his consultancy with Bath Museum Partnership, and to Heather Hartwell, Katherine Appleton (DEC), Ann Hemingway (HSC) and Ann Bevan (HSC) for their European Commission project ‘VeggieEAT’.  Good luck to Janet Dickinson for her application to the AHRC and her contract to Dorset County Council, and to Richard Gordon for his consultancy to the Royal Office of Oman.

Best wishes

Matthew

Erasmus Mundus call released

Erasmus+ is the EU’s largest programme of support for education and training worth a mega €14.7bn. Projects usually run 2-3 years and they all have the aim of  improving the level of key competencies and skills, improving the innovation and internationalisatoon of education and supporting the modernisation of education and training.

There are 11 programmes of funding available:

  1. Asylum & Migration: People flows and management of migration
  2. Creative Europe: Support for European cinema and the cultural and creative sectors
  3. EaSI: Programme for social change and innovation
  4. Erasmus+: Programme for education, training, youth and sport
  5. Europe for Citizens: Strengthen remembrance and enhance capacity for civic participation at Union level
  6. Health for Growth: Improving the quality, efficiency and sustainability of health systems
  7. Internal Security Fund: Support for the EU’s Internal Security Strategy
  8. Justice: Ensuring proper access to justice in cross-border legal cases
  9. COSME: Improving the business environment and the competitiveness of European enterprises.
  10. LIFE: Environmental and climate change action projects
  11. Rights, Equality & Citizenship: Promote the rights deriving from European citizen

The most generically applicable programme sunder the new organisation for BU staff is the Erasmus Mundus programme which is now found under Erasmus+ under :

  • Key Action 1 ‘Learning Mobility of Individuals’
  • Key Action 2 ‘Cooperation for Innovation & Exchange of Good Practice’

If you wish to make an Erasmus Mundus Action 2 submission, please get in touch with Paul Lynch or Sarah Katon a minimum of 5 weeks before the deadline of 3 March 2014 as Partners must be reviewed as part of our internal processes.

The 5 ‘Golden Rules’ for e-submission of bid applications

Funding opportunities, Guidance, R & KE Operations

For all standard RCUK bids (for example AHRC, ESRC, EPSRC, MRC, NERC, etc), the requirement is for the completed application to be submitted on J-es (J-es is the Research Councils’ web-based Joint Electronic Submission system for grant applications and award administration) by the Principal Investigator at least 5 working days before the application deadline.

The flowchart below illustrates the basic steps involved in the  ‘behind-the-scenes’ administration of  J-es bid applications before they are finally submitted to the councils.

As demonstrated in the flowchart, bid applications submitted through J-es are not exactly straightforward and quite often can be time-consuming and frustrating in some cases. Even when a bid application is ‘perfect’ in the eyes of the J-es checkers and institutional approvers, the process will still take up at least two working days, depending on the length of the application, and the availability of both J-es checkers and institutional approvers. Therefore, the 5-working-day turnaround will allow just enough time for potential changes and alterations to be made to the applications in order to maximise chances of success.  

When asked about the most common factors which delay the submission of a bid to J-es, institutional approvers and J-es checkers have collectively identified the following:

EligibilityThe eligibility of the PI is the first thing which you need to check, before embarking on the roller coaster ride of a bid application. The variety of funding bids from numerous research councils available out there means that each bid will come with a different guidance note. Even within the same research councils, guidance can sometimes differ between two separate funding opportunities.

Start date and duration of projectThe start date and the duration of the project should be planned in accordance with the funding guidance. For example, most of the times, funding councils require a minimum of 24 weeks between the bid submission date and the project start date but this can be different for each council. When there is a last minute change on J-es for the project start date or duration, this often involves a lengthy process as all previous costing figures provided for the project would have changed too.

AttachmentsAlthough providing a comprehensive CV or showing proof of all previous track records can be beneficial to your application, it is important to bear in mind that this is not always required. RKEO cannot stress enough times, the importance of reading the guidance and only attaching the required documents.  We have had applications returned to us due to attachments that were not specifically required and this will inevitably have an impact on the success of the application. 

Letter of supportThis is a major contributing factor to the delays in bid submission as quite often, letters of support come from external organisations or people and can take time to come back if there is missing or incorrect information that needs to be changed. And quite often, the most important and yet common missing information on a letter of support can be as simple as the date or signature.

 

FormatThe formatting on bid application documents is a constant bugbear for J-es checkers and institutional approvers. In the attempt to squeeze in as many words as possible onto the application document, the minimum margins, font size and page limit as stipulated by the council is quite often overlooked by PIs and this can cause unnecessary delays in the submission of the bid application.

These are just a few examples of cases which can cause unnecessary delay and angst in the process of submitting a bid application. Although they may seem obvious, knowing these factors may end up saving you time in the long run!

If you are interested in applying for a funding bid and would like to speak to one of us, do get in touch with us at the Research and Knowledge Exchange Office at 01202 961200.

Tweets, Likes, Diggs and Memes – using social media to your advantage #downwiththekids

Do you want to know how to use social media to enhance your research profile and get your message to a wider audience? Then this session is for you!

Our expert presenter – Prof Dimitrios Buhalis – will cover how to use social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook to network online and raise your academic profile.

As part of the BRAD framework this session will take place on January 10th  and you can book your place via the Staff Development webpage.

Service Computing Seminar: Servicing Big Data

Fusion

As part of the Service Computing Seminar (SCS) project, funded by Bournemouth University Fusion Investment Fund, we would like to invite you to the Service Computing Seminar

Title: Servicing Big Data

Time: 14:00-16:00 Wednesday, 18 Dec. 2013

Venue: PG143 (Thomas Hardy Suite, Talbot Campus)

Speaker: Prof. Athman Bouguettaya, Head of School of Computer Science and Information Technology at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

 

Abstract

Big data is here and in a big way.  Big data is coming from all sorts of sources and means, including sensors, deep space, social media, smartphones, genomic, etc.  The cloud has been instrumental supporting the storage and processing of the ever increasing amount of data.  “Domesticating” the data, i.e., making it useful, however, has been a major challenge.  Service computing is the next major evolution of computing that aims at transforming massive data into artefacts that are acted upon, i.e., services. Service computing is increasingly being recognized as part of a broader agenda in Service Science. In that respect, service computing may be viewed as the “engineering” side of service science. Service computing broadly focuses at providing a foundational framework to support a service-centric view of designing, developing, and exposing data (and applications), whether it is in the enterprise or on the Web. In that respect, the Web is and will undoubtedly be the preferred delivery platform of service-based solutions. More specifically, Web services are currently without contest the key enabler for deploying service-centric solutions. Fully delivering on the potential of next-generation Web services requires building a foundation that would provide a sound design for efficiently developing, deploying, publishing, discovering, composing, trusting, and optimizing access to Web services in an open, competitive, untrustworthy, and highly dynamic environment. The Web service foundation is the key catalyst for the development of a uniform framework called Web Service Management System (WSMS). In this novel framework, Web services are treated as first-class objects. In this talk, I will first motivate the need for a uniform service management to service big data. I will then overview the core components of a typical WSMS. I will conclude by describing our latest research servicing sensor data.

 

Short Bio

Athman Bouguettaya is Professor and Head of School of Computer Science and Information Technology at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder (USA) in 1992.  He was previously Science Leader in Service Computing at CSIRO ICT Centre, Canberra. Australia. Before that, he was a tenured faculty member and Program director in the Computer Science department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (commonly known as Virginia Tech) (USA).  He is a founding member and past President of the Service Science Society, a non-profit organization that aims at forming a community of service scientists for the advancement of service science. He is on the editorial boards of several journals including, the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, the International Journal on Next Generation Computing, VLDB Journal, Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal, and the International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems. He is also on the editorial board of the Springer-Verlag book series on Services Science.  He served as a guest editor of a number of special issues including the special issue of the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology on Semantic Web services, a special issue the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing on Service Query Models, and a special issue of IEEE Internet Computing on Database Technology on the Web. He served as a Program Chair of the 2012 International Conference on Web and Information System Engineering, the 2009 and 2010 Australasian Database Conference, 2008 International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) and the IEEE RIDE Workshop on Web Services for E-Commerce and E-Government (RIDE-WS-ECEG’04). He has published more than 170 books, book chapters, and articles in journals and conferences in the area of databases and service computing (e.g., the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, the ACM Transactions on the Web, WWW Journal, VLDB Journal, SIGMOD, ICDE, VLDB, and EDBT). He was the recipient of several federally competitive grants in Australia (e.g., ARC) and the US (e.g., NSF, NIH). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM.