The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) has announced it is inviting expressions of interest to join subject advisory groups for Subject Benchmark Statements.
QAA leads the development of Subject Benchmark Statements and reviews them on a cyclical basis to ensure they are useful as possible for discipline communities and can inform a range of purposes across the sector, including course design and providing support for securing academic standards.
In 2021, QAA will be reviewing the following subjects:
- Archaeology
- Chemistry (BSc and MSc/MSci/MChem)
- Classics and Ancient History (including Byzantine Studies and Modern Greek)
- Computing and Computing (Master’s)
- Counselling and Psychotherapy (BA &MA)
- Criminology, Early Childhood Studies
- Earth Sciences
- Environmental Sciences and Environmental Studies
- Forensic Science
- Geography
- History
- Housing Studies
- Theology and Religious Studies
Members of the academic community, employers, PSRBs and students are all encouraged to apply. Academic representatives and current students will only be drawn from higher education providers who are QAA Members.
You can view the call here: https://bit.ly/3pBgQ80
To submit an expression of interest, complete the online survey by 5pm on Friday 12 March.
After submitting your expression of interest it would be helpful if you would let Jane & Sarah (BU’s policy team) know. This is simply so we can track interest in sharing these kind of opportunities. We can be contacted at: policy@bournemouth.ac.uk. Thank you.
Tagged / computing
Exciting event alert! Online 5-7 November. Register till is not too late…
We are super excited to confirm that registration for #BESC2020 (7th International Conference on Behavioural and Social Computing), hosted by Bournemouth University, is now open. BESC aims to become a premier forum in which academic researchers and industry practitioners from data mining, artificial intelligence, statistics and analytics, business and marketing, finance and politics, and behavioral, economic, social and psychological sciences could present updated research efforts and progresses on foundational and emerging interdisciplinary topics of BESC, exchange new ideas and identify future research directions.
#BESC2020 attracted a range of exciting work around interdisciplinary field of behavioural and social computing. All accepted and presented papers expect to be included in IEEE Xplore and submitted for indexing in DBLP, Scopus, Google Scholar, and EI etc. Top quality papers after presented in the conference will be selected for extension and publication in several special issues of international journals, e.g., World Wide Web Journal (Springer) Social Network Analysis and Mining (Springer) and Web Intelligence. So if you wish to simply attend, you have a chance to do so and hear it first before any of the content will appear online or elsewhere.
The 3-days event is taking place online via Zoom.
Please note, even if you are not presenting, you can attend and learn about the latest thinking and practice in behavioural and social computing. Attendance only is free but all participants will need to register via Registration for BESC2020.
We are looking forward to fruitful discussions with all our speakers and attendees,
BESC2020 organising committee
Microsoft visit and talk 3 PM 26/9/18.
Dr. Kevin Larson of Microsoft has agreed to give a talk on interdisciplinary research as part of his visit to the UK at Bournemouth University. For those who would be interested in attending, please contact Daniela Doncakova (ddoncakova@bournemouth.ac.uk<mailto:ddoncakova@bournemouth.ac.uk>) to arrange a place at this lecture. The event will take place on 26/9/18 from 15:00.
EPSRC Building a Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing Community workshop
EPSRC is holding a two-day workshop on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing. The workshop will be highly multidisciplinary as well as bringing together those who are developing platforms and standards with researchers deploying and evaluating in real world environments.
In the Balancing Capability exercise, Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing was selected as an area to grow. While this is likely to happen due to the increasing economic and social influence of the Internet of Things and related technologies, EPSRC believe that some effort is required at this stage to ensure a balanced portfolio of funded research by the end of the delivery plan period.
Moreover, while they believe this field has a key role to play in contributing to the achievement of their cross-ICT priorities, they think that to achieve the objectives described in the priorities: People at the Heart of ICT, Safe and Secure ICT and Cross-Disciplinarity and Co-Creation a mature community discussion will be required.
Further information about EPSRC‘s portfolio and strategies, see our website.
What is Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing?
Put broadly, Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (PUC) is the fundamental and applied research that aims achieve the integration of computing into any device in any location that interacts with our lives.
Research in this area is necessarily multi-disciplinary and in order to achieve success will draw-on and synthesise ideas at the boundary of numerous other strands of research. This includes:
- Context awareness and affective computing in mobile systems and fundamental research into smart devices.
- Communication and information management between trillions of devices as well as new forms of distributed data handling and processing at scale.
- Research into the software or hardware of devices that have mobility as a unique aspect of their application. This includes the solutions to challenges of building systems on a grand scale such as interoperability, reliability and scalability.
Research into new forms of interaction with pervasive computer systems and related research into trust, privacy and security. This will require novel computer science and engineering while incorporating research from the social sciences, humanities and law.
How to apply
Those wishing to attend the workshop should complete the short Expression of Interest (EoI) form on this page.
This is a fantastic opportunity for BU academics as a lot of our research would be classed as ‘Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing’. If you do get a place, please can you let your RKEO representative know as we are interested in how this area will grow and what calls may come out of it.
Funding Competition: Commercialisation of Quantum Technologies (Innovate UK & EPSRC)

Innovate UK and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) are to invest a total of £19.5 million to support projects in Quantum Technologies. Projects may involve technologies belonging to one of the core groups defined in the UK’s roadmap for quantum technologies: clocks, sensors, imaging, communications or computing.
The call is now open, the registration deadline is 28th September and the call closes at noon on the 5th October.
Projects must be industry-led, but projects involving academics as partners are welcome, provided academic costs do not exceed 50% of the total.
Up to £6 million will be available for Feasibility Studies, which will fund the development of early stage devices, component technologies and for marketing studies. Projects will last up to 12 months and have total costs of £50k- £400k.
The Collaborative R&D call will seek to connect the supply chain, to deliver a demonstrator technology and must include an end user. A fund of £13.5 million is available. Total project values should be £500k – £2 million, but an addition 10% is available which can only be used for capital equipment, taking the maximum project value to £2.2 million.
The call brief is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/funding-competition-commercialisation-of-quantum-technologies
Networking and briefing events – click on the links for more information as dates, times, venues and content of the events do vary.
If you are interested in this call you must contact RKEO with adequate notice before the deadline. 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 you are thinking of applying, why not add an expression of interest on Research Professional so that BU colleagues can see your intention to bid and contact you to collaborate.
14:live with Dr Edward Apeh
Hello!
14:Live will be returning this Thursday 22nd of October 14:00-14:45 at Poole House Refectory, next to papa johns. This is open to all staff and students and I am pleased to welcome Dr Edward Apeh, a lecturer in computing.
The Cyber-landscape: you, your data and the Dark web
The line that separates our physical existence and the cyber landscape is becoming increasingly blurry with our daily activities moving online and our actions online having a direct consequence on our daily existence. A majority of our transactions (such as shopping, bill payments, banking, etc.) and social interactions are now undertaken online.
Our personal data facilitate these transactions and interactions. They enable and sustain the idea of a “free” internet in which personal data is exchanged for “free” apps and access to information. This has made personal data highly valuable in the cyber landscape. So much so that a vast array of encryption technologies and legislation such as the Data Protection Act have been put in place to protect and govern the use of our personal data.
This talk highlights the importance of our personal data in the cyber landscape. The legitimate and illegitimate use of our personal data is highlighted along with mechanisms in place to keep our personal data secure and procedures for handling circumstances when the security of our personal data is compromised.
It would be great to see you all there to listen to what’s going to be a very interesting talk with Edward Apeh, and just to give you that little bit more incentive to come along, there will be 30 x tokens for the first 30 audience members to be exchanged for a FREE individual Papa Johns Pizza at the end of the talk, plus lots of free tea & coffee, dont miss out! If you have any questions about this event or would like to hear about any other upcoming student engagement with research events, contact me on ocooke@bournemouth.ac.uk
I look forward to seeing you there!
Basic Research needs EU Funding Boost says Microsoft
The UK arm of Microsoft has backed UK universities in urging the EC to increase its support for basic research. As part of its submission to the Commission’s consultation Microsoft says that the private sector already funds its fair share of basic research and that the EU now need to take a lead. The submission states: “Universities and public research institutions are uniquely positioned to take on basic or pure research with no immediate commercial product in research that most companies would be unlikely to tackle but that has the potential to be transformative…Without greater investment in basic research, there is a danger that these fundamental game changing and important advances will happen outside Europe.” The consultation closed on 20 May and the Commission will announce its next move in November, based on its findings.
Consultation on EU Cloud Computing Strategy – have your say!
A consultation in order to develop an EU strategy on Cloud Computing has been published as the intention to develop an EU strategy for Cloud Computing in the EU’s Information and Communication Technologies strategy a ‘Digital Agenda for Europe’ has been announced. You can complete the Online Questionnaire until 31 August 2011.