Digital Commons Network^™

Enhancing Professional Skills Among Engineering Students By Interdisciplinary International Collaboration, Thomas Mejtoft, Helen Cripps, Melissa Fong-Emmerson, Christoper Blöcker

Practice Papers

Providing necessary knowledge and skills for engineering students to become successful professionals is a tricky task. Besides disciplinary knowledge, e.g., communication skills, ability to work in teams, and international experience are often mentioned as important. Regarding internationalization, most engineering programs in Sweden rely on either student exchange or low-level internationalization-at-home, such as international literature and lecturers. This paper explores sustainable international experiences for students on their home turf provided through an international interdisciplinary collaboration where engineering students in Sweden and marketing students in Australia work together on a project. The setup simulates a consultancy firm with development and marketing offices …

Centering Meaning-Filled Design Within Engineering Education: Recommendations On How To Integrate Interdisciplinary Architectural Design Charrettes, Community Engagement, Sustainability Principles, And Adapted Agile Methodologies Into A Student-Centered, Project-Based Engineering Program, David D Gillette, Michael Haungs, Thomas Fowler

Practice Papers

The Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies program (LAES) is a hybrid engineering and humanities degree housed in both the engineering and liberal arts colleges. LAES requires the same required math and science courses of standard engineering degrees, adding upper-level concentrations split equally between advanced engineering and humanities courses.

LAES was designed for retaining and recruiting a diversity of students in engineering, and to address recent innovations in industrial practice, technology design, and community-centered education. Through fifteen years of trial and error, the LAES program has developed a set of meaning-filled design guidelines for project work, combining engineering and humanistic problem …

The Immersive Placement Experience: Sink Or Swim?, Mohammed Shaikh, Abed Alaswad, Sarah Junaid

Practice Papers

To excel in their respective engineering fields, engineering students need to be equipped with a combination of technical and interpersonal skills. Central to excellent interpersonal skills is good communication. The aim of the study is to evaluate how well-prepared mechanical and design engineering students felt entering into their industrial placements, using a UK university as a pilot case study. For the study interviews were carried out with final year students who had previously completed an industrial placement year, focussing on communication, workplace diversity, technical working methods and university teaching styles. Reponses were anonymised, coded and analysed using quantitative and qualitative …

Engineering Solutions For A More Inclusive Society: A Case Study With Europe-Wide Challenge-Based Learning, Lennart Osterhus, Ulrike Bulmann, Viktoria Constanze Schneider, Kaline Furlan

Practice Papers

Engineering practices directly impact our society and yet, traditional engineering courses often present a lack of emphasis on social and sustainable responsibility. Therefore, a course was designed to increase societal awareness and promote social-conscious engineering practices, and also interdisciplinary and intercultural collaboration. The course followed the concept of challenge-based learning (CBL) and was offered within the framework of the European Consortium of Innovative Universities (ECIU). In such framework, students from 13 European partner universities could join, as well as professionals and citizens as so-called continuous learners. The challenge addressed the issue of an increasingly aging European society and the physical …

An Empirical Examination Of The Antecedents Of Residents' Support For Of Future Film Tourism Development, Deborah Castro, Sangkyun Kim, Guy Assaker

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

This study aimed to develop and test a conceptual model of the antecedents of residents' attitudinal behavior to support future film tourism in a popular tourism destination. These antecedents include: socio-cultural impacts of existing tourism, place attachment, external perceived realism of media programs, and perceived importance of residents' involvement. A total of 416 survey questionnaires were completed from residents living in the province of Seville, Spain. Partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was used to examine the relationship between these factors and the residents' support for future film tourism (RSFFT). The results indicate that place attachment and perceived importance of …

Shale Wettability Characteristics Via Air/Brines And Air/Oil Contact Angles And Influence Of Controlling Factors: A Case Study Of Lower Indus Basin, Pakistan, Darya Khan Bhutto, Abdul Majeed Shar, Ghazanfer Raza Abbasi, Ubedullah Ansari

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Wettability is the fundamental parameter that influences the productivity of hydrocarbon reservoirs. The knowledge of this regarding shale formation is yet inadequate; thus, detailed analysis is essential for successful development of such reservoirs. The Early Cretaceous Sembar formations in the Lower Indus Basin, Pakistan, is considered as the key target for energy exploration; however, it exhibits large uncertainties due to the lack of data availability. Sembar shales hold significant hydrocarbon volumes rich in organic content; however, prior to this, no comprehensive research has been conducted to quantify the wetting behavior of these shales. Thus, precise information about the wetting behavior …

Developing Research Culture Among Staff Under Conditions Of Organizational Change, Mariia Perelygina, Denise O' Leary

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

No abstract provided.

Incorporation Of Community Resources In Teaching Social Studies In Junior High Schools: A Case In The Adentan District Of The Greater Accra Region Of Ghana, Ronald Osei Mensah, Enock Swanzy-Impraim, Da-Costa Marfo, Pearl Adiza Babah

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Social studies education constitutes a diverse aspect of the human ecosystem that needs external resources to enable effective tuition and learning in the classroom. Using external resources has been a significant challenge for Ghana’s junior high school teachers. Given this, the study explored the integration of community resources in teaching social studies in a selected junior high school in the Adentan District in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. It investigated the factors that militate against using community resources and assessed how these problems could be resolved. The study made use of the random sampling technique, with a sample size …

The Role Of Authentic Leadership On Healthcare Street-Level Bureaucrats’ Well-Being During The Pandemic, Nasim Salehi, Yvonne Brunetto, Tom Dick

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

This study uses Conservation of Resources Theory, to explain Street-Level Bureaucrats’ (SLBs) workplace behavioural responses to threats to their well-being. We examine whether authentic leadership within street-level organisations positively impacts employee well-being by increasing SLBs’ perception of personal resources, and reducing their perceptions of work harassment. The research design comprises a survey that solicited quantitative and qualitative data from 163 healthcare SLBs working in Australian hospitals during the pandemic in April 2020. Analysis of the means indicates low levels of satisfaction with leadership and low levels of well-being for SLBs. The structural equation modelling findings show that poor leadership is …

Social Studies And History Curriculum Assessment In Colleges Of Education In Ghana: Reflective Practices Of Teacher Educators, Bernice Oteng, Ronald Osei Mensah, Pearl Adiza Babah, Enock Swanzy-Impraim

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Assessment is a crucial and essential component of successful instruction and learning. As a result, teachers must examine their actions in the classroom through a process of reflective practices (self-observation and self-evaluation) and think about why they do it and if it works. This essay examines the reflective practices of Ghanaian teacher educators regarding the evaluation of social studies and history curricula. It made use of the sequential explanatory mixed method as a methodology drawn from questionnaires, interviews and document reviews. The findings disclosed that teacher educators in Ghana’s colleges of education have low efficacy and poor reflective practices when …

Identifying The Characteristics, Constraints, And Enablers To Creating Value In Applied Performance Analysis, Denise Martin, Peter G. O'Donoghue, Jonathan Bradley, Sam Robertson, Denise Mcgrath

Articles

While applied performance analysts (PAs) are a well-established applied sports science practitioner group, there is no clear definition of the purpose of an analyst, their key relationships, or the expertise required to execute the role successfully. This research sought to understand how PA practitioners and educators perceive their role as applied PA practitioners. Twenty-seven applied PAs and educators with applied PA experience participated in six online focus groups, completing an online survey in advance. Reflexive thematic analysis of transcripts and survey data generated an overarching theme: embedded applied PA practitioners have a value co-creation role within performance ecosystems which is …

Detection Of Truthful, Semi-Truthful, False And Other News With Arbitrary Topics Using Bert-Based Models, Elena Shushkevich, John Cardiff, Anna Boldyreva

Conference Papers

Easy and uncontrolled access to the Internet provokes the wide propagation of false information, which freely circulates in the Internet. Researchers usually solve the problem of fake news detection (FND) in the framework of a known topic and binary classification. In this paper we study possibilities of BERT-based models to detect fake news in news flow with unknown topics and four categories: true, semi-true, false and other. The object of consideration is the dataset CheckThat! Lab proposed for the conference CLEF-2022. The subjects of consideration are the models SBERT, RoBERTa, and mBERT. To improve the quality of classification we use …

Determining Child Sexual Abuse Posts Based On Artificial Intelligence, Susan Mckeever, Christina Thorpe, Vuong Ngo

Conference papers

The volume of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) created and shared daily both surface web platforms such as Twitter and dark web forums is very high. Based on volume, it is not viable for human experts to intercept or identify CSAM manually. However, automatically detecting and analysing child sexual abusive language in online text is challenging and time-intensive, mostly due to the variety of data formats and privacy constraints of hosting platforms. We propose a CSAM detection intelligence algorithm based on natural language processing and machine learning techniques. Our CSAM detection model is not only used to remove CSAM on …

Using Machine Learning To Identify Patterns In Learner-Submitted Code For The Purpose Of Assessment, Botond Tarcsay, Fernando Perez-Tellez, Jelena Vasic

Conference papers

Programming has become an important skill in today’s world and is taught widely both in traditional and online settings. Instructors need to grade increasing amounts of student work. Unit testing can contribute to the automation of the grading process but it cannot assess the structure or partial correctness of code, which is needed for finely differentiated grading. This paper builds on previous research that investigated machine learning models for determining the correctness of programs from token-based features of source code and found that some such models can be successful in classifying source code with respect to whether it passes unit …

The Role Of Soc In Ensuring The Security Of Iot Devices: A Review Of Current Challenges And Future Directions, Hajar Bennouri, Abdiaziz Abdi, Iqbal Hossain, Alexandre Pujol

Conference papers

The growing popularity and deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has led to serious security concerns. The integration of a security operations center (SOC) becomes increasingly important in this situation to ensure the security of IoT devices. In this article, we will present a summary of IoT device security issues, their vulnerabilities, a review of current challenges to keep these devices secure, and discuss the role that SOC can bring in protecting IoT devices while considering the challenges encountered and the directions to consider when implementing a reliable SOC for IoT monitoring.

Work In Progress: A Virtual Educational Robotics Coding Club Framework To Improve K-6 Students Emotional Engagement In Stem, Kate Carmody, Julie Booth, Jospehine Bleach, Pramod Pathak, Paul Styles

Conference papers

The growing popularity and deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has led to serious security concerns. The integration of a security operations center (SOC) becomes increasingly important in this situation to ensure the security of IoT devices. In this article, we will present a summary of IoT device security issues, their vulnerabilities, a review of current challenges to keep these devices secure, and discuss the role that SOC can bring in protecting IoT devices while considering the challenges encountered and the directions to consider when implementing a reliable SOC for IoT monitoring.

Show, Prefer And Tell: Incorporating User Preferences Into Image Captioning, Annika Lindh, Robert J. Ross, John Kelleher

Conference papers

Image Captioning (IC) is the task of generating natural language descriptions for images. Models encode the image using a convolutional neural network (CNN) and generate the caption via a recurrent model or a multi-modal transformer. Success is measured by the similarity between generated captions and human-written “ground-truth” captions, using the CIDEr [14], SPICE [1] and METEOR [2] metrics. While incremental gains have been made on these metrics, there is a lack of focus on end-user opinions on the amount of content in captions. Studies with blind and low-vision participants have found that lack of detail is a problem [6, 13, …

Capturing The Behaviour Of Volunteer Pedestrians In A Newly-Developed University Campus Using A Distributed Array Of Bluetooth Low Energy Devices, Ahlam Al Anbouri, Mayank Parmar, David Powell, Paula Kelly, Niall Holmes Dr., Damon Berry, Lorraine D'Arcy

Conference papers

Contemporary public infrastructure projects emphasise sustainable options that integrate pedestrian routes, leisure facilities and convenient access to public transport systems. It is important to understand the effectiveness of these contemporary designs. In the age of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), there is a need to develop technologybased solutions that collect information about the behaviour of pedestrians in public spaces as they commute and engage in leisure pursuits while simultaneously preserving the privacy of these citizens. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), has privacypreserving features that make it worth considering as part of a technology solution for studies of this type. This …

Indication Of Pedestrian’S Travel Direction Through Bluetooth Low Energy Signals Perceived By A Single Observer Device, Mayank Parmar, Paula Kelly, Damon Berry

Conference papers

This paper presents a study to understand the directional sensitivity of a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) monitoring device (Observer) and whether, using a single such Observer, the characteristics of its antenna can be used to identify the direction of a pedestrian’s movement. To comprehend the directional characteristics of the antenna of the Observer employed for this study, the device is subjected to BLE signals emitted from a BLE beacon (Broadcaster) in an anechoic chamber. The results of this study confirmed that in the clean, noiseless environment of the chamber, the antenna we employed is clearly more receptive to signals emerging …

Exploring The Impact Of Competition And Incentives On Game Jam Participation And Behaviour, John Healy, Niamh Germaine

Conference papers

Competitive elements are a common feature of many game jams. However, there has been little research to date on the impact of competition on participants and their behaviours. To better understand how incentives and competition may affect the motivations and behaviour of game jam participants, we surveyed 47 game jam participants and analysed data from 4,564 online game jams. We found that incentives and competition were neither strong deterrents nor significant motivators for game jam participation. However, a significant percentage of the participants surveyed indicated that incentives and competition would affect their behaviour during a game jam. Our findings suggest …

Communety: Deep Learning-Based Face Recognition System For The Prediction Of Cohesive Communities, Syed Afaq Ali Shah, Weifeng Deng, Muhammad Aamir Cheema, Abdul Bais

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Effective mining of social media, which consists of a large number of users is a challenging task. Traditional approaches rely on the analysis of text data related to users to accomplish this task. However, text data lacks significant information about the social users and their associated groups. In this paper, we propose CommuNety, a deep learning system for the prediction of cohesive networks using face images from photo albums. The proposed deep learning model consists of hierarchical CNN architecture to learn descriptive features related to each cohesive network. The paper also proposes a novel Face Co-occurrence Frequency algorithm to quantify …

Transition Theory And The Emotional Journey To Medical Educator Identity: A Qualitative Interview Study, J Browne, T Collett

Peninsula Medical School

Background. Medical academia is in crisis, with fewer people entering and growing concern at numbers leaving. While faculty development is often seen as part of the solution, there are significant issues with faculty not engaging with and resisting development opportunities. Lack of motivation may be linked to what might be called a ‘weak’ educator identity. We studied medical educators' experiences of career development to gain further insights into: how professional identity may develop; individuals' accompanying emotional responses to perceived identity change; and consideration of the accompanying temporal dimensions. Drawing on new materialist sociology, we explore medical educator identity formation in …

The Power Of Education In A Globalised World: Challenging Geoeconomic Inequalities, Ozéias Rocha, Daniel Kamphambale, Cormac Macmahon, Jon Hans Coetzer, Lucía Morales

Articles

The globalization process has led to significant levels of controversy, as over the past few years, researchers have highlighted its negative connotations in terms of exacerbating economic inequalities, environmental degradation, exploitation of workers, loss of cultural diversity, and negative influence on democratic systems and financial stability. The negative connotation associated with the globalization process is not surprising. The implications for the global educational system significantly dominated by the influence of Western values, culture, and economic models based on consumerism to the detriment of traditional cultural and local identities have been eroded. The world economies are facing emerging areas of significant …

Circular Pedagogy To Advance The Integration Of Learning Technologies: Supporting Technological Universities Cultural Transformation, Nadia Barkoczi, Iulia Stefan, Ivaylo Peev, Todor Todorov, Lia Pop, Claudia Marian, Cristina Campian, Sonia Munteanu, Patrick Flynn, Jon-Hans Coetzer, Lucia Morales

Working Papers

European countries need active and proactive educational systems assisted by models that can drive a cultural transformation that supports sustainable socio-economic and environmental development. In this paper, we reflect on the future of European education. We offer some insights on how the foundations of a new educational model (ANEM) could be cemented and solidly supported by pillars that acknowledge our societies' rich and diverse cultures. Furthermore, the European University of Technology's (EUt+) future educational model is taken as a case study to enable us to reflect and analyse the need for novel pedagogies that drive change for a more sustainable …

An Accumulation Of Care: Affect In The Role Of The Contemporary Curator, Sara-Jayne Parsons

School of Art, Design and Architecture Theses

This research portfolio investigates an affective approach to contemporary curatorial practice that is shaped by an accumulation of care. By retracing my working methods and noticing small shifts or interruptions, I reveal transformative, incremental changes in my work as a curator. I introduce curatorial practice where care is described as the physical and intellectual concern for objects in a museum, and consider traditional narratives ascribed to the role of a curator. I then propose an expanded understanding of care in curatorial practice that goes beyond stewardship to encompass engagement, empathy and allyship. Adopting a posthumanist methodological strategy which negotiates subjectivity …

Towards Quantum Computing For Audio And Music Expression, Paulo Vitor Itaboraí

School of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences Theses

This research delves into the initial approaches of the use of emerging Quantum Computing technologies in music practice, anchored on preliminary studies on Quantum Representation of Audio (QRA). The approach is interdisciplinary, and attempts to explore the object - QRA - both from a technical scope and an artistic scope. A systematic review unifies diverse QRA techniques, spotlighting the need to bring accessibility to these techniques and terminologies (dense in theoretical physics formalism) for a computer music and/or artistic audiences, in a didactic manner. In this review, some additional techniques initially only discussed for representing images are translated into audio. …

Alterity In Central And Eastern European Illustrations For The Lord Of The Rings 1981-1993, Joel Merriner

School of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences Theses

The 2001-2003 cinematic release of Peter Jackson’s movie adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings heralded a period of widespread pictorial homogenisation in Tolkien visual culture. Propelled by the conceptual design of veteran “Western” Tolkien artists Alan Lee and John Howe, Jackson’s vision of Middle-earth became the hegemonic model by which other depictions are measured. Consequently, the potential for undertaking a scholarly examination of an alternative, specifically non-Western Tolkien vision (with all the implications for visual difference and/or commonality this might involve), has been largely ignored. This dissertation, however, seeks to foster a deeper understanding of the possibility …

‘My Blood Is In It’: A Phenomenological Study Of International Doctoral Students’ Embodied Experience Of A University Campus, Anne Bentley

School of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences Theses

Reflecting its Cartesian underpinnings, academic scholarship privileges discourse over embodiment, resulting in a lack of research about international doctoral students' bodily experience of Higher Education. International students represent a significant income stream for UK universities and offer the opportunity for the meeting of different cultures, minds and bodies. Using phenomenological theory and taking embodiment as its starting point, this thesis explores the implicit dimensions of international doctoral students' everyday experience of campus. Walking interviews, photo-elicitation and semi-structured interviews with eight international doctoral students yielded embodied, visual and discursive methods. Merleau-Ponty, Ahmed and Arendt were used to theorise the interrelated embodied, …

Editorial: Investigating The Effect Of The Physical Context On Customer Experience, Helen L. Bruce, Ewa Krolikowska, Tara Rooney

Articles

This editorial introduces a special issue of the Journal of Services Marketing, dedicated to articles discussing the effect of the physical context on customer experience. The editorial identifies diverse areas of extant knowledge which researchers might draw upon when investigating the effect of the physical context on customer experience. to inform future research agendas.

Women Microbusiness Owners’ Entrepreneurial Marketing Decision-Making During A Crisis, Helen L. Bruce, Tara Rooney, Ewa Krolikowska

Articles

Understanding effective marketing decision-making is key to driving business performance. However, knowledge of marketing decision-making by microbusiness owners is limited. Moreover, little is known about how microbusiness owners make marketing decisions under crisis conditions. This article explores entrepreneurial marketing decision-making by women microbusiness owners during the COVID-19 pandemic, through qualitative interviews with providers of children’s activities, who migrated their services online during lockdown. Findings shed light on their marketing decision-making by highlighting transitions between causation and effectuation approaches and identifying key resources leveraged in effectuation decision-making. We also observe how distinct principles of effectuation may be combined to make effective …