scholarly journals Co-Constructing a Community of Practice for Early-Career Computer Science Academics in the UK

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Crick ◽  
James H. Davenport ◽  
Paul Hanna ◽  
Alan Hayes ◽  
Alastair Irons ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Computer Science ◽  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Early Career ◽  
The Uk

scholarly journals Tomorrow’s Health Data Scientists in the Making: 2 Years of Training & Capacity Building Activities with the Farr Institute

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Athanasios Anastasiou ◽  
Georgina Moulton ◽  
Colin McCowan ◽  
Paul Taylor ◽  
Catharine Goddard
Keyword(s):  
Capacity Building ◽  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Spatial Data ◽  
Oral Communication ◽  
Education Programme ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Spatial Data Analysis ◽  
World Health ◽  
Building Activities ◽  
The Uk

ABSTRACT ObjectivesThe poster will showcase the Training & Capacity Building Programme (TCBP) established by the Farr network that is available to PhD students and Early Career Researchers (ECRs) both from within and outside the network. ApproachThe authors are using a mixed-methods approach to present the current state of the art that has motivated the structure of the TCBP and how the programme has been received by students, academic and industry leaders. Since 2014, the Farr network education leads have worked on a unique education programme that aims to equip students with key professional and methodological skills required by the roles they are likely to take in their future careers. The content of the programme has been informed by current research in the fields of data linkage and analysis of big datasets as well as the immediate experience of researchers, and healthcare and industry leads working actively in the field. We have focussed on developing a community of practice through the provision of an environment that has enabled students to share experiences and knowledge and to start building their own networks of collaboration across the Farr centres. ResultsThe Farr network of PhD students comprises of approximately 66 students from a variety of backgrounds including bioinformatics, computer science, epidemiology, mathematics, psychology and statistics. The Farr network hosted 2 main events in 2015 that provided the foundation for 34 PhD students to come together to develop skills in written and oral communication, Public and Patient Involvement (PPI), problem-solving, requirements gathering, data visualisation and spatial data analysis. Formal feedback collected from each event suggests that the programme is received well by students who see it as a set of activities that complement their specialised PhD related education. Feedback from supervisors and future employers also suggests that this programme has facilitated the development of skills that are useful for their PhD and employment. ConclusionThe Farr network has laid the foundation for the community of practice around the analysis of real-world health datasets across the UK, and will continue to cultivate this through the enrichment of the programme.

scholarly journals Supporting Early-Career Academics in the UK Computer Science Community

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Crick ◽  
James H. Davenport ◽  
Alan Hayes ◽  
Alastair Irons ◽  
Tom Prickett
Keyword(s):  
Computer Science ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Science Community ◽  
The Uk

Creating and Capturing Value through Crowdsourcing

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Information Systems ◽  
Systems Biology ◽  
Computer Science ◽  
Open Innovation ◽  
Product Innovation ◽  
Collective Intelligence ◽  
Innovation Management ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Uk

Examples of the value that can be created and captured through crowdsourcing go back to at least 1714, when the UK used crowdsourcing to solve the Longitude Problem, obtaining a solution that would enable the UK to become the dominant maritime force of its time. Today, Wikipedia uses crowds to provide entries for the world’s largest and free encyclopedia. Partly fueled by the value that can be created and captured through crowdsourcing, interest in researching the phenomenon has been remarkable. For example, the Best Paper Awards in 2012 for a record-setting three journals—the Academy of Management Review, Journal of Product Innovation Management, and Academy of Management Perspectives—were about crowdsourcing. In spite of the interest in crowdsourcing—or perhaps because of it—research on the phenomenon has been conducted in different research silos within the fields of management (from strategy to finance to operations to information systems), biology, communications, computer science, economics, political science, among others. In these silos, crowdsourcing takes names such as broadcast search, innovation tournaments, crowdfunding, community innovation, distributed innovation, collective intelligence, open source, crowdpower, and even open innovation. The book aims to assemble papers from as many of these silos as possible since the ultimate potential of crowdsourcing research is likely to be attained only by bridging them. The papers provide a systematic overview of the research on crowdsourcing from different fields based on a more encompassing definition of the concept, its difference for innovation, and its value for both the private and public sectors.

Academic engagement with small business and entrepreneurship: Towards a landscape of practice

2021 ◽  
pp. 095042222110344
Author(s):  
Oswald Jones
Keyword(s):  
Small Business ◽  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Academic Engagement ◽  
Business Owners ◽  
Business Research ◽  
Structural Funds ◽  
Core Concepts ◽  
Eu Structural Funds ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Eu

Academic engagement with small business and entrepreneurship was facilitated by the availability of European Union (EU) funding, which also stimulated the emergence of a small business and entrepreneurship (SBE) ‘community of practice’. Gradually, the SBE community developed into a ‘landscape of practice’ as small business research moved towards maturity. Furthermore, the SBE landscape of practice has coalesced around three core concepts: entrepreneurial learning, social networks and social capital. EU funding was the catalyst for many SBE academics in the UK to engage with practitioners involved with starting and managing their own businesses. The UK’s exit from the EU will inevitably mean that universities will no longer have access to EU Structural Funds. This has major implications for the UK SBE community’s engagement with practice as well as for entrepreneurs and business owners who have benefitted from a range of programmes designed to improve the performance of smaller firms.

The Pransky interview: Dr Yoky Matsuoka, Vice President Technology, Nest Labs

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (6) ◽  
pp. 481-486
Author(s):  
Joanne Pransky
Keyword(s):  
Computer Science ◽  
Mechanical Engineering ◽  
Academic Career ◽  
Industrial Robot ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Smoke Detector ◽  
Foundation Engineering ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The University

Purpose – This article is a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry engineer-turned entrepreneur regarding the evolution, commercialization and challenges of bringing a technological invention to market. Design/methodology/approach – The interviewee is Dr Yoky Matsuoka, the Vice President of Nest Labs. Matsuoka describes her career journey that led her from a semi-professional tennis player who wanted to build a robot tennis buddy, to a pioneer of neurobotics who then applied her multidisciplinary research in academia to the development of a mass-produced intelligent home automation device. Findings – Dr Matsuoka received a BS degree from the University of California, Berkeley and an MS and PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She was also a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and in Mechanical Engineering at Harvard University. Dr Matsuoka was formerly the Torode Family Endowed Career Development Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington (UW), Director of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering and Ana Loomis McCandless Professor of Robotics and Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2010, she joined Google X as one of its three founding members. She then joined Nest as VP of Technology. Originality/value – Dr Matsuoka built advanced robotic prosthetic devices and designed complementary rehabilitation strategies that enhanced the mobility of people with manipulation disabilities. Her novel work has made significant scientific and engineering contributions in the combined fields of mechanical engineering, neuroscience, bioengineering, robotics and computer science. Dr Matsuoka was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in which she used the Genius Award money to establish a nonprofit corporation, YokyWorks, to continue developing engineering solutions for humans with physical disabilities. Other awards include the Emerging Inventor of the Year, UW Medicine; IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Academic Career Award; Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers; and numerous others. She leads the development of the learning and control technology for the Nest smoke detector and Thermostat, which has saved the USA hundreds of billions of dollars in energy expenses. Nest was sold to Google in 2013 for a record $3.2 billion dollars in cash.

scholarly journals Unwaged Posts in UK Universities: Controversies and Campaigns

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 533-553 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Forkert ◽  
Ana Lopes
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Creative Industries ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Higher Education System ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The University ◽  
Uk Higher Education

This article examines unwaged posts at UK universities, using recent examples of advertised job posts. While unpaid work is common in the UK higher education system, unwaged posts are not. The posts under scrutiny in this article differ from traditional honorary titles as they target early career academics, who are unlikely to have a paid position elsewhere, rather than established scholars. The article contextualizes the appearance of these posts in a climate of increasing marketization of higher education, entrenching managerialism in higher education institutions, and the casualization of academic work. We also discuss resistance to the posts, arguing that the controversy surrounding unpaid internships in the creative industries created a receptive environment for resisting unwaged posts in academia. We analyze the campaigns that were fought against the advertisement of the posts, mostly through social media and the University and College Union. We explore the tactics used and discuss the advantages and limitations of the use of social media, as well as the role of trade unions in the campaigns against these posts, and we reflect on what future campaigns can learn from these experiences.

Community of Practice Software Management Tools

2011 ◽  
pp. 112-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Jewell ◽  
Derek H.T. Walker
Keyword(s):  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Performance Measures ◽  
Collaborative Study ◽  
Software Tool ◽  
Research Proposal ◽  
Management Approach ◽  
Anecdotal Evidence ◽  
Management Tools ◽  
The Uk

This chapter provides insights from a large UK construction organisation case study where communities of practice have been supported through use of a software tool and management approach that encourages their spread across the organisation. We provide a descriptive characterisation of what the community of practice (COP) software tool does, how it evolved, and anecdotal evidence from interviews with its users of its value to the UK case study organisation. We recognise the need to investigate COP value generation more formally, and we have developed a research proposal to undertake further work in a collaborative study with industry to provide useful COP performance measures to be undertaken. This chapter provides valuable insights from several years’ reflection upon the tool’s use and application, and we highlight both drivers and barriers to its deployment. The objective was to provide a practical example of what COP management tools could and should address.

Gender and Computing at University in the UK

2009 ◽  
pp. 1583-1590
Author(s):  
Ruth Woodfield
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Computer Science ◽  
Educational Level ◽  
The Us ◽  
Underlying Causes ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Women's Role ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Educational Field

In the late 1970s, women’s progress and participation in the more traditional scientific and technical fields, such as physics and engineering, was slow, prompting many feminist commentators to conclude that these areas had developed a nearunshakeable masculine bias. Although clearly rooted in the domains of science and technology, the advent of the computer was initially seen to challenge this perspective. It was a novel kind of artefact, a machine that was the subject of its own newly created field: “computer science” (Poster, 1990, p. 147). The fact that it was not quite subsumed within either of its parent realms led commentators to argue that computer science was also somewhat ambiguously positioned in relation to their identity as masculine. As such, it was claimed that its future trajectory as equally masculine could not be assumed, and the field of computing might offer fewer obstacles and more opportunities for women than they had experienced before. Early predictions of how women’s role in relation to information technology would develop were consequently often highly optimistic in tone. Computing was hailed as “sex-blind and colour-blind” (Williams, Cited in Griffths 1988, p. 145; see also Zientara, 1987) in support of a belief that women would freely enter the educational field, and subsequently the profession, as the 1980s advanced. During this decade, however, it became increasingly difficult to deny that this optimism was misplaced. The numbers of females undertaking undergraduate courses in the computer sciences stabilised at just over a fifth of each cohort through the 1980s and 1990s, and they were less likely to take them in the more prestigious or researchbased universities (Woodfield, 2000). Tracy Camp’s landmark article “The Incredible Shrinking Pipeline” (1997), using data up to 1994, plotted the fall-off of women in computer science between one educational level and the next in the US. It noted that “a critical point” was the drop-off before bachelor-level study—critical because the loss of women was dramatic, but also because a degree in computer science is often seen as one of the best preparatory qualifications for working within a professional IT role1. The main aim of this article is to examine how the situation has developed since 1994, and within the UK context. It will also consider its potential underlying causes, and possible routes to improvement.

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