Research

From Shanghai with love

The first resident in the University’s high-tech apartment, the iDorm2, has travelled nearly 6,000 miles from Shanghai to work with Essex’s newly formed Digital Lifestyles Centre.

Liping Shen is working on ways of applying emotion detection technology to China’s e-learning environment during her four-month stay, while evaluating the iDorm as a living environment.

Liping speaks to her son Zhe in Shanghai

But her most pressing challenge is to evaluate the communications technology that can link her temporary home in Essex with her home in Shanghai.

That technology enables her to speak daily to her two-year-old son Shen Zhe Chen, who is missing his mum, and is confused by the webcam link.

Liping explained: ‘The first time he was very excited to see me, but he wanted to touch me and to embrace me, and asked me to do up his shoes. He couldn’t understand the situation.’
Working in conjunction with BT and the University, Liping will be testing a range of communication technology including a ‘smart photo frame’ which provides a live image connection between her two homes.

Liping works in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, one of China’s oldest and most prestigious universities with more than 38,000 students.

Her research at Essex will add some of Essex’s patented emotion aware systems to a massive e-learning test bed in China, with numerous distributed smart classrooms, tens of thousands of enrolled students, and thousands of mobile users. Liping explained that the aim is to understand the different emotions being experienced by remote learners in order to improve their learning activities.

Professor Vic Callaghan, a co-director of Essex’s Digital Lifestyles Centre, explained: ‘Liping is experiencing life in the iDorm with fairly rudimentary equipment, and her assessment is helping us to generate the specification to make it intelligent. We will be spending £250,000 on high-tech equipment.’

Study assesses needs of ageing population

Professor Ruth Hancock, of the Department of Health and Human Sciences, has been awarded £107,000 to take part in a collaborative study investigating the impact of the UK’s ageing population.

The Economic and Social Research Council grant is part of a £940,000 total awarded to Essex and the collaborative partners, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), the University of Leicester, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and the Pensions Policy Institute.

The project, led by Professor Mike Murphy of LSE aims to project the size of the older population and their financial, health, family, household and social resources and needs for care over the next 30 years.

Specific objectives include investigating mortality trends and disease patterns, modelling the future family unit, projecting pensions, savings and income of the older generations, and estimating the future public and private expenditure necessary to meet long-term care needs.

Professor Hancock said: ‘In the UK the number of people over the state pension age is projected to rise by almost 40 per cent in the next 25 years while the number aged 80 and over will nearly double. This will have substantial implications for the well-being of the older population and for public policy. Our overriding aim is to produce high quality analysis to inform public debate and development of future long-term care and pensions policy.’

Professor Hancock will look specifically at producing unified projections of public and private expenditure on pensions and long-term care, and of the distributional implications of policy changes in those areas.

Extra funding for election study

The Economic and Social Research Council has awarded the British Election Study researchers a further £100,000 to continue their investigations.

The grant will support the continuation of a panel survey started at the time of the last general election.

Professor Paul Whiteley, one of the researchers from the Department of Government working on the study said: ‘Traditionally the British Election Study has been funded to collect survey evidence about voting at the time of a general election. But often the outcome of an election is effectively decided in the four years before the election takes place, and so there is a real advantage in monitoring the opinions of the same group of people during the inter-election period. We will, for example, be able to discover if Gordon Brown is an electoral asset or a liability to Labour when, and if, he finally becomes the leader.’

Also in the printed November edition of Wyvern:

• Research funding workshop
• Bookshelf