Month: February 2020

The Mathematical Science group has a strong track record of applying statistics methods to improve and study road safety.  Recently, our Julian Stander joined forces with excellent colleagues in the School of Psychology
to publish a paper in the journal Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour entitled “Evaluating the effectiveness of a young driver-education intervention: Learn2Live”.  This paper reports that
a fear-based road safety intervention had an effect on decreasing young drivers’ attitudes towards risky driving and that young drivers preferred a peer-led educational road safety intervention experience, rather than
an adult-led intervention experience.

The 6th Edition of Modern Engineering Mathematics has just been published.  This is one of the most popular textbooks amongst all students of engineering worldwide.  Phil Dyke (Professor of Applied Mathematics) is the editor, succeeding Glyn James who sadly died last year.  Matthew Craven (Lecturer in Applied Mathematics) and Yinghui Wei (Associate professor of Statistics) helped produce this new edition, available from 26th February 2020.  Its production follows a year of hard work.

Recently two papers have been published by members of CMS and their collaborators.

• An exact algorithm for small-cardinality constrained portfolio optimisation, with authors: David Graham and Matthew Craven
• Identifying good algorithm parameters in evolutionary multi- and many-objective optimisation: A visualisation approach, with authors: David Walker and Matthew.Craven

The common theme linking both papers is the use of randomised algorithms in optimization problems.

Malgorzata Wojtys and Craig McNeile been awarded a small grant, from
the IMA/RSS, to organize a 1 day workshop on developing curriculum in
mathematical sciences with employers. The website for the workshop is here.

Today there was a career conference for the mathematics undergraduate at the University of Plymouth, which was organized by Dr. Malgorzata Wojtys and Pippa Waller.

There were talks by graduates of the school of mathematics and other industry representatives, which gave insight into their careers and advice to the current students.

There were two workshops at the conference

Secrets of successful assessment centres with Babcock International

Get the measure of psychometric tests:

Prof Li Zhang from Yunnan University, China, visited the University of Plymouth for a few months. Before she left, she presented a talk on her research in the statistics seminar.

Comprehensive Analysis of Innovate Activities in Science and Technology

Date/Time: Wednesday, 29 January 2020, 4pm,

Li Zhang, Yunnan University, China

The purpose of this research is to provide a set of statistical methods for administrative authority who organizes and evaluates innovate activities in science and technology. Statistical methods can be used to describe innovate activities, evaluate the innovators, and extract information from the large and sparse data, in order to help administrative authority to develop effective science and technology policy.

With a case study on the evaluation of 31 districts in China, this research includes the following aspects:

·         Establish an indicator system about innovate input, output and environment.

·         Describe the quantitative features of indicators by data visualization and summary statistics.

·         Create composite indicators to evaluate the innovate activities across 31 districts in China.