Early Researchers Research Articles

An In-Depth Analysis of Collision Avoidance Path Planning Algorithms in Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract: Path planning is a way to define the motion of an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) in any existing obstacle environment to enable the vehicle's movement by setting directions to avoid that can react to the obstacles in the vehicle's path. A good, planned path perceives the environment to the extent of uncertainty and tries to build or adapt its change in the path of motion. Efficient path planning algorithms are needed to alleviate deficiencies, which are to be modified using the deterministic path that leads the ASV to reach a goal or a desired location while finding an optimal solution has become a challenge in the field of optimization along with a collision-free path, making path planning a critical thinker. The traditional algorithms have a lot of training and computation, making it difficult in a realistic environment. This review paper explores the different techniques available in path planning and collision avoidance of ASV in a dynamic environment. The objective of good path planning and collision avoidance for a dynamic environment is compared effectively with the existing obstacle’s movement of different vehicles. Different path planning technical approaches are compared with their performance and collision avoidance for unmanned vehicles in marine environments by early researchers. This paper gives us a clear idea for developing an effective path planning technique to overcome marine accidents in the dynamic ocean environment while choosing the shortest, obstacle-free path for Autonomous Surface Vehicles that can reduce risk and enhance the safety of unmanned vehicle movement in a harsh ocean environment.

What exactly is an "early career researcher" anyway?

What exactly is an "early career researcher" anyway?

Publish and perish: mental health among communication and media scholars

Abstract Studies point to a significantly higher prevalence of mental health issues among academics compared to most other working populations. However, we know relatively little about the situation within the field of media and communication studies. Based on an international survey of 1028 researchers within this field, we found mental health issues to be widespread. Early career researchers, women, and those in nonpermanent positions were significantly more strongly affected by these issues than scholars in later career stages, men, and those in permanent employment. Academics in our field worry most about structural aspects of their work, most notably about publication pressure and future career prospects. We argue that while our findings are somewhat aligned with results from or across other fields, they are still worrisome. We thus argue for the need to start a conversation about how to reduce the mental burden, especially for young and early career researchers.

Becoming a mother in neoliberal academia: Subjectivation and self‐identity among early career researchers

AbstractThis paper investigates how becoming a mother—and navigating such a complicated life transition—while pursuing an academic career impacts the way female researchers perceive themselves as acting subjects. By analyzing in‐depth virtual interviews with Italian female early career researchers, this work explores the relationship between fertility decisions, motherhood hardships, self‐identity, and career‐related experiences in the interviewees' biographical trajectories. Despite their consideration of childbearing as a mental and practical obstacle to scientific production, many of the interviewees ascribe positive career outcomes to the arrival of their first child. The reflexivity set in motion by the interview process allows us to observe the collected interviews as double‐layered narratives. The postponement of fertility choices and the presence of work‐family conflict tend to be described as ordinary facets of a common career pattern, intrinsic to the female academic working experience. Meanwhile, the positive impacts of motherhood on self‐identity and work‐related skills are recounted on a more individual level, framed as a sort of paradox, a personal journey of self‐discovery or—to some extent ‐ a heroic performance.

Treatment resistant depression: a critical reflection on missing oral narratives in dance therapy literature

South Asian narratives are underrepresented in dance movement psychotherapy academia. Systematically supporting more anecdotal literature on utilising the body’s innate wisdom in illness prevention and treatment is essential to support equitable accommodation of oral narratives. In this critical reflection, I have integrated my emerging perspectives as a member of the South Asian diaspora, a clinician who has trained and worked within the medical model and an early career researcher. I present two anecdotal themes and brief case examples relevant to contemplating the value of oral narratives within dance movement psychotherapy. They are: (1) embodied storytelling as a way of building emotional intelligence, and (2) intuition as a way of trusting one’s bodily cues in individuals.

David versus Goliath: Early career researchers in an unethical publishing system.

The publish-or-perish culture in academia has catalysed the development of an unethical publishing system. This system is characterised by the proliferation of journals and publishers-unaffiliated with learned societies or universities-that maintain extremely large revenues and profit margins diverting funds away from the academic community. Early career researchers (ECRs) are particularly vulnerable to the consequences of this publishing system because of intersecting factors, including pressure to pursue high impact publications, rising publication costs and job insecurity. Moving towards a more ethical system requires that scientists advocate for structural change by making career choices that come with risks, many of which disproportionately impact ECRs. We illuminate major issues facing ECRs in Ecology and Evolution under the current publishing system, and propose a portfolio of actions to promote systemic change that can be implemented by ECRs and established researchers.

31st Annual GP2A Medicinal Chemistry Conference

The Group for the Promotion of Pharmaceutical Chemistry in Academia (GP2A) held its 31st annual conference in August 2023 at the Faculty of Pharmacy of Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France. There were 8 keynote presentations, 10 early career researcher oral presentations and 23 poster presentations. Among them, four awards were delivered, two for best oral communications and two for the best poster presentations.

Collaborative Learning of Ph.D. Candidates in Design on Emerging Scenarios in Scientific Publication

The article describes a collaborative learning process aimed at introducing early stage researchers in design to a non-hegemonic approach to design knowledge production and publications. Four co-creation sessions has been held in the context of Prode project, engaging phd students in design to take in account emerging issues in scientific publishing. In specific an innovative Living publication lifecycle has been introduced (supporting an iterative model for publications) and the relative Living publications scenario (including Augmented publications; Collective authoring; Evolving publications; Publications reuse) has been used to discuss and disrupt traditional publication patterns and envision beyond the “article” format, new typologies of (not only textual) research products and new forms of dissemination, to meet the challenges of an impactful design education. The context of change of scientific publication and hypothesis underlying the paper have been discussed elsewhere (Lupo, 2022; Lupo, 2023). For the purpose of this article, the focus is the training of early stage researchers, in order to make them aware of the potentiality of plurality and diversity of design knowledge publication. The collaborative approach and tools adopted eased the empowering of the PhD students through brainstorms, role plays and hands-on tests.

Decentralised, collaborative, and privacy-preserving machine learning for multi-hospital data

BackgroundMachine Learning (ML) has demonstrated its great potential on medical data analysis. Large datasets collected from diverse sources and settings are essential for ML models in healthcare to achieve better accuracy and generalizability. Sharing data across different healthcare institutions or jurisdictions is challenging because of complex and varying privacy and regulatory requirements. Hence, it is hard but crucial to allow multiple parties to collaboratively train an ML model leveraging the private datasets available at each party without the need for direct sharing of those datasets or compromising the privacy of the datasets through collaboration. MethodsIn this paper, we address this challenge by proposing Decentralized, Collaborative, and Privacy-preserving ML for Multi-Hospital Data (DeCaPH). This framework offers the following key benefits: (1) it allows different parties to collaboratively train an ML model without transferring their private datasets (i.e., no data centralization); (2) it safeguards patients’ privacy by limiting the potential privacy leakage arising from any contents shared across the parties during the training process; and (3) it facilitates the ML model training without relying on a centralized party/server. FindingsWe demonstrate the generalizability and power of DeCaPH on three distinct tasks using real-world distributed medical datasets: patient mortality prediction using electronic health records, cell-type classification using single-cell human genomes, and pathology identification using chest radiology images. The ML models trained with DeCaPH framework have less than 3.2% drop in model performance comparing to those trained by the non-privacy-preserving collaborative framework. Meanwhile, the average vulnerability to privacy attacks of the models trained with DeCaPH decreased by up to 16%. In addition, models trained with our DeCaPH framework achieve better performance than those models trained solely with the private datasets from individual parties without collaboration and those trained with the previous privacy-preserving collaborative training framework under the same privacy guarantee by up to 70% and 18.2% respectively. InterpretationWe demonstrate that the ML models trained with DeCaPH framework have an improved utility-privacy trade-off, showing DeCaPH enables the models to have good performance while preserving the privacy of the training data points. In addition, the ML models trained with DeCaPH framework in general outperform those trained solely with the private datasets from individual parties, showing that DeCaPH enhances the model generalizability. FundingThis work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC, RGPIN-2020-06189 and DGECR-2020-00294), Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) AI Catalyst Grants, CIFAR AI Chair programs, Temerty Professor of AI Research and Education in Medicine, University of Toronto, Amazon, Apple, DARPA through the GARD project, Intel, Meta, the Ontario Early Researcher Award, and the Sloan Foundation. Resources used in preparing this research were provided, in part, by the Province of Ontario, the Government of Canada through CIFAR, and companies sponsoring the Vector Institute.

How to Undertake an Impactful Literature Review: Understanding Review Approaches and Guidelines for High-impact Systematic Literature Reviews

Literature reviews lay the foundation for academic investigations, especially for early career researchers. However, in the planning phase, we generally lack clarity on approaches, due to which a lot of review articles are rejected or fail to create a significant impact. The systematic literature review (SLR) is one of the important review methodologies which is increasingly becoming popular to synthesize literature in any discipline in general and management in particular. In this article, we explain the SLR methodology and provide guidelines for performing and documenting these studies. Through systematic processes, these reviews offer suggestions to synthesize literature to identify research gaps and indicate research directions. Lastly, this article serves as a guide for researchers and academics in conducting an extensive literature review.

Barriers and facilitators to establishing a clinical academic career in clinical education research in the UK: A focus group study

In a rapidly changing healthcare environment, we need a robust evidence base to inform effective education and training. This study aimed to examine factors perceived to determine career progression in clinical education research in the UK. Six online focus groups were conducted, with 35 participants from a range of medical, dental, nursing, and allied health professions who identified as aspiring or early career clinical education researchers. Transcripts underwent thematic analysis. Two themes and associated subthemes were constructed to illustrate perceived factors impacting on career development: (1) A cultural challenge from clinical norms. Challenges included differences between the epistemological assumptions of biomedical and clinical research, and the underlying philosophy of education research, which is more closely aligned with the knowledge generation of the social sciences. This led to difficulty communicating the impact of education research to patient care. There were also blurred boundaries between education delivery and research, with the latter lacking a clearly defined group identity. (2) Structures, systems and relationships for career progression. Practical considerations included time and funding (or lack thereof), the opportunity to undertake formal training, networking and role models. This research highlights a number of systemic barriers and facilitators to careers in clinical education research and offers targets of intervention to enable a sustainable academic workforce in clinical education research.

WhatsApp — what’s that?

AbstractIn this, the second iteration of our continuing ‘Harbingers of Change’ project, over 160 early career researchers (ECRs) from eight countries were questioned about their scholarly communications. Three repeat in‐depth interviews were conducted over 2 years of the pandemic to chart changes in attitude and behaviour. This paper provides interview findings (and an extensive literature review) regarding the role played by social media platforms. It was prompted by an initial review of the data that highlighted significant changes in the attitudes and behaviour of Malaysian ECRs, especially in respect to WhatsApp. Data were provided from several open‐ended interview questions about social media, a few interviewer prompts for individual platform names, and, indirectly, from ‘mentions’ of individual platforms in answers to a range of questions about scholarly communications. Findings were: (1) 15 platforms were mentioned in respect to a range of scholarly activities, most notably visibility and reach; (2) Twitter (now X) was the most mentioned, by half the ECRs; (3) ‘churn’ is a notable observation, with large gains and losses in mentions occurring between interviews; (4) large differences between countries, with Malaysian ECRs very much leading on the adoption of social media and largely responsible for the rise of WhatsApp, French ECRs showing little interest, and China a different space where WeChat reigns supreme and foreign platforms are blocked.

How do early career researchers perceive success in their fields? – report on interviews with humanists, theologians and scientists-artists in Poland

Purpose: This paper presents the Polish researchers’ opinions on success perception in science and examines the role of bibliometric and altmetric indices/metrics. It also provides respondents’ statements on how their work is evaluated at Polish universities.Methods: The data come from in-depth interviews (spring 2023) with early career researchers in Linguistics, Literary Studies, History, Philosophy, Polish studies, Theology, Arts, Music, Plastic/Fine Arts, and Film.Results: The respondents’ attachment to indices used in the periodical evaluation of scholars at Polish universities, such as the number of publications, ministerial score points, and external grants, was observed. The respondents were critical of citations as the determinant of success. They were generally not very interested in altmetrics.Value: The importance of this research (National Science Centre grant No 2022/45/B/HS2/00041), which is the Polish continuation of the two international projects (2016–2022), lies mainly in providing a platform to researchers in art and humanities, not included in earlier studies devoted to the sciences and social sciences.

2022 John C. Warner early career researcher prize

2022 John C. Warner early career researcher prize

Current methods for monitoring Pseudomonas syringae biofilm development.

This work reviews biofilm investigation techniques and highlights the benefits and drawbacks of each approach focusing especially on Pseudomonas syringae and may serve as a comprehensive guide for any early-career researchers starting with the topic of biofilm. Each approach with applications of individual microscopy and spectroscopy techniques is summarized together with characterization of Pseudomonas syringae and its role in pathogenesis.

Fostering networking opportunities and creating a community of early and mid-career clinicians and researchers within the International Society for Bipolar Disorders.

Fostering networking opportunities and creating a community of early and mid-career clinicians and researchers within the International Society for Bipolar Disorders.

Child-adult speech diarization in naturalistic conditions of preschool classrooms using room-independent ResNet model and automatic speech recognition-based re-segmentation.

Speech and language development are early indicators of overall analytical and learning ability in children. The preschool classroom is a rich language environment for monitoring and ensuring growth in young children by measuring their vocal interactions with teachers and classmates. Early childhood researchers are naturally interested in analyzing naturalistic vs controlled lab recordings to measure both quality and quantity of such interactions. Unfortunately, present-day speech technologies are not capable of addressing the wide dynamic scenario of early childhood classroom settings. Due to the diversity of acoustic events/conditions in such daylong audio streams, automated speaker diarization technology would need to be advanced to address this challenging domain for segmenting audio as well as information extraction. This study investigates alternate deep learning-based lightweight, knowledge-distilled, diarization solutions for segmenting classroom interactions of 3-5 years old children with teachers. In this context, the focus on speech-type diarization which classifies speech segments as being either from adults or children partitioned across multiple classrooms. Our lightest CNN model achieves a best F1-score of ∼76.0% on data from two classrooms, based on dev and test sets of each classroom. It is utilized with automatic speech recognition-based re-segmentation modules to perform child-adult diarization. Additionally, F1-scores are obtained for individual segments with corresponding speaker tags (e.g., adult vs child), which provide knowledge for educators on child engagement through naturalistic communications. The study demonstrates the prospects of addressing educational assessment needs through communication audio stream analysis, while maintaining both security and privacy of all children and adults. The resulting child communication metrics have been used for broad-based feedback for teachers with the help of visualizations.

Tauhi Vā, A Tongan Artistic Tradition Continues in Academic Research:

I have purposefully used a narrative approach in my review of Ka‘ili’s (2017) Marking Indigeneity: The Tongan Art of Sociospatial Relations to support my meaning making as a Tongan academic and Pasifika researcher. I considered elements of the text that worked well for me as an early career researcher and that are accessible to Tongan and non-Tongan academics alike. The Oceanian artistic traditions of time (tā) and space (vā) promoted in this book offer a continuation of ancient oral traditions into the contemporary realm of academic literature. In essence, Ka‘ili’s book brings significant understandings of the tā-vā theory into interdisciplinary research spaces and across the global landscape of Pasifika research and academic practice. This is evidenced in the more than 60 Pasifika authors’ citations of Ka‘ili’s book, to date. My recommendation of this book draws upon these facets: the accessibility of the text, the elements of the text, and the global reach of the text.

Beyond barriers, towards diversity: how hybrid student conferences can drive accessibility.

The third International Student Symposium on Animal Behaviour and Cognition (ISSABC) aimed to address barriers for early career researchers, hosting a conference both in-person and online at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). The conference, attended by 101 in-person and 79 virtual participants from 24 countries, featured 81 presentations, 29 posters, five plenary talks, three workshops, and a career development round-table discussion. A user-friendly website and digital platforms facilitated communication and real-time discussions between in-person and online participants. Transparent fund management, support from sponsors and societies, and sustainable practices ensured financial accountability and minimised environmental impact. The conference emphasised sustainability measures, including eco-friendly catering and local reusable mugs. Future organisers of similar events are encouraged to prioritise local representation, plan contingencies, select plenary speakers rigorously, and employ effective marketing. With this meeting review, we highlight how hybrid conferences like the third ISSABC, through innovative approaches and sustainable practices, enhance accessibility, inclusivity, and empower the next generation of scientists.

Young children's right to be heard on the quality of their education: Addressing potential misunderstandings in the context of early childhood education

AbstractIn early childhood education many researchers and professionals across the world have embraced the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child's requirement to include young children in decision‐making. In the context of ongoing discussion about young children's capacity to share their views and opinions about matters affecting them, there is often a focus on demonstrating ‘evidence’ that young children can participate in decision‐making as capable meaning‐makers in their own lives, defying traditional paternalistic approaches and assumptions. While acknowledging the important work that has been undertaken to support children's participatory rights, this article seeks to raise questions about whether understanding the right of young children to be heard, particularly in relation to the quality of their education, may have been subject to a form of ‘rights inflation’ that has extended the scope of the application of the right beyond the parameters of the legal framework and/or promoted an interpretation which exceeds what the text of the Convention can bear. In this article, we explore three possible misrepresentations relating to young children's participation in decision‐making related to the quality of education: (1) that all children can, should and want to have opportunities to share views on all matters affecting them; (2) that young children should always be allowed to learn and play freely; and (3) that children are the experts in their worlds. We do this to open up a conversation about the limits and partiality of young children's participation when viewed through the lens of children's human rights, highlighting, inter alia, the ongoing need to underscore the role of parents/guardians and professionals in enabling young children to enjoy all of their human rights, including the right to a quality education, fully.