Achievements

We study the problem of how to optimise a cloud service provider's pricing policy so as to better compete with other providers. Different from previous work, we take both the evolution of the market and the competition between multiple cloud providers into consideration while optimising the pricing strategy for the provider. Inspired by the real situations in today's cloud market, we consider a situation in which there is only one provider who actively optimises his/her pricing policy, while other providers adopt a follow-up policy to match his/her price cut. To compute optimal pricing policy under the above settings, we decompose the optimisation problem into two steps:

1. When the market finally becomes saturated, we use Q-learning, a method of reinforcement learning, to derive an optimal pricing policy for the stationary market;
2. Based on the optimal policy for the stationary market, we use backward induction to derive an optimal pricing policy for the situation of competition in an evolutionary market. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (or IJCAI) is a gathering of Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers and practitioners. It is organised by the IJCAI, Inc., and has been held biennially in odd-numbered years since 1969. It is sponsored jointly by the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) Organization, and the national AI societie(s) of the host nation(s). IJCAI is a highly selective conference. A record number of 1996 papers were submitted to IJCAI-15. Of these, 575 papers (28.8%) were accepted based on their novelty, originality, clarity and impact. We are delighted that Bolei Xu, IDIC Year 2 PhD student, has his papers accepted to appear in the IJCAI 2015 proceedings with a ten-minute talk. His accepted paper titled “Optimal Pricing for the Competitive and Evolutionary Cloud Market” is co-written with his PhD supervisor Professor Guoping Qiu and his mentors in Microsoft Research Asia Dr Tao Qin and Dr Tie-Yan Liu.

Viral marketing has attracted attentions from both academics and practitioners. With the rise of user-generated content (UGC) and broadcasting networks, viral online video advertising campaigns (viral advertising in short) are an emerging trend in viral marketing. While previous literature mainly studies the influence of network structure on viral advertising, we decompose the diffusion network into individual’s sharing behaviour. Referring to the theories on emotion and social network, we propose a framework that specifies the role of emotion and social feature on individual’s sharing of online video advertisements in viral marketing campaign. This framework will be tested using real-world data extracted from online broadcasting networks in the future work.

The Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS) is an annual information systems/information technology conference which is affiliated with the Association for Information Systems. PACIS is one of the premier information systems events in the Asia Pacific region and it provides a platform for panel discussions and the presentation of peer-reviewed information systems research papers. The first PACIS conference was held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan in 2003. Since then it has been held in Australia, Korea, Malaysia and Vietnam. PACIS 2015 will held in Singapore this year, and is organised by National University of Singapore (NUS). In 2014, PACIS received 648 papers submissions and 249 papers were accepted. 1674 scholars from 42 countries also participated in PACIS 2014. PACIS 2015 received 640 papers and we are pleased that Boying Li, IDIC Year 2 PhD student, has her papers accepted for both the doctorial consortium as well as in the Social Media and Business Impact Track. Her accepted paper is titled “What Triggers Sharing in Viral Marketing? The Role of Emotion and Social Feature” is co-written with her PhD supervisors Dr Alain Chong and Dr Eugene Ch'ng.

The paper was awarded the Excellent Paper Award by the Ningbo Municipal Bureau of Education.

As the knowledge economy develops and the knowledge production pattern changes, some universities began to introduce the idea of “collaborative innovation” into doctoral education and created the collaborative innovation doctoral education mode. The mode of International Doctoral Innovation Centre in the University of Nottingham Ningbo China is a typical representative of this new education mode and shows traits of collaborative innovation across disciplines, departments and boundaries, which opened up a new road of cultivating international innovative talents.

2015 Ningbo Annual Forum of Research on Higher Education is an academic forum sponsored by the Ningbo Municipal Bureau of Education and held by the Centre for Research on Regional Higher Education Development of Ningbo University and the Ningbo Polytechnic. The purpose of this forum is to thoroughly implement the spirit of the party's eighteen plenary session, enforce the research on higher education theory, promote the reform and development of higher education and explore and solve the big theoretical and practical problems during the process of higher education development. The theme of the forum is “Idea· System· Approach: Higher Education Quality Construction”. Directors, related staff and higher education researchers from all the institutes of higher education and development planning departments in Ningbo higher education institutions attended the forum. And they had in-depth communications around this theme and vigorous discussions about relative problems.

Economy” and the academic-industry panel discussions. Two of his IDIC students, Xinyu Fu and Mengdi Li coordinated in data and visual analytics of Johnson and Johnson’s datasets during the academic-industry panel discussion session, fulfilling part of the IDIC’s objectives in applying academic knowledge to real-world industry issues.

The International Conference on Operations and Supply Chain Management (ICOSCM) series began in 2007. It is a gathering of operations and supply chain researchers and practitioners and is the official conference of the Association of Supply Chain and Operations Management (ASCOM). The 9th ICOSCM was hosted by the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. The conference theme was “Data-Driven Research for Supply Chain Management”. Apart from traditional parallel presentations, a number participants were senior executives in the industrial discussion related to challenges and applications of Big Data in their respective industry. Various academics active in Big Data research were also involved as core panel members, contributing to helping industry-practitioners in data analytics. These were organised via a number of panel discussions and keynote speech.

The new interactive scientific game has been developed by Dr Eugene Ch’ng, from the School of Computer Science at UNNC in the hope that twenty first century crowd-sourcing will shed light on what people who commemorated the dead 4000 years ago were thinking. The game will be unveiled by Dr Ch’ng at the Royal Society Summer Exhibition 2015 which is taking place in London from Tuesday June 30 to Friday July 3.

Dr Ch’ng said: “Hidden behind the game is a scientific enquiry. We want to know why people were buried in elaborate graves and what importance they attached to the landscape and other monuments around Stonehenge. The answers we get will help us understand why certain parts of the hidden landscape around Stonehenge might attract more burials or how grave goods and their importance affect burial locations”.

More information is available at How would you like to be buried – at Stonehenge?

Tim Standbrook, Consul Science and Innovation, British Consulate-General Shanghai attended the opening ceremony and addressed for the workshop. Professor Wen-quan Tao, Professor Darren Robinson and Dedao Gu gave keynote speeches at the workshop. More than 100 national and international experts, academics, industrial guests and PhD students attended the workshop. The theme of the workshop was to explore the development of smart energy technologies based on heat transfer enhancement technology, improving the efficiency of energy technologies in the construction of smart city, and to encourage industry-university-institute collaboration. 

Alongside the workshop a Faculty of Science and Engineering PhD Innovation Competition and IDIC PhD Research Showcase was organised in order to encourage students’ entrepreneurial initiatives, raise IDIC's profile, enhance academic communication and industrial links by involving academics and industries and therefore promoting the commercialisation of technology and contributing to industry advancement in Ningbo. 

41 IDIC PhD posters were showcased at the workshop. Academics, industrial collaborators and students have exchanged ideas and knowledge on these PhD projects.  Three PhD innovation projects were awarded with 150,000 RMB as research funding to support their projects (the winning projects are below). This entrepreneurial experience laid a solid foundation for students to initiate their own business in the future.

Winning groups of PhD Innovation Competition

Prize	Project title	Members
First	Development of swirl nasal filter for protection from particulate matter	Guozhen Li, Jie Dong, Kaiqi Shi, Jiefeng Yan
Second	Smart multifunction smart device for human alertness - wearable "SOZY W&D glove"	Sannia Mareta, Oluleke Bamodu, Yiyi Wu, Zhuge Yan
Third	Development of low VOCs waterborne coating containing ionic liquids with multi-functions	Yiyang Kong, Zhen Wei, Jie Niu