Prof Sally Smith

PhD
Doctorate

Level Doctorate

Student Mr Fredrick Mbuya

Status Current

Part Time No

Years 2024

Project Title Assessing the early impact of data skills training initiatives

Awarding Institution Edinburgh Napier University

Director of Studies Khristin Fabian

Second Supervisor Sally Smith

Level	Doctorate
Student	Mr Fredrick Mbuya
Status	Current
Part Time	No
Years	2024
Project Title	Assessing the early impact of data skills training initiatives
Awarding Institution	Edinburgh Napier University
Director of Studies	Khristin Fabian
Second Supervisor	Sally Smith

Inclusion: Understanding the impact of higher education policy
Doctorate

Level Doctorate

Student Tatiana Tungli

Status Current

Part Time No

Years 2023

Project Title Inclusion: Understanding the impact of higher education policy

Project Description The primary aim of this research is to understand the impact of current Higher Education Policy on the overall university experience of students with disabilities in Scotland. The focus is specifically on undergraduate students within STEM-related subjects.

Awarding Institution Edinburgh Napier University

Director of Studies Debbie Meharg

Second Supervisor Sally Smith

Level	Doctorate
Student	Tatiana Tungli
Status	Current
Part Time	No
Years	2023
Project Title	Inclusion: Understanding the impact of higher education policy
Project Description	The primary aim of this research is to understand the impact of current Higher Education Policy on the overall university experience of students with disabilities in Scotland. The focus is specifically on undergraduate students within STEM-related subjects.
Awarding Institution	Edinburgh Napier University
Director of Studies	Debbie Meharg
Second Supervisor	Sally Smith

PhD
Doctorate

Level Doctorate

Student Maria Cecil

Status Current

Part Time No

Years 2022 - 2025

Project Title Gendered information landscapes and their impact on routes into and through apprenticeships

Project Description The aim is to understand the myriad sources of gender stereotyping that impact on young people’s choices around apprenticeships and work-based learning (WBL). First, by a policy and literature review around occupational segregation in apprenticeships, including data from other countries; then investigating young people’s situated experience of information related to apprenticeships and its influence on their choices. This will support Skills Development Scotland to build policies and strategies to promote equality in apprenticeships.
Scottish apprenticeships provide important new learner pathways, incorporating work experience, potentially from S5 to degree level. However, subjects, careers, and apprenticeships themselves are often seen in gendered terms, by potential apprentices and those involved in advice, recruitment, and delivery. Crucial sectors, such as STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and HEED (health care, elementary education, and the domestic sphere) suffer from self-propagating gender imbalances, reflected in the related apprenticeships. Meanwhile, apprenticeships tend to be seen as stereotypically male, despite extensive modernisation.
By synthesising extant research and gathering new data, this research will map the information landscapes young people in Scotland move through, in terms of apprenticeships. The information landscapes paradigm recognises that people encounter and pay attention to different forms and sources of information, tacit or explicit, formal or informal, etc. Differences may be due to social groups, such as class or gender, or may be individual. Salient information is as likely to come from YouTube as from a careers advisor. Using a mixed methods approach, empirical data will be gathered from young people, including apprentices, about their experiences and perspectives, looking back on their choices and influences. The mapping paradigm encourages participatory and creative methods.
This doctoral study will provide a rich and accessible depiction of young people’s situated experience of gender stereotyping in terms of apprenticeships, informing effective strategies to promote workplace equality.

Awarding Institution Edinburgh Napier University

Director of Studies Ella Taylor-Smith

Second Supervisor Sally Smith

Additional Supervisor Colin Smith

Level	Doctorate
Student	Maria Cecil
Status	Current
Part Time	No
Years	2022 - 2025
Project Title	Gendered information landscapes and their impact on routes into and through apprenticeships
Project Description	The aim is to understand the myriad sources of gender stereotyping that impact on young people’s choices around apprenticeships and work-based learning (WBL). First, by a policy and literature review around occupational segregation in apprenticeships, including data from other countries; then investigating young people’s situated experience of information related to apprenticeships and its influence on their choices. This will support Skills Development Scotland to build policies and strategies to promote equality in apprenticeships. Scottish apprenticeships provide important new learner pathways, incorporating work experience, potentially from S5 to degree level. However, subjects, careers, and apprenticeships themselves are often seen in gendered terms, by potential apprentices and those involved in advice, recruitment, and delivery. Crucial sectors, such as STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and HEED (health care, elementary education, and the domestic sphere) suffer from self-propagating gender imbalances, reflected in the related apprenticeships. Meanwhile, apprenticeships tend to be seen as stereotypically male, despite extensive modernisation. By synthesising extant research and gathering new data, this research will map the information landscapes young people in Scotland move through, in terms of apprenticeships. The information landscapes paradigm recognises that people encounter and pay attention to different forms and sources of information, tacit or explicit, formal or informal, etc. Differences may be due to social groups, such as class or gender, or may be individual. Salient information is as likely to come from YouTube as from a careers advisor. Using a mixed methods approach, empirical data will be gathered from young people, including apprentices, about their experiences and perspectives, looking back on their choices and influences. The mapping paradigm encourages participatory and creative methods. This doctoral study will provide a rich and accessible depiction of young people’s situated experience of gender stereotyping in terms of apprenticeships, informing effective strategies to promote workplace equality.
Awarding Institution	Edinburgh Napier University
Director of Studies	Ella Taylor-Smith
Second Supervisor	Sally Smith
Additional Supervisor	Colin Smith

PhD
Doctorate

Level Doctorate

Student Dr Zakwan Jaroucheh

Status Complete

Part Time No

Years 2008 - 2012

Project Title An approach to cross-domain situation-based context management and highly adaptive services in pervasive environments

Project Description The concept of context-awareness is widely used in mobile and pervasive computing to reduce explicit user input and customization through the increased use of implicit input. It is considered to be the corner stone technique for developing pervasive computing applications that are flexible, adaptable, and capable of acting autonomously on behalf of the user. This requires the applications to take advantage of the context in order to infer the user’s objective and relevant environmental features. However, context-awareness introduces various software engineering challenges such as the need to provide developers with middleware infrastructure to acquire the context information available in distributed domains, reasoning about contextual situations that span one or more domains, and providing tools to facilitate building context-aware adaptive services.
The separation of concerns is a promising approach in the design of such applications where the core logic is designed and implemented separately from the context handling and adaptation logics. In this respect, the aim of this dissertation is to introduce a unified approach for developing such applications and software infrastructure for efficient context management that together address these software engineering challenges and facilitate the design and implementation tasks associated with such context-aware services. The approach is based around a set of new conceptual foundations, including a context modelling technique that describes context at different levels of abstraction, domain-based context management middleware architecture, cross-domain contextual situation recognition, and a generative mechanism for context-aware service adaptation.
Prototype tool has been built as an implementation of the proposed unified approach. Case studies have been done to illustrate and evaluate the approach, in terms of its effectiveness and applicability in real-life application scenarios to provide users with personalized services.

Awarding Institution Edinburgh Napier University

Director of Studies Xiaodong Liu

Second Supervisor Sally Smith

Thesis An approach to cross-domain situation-based context management and highly adaptive services in pervasive environments

Level	Doctorate
Student	Dr Zakwan Jaroucheh
Status	Complete
Part Time	No
Years	2008 - 2012
Project Title	An approach to cross-domain situation-based context management and highly adaptive services in pervasive environments
Project Description	The concept of context-awareness is widely used in mobile and pervasive computing to reduce explicit user input and customization through the increased use of implicit input. It is considered to be the corner stone technique for developing pervasive computing applications that are flexible, adaptable, and capable of acting autonomously on behalf of the user. This requires the applications to take advantage of the context in order to infer the user’s objective and relevant environmental features. However, context-awareness introduces various software engineering challenges such as the need to provide developers with middleware infrastructure to acquire the context information available in distributed domains, reasoning about contextual situations that span one or more domains, and providing tools to facilitate building context-aware adaptive services. The separation of concerns is a promising approach in the design of such applications where the core logic is designed and implemented separately from the context handling and adaptation logics. In this respect, the aim of this dissertation is to introduce a unified approach for developing such applications and software infrastructure for efficient context management that together address these software engineering challenges and facilitate the design and implementation tasks associated with such context-aware services. The approach is based around a set of new conceptual foundations, including a context modelling technique that describes context at different levels of abstraction, domain-based context management middleware architecture, cross-domain contextual situation recognition, and a generative mechanism for context-aware service adaptation. Prototype tool has been built as an implementation of the proposed unified approach. Case studies have been done to illustrate and evaluate the approach, in terms of its effectiveness and applicability in real-life application scenarios to provide users with personalized services.
Awarding Institution	Edinburgh Napier University
Director of Studies	Xiaodong Liu
Second Supervisor	Sally Smith
Thesis	An approach to cross-domain situation-based context management and highly adaptive services in pervasive environments

PhD
Doctorate

Level Doctorate

Student Abi Truebig

Status Current

Part Time Yes

Years 2019

Project Title Transactional Distance Theory and Needs in Online Professional Development

Awarding Institution Edinburgh Napier University

Director of Studies Sally Smith

Second Supervisor Khristin Fabian

Prof Sally Smith's Supervisions (5)