Participant profile

Doctoral candidates (PhDers) of the UPV/EHU, from any PhD programme in any discipline, full-time or part-time, and in any year of PhDing.

Calendar

March / April 2025 in all three UPV/EHU Campus sites

Duration / Timetable

13 hours (four three-and-a-quarter hour classes, one class per week over four weeks)

Time: 10:00 to 13:15

Attendance Requirement

To successfully complete the course PhDers will be required to attend all of all four classes, and contribute to all three set practical work submissions and final class group (see points 3 and 5 of the Basic regulations for participation in transversal training activities organised by the Doctoral School).

Language

English

Modality

A real-classroom

Pre-requisites

All classes will be conducted in English and you will be expected to use and work in English during the clases. A good level of confidence of working in English is therefore recommended.  But your English does not need to be perfect, just good enough, and will benefit from this practice.

Location and dates

Speaker, Trainer and Profile

Tim Smithers: I am a designer, researcher, and teacher. My early research was on computational methods for structural design and analysis, including parallel hardware and parallel algorithms for doing this. Since then I have mostly worked in AI in Design research and in Behaviour based robotics, but Ihave also worked, with others, on research topics in the Arts, Engineerings, Humanities, and Sciences. This has involved working with different people from different disciplines, in different collaborations, large and small, and, in different research groups and Labs in different parts of the world. I have long been interested in the practices of good research, and in how to help PhDers learn these needed practices. Since 2010 I have worked as a freelance Researcher and Teacher, designing and teaching courses on the Foundations of Research Practices for mixed discipline groups of PhDers, and on helping research group leaders design their research programmes and strengthen their research practices, and occasionally I do things for the Research Executive Agency (REA) of the EU Commission. I still design things and do some research.

More about my work experience is described on my LinkedIn profile page and many of my publications are on Academia.

Group size

There is a maximum of 18 students in Donostia-San Sebastián and in Leioa, and 15 in Vitoria-Gasteiz.

Registration

Objectives

The objective of the OMR2025 course are to set out the basic questions about what makes an observation a good enough observation for research, and what making good measurements for research involves, and how to understand how this can be incorporated into effective observation and measurement practices for research, across all the research areas and topics in the Arts, Engineerings, Humanities, and Sciences.

A further objective of this course is to provide an opportunity for PhDers to know more of the research practices of people working in different disciplines, on different topics, in different ways, and to engage in useful and interesting discussion about what is similar and what is different in all this research.

Competences to be acquired by the doctoral student

Observations and measurements are essential for the construction of reliable and robust new knowledge and understanding, in all research disciplines, not just in the Engineerings and Sciences.  Researchers in the Arts and Humanities also need to make and use observations and measurements.

The particular knowledge and skills needed to make careful observations and measurements is properly found in the particular research disciplines that make them, and usually involve particular practices that use specialised observation and measuring techniques.

There are, however, a set of basic concepts and concerns common to all observation and measurement making in research. You will acquire a sound and critical understanding of these, and how they show up in the observation and measurement making in different research disciplines.  This will provide you with a needed foundation to your successful observation and measurement making and using in your PhD research.In accordance with the

Personal Training Plan:

• Systematic understanding of a field of study and mastery of research skills and methods related to that field.
• Ability to conceive, design or create, implement and adopt a substantial process of research or creation.
• Ability to contribute to the expansion of the frontiers of knowledge through original research.
• Ability to critically analyse, evaluate and synthesise new and complex ideas.
• Ability to communicate with the academic and scientific community and with society in general about their fields of knowledge in the modes and languages in common use in their international scientific community.
• Ability to promote, in academic and professional contexts, scientific, technological, social, artistic or cultural progress within a knowledge-based society.

Format

The course is composed of four three-hour classes run over four weeks, with a 15 minute break about mid-way through each class.  Practical work -- which will involve set readings and practical exercises in the building of particular SoA elements, organisation and structure -- will be done in groups of three or four PhDers from the same class group.  This will be set each week to be completed and presented for the following week: three in total.  This practical work will need between four to five hours each week, including working with the other people in your group.

All classes will work as seminars, and include both presented material and open discussion.  So, PhDers should come prepared to make their own notes, and actively engage in, and contribute to, each class.

Content

The first three classes of this course cover the following aspects of making and using models in research.

• [1] Introduction to the basic idea of observation and measurement — to map observations into well defined scales of quantities with units — and a review of the main ways observations and measurements have been understood in different disciplines, and at different times.
• [2] Introduction and discussion of the Model-based Epistemology of Measurement — a recent and important development for measurement practices — and how this extends good observation making with the needed conditions to make an observation a reliable and usable measurement.
• [3] A review of examples of observations and measurement in different kinds of research, and how they fit a model-based epistemology, together with discussions about order from randomness, accuracy, precision, and calibration, in measurement.

In the fourth, and last, class each practical work group will make a short presentation of what they did for each of the three set practicals, followed by some questions and discussion of what they present.

See more

Foundations of Research Practices

FRP Words of Recommendation : "What PhDers say ..."

This course is offered in collaboration with Euskampus Fundazioa.