Standard Protocols for the 3 MST Markers Evaluated

This protocol outlines the procedure developed for the EPA Gulf of Mexico grant to Harwood, Lepo and Wang to process environmental water samples via DNA extraction from membrane filters. DNA is then used in PCR-based microbial source tracking assays for human-associated Bacteroides (HBac), M. smithii (Msmithii) and human polyomavirus BK and JC (HPyVs) targets

Year 2 Report

This report covers the project from the end of the preliminary year 1 report, May 31, 2008 through May 31, 2009

Project Overview

The overarching goal of this study is to identify useful method(s) for detecting human sewage pollution in Gulf of Mexico waters and to produce protocols that are readily transferable across laboratories (standard operating procedures), such that these microbial source tracking methods can be used by laboratories across the Gulf of Mexico states. This project is a collaborative effort among several universities, including the University of South Florida, University of West Florida and University of Southern Mississippi (co‐principal investigators) as well as Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi, Texas A&M University at El Paso and Nicholls State University (collaborators)

Year 1 Report

This report covers the project from its inception (08/03/07) through May 2008

Year 3 Final Report

This report covers the project from the end of the preliminary year 2 report, June 1, 2009 through August 31, 2010. It also provides a synopsis of the accomplishments for the duration of the grant (3 years)

Contour tracking of contaminant clouds with sequential Monte Carlo methods

Contour tracking for a single source emission is addressed in this paper. This problem is solved by estimating the contour boundary positions using a set of particle filters. The use of Sequential Monte Carlo techniques enables the tracking to performed when the measurements are noisy and the tracking results also includes the estimation uncertainly. The proposed technique is illustrated for a SCIPUFF generated single emission scenario and simulation experiments showed the successful tracking throughout the tracking period

Online Localization and Tracking of Multiple Moving Speakers in Reverberant Environments

We address the problem of online localization and tracking of multiple moving speakers in reverberant environments. The paper has the following contributions. We use the direct-path relative transfer function (DP-RTF), an inter-channel feature that encodes acoustic information robust against reverberation, and we propose an online algorithm well suited for estimating DP-RTFs associated with moving audio sources. Another crucial ingredient of the proposed method is its ability to properly assign DP-RTFs to audio-source directions. Towards this goal, we adopt a maximum-likelihood formulation and we propose to use an exponentiated gradient (EG) to efficiently update source-direction estimates starting from their currently available values. The problem of multiple speaker tracking is computationally intractable because the number of possible associations between observed source directions and physical speakers grows exponentially with time. We adopt a Bayesian framework and we propose a variational approximation of the posterior filtering distribution associated with multiple speaker tracking, as well as an efficient variational expectation-maximization (VEM) solver. The proposed online localization and tracking method is thoroughly evaluated using two datasets that contain recordings performed in real environments.Comment: IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, 201