An Evaluation of Classification and Outlier Detection Algorithms

This paper evaluates algorithms for classification and outlier detection accuracies in temporal data. We focus on algorithms that train and classify rapidly and can be used for systems that need to incorporate new data regularly. Hence, we compare the accuracy of six fast algorithms using a range of well-known time-series datasets. The analyses demonstrate that the choice of algorithm is task and data specific but that we can derive heuristics for choosing. Gradient Boosting Machines are generally best for classification but there is no single winner for outlier detection though Gradient Boosting Machines (again) and Random Forest are better. Hence, we recommend running evaluations of a number of algorithms using our heuristics

A Binary Neural Shape Matcher using Johnson Counters and Chain Codes

In this paper, we introduce a neural network-based shape matching algorithm that uses Johnson Counter codes coupled with chain codes. Shape matching is a fundamental requirement in content-based image retrieval systems. Chain codes describe shapes using sequences of numbers. They are simple and flexible. We couple this power with the efficiency and flexibility of a binary associative-memory neural network. We focus on the implementation details of the algorithm when it is constructed using the neural network. We demonstrate how the binary associative-memory neural network can index and match chain codes where the chain code elements are represented by Johnson codes

How does access to Assistive Technology mediate recourse to Disability Justice for urban poor people? A study centring the experiences of disabled slum dwellers in Freetown, Sierra Leone

This thesis addresses the central question of the role of Assistive Technology (AT) in mediating recourse to disability justice, centring the experiences of disabled slum dwellers in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Taking evidence from six datasets collected across four years, the study maps the local experience to the national and global picture offering a strategic reflection on the current state of work in the sector. The evidence from Sierra Leone (SL) reveals that quality AT is missing for almost all poor, disabled people. A novel finding from the research is that the lack of AT is most apparent for those who live in mainstream mixed urban settlements where disability identity is stigmatised and often hidden. Disabled people living together in an autonomously-organised settlement did – mostly - have AT, indicating further investigation into the role of collective action and autonomous organisation would be fruitful. Picking up themes emerging from the SL evidence globally, the study reveals that the AT interventions of core actors do not align with a single common operational framework. Borrowing from Amartya Sen’s seminal provocation Equality of What? (Sen, 1980), AT for what? becomes a pertinent question in the face of this dissensus. The study finds that the provision of AT within an operational framework of Disability Justice would better ensure the needs and aspirations of poor disabled people were prioritised in investment and priority setting. The thesis proposes, and tests, the potential configuration of a disability justice framework, as a basis future work can build from. Taken as a whole, the evidence presented in this study suggests that the claims for disability justice (including access to AT) of urban poor disabled people are often subjugated to background conditions, sitting behind the life-and-death claims for the basic need of life for the whole community (water, shelter, food). Therefore, any framework for disability justice must itself be linked to a broader push for justice for all poor people to be meaningful and impactful. Similarly, any broad social justice movement should place disability justice at its heart if it intends to drive for progressive change that benefits all. Finally, this study finds that AT is more than a commonplace element of the struggle for justice due to its fundamental necessity as an enabler of participation. The evidence suggests that AT can be viewed as a transitional demand of Disability Justice

Voice-hearing and emotion: an empirical study

This survivor‒researcher-led project investigates emotional aspects of the experience of hearing voices in the general English adult population. Although voice-hearing is strongly associated with distress in clinical as well as everyday contexts, surprisingly little is known about the complexity and variety of emotions experienced by voice-hearers and the significance of space and spatial metaphors in making sense of them. This thesis was inspired by the Maastricht approach to working with voices developed by the Dutch social psychiatrist Marius Romme and the researcher Sandra Escher. Romme and Escher’s analysis of the links between voice-hearing, people’s experiences of trauma and their emotions informed my choice of qualitative and creative methods to explore the emotional aspects of hearing voices. This empirical investigation is supported by an analysis of clinical and cultural accounts of the relations between voice-hearing, emotions and trauma, drawing on sources from the past and the present. I conducted thirty semi-structured interviews with people who hear voices, recruited largely through two community mental health centres in different geographical locations over a period of twenty months. Data were thematically analysed. My findings build on existing research, which shows that the emotions associated with hearing voices relate to the kind and quality of relationship that participants have with their voices and the significance of these relationships within an individual’s life context. Particular attention was paid in this study to voice-hearers’ use of creative and embodied practices in managing the relationships with their voices, and the importance of acknowledging the effects of cultural dislocation as well as trauma in shaping voice-hearing experiences. My thesis shows that participants used a variety of techniques in order to assert real or imaginary boundaries in their interior and exterior worlds, with varying degrees of success. Drawing on work in cultural and emotional geography, this thesis makes an original contribution to the growing interdisciplinary literature about voice-hearing by demonstrating the significance of space and spatial metaphors in voice-hearers’ relationships with their voices

Examining Arctic Melt Pond Dynamics via High Resolution Satellite Imagery

The Arctic Ocean is a rapidly changing environment, and a key observational system for monitoring climate change. The Arctic is going under a rapid transition from thicker, multi-year ice, to thinner first-year ice, that may have many potential consequences. As first year Arctic sea ice begins to retreat in the spring and early summer, melting snow and ice form ponds on the surface- “melt ponds”. These melt ponds increase light transmission to the water column, resulting in warming and increased primary production under the ice. Recent advances in high resolution satellite imagery now allow us to monitor the development and propagation of melt ponds from space. 14 Worldview images (privately owned) of first year ice in the Chukchi Sea with sub-meter scale spatial resolution were recorded from June and July 2018 and classified into 4 distinct classes- Un-ponded Ice, Dark Melt Pond, Light Melt Pond, and Open Water. Classification data were analyzed for melt pond abundance (pond fraction) and size. Pond growth can be described by either a linear or logistic growth function (r2 = 0.86). Additionally, previously recorded light transmission values can be used to create an under-ice light availability budget based on class distribution data. This allows for estimates of primary production and the prediction of below ice phytoplankton blooms. As the Arctic continues to experience an extreme regime shift, increased monitoring of melt ponds and other rapidly changing systems will be essentialhttps://digitalcommons.odu.edu/gradposters2021_sciences/1011/thumbnail.jp

Implementing Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Strategies Using Children\u27s Literature in the Urban Multicultural Preschool: Examining Teachers\u27 Language Dialect Beliefs and Practices

This study examined preschool teachers\u27 implementation of culturally and linguistically responsive strategies using children\u27s literature in an urban multicultural preschool. Through a qualitative phenomenological design, this research aimed to expand understandings of language dialect and achievement in early childhood education and examine preschool teachers\u27 knowledge, beliefs, and instructional practices regarding identified home languages—African American Vernacular English and Hispanic American English, Academic Language, and code switching. The phenomenon under investigation was early childhood professionals\u27 beliefs and frequency of home language dialect use within the classroom and implementation of culturally and linguistically responsive strategies within the classrooms of an urban multicultural preschool before and after receiving targeted professional development using children\u27s books. The participants in this study included five preschool teachers and one preschool center director within the same private preschool center located in an urban city within the southeastern region of the United States. Semi-structured pre- and post-interviews, classroom observations using descriptive and reflective field notes, and targeted professional development sessions were conducted in order to capture the essence of the phenomenon within this preschool setting and to develop textural descriptions of the participants\u27 engagement and experiences within the study. The investigation revealed that knowledge of home language features, academic language and code switching, the use of home language features and code switching, teacher perspectives regarding culturally and linguistically responsive instruction, and cultural and linguistic influence of parents and teachers are key factors in the frequency and nature of the implementation of culturally and linguistically responsive strategies within the multicultural preschool. Further, as teachers\u27 language dialect knowledge of home language, academic language, and code switching increased, the nature of instructional practices shifted to an affirmative and validating perspective from an initial deficit/ non-affirmative perspective at the outset of the study. Implications for research and practice indicate the need to consider teachers\u27 foundational cultural and linguistic knowledge of the children in their classrooms when teachers are tasked with implementing culturally and linguistically diverse instructional practices

Assistive Technology (AT), for What?

Amartya Sen’s seminal Tanner lecture: Equality of What? began a contestation on social justice and human wellbeing that saw a new human development paradigm emerge—the capability approach (CA)—which has been influential ever since. Following interviews with leading global assistive technology (AT) stakeholders, and users, this paper takes inspiration from Sen’s core question and posits, AT for what? arguing that AT should be understood as a mechanism to achieve the things that AT users’ value. Significantly, our research found no commonly agreed operational global framework for (disability) justice within which leading AT stakeholders were operating. Instead, actors were loosely aligned through funding priorities and the CRPD. We suggest that this raises the possibility for (welcome and needed) incoming actors to diverge from efficiently designed collective action, due to perverse incentives enabled by unanchored interventions. The Global Report on Assistive Technology (GReAT) helps, greatly! However, we find there are still vital gaps in coordination; as technology advances, and AT proliferates, no longer can the device-plus-service approach suffice. Rather, those of us interested in human flourishing might explore locating AT access within an operational global framework for disability justice, which recognizes AT as a mechanism to achieve broader aims, linked to people’s capabilities to choose what they can do and be

An Evaluation of Phonetic Spell Checkers

In the work reported here, we describe a phonetic spell-checking algorithm integrating aspects of Soundex and Phonix. We increase the number of letter codes compared to Soundex and Phonix. We also integrate phonetic rules but use far less than Phonix where retrieval may be slow due to the computational cost of comparing the input to a large list of transformation rules. Our algorithm aims to repair spelling errors where the user has substituted homophones in place of the correct spelling. We evaluate our algorithm by comparing it to three alternative spell-checking algorithms and three benchmark spell checkers (MS Word 97 & 2000 and UNIX `ispell') using a list of phonetic spelling errors. We find that our approach has superior recall (percentage of correct matches retrieved) to the alternative approaches although the higher recall is at the expense of precision (number of possible matches retrieved). We intend our phonetic spell checker to be integrated into an existing spell checker so the precision will be improved by integration thus high recall is the aim for our approach in this paper

Prior cigarette smoke exposure does not affect acute post-stroke outcomes in mice

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is currently the third leading cause of death globally and is characterized by airflow limitation that is progressive and not fully reversible. Cigarette smoking is the major cause of COPD. Fifty percent of deaths in the COPD population are due to a cardiovascular event and it is now recognised that COPD is a risk factor for stroke. Whether COPD increases stroke severity has not been explored. The aim of this study was to investigate whether functional and histological endpoints of stroke outcomes in mice after transient middle cerebral artery occlusion (tMCAo) were more severe in mice exposed to cigarette smoke (CS). 7-week-old male C57BL/6 mice were exposed to room air or CS generated from 9 cigarettes/day, 5 days/week for 2, 8 and 12 weeks. Following air or CS exposure, mice underwent tMCAO surgery with an ischaemic period of 30–40 min or sham surgery. Mice were euthanised 24 h following the induction of ischaemia and bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF), lungs and brains collected. Mice exposed to CS for 2 weeks and subjected to a stroke had similar BALF macrophages to air-exposed and stroke mice. However, CS plus stroke mice had significantly more BALF total cells, neutrophils and lymphocytes than air plus stroke mice. Mice exposed to CS for 8 and 12 weeks had significantly greater BALF total cells, macrophages, neutrophils and lymphocytes than air-exposed mice, but stroke did not affect CS-induced BALF cellularity. Prior CS exposure did not worsen stroke-induced neurological deficit scores, reduced foregrip strength, infarct and oedema volumes. Collectively, we found that although CS exposure caused significant BALF inflammation, it did not worsen acute post-stroke outcomes in mice. This data suggests that while patients with COPD are at increased risk of stroke, it may not translate to COPD patients having more severe stroke outcomes

A Binary Neural Network Framework for Attribute Selection and Prediction

In this paper, we introduce an implementation of the attribute selection algorithm, Correlation-based Feature Selection (CFS) integrated with our k-nearest neighbour (k-NN) framework. Binary neural networks underpin our k-NN and allow us to create a unified framework for attribute selection, prediction and classification. We apply the framework to a real world application of predicting bus journey times from traffic sensor data and show how attribute selection can both speed our k-NN and increase the prediction accuracy by removing noise and redundant attributes from the data