ENHANCING USERS’ EXPERIENCE WITH SMART MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

The aim of this thesis is to investigate mobile guides for use with smartphones. Mobile guides have been successfully used to provide information, personalisation and navigation for the user. The researcher also wanted to ascertain how and in what ways mobile guides can enhance users' experience. This research involved designing and developing web based applications to run on smartphones. Four studies were conducted, two of which involved testing of the particular application. The applications tested were a museum mobile guide application and a university mobile guide mapping application. Initial testing examined the prototype work for the ‘Chronology of His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah’ application. The results were used to assess the potential of using similar mobile guides in Brunei Darussalam’s museums. The second study involved testing of the ‘Kent LiveMap’ application for use at the University of Kent. Students at the university tested this mapping application, which uses crowdsourcing of information to provide live data. The results were promising and indicate that users' experience was enhanced when using the application. Overall results from testing and using the two applications that were developed as part of this thesis show that mobile guides have the potential to be implemented in Brunei Darussalam’s museums and on campus at the University of Kent. However, modifications to both applications are required to fulfil their potential and take them beyond the prototype stage in order to be fully functioning and commercially viable

Chaperone driven polymer translocation through Nanopore: spatial distribution and binding energy

Chaperones are binding proteins which work as a driving force to bias the biopolymer translocation by binding to it near the pore and preventing its backsliding. Chaperones may have different spatial distribution. Recently we show the importance of their spatial distribution in translocation and how it effects on sequence dependency of the translocation time. Here we focus on homopolymers and exponential distribution. As a result of the exponential distribution of chaperones, energy dependency of the translocation time will changed and one see a minimum in translocation time versus effective energy curve. The same trend can be seen in scaling exponent of time versus polymer length, $\beta$ ($T\sim\beta$). Interestingly in some special cases e.g. chaperones of size $\lambda=6$ and with exponential distribution rate of $\alpha=5$, the minimum reaches even to amount of less than $1$ ($\beta<1$). We explain the possibility of this rare result and base on a theoretical discussion we show that by taking into account the velocity dependency of the translocation on polymer length, one could truly predict the amount of this minimum

Superpixel Based Segmentation and Classification of Polyps in Wireless Capsule Endoscopy

Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) is a relatively new technology to record the entire GI trace, in vivo. The large amounts of frames captured during an examination cause difficulties for physicians to review all these frames. The need for reducing the reviewing time using some intelligent methods has been a challenge. Polyps are considered as growing tissues on the surface of intestinal tract not inside of an organ. Most polyps are not cancerous, but if one becomes larger than a centimeter, it can turn into cancer by great chance. The WCE frames provide the early stage possibility for detection of polyps. Here, the application of simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) superpixel for segmentation of polyps in WCE frames is evaluated. Different SLIC superpixel numbers are examined to find the highest sensitivity for detection of polyps. The SLIC superpixel segmentation is promising to improve the results of previous studies. Finally, the superpixels were classified using a support vector machine (SVM) by extracting some texture and color features. The classification results showed a sensitivity of 91%.Comment: This paper has been published in SPMB 201

Type D Solutions of 3D New Massive Gravity

In a recent reformulation of three-dimensional new massive gravity (NMG), the field equations of the theory consist of a massive (tensorial) Klein-Gordon type equation with a curvature-squared source term and a constraint equation. Using this framework, we present all algebraic type D solutions of NMG with constant and nonconstant scalar curvatures. For constant scalar curvature, they include homogeneous anisotropic solutions which encompass both solutions originating from topologically massive gravity (TMG), Bianchi types II, VIII, IX, and those of non-TMG origin, Bianchi types VI_{0} and VII_{0} . For a special relation between the cosmological and mass parameters, \lambda=m^2, they also include conformally flat solutions, and in particular those being locally isometric to the previously-known Kaluza-Klein type AdS_2xS^1 or dS_2x S^1 solutions. For nonconstant scalar curvature, all the solutions are conformally flat and exist only for \lambda=m^2 . We find two general metrics which possess at least one Killing vector and comprise all such solutions. We also discuss some properties of these solutions, delineating among them black hole type solutions.Comment: Dedicated to the memory of Yavuz Nutku; 28 pages, REVTe