Designing appliances for mobile commerce and retailtainment

In the emerging world of the new consumer and the `anytime, anywhere' mobile commerce, appliances are located at the collision point of the retailer and consumer agendas. The consequence of this is twofold: on the one hand appliances that were previously considered plain and utilitarian become entertainment devices and on the other, for the effective design of consumer appliances it becomes paramount to employ multidisciplinary expertise. In this paper, we discuss consumer perceptions of a retailtainment commerce system developed in collaboration between interactivity designers, information systems engineers, hardware and application developers, marketing strategists, product development teams, social scientists and retail professionals. We discuss the approached employed for the design of the consumer experience and its implications for appliance design

Face flow

In this paper, we propose a method for the robust and efficient computation of multi-frame optical flow in an expressive sequence of facial images. We formulate a novel energy minimisation problem for establishing dense correspondences between a neutral template and every frame of a sequence. We exploit the highly correlated nature of human expressions by representing dense facial motion using a deformation basis. Furthermore, we exploit the even higher correlation between deformations in a given input sequence by imposing a low-rank prior on the coefficients of the deformation basis, yielding temporally consistent optical flow. Our proposed model-based formulation, in conjunction with the inverse compositional strategy and low-rank matrix optimisation that we adopt, leads to a highly efficient algorithm for calculating facial flow. As experimental evaluation, we show quantitative experiments on a challenging novel benchmark of face sequences, with dense ground truth optical flow provided by motion capture data. We also provide qualitative results on a real sequence displaying fast motion and occlusions. Extensive quantitative and qualitative comparisons demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art optical flow and dense non-rigid registration techniques, whilst running an order of magnitude faster

Structure tensor total variation

This is the final version of the article. Available from Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics via the DOI in this record.We introduce a novel generic energy functional that we employ to solve inverse imaging problems within a variational framework. The proposed regularization family, termed as structure tensor total variation (STV), penalizes the eigenvalues of the structure tensor and is suitable for both grayscale and vector-valued images. It generalizes several existing variational penalties, including the total variation seminorm and vectorial extensions of it. Meanwhile, thanks to the structure tensor’s ability to capture first-order information around a local neighborhood, the STV functionals can provide more robust measures of image variation. Further, we prove that the STV regularizers are convex while they also satisfy several invariance properties w.r.t. image transformations. These properties qualify them as ideal candidates for imaging applications. In addition, for the discrete version of the STV functionals we derive an equivalent definition that is based on the patch-based Jacobian operator, a novel linear operator which extends the Jacobian matrix. This alternative definition allow us to derive a dual problem formulation. The duality of the problem paves the way for employing robust tools from convex optimization and enables us to design an efficient and parallelizable optimization algorithm. Finally, we present extensive experiments on various inverse imaging problems, where we compare our regularizers with other competing regularization approaches. Our results are shown to be systematically superior, both quantitatively and visually

Towards longitudinal data analytics in Parkinson's Disease

The CloudUPDRS app has been developed as a Class I med- ical device to assess the severity of motor symptoms for Parkinson’s Disease using a fully automated data capture and signal analysis pro- cess based on the standard Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale. In this paper we report on the design and development of the signal pro- cessing and longitudinal data analytics microservices developed to carry out these assessments and to forecast the long-term development of the disease. We also report on early findings from the application of these techniques in the wild with a cohort of early adopters

Magnetospheric considerations for solar system ice state

The current lattice configuration of the water ice on the surfaces of the inner satellites of Jupiter and Saturn is likely shaped by many factors. But laboratory experiments have found that energetic proton irradiation can cause a transition in the structure of pure water ice from crystalline to amorphous. It is not known to what extent this process is competitive with other processes in solar system contexts. For example, surface regions that are rich in water ice may be too warm for this effect to be important, even if the energetic proton bombardment rate is very high. In this paper, we make predictions, based on particle flux levels and other considerations, about where in the magnetospheres of Jupiter and Saturn the ∼MeV proton irradiation mechanism should be most relevant. Our results support the conclusions of Hansen and McCord (2004), who related relative level of radiation on the three outer Galilean satellites to the amorphous ice content within the top 1 mm of surface. We argue here that if magnetospheric effects are considered more carefully, the correlation is even more compelling. Crystalline ice is by far the dominant ice state detected on the inner Saturnian satellites and, as we show here, the flux of bombarding energetic protons onto these bodies is much smaller than at the inner Jovian satellites. Therefore, the ice on the Saturnian satellites also corroborates the correlation

Increased prevalence of irritable bowel syndrome in patients with bronchial asthma

AbstractIrritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is one of the most common diseases of the gastrointestinal tract. IBS may represent a primary disorder of gastrointestinal motility, accompanied with motor dysfunction in various extraintestinal sites. Recent studies suggest that IBS is associated with bronchial hyper-responsiveness and bronchial asthma might be more prevalent in IBS patients than in control subjects. The aim of our study was to assess the prevalence of IBS in a cohort of asthmatic patients. We evaluated 150 patients with bronchial asthma (71 males and 79 females, aged 45.1±14.9 years) and two control groups including 130 patients with other pulmonary disorder and 120 healthy subjects. All subjects enrolled (asthmatic and controls) completed the Greek version of the Bowel Disease Questionnaire (BDQ). BDQ is a, previously validated, self-report instrument to measure gastrointestinal symptoms. Diagnosis of IBS was based on Rome II criteria. The IBS prevalence was significantly higher in asthmatics (62/150, 41.3%) than in subjects with other pulmonary disorders (29/130, 22.3%,P <0.001) and healthy ones (25/120, 20.8%, P<0.001). For all subjects studied, the prevalence of IBS was significantly higher in females (78/214, 36.4%) than in males (38/186, 20.4%, P<0.001). The IBS prevalence in asthmatic males was 29.5% vs. 15.2% in male patients with other pulmonary disorders (P=0.002) and 14.2% in male healthy subjects (P=0.002). The IBS prevalence in asthmatic females was 51.8% vs. 28.1% in females patients with other pulmonary disorders (P<0.001) and 26.5% in females healthy subjects (P<0.001). None of the asthma medications were associated with increased or decreased likelihood of IBS. We conclude that patients with bronchial asthma have an increased prevalence of IBS. Further studies are needed to clarify the potential pathogenetic mechanisms underlying the association between IBS and asthma