Metadata and the DigiLab

Presentation at the ‘Internet of Things’ Technology Strategy Board Specialist Workshop held at at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, Londo

Scalable Reliable SD Erlang Design

This technical report presents the design of Scalable Distributed (SD) Erlang: a set of language-level changes that aims to enable Distributed Erlang to scale for server applications on commodity hardware with at most 100,000 cores. We cover a number of aspects, specifically anticipated architecture, anticipated failures, scalable data structures, and scalable computation. Other two components that guided us in the design of SD Erlang are design principles and typical Erlang applications. The design principles summarise the type of modifications we aim to allow Erlang scalability. Erlang exemplars help us to identify the main Erlang scalability issues and hypothetically validate the SD Erlang design

Controlling for exposure changes the relationship between ethnicity, deprivation and injury: an observational study of child pedestrian injury rates in London.

BACKGROUND: Research has suggested that inequalities in risk exposure may help explain identified ethnic inequalities in child pedestrian injury risk. However, addressing risk exposure in epidemiological research presents theoretical and methodological challenges. This article conceptualises the risk of child pedestrian injury as related to both exposure levels (the quantity of time children spend as pedestrians) and the probability of a hazard where that exposure takes place (the quality of the road environment). OBJECTIVE: To investigate the sensitivity of results on ethnic inequalities in child pedestrian injury risk in London to control for exposure and hazard levels. METHODS: Using police records of injury 2000-2009, we modelled the relationship between ethnicity, deprivation and child pedestrian injury rates in London using characteristics of the road environment to control for hazard levels and restricting the analysis to the time of the weekday morning commute (7.00-9.00 am), when most children must make a journey to school, to control for exposure levels. RESULTS: Controlling for risk exposure in this way fundamentally changed the nature of the relationship between ethnicity, deprivation and child pedestrian injury. During the time of the morning commute to school, 'Black' children were found to have higher pedestrian injury rates in the least-deprived areas. CONCLUSIONS: To inform effective strategies for reducing injury inequality, it is vital that exposure to risk is both acknowledged and considered

E-fulfilment Systems for Quality Healthcare Delivery: A New Construct for Visualising and Designing

Electronically delivered information and funds transaction systems do offer such organisations great potential for efficiency and effectiveness, but many large integrated ICT systems, particularly in public service projects, have notoriously underperformed and disappointed. To ensure that quality is ‘engineered in’ a holistic, integrated and quality approach is required, and Total Quality Management (TQM) principles are the obvious foundations for this. TQM is a business philosophy that encourages an over-arching responsibility - both individual and collective - to quality and customer satisfaction. This paper describes a novel approach to viewing the operations of a healthcare provider where electronic means could be used to distribute information and facilitate electronic fund settlements, building around the Full Service Provider core. Specifically, an approach called the “triple pair flow” model is used to provide a view of healthcare delivery that is integrated, yet detailed, and that combines the strategic enterprise view with a business process view

Silent speech: restoring the power of speech to people whose larynx has been removed

Every year, some 17,500 people in Europe and North America lose the power of speech after undergoing a laryngectomy, normally as a treatment for throat cancer. Several research groups have recently demonstrated that it is possible to restore speech to these people by using machine learning to learn the transformation from articulator movement to sound. In our project articulator movement is captured by a technique developed by our collaborators at Hull University called Permanent Magnet Articulography (PMA), which senses the changes of magnetic field caused by movements of small magnets attached to the lips and tongue. This solution, however, requires synchronous PMA-and-audio recordings for learning the transformation and, hence, it cannot be applied to people who have already lost their voice. Here we propose to investigate a variant of this technique in which the PMA data are used to drive an articulatory synthesiser, which generates speech acoustics by simulating the airflow through a computational model of the vocal tract. The project goals, participants, current status, and achievements of the project are discussed below.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Reporting back environmental exposure data and free choice learning.

Reporting data back to study participants is increasingly being integrated into exposure and biomonitoring studies. Informal science learning opportunities are valuable in environmental health literacy efforts and report back efforts are filling an important gap in these efforts. Using the University of Arizona's Metals Exposure Study in Homes, this commentary reflects on how community-engaged exposure assessment studies, partnered with data report back efforts are providing a new informal education setting and stimulating free-choice learning. Participants are capitalizing on participating in research and leveraging their research experience to meet personal and community environmental health literacy goals. Observations from report back activities conducted in a mining community support the idea that reporting back biomonitoring data reinforces free-choice learning and this activity can lead to improvements in environmental health literacy. By linking the field of informal science education to the environmental health literacy concepts, this commentary demonstrates how reporting data back to participants is tapping into what an individual is intrinsically motivated to learn and how these efforts are successfully responding to community-identified education and research needs

Reduced street lighting at night and health: A rapid appraisal of public views in England and Wales.

Financial and carbon reduction incentives have prompted many local authorities to reduce street lighting at night. Debate on the public health implications has centred on road accidents, fear of crime and putative health gains from reduced exposure to artificial light. However, little is known about public views of the relationship between reduced street lighting and health. We undertook a rapid appraisal in eight areas of England and Wales using ethnographic data, a household survey and documentary sources. Public concern focused on road safety, fear of crime, mobility and seeing the night sky but, for the majority in areas with interventions, reductions went unnoticed. However, more private concerns tapped into deep-seated anxieties about darkness, modernity 'going backwards', and local governance. Pathways linking lighting reductions and health are mediated by place, expectations of how localities should be lit, and trust in local authorities to act in the best interests of local communities

Review of UK biodiversity indicators that provide status and trends for species

The quality assurance panel was convened to provide advice on improvements that could be made to a suite of UK biodiversity indicators that are used to assess the status and trends of a range of species, and which are linked in turn to a range of biodiversity targets