Understanding requirements work in e-science projects

The e-science vision is to create infrastructures to enable faster, better and more collaborative science to be carried out in the 21st Century. The goal is for these infrastructures to allow scientists to collaborate routinely, scaling geographical and disciplinary boundaries; to create ad hoc arrangements datasets, equipment or computational power to solve larger, more complex scientific problems; to federate remote datasets, hence, aiding scientists in data discovery and even data re-use. The work to turn the e-science vision into reality has been the subject of major research programmes in the UK (UK E-Science Programme) and the US (National Science Foundation’s Cyberinfrastructures Programme). Inevitably, e-science technologies and scientific practices will co-evolve as collaborative work becomes more prevalent, and cross-disciplinary work becomes routinised. Thus, the design and development of e-science technologies will play a critical part in the above process; there is a clear need to develop technologies which will accurately reflect end-users’ needs as well as account for the wider social structures of future scientific work. In e-science, there has been an on-going debate about whether new requirements techniques are needed to deal with the ‘unique’ characteristics of e-science projects, and the ambitious aims of e-science software. Some argue that e-science presents sufficiently novel combinations of challenges that new techniques are needed, whilst others argue that e-science practitioners should ‘borrow’ from pre-existing requirements engineering techniques. However, one barrier in settling this question (insomuch as it can be ‘settled’) is that there is currently a lack of empirical data on the requirements work and activities carried out in existing e-science projects. Studying requirements activities in e-science projects by examining the actual problems encountered would yield insights regarding the challenges in working out requirements for e-science technologies, and more generally, better inform the structure of requirements work in future projects. The research in this thesis examines the requirements activities of three UK e-science projects drawn from the astronomy, molecular simulation and translational science disciplines. Detailing the experience of project team members, the research explores issues and challenges encountered over the course of working out requirements for escience technologies. In particular, this research takes a slightly different approach from similar studies, with the unit of analysis being at the project level, reflecting shifts in emphasis on requirements work as projects evolve. Three aspects of requirements work in e-science projects are explored closely. Firstly, the temporal patterns in development work and how requirements activities fitted into such rhythms, phases and trajectories; secondly, the challenges of making a prototyping approach work; thirdly, the challenges of stabilising the ‘missing middle’ – a term to describe the gap between the high-level visionary description of the system from the project proposal, into fine-grained, detailed requirements. Then all three themes are drawn together, in order to make more general observations regarding the challenges of working out requirements for e-science technologies, as well as some observations regarding the shape of requirements work over the course of an e-science project. The thesis concludes that working out requirements for e-science technologies is challenging due to the complexities of supporting multi-disciplinary and multi-organisational work and the novelty of the technology to be developed. Team members have to grapple with multiple domains of knowledge, where there is little pre-existing expertise on how these aspects could be combined. Evidence from the data suggests that multiple strategies are employed to manage this complexity; where the selection of techniques is done on a contingent basis. Thus, one of the major implications of this thesis is to suggest more systematic and explicit capture of ‘lessons learnt’ from developers of previous e-science technologies

Excess caffeine exposure impairs eye development during chick embryogenesis

Caffeine has been an integral component of our diet and medicines for centuries. It is now known that over consumption of caffeine has detrimental effects on our health, and also disrupts normal foetal development in pregnant mothers. In this study, we investigated the potential teratogenic effect of caffeine over-exposure on eye development in the early chick embryo. Firstly, we demonstrated that caffeine exposure caused chick embryos to develop asymmetrical microphthalmia and induced the orbital bone to develop abnormally. Secondly, caffeine exposure perturbed Pax6 expression in the retina of the developing eye. In addition, it perturbed the migration of HNK-1(+) cranial neural crest cells. Pax6 is an important gene that regulates eye development, so altering the expression of this gene might be the cause for the abnormal eye development. Thirdly, we found that reactive oxygen species (ROS) production was significantly increased in eye tissues following caffeine treatment, and that the addition of anti-oxidant vitamin C could rescue the eyes from developing abnormally in the presence of caffeine. This suggests that excess ROS induced by caffeine is one of the mechanisms involved in the teratogenic alterations observed in the eye during embryogenesis. In sum, our experiments in the chick embryo demonstrated that caffeine is a potential teratogen. It causes asymmetrical microphthalmia to develop by increasing ROS production and perturbs Pax6 expression

Examining consumers’ adoption of wearable healthcare technology: The role of health attributes

With the advancement of information technology, wearable healthcare technology has emerged as one of the promising technologies to improve the wellbeing of individuals. However, the adoption of wearable healthcare technology has lagged when compared to other well-established durable technology products, such as smartphones and tablets, because of the inadequate knowledge of the antecedents of adoption intention. The aim of this paper is to address an identified gap in the literature by empirically testing a theoretical model for examining the impact of consumers’ health beliefs, health information accuracy, and the privacy protection of wearable healthcare technology on perceived usefulness. Importantly, this study also examines the influences of perceived usefulness, consumer innovativeness, and reference group influence on the adoption intention of wearable healthcare technology. The model seeks to enhance understanding of the influential factors in adopting wearable healthcare technology. Finally, suggestions for future research for the empirical investigation of the model are provided

Six-Digit Stroke-based Chinese Input Method

Abstract-During the last three decades, more than one thousand Chinese input methods have been developed. However, people are still looking for better input methods in terms of easy to use, easy to remember, high input speed and small keypad implementation on handheld devices. The well-known strokebased Chinese input method using only five basic stroke types could achieve low learning curve and small numeric keypad implementation but its input speed is limited for complex Chinese characters with a lot of strokes. To tackle this problem, simplified stroke-based Chinese character and phrase coding methods using (3+3) rules are proposed in this paper. The proposed method only uses the first 3 stroke codes and the last 3 stroke codes to represent the first and last radical information of the character for achieving lower average code length and higher hit rate of first character on the candidate list. To further enhance the input speed, a very user-friendly (3+3) phrase coding rule is also proposed for inputting Chinese phrases in terms of 2-character, 3-character and long-character phrases. Three special key assignment designs are developed for practical implementation of the proposed Chinese character and phrase input method using conventional QWERTY keyboard, PC's numeric keypad and mobile phone 12-key keypad. Experimental results have shown that the proposed character coding can achieve lower average code length and higher Hit Rate of First Character as compared with conventional stroke-based method and some well-known Chinese input methods. The proposed coding rules are also very easy to use and remember

Multiple Block-Size Search Algorithm for Fast Block Motion Estimation

Abstract-Although variable block-size motion estimation provides significant video quality and coding efficiency improvement, it requires much higher computational complexity compared with fixed block size motion estimation. The reason is that the current motion estimation algorithms are mainly designed for fixed block size. Current variable block-size motion estimation implementation simply applies these existing motion estimation algorithms independently for different block sizes to find the best block size and the corresponding motion vector. Substantial computation is wasted because distortion data reuse among motion searches of different block sizes is not considered. In this paper, a motion estimation algorithm intrinsically designed for variable block-size video coding is presented. The proposed multiple block-size search (MBSS) algorithm unifies the motion searches for different block sizes into a single searching process instead of independently performing the search for each block size. In this unified search, the suboptimal motion vectors for different block sizes are used to determine the next search steps. Its prediction quality is comparable with that obtained by performing motion search for different block sizes independently while the computational load is substantially reduced. Experimental results show that the prediction quality of MBSS is similar to full search. Block matching, motion estimation, video coding, search pattern, directional search

Thermal comfort and energy performance of public rental housing under typical and near-extreme weather conditions in Hong Kong

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. Building performance evaluation is crucial for sustainable urban developments. In high-density cities, occupants suffer from poor living conditions due to building overheating, especially during increasingly frequent near-extreme summer conditions caused by climate change. To represent this situation, the summer reference year weather data was employed for building simulations using DesignBuilder. This study aims to evaluate the thermal comfort and energy consumption of four typical public rental housing (PRH) building types in Hong Kong. For free-running flats, results show generally higher air temperatures in the oldest PRH type (Slab) with a compact linear building form and the most sensitive response to outdoor temperature changes for another older PRH type (Trident) with a Y-shaped design, possibly owing to its high wall conductivity. Occupants in all building types experience a ???10% increase in the proportion of discomfort hours when compared to results for typical summer conditions, but overheating is the most severe in Slab type PRH. Following an initial assessment of the cooling energy usage, a simple sensitivity test was conducted to explore the potential energy savings by various passive design strategies, including shading and reducing the exposed cooled space. A cross-shaped building form also appears to be more energy efficient. These findings, complemented by further parametric analyses, may prove useful when designing buildings for climate change

Hong Kong Renal Registry Report 2012

SummaryThis report examined the characteristics and trends of dialysis and renal transplant patients among the resident population of Hong Kong who were managed by hospitals or dialysis centers of the Hospital Authority, and accounted for approximately 95% of all patients receiving renal replacement therapies (RRTs) in the territory. Patients receiving RRTs solely in the private sector were not included in this report. Data trends from 1996 to 2011 are presented. In 2011, 1115 new patients were accepted into RRT programs, and the incident rate was 157 patients per million populations (pmp). An increasing trend was noted. The incident rate was 95.1 pmp at the commencement of the annual report in 1996. The point prevalence on December 31, 2012 was 8197 with a prevalence rate of 1152.5 pmp. Overall, there were 3573 patients (43.6%) on peritoneal dialysis (PD) and 1246 patients (15.2%) on hemodialysis (HD), and 3378 patients (41.2%) were living with a functioning renal transplant. The PD/HD ratio was 74.2:25.8. The “PD First” policy was continued. The overall mortality rate among RRT patients was 9.95 patients per 100 patient-years exposed. There was a decreasing trend in mortality among PD patients. Infection and cardiovascular complications were the most common causes of death. Renal transplant was the modality with the best survival rates. The 5 years cumulative patient survival rate for patients on transplant treatment was 89.6%, whereas the corresponding patient survival rates for PD and HD patients were 50.7% and 55.7%, respectively. More than 70% of RRT patients with reports on rehabilitation were active and had normal daily activities