The colour of life: interacting with SenseCam images on large multi-touch display walls

A SenseCam can provide a detailed visual archive of a person’s life, activities and experiences. However, as the number of images captured per year can extend beyond one million, gaining an insight into an individual’s lifestyle in a fast, effective and intuitive manner is a challenging prospect. In this work, we develop an interactive image browsing tool, which incorporates visualisation techniques that can capture not only a snapshot of an individual’s lifestyle over long periods of time, but also how that lifestyle varies with changing days, weeks, or years. The image retrieval tool incorporates the Colour of Life algorithms [1], which can represent an overview of millions of images with a single visualisation. The Colour of Life algorithms focus on the relationship between lifestyle and colour, by capturing the colours to which we are exposed in our lives (and therefore captured by SenseCam images), collating similar colours for specific time periods and depicting how those colours change over time with a flowing time-line – see Figure 1 which depicts the life of a SenseCam user over the period of 8 days. In this figure, time is orientated along the horizontal axis and larger vertical peaks indicate higher user activity for a given period of time. In Figure 1, the normal working week consists of the rhythmical blue, pink (work) and yellow (home) peaks and troughs for each day (with less activity at the start and end of the days), whereas time outdoors increases at the weekend, especially during the night (and hence the darker colours on the left hand side of the figure). The Colour of Life visualisation, while providing information on changes in lifestyle, does not provide sufficient context to understand the exact activities of a user for a given time period. For example, on the left of Figure 1 there is a peak of purple, that does not occur anywhere else during the 8 days of activities images – where was the user at this point in time and what was he doing? In this work, we build an interactive image browsing tool based around the Colour of Life visualisation. We exploit the use of high resolution multi-touch display walls, where we extend the Colour of Life algorithms to produce an intuitive visualisation, which incorporates image mosaicing (see Figure 2). Through this we incorporate coarse lifestyle data with more fine detailed contextual information on human activities into one interactive visualisation tool. As an additional feature, we have investigated the use of image classification within the framework of the Colour of Life. One such example is the categorisation of images as being as social (i.e. interacting with other people) or non-social. Using such a classification, we can depict a person’s social lifestyle, and how that varies over time

Disturbance Observers for Robust Safety-critical Control with Control Barrier Functions

This work provides formal safety guarantees for control systems with disturbance. A disturbance observer-based robust safety-critical controller is proposed, that estimates the effect of the disturbance on safety and utilizes this estimate with control barrier functions to attain provably safe dynamic behavior. The observer error bound - which consists of transient and steady-state parts - is quantified, and the system is endowed with robustness against this error via the proposed controller. An adaptive cruise control problem is used as illustrative example through simulations including real disturbance data.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

Acoustic emission method to study fracture (Mode-I, II) and residual strength characteristics in composite-to-metal and metal-to-metal adhesively bonded joints.

Failure behaviour of two types of adhesively bonded joints (composite-to-metal, metal-to-metal) has been studied under failure modes (Mode I: double cantilever beam (DCB) and Mode II: three-point end notch flexures (3-ENF)) using acoustic emission (AE) technique. The bonded specimens were prepared using two types of adhesive bond materials with three variations of adhesive bond quality. The effect of the presence of interfacial defects along the interface on the residual strength of the joint has also been studied. It was possible using the maximum AE amplitude method to select the AE events of mechanical significance. However, it proved difficult to propose a definitive AE trait for the mechanical phenomena occurring within specific AE event signals, for all adhesive types, bond qualities, and substrate configurations; therefore, all specimen combinations. There was a notable shift in spectral energy proportion as the AE source of mechanical significance varied along the specimen length for specimen combinations. However, it was difficult to confirm this distinctive trait for all specimen combinations due to difficulty in confirming the location and exact mechanical source. The proposed measurement technique can be useful to assess the overall structural health of a bonded system and may allow identification of defects

Health effects of adopting low greenhouse gas emission diets in the UK.

OBJECTIVE: Dietary changes which improve health are also likely to be beneficial for the environment by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG). However, previous analyses have not accounted for the potential acceptability of low GHG diets to the general public. This study attempted to quantify the health effects associated with adopting low GHG emission diets in the UK. DESIGN: Epidemiological modelling study. SETTING: UK. PARTICIPANTS: UK population. INTERVENTION: Adoption of diets optimised to achieve the WHO nutritional recommendations and reduce GHG emissions while remaining as close as possible to existing dietary patterns. MAIN OUTCOME: Changes in years of life lost due to coronary heart disease, stroke, several cancers and type II diabetes, quantified using life tables. RESULTS: If the average UK dietary intake were optimised to comply with the WHO recommendations, we estimate an incidental reduction of 17% in GHG emissions. Such a dietary pattern would be broadly similar to the current UK average. Our model suggests that it would save almost 7 million years of life lost prematurely in the UK over the next 30 years and increase average life expectancy by over 8 months. Diets that result in additional GHG emission reductions could achieve further net health benefits. For emission reductions greater than 40%, improvements in some health outcomes may decrease and acceptability will diminish. CONCLUSIONS: There are large potential benefits to health from adopting diets with lower associated GHG emissions in the UK. Most of these benefits can be achieved without drastic changes to existing dietary patterns. However, to reduce emissions by more than 40%, major dietary changes that limit both acceptability and the benefits to health are required

Bryan Kies

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A Hydrolase of Trehalose Dimycolate Induces Nutrient Influx and Stress Sensitivity to Balance Intracellular Growth of Mycobacterium tuberculosis

SummaryChronic tuberculosis in an immunocompetent host is a consequence of the delicately balanced growth of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) in the face of host defense mechanisms. We identify an Mtb enzyme (TdmhMtb) that hydrolyzes the mycobacterial glycolipid trehalose dimycolate and plays a critical role in balancing the intracellular growth of the pathogen. TdmhMtb is induced under nutrient-limiting conditions and remodels the Mtb envelope to increase nutrient influx but concomitantly sensitizes Mtb to stresses encountered in the host. Consistent with this, a ΔtdmhMtb mutant is more resilient to stress and grows to levels higher than those of wild-type in immunocompetent mice. By contrast, mutant growth is retarded in MyD88−/− mice, indicating that TdmhMtb provides a growth advantage to intracellular Mtb in an immunocompromised host. Thus, the effects and countereffects of TdmhMtb play an important role in balancing intracellular growth of Mtb in a manner that is directly responsive to host innate immunity