The artisan and the artist. Innovation enables transformation

Technologies Excellence Group, for theCurriculum for Excellence Group for SG (commissioned by/for Mike Russell-Cabinet Secy on Education

Demonstration of the Effect of Centre of Mass Height on Postural Sway Using Accelerometry for Balance Analysis

The effect of center of mass (COM) height on stand-still postural sway analysis was studied. For this purpose, a measurement apparatus was set up that included an accelerometry unit attached to a rod: three plumb lines, positioned at 50 cm, 75 cm, and 100 cm to the end of the rod, each supported a plumb bob. Using a vice mechanism, the rod was inclined from vertical (0 degree inclination) in steps of 5 degrees to 90 degrees. For each inclination, the corresponding inclination angle was manually measured by a protractor, and the positions of the three plumb bobs on the ground surface were also manually measured using a tape measure. Algebraic operations were used to calculate the inclination angle and the associated displacements of the plumb bobs on the ground surface from the accelerometry data. For each inclination angle, the manual and accelerometry calculated ground displacement produced by each plumb bulb were close. It was demonstrated that the height of COM, where the measurement was taken, affected the projected displacement on the ground surface. A higher height produced a greater displacement. This effect has an implication in postural sway analysis where the accelerometry readings may need comparison amongst subjects with different COM heights. To overcome this, a method that normalized the accelerometry readings by considering the COM height was proposed, and the associated results were presented

Photovoltaic technologies

Photovoltaics is already a billion dollar industry. It is experiencing rapid growth as concerns over fuel supplies and carbon emissions mean that governments and individuals are increasingly prepared to ignore its current high costs. It will become truly mainstream when its costs are comparable to other energy sources. At the moment, it is around four times too expensive for competitive commercial production. Three generations of photovoltaics have been envisaged that will take solar power into the mainstream. Currently, photovoltaic production is 90% first-generation and is based on silicon wafers. These devices are reliable and durable, but half of the cost is the silicon wafer and efficiencies are limited to around 20%. A second generation of solar cells would use cheap semiconductor thin films deposited on low-cost substrates to produce devices of slightly lower efficiency. A number of thin-film device technologies account for around 5–6% of the current market. As second-generation technology reduces the cost of active material, the substrate will eventually be the cost limit and higher efficiency will be needed to maintain the cost-reduction trend. Third-generation devices will use new technologies to produce high-efficiency devices. Advances in nanotechnology, photonics, optical metamaterials, plasmonics and semiconducting polymer sciences offer the prospect of cost-competitive photovoltaics. It is reasonable to expect that cost reductions, a move to second-generation technologies and the implementation of new technologies and third-generation concepts can lead to fully cost- competitive solar energy in 10–15 years

Photonic quantum technologies

The first quantum technology, which harnesses uniquely quantum mechanical effects for its core operation, has arrived in the form of commercially available quantum key distribution systems that achieve enhanced security by encoding information in photons such that information gained by an eavesdropper can be detected. Anticipated future quantum technologies include large-scale secure networks, enhanced measurement and lithography, and quantum information processors, promising exponentially greater computation power for particular tasks. Photonics is destined for a central role in such technologies owing to the need for high-speed transmission and the outstanding low-noise properties of photons. These technologies may use single photons or quantum states of bright laser beams, or both, and will undoubtably apply and drive state-of-the-art developments in photonics

The learning technologies of the future: technologies that learn?

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) operate in a borderless and complex environment, abundant in potentially useful information. The Creating Academic Learning Futures (CALF) research project, carried out in partnership by the University of Leicester and University College Falmouth in the UK, involves the development of approaches and tools for structuring and filtering information, in order to facilitate institutional decision-making in participative and creative ways. One of the aims of the CALF project is to involve students in creating and exploring a variety of plausible ‘alternative futures’ for learning and teaching technologies in higher education. This paper discusses some of the issues that are emerging in the course of the research process and presents ideas for the future, grounded in and emergent from ‘student voices’ from the CALF research project. Students expected the technologies of the near future to enable them to become co-creators in their own education processes. The future scenarios imagined the rise of learning technologies which instead of becoming outdated with use, become more valuable as more user-generated content is invested, technologies which are truly learning in that they learn about their users and constantly morph/adapt to their users’ needs. Finally, increasing virtualisation was a recurrent theme across most student-generated scenarios. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the strengths and limitations of using technologies for involving students in creative activities for generating future scenarios for higher education. The technologies used by the project enabled collaborative creative thinking across a broader spectrum of possibilities about the relationship between the present and the future of higher education

Face recognition technologies for evidential evaluation of video traces

Human recognition from video traces is an important task in forensic investigations and evidence evaluations. Compared with other biometric traits, face is one of the most popularly used modalities for human recognition due to the fact that its collection is non-intrusive and requires less cooperation from the subjects. Moreover, face images taken at a long distance can still provide reasonable resolution, while most biometric modalities, such as iris and fingerprint, do not have this merit. In this chapter, we discuss automatic face recognition technologies for evidential evaluations of video traces. We first introduce the general concepts in both forensic and automatic face recognition , then analyse the difficulties in face recognition from videos . We summarise and categorise the approaches for handling different uncontrollable factors in difficult recognition conditions. Finally we discuss some challenges and trends in face recognition research in both forensics and biometrics . Given its merits tested in many deployed systems and great potential in other emerging applications, considerable research and development efforts are expected to be devoted in face recognition in the near future

Integrated Photonic Quantum Technologies

Generations of technologies with fundamentally new information processing capabilities will emerge if microscopic physical systems can be controlled to encode, transmit, and process quantum information, at scale and with high fidelity. In the decade after its 2008 inception, the technology of integrated quantum photonics enabled the generation, processing, and detection of quantum states of light, at a steadily increasing scale and level of complexity. Using both established and advanced fabrication techniques, the field progressed from the demonstrations of fixed circuits comprising few components and operating on two photons, to programmable circuitry approaching 1000 components with integrated generation of multi-photon states. A continuation in this trend over the next decade would usher in a versatile platform for future quantum technologies. This Review summarises the advances in integrated photonic quantum technologies (materials, devices, and functionality), and its demonstrated on-chip applications including secure quantum communications, simulations of quantum physical and chemical systems, Boson sampling, and linear-optic quantum information processing.Comment: 6 figure