- Theme:
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Funding:
- EPSRC
Summary on Grant Application Form More than two thirds of the worlds population will be living in cities by 2050, which made sustainable cities a key theme at the Rio+20 Summit. Over 40% of the UK population live their working lives carrying out knowledge work in offices - enclosed spaces in the built environment. Over 40% of the UK's GDP is driven by the knowledge work carried out in these buildings. While these buildings must meet basic environmental and safety standards, building codes are primarily defined around the performance of the physical infrastructure rather than capturing the performance of a person in a building in a city. Indeed, the energy agenda has recently focused on making these work environments as air tight and thus as energy efficient as possible. But what if this energy efficiency is costing our wellbeing, and thus our performance and capacity to contribute to environmental, economic and social sustainability? We are all familiar with working in buildings that are overhot, stuffy and have seemingly no air flow, and how our performance seems to suffer as a result. Yet such environments may be well within building specifications for environmental quality. There is a clear need to be able to quantify the impact of indoor air on human performance and determine what is optimal for quality performance.
We hypothesize that poor indoor environments are the result of approaching building performance on the basis of (1) what is easy to measure (e.g. energy/carbon) and (2) without properly considering effects of the environment on human cognitive performance. Poor design may have such a critical impact on the creativity and innovation required for knowledge work that we need a radical shift in design focus. That radical reconsideration may show that even small changes not just to design, but to the way information about both the building and the person is presented, may significantly improve performance.
The goals of the Refresh project are to put the human at the centre of building performance and to develop new measures and models that better capture the complexity of these interactions. We plan to measure the *dynamic* changes in and around the local environment on human performance in that environment. These measures will give us ways to create new models of building environments that in turn will be available to help inform policy for building quality that takes human wellbeing in these environments into account. These models will also help us to design new kinds of environmental interaction tools. For instance, much current attention is focused on smart meters to encourage us to change our behaviour around energy use. This is a very one-way view of our interaction with a buiding; it's all building to human. What if the building, however, knew something about our state and tasks? Would we be able to present a co-interaction meter that might suggest opening a window or going for a walk to get some air in order to complete a task when we're apparently becoming sluggish?
Our proposal brings together a novel mix of ICT and engineering sciences. As such, our results will affect a range of disciplines. Overall, our research explicitly aims to develop a methodology for assessing indoor climate for human performance as the outdoor microclimate is altered due to a changing neighbourhood. We will discover how dynamic changes may enable us to create not just a sustainable indoor environment, but an indoor environment which sustains. We will enhance the present energy-dominated portfolio of built environment research by taking a holistic view and integrating explicit feedbacks between urban microclimate, ventilation and human performance. Our approach will provide guidance on how to meet energy efficiency targets without compromising productivity.
Primary investigators
- monica schraefel
- Janet Barlow
- Catherine Noakes
Associated research group
- Agents, Interaction and Complexity
- Date:
- 2014-2014
Wind is one of the significant renewable energy resources, which has been highly promoted. However, the biggest challenge of wind development is the unreliability due to the intermittence. One of the solutions is hibernus restore, which allows electronic applications working in dynamic and unreliable power situation by storing current data and states in somewhere else before wind power is actually getting lost. Therefore, accurate prediction of wind power is required. The objective of this project is to implement the system, which can predict the change of wind power in very short-term (few seconds) and foresight if wind is about to lose (below the threshold). Several prediction algorithms are evaluated first in MATLAB, which contain persistence method, ARIMA and BPNN. These approaches would be compared with appropriate error metrics to figure out the one with the best performance to be finally implemented in FPGA board. The evaluation indicates BPNN performs best to predict wind in very short-term. In order to implement BPNN, shift-and-add PWL approximation method is applied to approximate the transfer function of BPNN. Finally, used energy, resources and calculation speed of the system would be used to evaluate the final performance of the ANN system.
Primary investigators
Associated research group
- Electronics and Computer Science
- Date:
- 2014-2018
- Theme:
- Simulation, Modelling and Evalution
Unlike the established Sub-Threshold Voltage (STV) techniques, the recently introduced Near-Threshold Voltage (NTV) approach promises to scale well with the decreasing supply voltage while maintaining robustness and reliability. This research proposes to integrate the NTV approach, as a method of enabling significant reductions in the energy consumption, with many-core processor architectures. One of the main goals of the proposed research is to investigate to what extent extremely low supply voltages can maintain the robustness of logic circuits, tolerate process variability and be resilient against errors. Since NTV circuits at low voltage must run at lower frequencies, CPU intensive tasks, that are typically performed in battery powered mobile devices, will be executed in a many-core environment to maintain performance while the overall energy is reduced. As natural variations in manufacturing processes can lead to voltage fluctuations and logic circuit failures, techniques will be investigated to monitor the errors and adjust the supply voltage dynamically to maintain reliable operation. Control circuitry will need to be developed to reduce energy consumption even further, through adjusting the required supply voltage of individual components of the chip and powering them down when they are not being used. It is envisaged that processors developed in the course of this research may also be suitable for other applications, for example, energy-harvester powered sensor nodes where the development of specialised ultra-low energy processor technologies is currently lagging.
Associated research group
- Electronic and Software Systems
- Date:
- 2010-2014
- Funding:
- EPSRC
A normal functioning hand is one of the most important features for human independence. A complex neuromusculoskeletal structure of the human hand consists of many dedicated subsystems cooperated in a highly organised manner to form a powerful and precise device. The malfunction of any of its elements may result in disability and hand functional impairment. There exist many injuries that can result in the loss of hand function, such as i.e. stroke, spinal cord injuries and complications after hand surgery or hand traumatic injury such as i.e. tendon ruptures.
Surface electrode array stimulation is a non-invasive method of muscle activation applied via adhesive electrode arrays placed on the surface of the patient skin above the location of the desired muscles. Surface electrode array stimulation is able to induce movements in paralysed or weak limb, by delivering a series of electrical pulses to associated skeletal muscles through activation of chosen elements of electrode array. Surface electrode array stimulation is a promising technique for stroke rehabilitation of the wrist and fingers, due to its increased muscle selectivity. However, the effectiveness of the method is strongly related to the precision and accuracy of the stimulation. Locating the optimal stimulation sites via selection of the appripriate elements of the electrode array is critical to the effective application of this rehabilitation approach.
This project addresses the use of surface electrode arrays to regulate the stimulation applied to the extensor muscles of the hand and wrist in order to induce hand movement to desired posture. A general control strategy developed in this project embeds optimisation methods for selection of appropriate elements of the electrode array with iterative learning control.
In iterative learning control, the patient makes repeated attempts to complete a predefined task with the aim of gradually decreasing the error between the movement performed and desired one. A number of different gradient-based methods, such as penalty method and sparse optimisation methods has been developed and tested based on theoretical and experimental findings. These methods are used to find a sparse input vector, which is employed to select only those array elements that are critical to task completion within iterative learning control framework.
The developed methods, are presented in the context of the complete and novel design of the Hand Rehabilitation System (HaReS) to provide both, theoretical and practical indications for further expantion of this rehabilitation technology and future research. The system comprises the ILC-based control algorithms for electrode array stimulation with a game-based training environment that provides feedback to the patient.
Primary investigators
- Anna Soska
- Eric Rogers
- Christopher Freeman
Associated research groups
- Electronics and Electrical Engineering
- Electronics and Electrical Engineering
- Electronics and Electrical Engineering
- Funding:
- EPSRC
The Team
Southampton Wireless Visible Light Communications (SW-VLC) team has been focusing on the networking aspect of VLC research, with worldwide collaborations spanning from both academia and industry. This project will be conducted by the PI, one post-doctoral RA and one PhD student.
The Idea
 Conventional Design When adopting the conventional design principle, one may partition the room into four square-shaped cells having 16 APs per cell. However, constructing conventional cells by restricting users within a pre-defined boundary will lead to tele-traffic overload in crowded cells and to underload in cells only supporting a few users, resulting in an unbalanced loading problem. A typical example can be seen as in the left figure having a highly unbalanced user-loading, where a cluster of users are in the `northern' half of the room, while only few users are in the `south-west' corner. |
 User-centric Design Distinctively, by taking into account the users' geo-locations, the novel user-centric design flow is based on grouping the users together and then associating the APs with them. Hence, the resultant cells are of amorphous shape. It is easy to see that the amorphous cells are capable of breaking the fixed boundaries of conventional design and of avoiding the unbalanced loading problem, since more APs are associated with the crowded areas, whilst assigning less APs to the areas supporting only a few users. |
 Moving Amorphous Cells Animation As further advances, amorphous cells are capable of forming user-centric `breathing' cells evolving upon users' movement, where new APs may join in the cell formation with the resigning of old APs. The left figure animation shows how the amorphous cells are adapted corresponding to the movement of a particular user, where both the amorphous cell shape and the total number of amorphous cells are evolving. |
The Demo
The Vision
Publications
- Simeng, Feng; Li, Xuan; Zhang, Rong; Ming Jiang and Hanzo, Lajos (2016) Hybrid Positioning for the Amorphous-Cell Assisted User-Centric Visible Light Downlink. IEEE Photonics Journal (submitted)
- Li, Xuan; Yongkai Huo; Zhang, Rong and Hanzo, Lajos (2016) User-Centric Visible Light Communications for Energy-Efficient Scalable Video Streaming. [in special issue: Green Communications and Networking Series 3 ] IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (submitted)
- Zhang, Rong; Claussen, Holger; Haas, Harald and Hanzo, Lajos (2016) Energy Efficient Visible Light Communications Relying on Amorphous Cells. [in special issue: Energy-Efficient Techniques for 5G Wireless Communication Systems] IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
- Zhang, Rong; Wang, Jiaheng; Wang, Zhaocheng; Xu, Zhengyuan; Zhao, Chunming and Hanzo, Lajos (2015) Visible light communications in heterogeneous networks: pave the way for user-centric design. [in special issue: Visible Light Communications] IEEE Wireless Communications
- Li, Xuan; Zhang, Rong; Wang, Jiaheng; Xu, Zhengyuan and Hanzo, Lajos (2015) Users First: User-Centric Cluster Formation for Interference Mitigation in Visible Light Networks. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
- Li, Xuan; Jin, Fan; Zhang, Rong and Hanzo, Lajos (2015) Cooperative load balancing in hybrid visible light communications and WiFi. IEEE Transactions on Communications
- Jiang, Junyi; Zhang, Rong and Hanzo, Lajos (2015) Analysis and design of three-stage concatenated color-shift keying. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology
- Li, Baolong; Wang, Jiaheng; Zhang, Rong; Shen, Hong; Zhao, Chunming and Hanzo, Lajos (2015) Multiuser MISO transceiver design for indoor visible light communication with Per-LED optical power constraints. IEEE Photonics Journal
- Jin, Fan; Zhang, Rong and Hanzo, Lajos (2014) Resource allocation under delay guarantee constraints for heterogeneous visible light and RF femtocells. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
Primary investigator
- rz
Partners
- Bell Labs
- BT
Associated research group
- Next Generation Wireless
- Date:
- 2014-
- Themes:
- Accessible Technologies, Educational Enhancement, ELearning, Platforms and Tools
- Funding:
- EU
A pan-european Erasmus+ project aiming to provide an online course authored by accessibility experts in nine universities. The introductory MOOC aims to highlight the barriers experienced by those who have a range of sensory, physical and cognitive disabilities and impairments when accessing online content or some general technologies and how strategies can be introduced to provide digital accessibility. The five week programme will be introduced with strategies being presented as ââ¬Ëstepsââ¬â¢ through the process. The steps will cover access to mobile and web services, online multimedia such as videos etc., documentation and technology used in daily living such as Self -Service Terminals (e.g. cash machines), smart homes and cities. Every step of the course will be authored by one group within the partnership and reviewed by another before receiving its final evaluation from the hosting MOOC platform partnership.
Primary investigators
- Gottfried Zimmerman
- Mike Wald
Partners
- Høgskolen i Oslo og Akershus
- HdM Stuttgart
- Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis
- University of York
- Dublin Institute of Technology
- Technische Universität Dresden
- Johannes Kepler Universität Linz
- àñýõÃâ¬Ã¹ÃÆÃâîüùÿ ÃâùóñïÿÃ⦠(University of the Aegean)
Associated research group
- Web and Internet Science
- Funding:
- EPSRC
To meet the demand of exponentially growing tele-traffic and to sustain the current level of economical growth, a high-quality digital infrastructure based on innovative and cost efficient solutions is required. The current geo-economics and building-preservation of historic cities do not favour the pervasive penetration of fibre. Hence, a lower-cost solution based on the improved exploitation of the existing copper network is essential to facilitate transformation of the digital infrastructure to support the next evolutionary step to Giga bits/s data rates. However, experts from our industrial partner BT believe that the throughput achieved with the aid of the state-of-the-art copper technology may only represent less than 30% of its ultimate capacity, when we exploit the hitherto unexploited high-frequency band. Hence, the research of next-generation ultra-high-throughput DSL systems beyond G.fast becomes of crucial importance and timely, where radically new signal processing techniques have to be conceived.
The challenge is to conquer the entire Very High Frequency (VHF) band and to holistically design the amalgamated wire-line and wireless system considered. Our proposed research starts from the fundamental understanding of the DSL channel over the entire VHF and beyond into UHF (up to 500 MHz) bands to the design of radical signal processing techniques for tackling the critical challenges. Holistic system optimisation is proposed for exploiting the full potential of copper. Thanks to BT's huge support, our proposed research has a high immediate engineering impact and a long-term scientific adventure.
- WP A: Copper Channel and Interference Modelling (ALL)
- WP B: Constellation Shaping (NCL+BT)
- WP C: Advanced Transceiver (SOTON+BT)
- WP D: Full Duplex (NCL+BT)
- WP E: Cooperative Backhaul (SOTON+BT)
Academic Investigators
The Principal Investigator (PI) Professor Lajos Hanzo Wolfson Fellow of the RS, FREng, FIEEE, FIET, Fellow of EURASIP, DSc, received his degree in electronics in 1976 and his doctorate in 1983. In 2009 he was awarded the honorary doctorate "Doctor Honoris Causa" by the Technical University of Budapest. During his 37-year career in telecommunications, he has held various research and academic posts in Hungary, Germany and the UK. Since 1986 he has been with the school of ECS, where he heads the SW team. He has successfully supervised about 100 PhD students, co-authored 20 John Wiley/IEEE Press books on mobile radio communications totalling in excess of 10 000 pages, published 1400+ research entries at IEEE Xplore, acted both as TPC and General Chair of several IEEE conferences, presented keynote lectures and has been awarded a number of distinctions. Currently he is directing a 60-strong academic research team, working on a range of research projects in the field of wireless multimedia communications sponsored by industry, the EPSRC UK and the European FP7 Programme. He is an enthusiastic supporter of industrial and academic liaison. He is also a Governor of the IEEE VTS. During 2008 - 2012 he was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Press and a Chaired Professor also at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He has 20 000+ GS citations and an H-index of 55.
The Co-Investigator (CoI) Dr Charalampos Tsimenidis is a Senior Lecturer in CSSP group in the school of EEE at NCL, UK. He received his MSc (with distinction) and PhD in communications and signal processing from NCL in 1999 and 2002, respectively. His main research interests are in the area of adaptive and iterative receivers for wireless communications. During the last 12 years, he has published over 150 conference and journal papers, successfully supervised 3 MPhil and 26 PhD students and made contributions to several European funded research projects and industrial projects. He has served as TPC member for over 80 international conferences and presented professional tutorials at various major conferences. He is a member of the IET and a senior member of the IEEE.
The Co-Investigator (CoI) Dr Rong Zhang is a Lecturer in SW team in the school of ECS at UoS, UK. He received his PhD in wireless communications from the UoS in 2009. During his post-doctoral period in ECS, he contributed to a number of international projects, including the India-UK Advanced Technology Centre of excellence (IU-ATC), the UK-China Science Bridges: R&D on 4G Wireless Mobile Communications (UC4G) as well as the EU OPTIMIX projects and the EU CONCERTO projects. He has a total of 70+ IEEE and OSA publications, including 40+ journals (20 of which as first author). He has acted as TPC member/invited session chair at major conferences. He is a member of the IET, of the IEEE and of the OSA.
Industrial Experts
Dr Anas Al Rawi received his M.Sc. (with distinction) and PhD degrees in communications and signal processing from Newcastle University, U.K., in 2007 and 2011, respectively. Currently, Anas is a senior researcher with the Access Network Research team, Research & Innovation, BT. His primary role focuses on the modelling of the current G.fast technology and its future generations. His research interests include copper based cross-layer optimisation, cooperative networks and multi-mode MIMO systems modelling.
Les Humphrey obtained B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, and ACGI, from Imperial College London University, 1970, M.Sc. in Telecom Switching from Aston University Birmingham 1974. Joined ITT/STL in 1970 working on modulation for digital microwave links and very high speed baseband digital transmission on coax for trunk applications. Worked on DSP and A to D aspects including Si implementation from 1978 till 2001 for ITT/STL/STC/Nortel. Was technical lead for projects including Trans-Multiplexer, various speech and image processing projects, software defined radio, A to D and D to A technology, formal methods for Si design, EMC aspects of digital transmission, and digital transmission on copper pairs from ISDN basic rate access to VDSL. Joined BT in 2001 as Chief Researcher with responsibility for leading DSL Research and Standards activities related to DSL, including work on ADSL, VDSL2, and in the past 5 years focusing on the G.fast concept both DSP and systems aspects.
Dr Paul Botham, Senior Research Engineer, Research & Innovation, BT. Paul Botham joined BT with a D.Phil. in theoretical physics from Oxford University. Within Research and Innovation, he has worked in a variety of network modelling roles, applying mathematical techniques to develop software tools for designing least-cost, resilient BT networks. This has involved a wide range of technologies in both core-transport and access environments. Paul is currently working on optimised deployment of next-generation network technology, incorporating both modelling of high-frequency propagation in copper cables and risk analysis for BT business cases.
Work Plan
If you cannot see our work plan, please download it here.
Primary investigators
- Lajos Hanzo
- rz
- Dr Charalampos Tsimenidis
Partner
- BT
Associated research group
- Next Generation Wireless