Date:

2011-2014

Theme:

Healthcare in ECS

Funding:

EUFP7

Quantitative EEG is used in medical laboratories to determine the brain connectivity in autistic children but due to the artificial nature of this lab-based approach its validity under a real-life scenario is doubtful. Also therapeutic interventions are executed typically in a clinical setting and have a limited extension in time while it has been proved the beneficial effect of an intensive intervention. Moreover, although pointed out by several researcher the need of a personalised treatment for each child, there is a little knowledge about how to identify the most suitable treatment or integration of treatments for a specific child. The MICHELANGELO project intends to bring the assessment and the therapy of the autism out of the clinical environment and develop a patient-centric home-based intervention solution requiring a minimal human involvement and therefore extremely cost effective. The main outcomes of the project are intended to address both the assessment and the therapeutic intervention in autistic children :

1. Autism Assessment • A camera-based system that – triggered by a wearable EEG solution – will take snapshots of the scenes according to the eye movement and will allow to identify the stimuli that in a natural environment (the child’s home) cause significant responses in the autistic child; • The same pervasive wearable EEG system that - used in conjunction with an eye-tracking device - measures the brain activity while the patient is presented with the reproduction of the identified stimuli and allows to better characterize them. The eye tracking system will record the eyes’ fixations and will enable to see how the brain connectivity changes with naturalistic stimuli and allows determining the particular properties of the objects (e.g. shape, colour etc.) the child is looking at and most responsible for the abnormal brain wave behaviour. The system - being pervasive in nature - makes the patient “less aware� about the artificial nature of the experiment and therefore affects the cognitive activity far less than the currently employed systems. • A set of advanced and sophisticated signal processing algorithms enabling accurate characterisation of stimulation-specific brainwave anomalies and connectivity between different brain regions and hence giving vivid insight into the process of information integration ability of the brain in a stimulus-specific way. 2. Autism Therapy • The design of a personalized intervention protocol based on a heterogeneous strategy where well consolidated developmental/behavioural thera peutic approaches are combined with neurophysiologically established new connectivity-guided neuro feedback techniques. Intervention will use also ICT-based solutions such as virtual reality, serious game and robotics. • A set of unobtrusive tools for the continuous monitoring of the autistic children during the therapeutic program allowing the adaptation and personalization of the intervention. They include a wearable multi-parametric platform measuring relevant vital signs together with a camera-based system for the recognition of repetitive behaviors. • Sophisticated algorithms for advanced imaging techniques (Diffusion Tensor Imaging and fMRI) which are used by the doctor to check the anatomical and functional connectivity of the brain at different steps during the therapy and assess its effectiveness. • A novel system enabling intensive intervention in “patient-centric� way in the home settings with minimal human intervention leading to significant cost reduction while substantially enhancing effective clinical outcome. Finally the MICHELANGELO project will set the bases to validate the results of its research work in an exploratory study executed in Italy and in France.

Primary investigator

• Koushik Maharatna

Secondary investigators

• Srinandan Dasmahapatra
• Bashir Al-Hashimi
• Mike Wald

Partner

• 4 partners around EU

Associated research groups

• Pervasive Systems Centre
• Electronic Systems and Devices Group
• Electronics and Electrical Engineering

Date:

2010-2013

Theme:

Healthcare in ECS

Funding:

Artemis Joint Undertaking EU

The CHIRON Project intends to combine state-of-the art technologies and innovative solutions into an integrated framework designed for an effective and person-centric health management along the complete care cycle. In this vision, a. CHIRON will address and harmonize the needs and interests of all the three main beneficiaries of the healthcare process, i.e., the citizens using the services, the medical professionals and the whole community; b. CHIRON will position the citizens at the core of the whole healthcare cycle by considering them as “persons� with specificities and identities and will empower them to manage their own health; c. CHIRON will enlarge the boundaries of healthcare by fostering a seamless integration of clinical setting, at home setting and mobile setting in a concept of a continuum of care; d. CHIRON will speed up the move from treatment of acute episodes to prevention; e. CHIRON will provide the physicians with extensive support for treatment monitoring and management, timely decisions and appropriate actions in both the clinical and home environments; More specifically CHIRON intends: a. to design – according to this integrated approach – a reference architecture for personal healthcare which will ensure the interoperability between heterogeneous devices and services, a reliable and secure patient data management and a seamless integration with the clinical workflow; b. to develop sophisticated solutions of complex data analysis, feature extraction and knowledge management; c. to introduce beyond state of the art solutions in various specific parts of the system; d. to provide new, advanced tools for real time processing, computer-aided analysis and accurate visualization of medical images; and e. to validate the result of the research and assess the proposed solutions in relation to their technical and clinical aspects and from a socio-economic perspective. The CHIRON system will provide powerful supporting ICT tools and at the same time it will ensure that the patients and the doctors remain the protagonists of the healthcare process that has been designed around them.

Primary investigator

• Koushik Maharatna

Secondary investigators

• Srinandan Dasmahapatra
• Bashir Al-Hashimi
• Mahesan Niranjan

Partner

• 28 partners around Europe

Associated research groups

• Pervasive Systems Centre
• Electronic Systems and Devices Group
• Electronics and Electrical Engineering

Date:

2011-2013

Themes:

Solid dielectrics, Nanomaterials and Dielectrics

Funding:

_other

With political pressure to adopt renewable sources of energy such as wind, wave, solar and tidal comes the need to distribute power from the point of generation to the national distribution grid in a cost efficient manner. In the UK, the primary focus is on wind energy but this is an intermittent source of power which is typically generated offshore. Efficient distribution of electrical power demands insulation systems that combine low electrical loss, high breakdown strength with a balance of desirable thermal and mechanical properties. In this project we are looking at dielectric materials for use in future high voltage cable systems in collaboration with a major utilities company.

Primary investigators

• asv
• Ian Lee Hosier

Partner

• (Confidential)

Associated research group

• Electronics and Computer Science

Date:

2008-2011

Theme:

Novel Sensors

Funding:

EPSRC, Dstl

Primary investigators

• Professor Robert Wood
• Professor Keith Stokes
• Dr Julian Wharton
• Nick Harris
• awc

Secondary investigators

• Dr Megyan Nie
• apl08r
• Stefano Neodo

Partners

• nCATS
• Dstl
• Rolls Royce
• Lloyd's Register
• GKN Aerospace

Associated research groups

• Electronic Systems and Devices Group
• Electronics and Electrical Engineering

We investigate ZnO layer deposited using atomic layer deposition (ALD) method for thin film transistor (TFT) and nanowire transistor devices.

Primary investigators

• Harold Chong
• pa

Secondary investigators

• sms08r
• ejo8r
• tbm206

Date:

2009-2012

Themes:

Trust and Provenance, Grid and Distributed Computing, Decentralised Information Systems

Funding:

ESRC

A quantitative node for the ESRC-funded Digital Social Research programme.

Through the synthesis of statistical and computing expertise the project aims to realise the ESRC's vision of e-science enabling cutting edge methodological developments to help quantitative researchers do new and better research and to provide learning pathways to bring these cutting edge developments into working practices of quantitative social sciences.

Primary investigators

• Professor William Brown (University of Bristol)
• lavm

Secondary investigators

• Danius Michaelides
• hy2
• Professor Ian Plewis (University of Manchester)
• Dr Mark Tranmer (University of Manchester)
• Professor David De Roure (University of Oxford)
• Dr Paul Lambert (University of Stirling)
• Professor Mac MacDonald (Institute of Education)

Partners

• University of Bristol
• University of Manchester
• Universtiy of Oxford
• Universtiy of Stirling
• Institute of Education

Associated research groups

• Web and Internet Science
• Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group

Date:

2011-2013

Theme:

Trust and Provenance

Mission: to support the widespread publication and use of provenance information of Web documents, data, and resources. The Working Group will publish W3C Recommendations that define a language for exchanging provenance information among applications. (See Charter)

Primary investigator

• lavm

Secondary investigator

• tdh

Partner

• W3C Working Group

Associated research groups

• Web and Internet Science
• Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group

Date:

2010-2015

Themes:

Human Computer Interaction, Trust and Provenance

Funding:

EPSRC, AHRC

The PATINA project aims to revolutionise the design of technologies for supporting research. It was awarded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through the RCUK Digital Economy programme and will run for three years from October 2010.

Current digital research support systems take attention away from the material that they describe. PATINA will provide researchers with new opportunities to create research spaces that emphasise the primacy of research material, and support the sharing of research activities as well as results. Through recording of research practice the project will also enable you to ‘walk in the footsteps’ of other researchers, and explore how the provenance of your developing ideas links with theirs through shared objects that exist both online and in the real world.

The consortium will build wearable prototypes that can enhance research objects by projecting related information back into their research space. These technologies will also provide the means to capture, record, and replay the researcher's activities to support intuitive archiving, sharing and publication of interactions with research objects. The design of the technologies will draw on theoretical frameworks of space developed from studies of research spaces as diverse as libraries, museums, homes and archaeological fieldwork sites.

The project is led by the University of Bristol in collaboration with the Universities of Brighton, Greenwich, Newcastle, Southampton and Swansea. It involves partnerships with Microsoft Research, Nokia Research and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Primary investigators

• lavm
• Dr Mike Fraser, Bristol
• Dr Graeme Earl, Archeology, Southampton
• Prof Matt Jones, Swansea
• Dr Rosamund Davies, Greenwich
• Dr Martyn Dade-Robertson

Partners

• Archeology, Southampton
• University of Bristol
• University of Newcastle
• University of Brighton
• University of Greenwich
• University of Swansea

Associated research groups

• Web and Internet Science
• Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group

Date:

2011-2015

Themes:

Systems and control, Intelligent Systems and Machine Learning, Image processing and Computer Vision

Funding:

ERC starting grant

Today's state-of-the-art methods for data processing are model based. We propose a fundamentally new approach that does not depend on an explicit model representation and can be used for model-free data processing. From a theoretical point of view, the prime advantage of the newly proposed paradigm is conceptual unification of existing methods. From a practical point of view, the proposed paradigm opens new possibilities for development of computational methods for data processing.

The underlying computational tool in the proposed setting is low-rank approximation. Recent work by the applicant, co-workers, and others has demonstrated advantages of computational methods based on low-rank approximation over classical methods, based on solution of linear systems of equations. In this project, we will further advance the theory and algorithms for low-rank approximation by developing robust and efficient local optimisation methods and methods based on convex relaxations.

Low-rank approximation has applications in systems and control, signal processing, computer algebra, and machine learning, to name a few. Generic examples in system theory and signal processing are model reduction and system identification. Dimensionality reduction, classification, and information retrieval problems in machine learning can be formulated and solved as low-rank approximation problems, thus benefiting from the theory, algorithms, and numerical software tools developed in this research project. Beyond the scope of the project, we envisage that the newly proposed paradigm will catalyse cross-disciplinary research, leading to selection of the best theoretical tools and computational methods available as well as development of new ones by a synergy of ideas from different application domains.

Primary investigator

• im

Associated research group

• Information: Signals, Images, Systems Research Group

Date:

2010-2011

Theme:

Web Science

Funding:

JISC

The project aims to align musical composer artifacts within a number of scholary data catalogs including Grove, RISM, Copac & British Library. The project will also expose the aligned composers as RDF using a canonical URI, which will link to the LinkedBrainz/MusicBrainz data where possible.

Primary investigator

• monica schraefel

Secondary investigators

• ds
• David Bretherton

Partners

• Grove
• RISM
• Copac

Associated research group

• Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group