- Date:
- 2008-
- Themes:
- Pervasive Computing and Networks, Algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks
This project aims to develop algorithms so that when network failures mean that nodes cannot communicate their data to the base station the gathered sensor readings can be backed up to other nodes. These backup copies can then be used to recover the data in the event of the original sensing node failing.
Primary investigator
- pjb08r
Secondary investigator
Associated research groups
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Pervasive Systems Centre
- Date:
- 2006-2010
- Themes:
- Energy Harvesting, Renewable Energy, MEMs and NEMs
- Funding:
- EPSRC
This research programme is aimed to develop a new generation of micro/nano thermoelectric generator for power harvesting applications by using the latest submicron micromachining processes. Such a device is intended initially for use in power harvesting applications and will be demonstrated powering a wireless sensor node from modest temperature gradients at ambient room temperature.
- Date:
- 2006-2010
- Themes:
- Energy Harvesting, Renewable Energy, MEMs and NEMs
- Funding:
- EPSRC
This research programme is aimed to develop a new generation of micro/nano thermoelectric generator for power harvesting applications by using the latest submicron micromachining processes. Such a device is intended initially for use in power harvesting applications and will be demonstrated powering a wireless sensor node from modest temperature gradients at ambient room temperature.
- Date:
- 2006-2010
- Themes:
- Energy Harvesting, Renewable Energy, MEMs and NEMs
- Funding:
- EPSRC
This research programme is aimed to develop a new generation of micro/nano thermoelectric generator for power harvesting applications by using the latest submicron micromachining processes. Such a device is intended initially for use in power harvesting applications and will be demonstrated powering a wireless sensor node from modest temperature gradients at ambient room temperature.
- Date:
- 2009-2011
- Themes:
- Virtual Communities and Social Systems, Web Science
- Funding:
- JISC
This project will employ a VRE to enable behavioural scientists working within a variety of disciplines across the university to collaborate in sharing and reviewing components of internet-delivered interventions. We will analyse and describe how the VRE can be flexibly used to support collaborations within and outside the university. Behavioural interventions (BIs) ââ¬â packages of advice and support for behaviour change ââ¬â are arguably the most important methodology and technology employed by behavioural scientists for understanding and changing behaviour. Internet-Based BIs (IBBIs) are beginning to play a crucial role in the delivery of BIs. If IBBIs could be viewed and shared within a VRE this would allow wider research communities to greatly speed up the research cycle of producing intervention components and testing them using large, pooled datasets. We have confirmed that there is enthusiasm to collaborate in developing IBBIs; we are already collaborating with UCL on this project and after holding several workshops have developed a large network of potential collaborators from other universities from within the UK, Europe, and the USA. The challenge to the university is how best to support resource sharing, critical analysis, publishing, and peer review of IBBIs within these inter-disciplinary research groups and networks. The behavioural scientists want to be able to collaborate on the building of the IBBI, discuss the IBBI (peer review), securely make available the results of the IBBI to other behavioural scientists, allow others to use this anonymised data in meta-studies, and inform others of what worked or did not. In this project we intend to build on the JISC VRE funded projects ââ¬ËCOREââ¬â¢ and ââ¬ËmyExperimentââ¬â¢. The target wider community nationally and internationally is represented by the e-social science, behavioural science, and VRE communities. The impact of this project will be in two main areas: the technology, and the user communities. Technology-wise the baseline comprises the CORE and myExperiment projects; we will be combining the experiences and technologies of these previous existing VRE projects. By completing this work we intend to extend this knowledge from the medical and science domains and apply it to the behavioural science domain.
Primary investigators
Partner
- Prof Lucy Yardley (Psychology, UoS)
Associated research groups
- Learning Societies Lab
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Electronic and Software Systems
- Date:
- 2009-2011
- Themes:
- Virtual Communities and Social Systems, Web Science
- Funding:
- JISC
The aim of the project is to build a framework for the integration of basic science and clinical research to manage research lifecycles and allow for integration of scientific approaches throughout these lifecycles into the everyday work practice of the consortia that manage translational clinical research. The project will take the CORE VRE and embed it into a National centre for surgical excellence, the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital (RNOH). The VRE will integrate both with the institutional systems and research life cycle, and with the national systems such as the National Health Service (NHS). It is our aim to integrate the CORE VRE with myExperiment to provide a set of services at RNOH to cover the four main areas of the research cycle, namely: the monitoring and governance of trials (experiment research administration); the trial protocols (experiment workflows); the publishing, dissemination and discussion on the results of trials in a repository; and the discovery of information from the repository and other resources. For this community, there are three tightly coupled areas of focus: research, clinical practice, and education (in the form of continuing professional development and training of the next generation of surgeons). In this project, our user community will be heavily involved in co-designing and codeployment of the tool set, and in particular the front end of the workbench will be user focused. The tools will need to be available to staff anywhere with the organisation, as clinicians need to be able to enter the data during clinics and directors of research need to be able to monitor the trials. This will bring with it a number of inter-operability issues, as we move data between the VRE, the hospital systems (NHS) and the institutional systems. To aid the understanding of the how the system will be used, we outline a typical ââ¬Ëresearch cycleââ¬â¢ that includes the practice of a clinical specialist in orthopaedics (who may also be a Higher surgical trainee) and a basic scientist. The purpose of this is to identify time essential information provision and interaction with pervasive technologies. For new researchers one of the most difficult tasks is to learn good practice or find related experiments to learn how to instantiate the protocols; in many organisations it is often easier to repeat an experiment than to find the results of a similar previous experiment. In this abstracted model of the research lifecycle, we have split up the cycle into four main research activities. In each of these activities the different issues and stakeholders are addressed. The wider community nationally is represented by the Musculoskeletal network of Greater London, NHS, e-science, Surgical and VRE communities. It is through the Musculoskeletal network of Greater London that we will be able to co-ordinate knowledge and demonstrations to advise the community and for continuity. This project will impact on the wider academic community in the UK, initially through dissemination via organisations such as BriteNet (Tissue Engineering), The British Orthopaedic Association, British Orthopaedic Research Society, and the British Elbow and Shoulder Society as the groups tied into the consortia development.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
- David De Roure
- Lester Gilbert
- sg01v
- Alejandra Saucedo
- pz2g12
Partner
- Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, Stanmore
Associated research group
- Electronic and Software Systems
- Date:
- 2009-2009
- Theme:
- Virtual Communities and Social Systems
- Funding:
- National Institute for Health Research
IBS affects 10ââ¬â22% of the UK population, with NHS costs over ã200 million a year. Abdominal pain, bloating and altered bowel habit affect quality of life, social functioning and time off work. Current GP treatment relies on a positive diagnosis, reassurance, lifestyle advice and drug therapies, but many suffer ongoing symptoms. A recent Cochrane review highlighted the lack of research evidence for IBS drugs. Neither GPs, nor patients have good evidence to inform prescribing decisions. However, IBS drugs are widely used: NHS costs 2005 of nearly ã10 million for mebeverine and over ã8 million for ispaghula husk. CBT and self-management can be helpful, but poor availability in the NHS restricts its use. Development of web-based CBT could increase access without increased costs. Aims 1) To develop a patient CBT based self-management website for IBS, using material from a previously validated paper-based CBT IBS self-management programme and assess the level of support needed for patients using the website (ie initial 30 minute telephone support session with a nurse or not). 2) To pilot an RCT to assess the effectiveness of the most commonly prescribed medications in UK general practice for IBS: mebeverine (anti-spasmodic) and ispaghula husk (bulking-agent) and of the patient CBT based self-management website.
Primary investigators
- Gary Wills
- Dr Hazel Everitt (Clinical Lecturer in General Practice)
- Prof Rona Moss-Morris (Professor of Health Psychology)
Associated research groups
- Learning Societies Lab
- Electronic and Software Systems
- Date:
- 2009-2009
- Theme:
- Virtual Communities and Social Systems
- Funding:
- National Institute for Health Research
Aims This programme will address the public health need a) to provide evidence for more rationally targeting antibiotics to those most likely to benefit and b) to develop better antibiotic and non-antibiotic strategies. Aims This programme will address the public health need a) to provide evidence for more rationally targeting antibiotics to those most likely to benefit and b) to develop better antibiotic and non-antibiotic strategies. Acute infections are the commonest conditions managed in primary care, and most people still receive an antibiotic despite limited evidence for their effectiveness. The overuse of antibiotics creates a major threat to the public health - antibiotic resistance. To move patient care forward we need to a) understand which patients are likely to suffer adversely when antibiotics are not given b) assess the impact of infections and their treatment on quality of life c) assess the effectiveness of alternative antibiotic prescribing strategies and non antibiotic approaches, and d) develop easily accessible information for patients. ECS Research plans: 5) Trial of tailored self management website. We will develop and then perform a moderate sized trial of a robust, theoretically based, interactive and tailored website to alter antibiotic expectations and use. We will develop a website and perform a trial among a minimum of 2000 patients. (A definitive trial will require several thousand patients). A website has the potential for results to be available rapidly nationally and currently 60% of families have access rising by 5% each year.
Primary investigators
- Gary Wills
- Prof Paul Little (Professor of Primary Care Research)
- Prof Lucy Yardley (Professor of Health Psychology)
Associated research groups
- Learning Societies Lab
- Electronic and Software Systems
- Date:
- 2009-2014
- Theme:
- Grid and Distributed Computing
- Funding:
- EPSRC
The myGrid Consortium is a multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary, internationally leading research group focusing on the challenges of e Science-the use of computational resources that allows scientists around the world to collaborate to produce and analyse the vast amounts of complex data in disciplines as diverse as biology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, music and social science. This platform grant enables the consortium to sustain an internationally leading team of researchers working on the foundations of e-Science.
The consortium delivers e-Laboratory environments in which scientists perform virtual or in silico experiments. The consortium's flagship tools include Taverna, myExperiment and Utopia. Taverna is used to develop the scientific workflows that scientists use to gather and analyse data - these represent the experiments on, for example, the genes and proteins involved in diseases. The myExperiment Virtual Research Environment is social web site software for the social curation and sharing of scientific research objects, including workflows and in silico experiments. UTOPIA is a suite of scientific visualisation and analysis tools that brings together disparate data sources in an easy to use unified interface. Together these enable scientific investigations to be undertaken in a way that enables the scientist to concentrate on the science, a feat that requires basic research in computer science.
These E-Science tools are world leaders with 1000, 900 and 2000 users respectively - Taverna is used in some 350 organisations. Producing these tools necessitates foundational e-Science research in four main areas: the management of the knowledge in such environments; the production and management of the metadata, or descriptions, of the experiments and experimental holdings; the design, use and reuse of in silico experiments; and the exploitation of social networks to enhance e-Science. Explicitly engaging with users supports adoption, and it drives challenging, user-relevant research and development based on observed experience and real need.
The platform grant enables the consortium to retain key staff that help sustain this world leading effort in e-Science and Open Science - they are experts in scientific workflow management, semantic technologies, intelligent middleware and social computing. Crucially it also supports our participation on the international stage, and it allows pump-priming novel and innovative research projects that are the hallmark of the consortium.
Primary investigators
- Carole Goble
- David De Roure
Secondary investigator
- Professor JG Frey
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2008-2011
- Themes:
- Multimedia, Web Science
- Funding:
- Provincia Autonoma di Trento (The Autonomous Province of Trento) (Bando grandi progetti 2006)
The aim of LiveMemories is to scale up content extraction techniques towards very large scale extraction from multimedia sources, setting the scene for a Content Management Platform for Trentino; using this information to support new ways of linking, summarizing and classifying data in a new generation of digital memories which are `aliveââ¬â¢ and user-centered; and to turn the creation of such memories into a communal web activity. Achieving these objectives will make Trento a key player in the new Web Science Initiative, digital memories, and Web 2.0, thanks also to the involvement of Southampton. But LiveMemories is also intended to have a social and cultural impact besides the scientific one: through the collection, analysis and preservation of digital memories of Trentino; by facilitating and encouraging the preservation of such community memories; and the fostering of new forms of community, and enrichment of our cultural and social heritage.
In the digital age, our records of past and present are growing at an unprecedented pace. Huge efforts are under way in order to digitize data now on analogical support; at the same time, low-cost devices to create records in the form of e.g. images, videos, and text are now widespread, such as digital cameras or mobile phones.
This wealth of data, when combined with new technologies for sharing data through platforms such as Flickr, Facebook, or the blogs, open up completely new, huge opportunities of access to memory and of communal participation to its experience.
Primary investigators
Secondary investigators
- dpd
- Jonathon Stephen Hare
- ads04r
- kmo
- Heather Packer
Partners
- University of Trento
- Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Associated research group
- Web and Internet Science