11913 research outputs found
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Learning 6D Object Pose Estimation With Event Cameras Using Synthetic Data and Domain Randomization
Full text linkEstimating the 6D pose of rigid objects is a critical upstream task in many robotics applications. Most existing methods rely on RGB or RGB-D sensing modalities, which suffer from limitations under challenging lighting conditions and high-speed motion. In contrast, event-based cameras offer unique advantages such as high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, making them well-suited for such scenarios. However, current event-based pose estimation methods are typically optimization-based, designed for relatively simple objects, and require hand-crafted parameters. In this work, we introduce the first learning-based approach for 6D object pose estimation using event cameras, employing an Augmented Event Encoder (AEE) trained entirely only on synthetic data and validated on the E-POSE dataset. Our model leverages an augmented autoencoder with domain randomization to map synthetic templates into a latent space, enabling accurate matching with real event query images. The method demonstrates robust performance across various scenarios, including changes in illumination and camera speeds, and achieves strong results on the ADD-S (Rotation) metric
Re-storying the curriculum and student co-creation in decolonial narratives through comic art and the collective imagination
Full text linkThis interactive session explores how co-created comic-book storytelling can function as a decolonial pedagogical tool, enabling students to uncover, visualise, and celebrate the invisible contributions of historically marginalised figures in education, health, and social reform. The project centres on collaborative partnerships between students and educators across two UK universities - Sunderland (post-92) and Glasgow (research-intensive) - to challenge dominant Eurocentric, male, and Western narratives embedded in higher education curricula.
Mainstream curricula across disciplines continue to privilege white, Western epistemologies, marginalising global and local knowledge systems. Within fields such as education, social sciences, nursing, and health sciences, the absence of diverse voices reinforces systemic inequities and limits students’ sense of belonging. Decolonising curricula therefore demands more than adding content as it requires reimagining how knowledge is represented, shared, and valued. Yet, few pedagogical models centre creative co-production and student agency in this process.
This session presents the start of a participatory research and teaching project in which students act as co-researchers and co-designers, creating comic-style narratives that re-story the contributions of overlooked historical and contemporary figures from the Global South and marginalised UK communities. The comic format - accessible, visual, and narrative - enables critical engagement with complex social histories while disrupting the textual dominance of Eurocentric academic discourse.
The workshop will:
• Demonstrate how visual storytelling can act as a decolonial research and teaching method;
• Share examples of student-created comic panels and narratives from the project;
• Explore how co-production can begin to foster psychological safety, belonging, and epistemic justice in higher education;
• Reflect on initial lessons learned from collaboration across post-92 and research-intensive contexts, highlighting institutional contrasts and shared commitments to inclusion.
The session embodies undisciplinarity by collapsing traditional academic-artistic divides and positioning creativity, affect, and relationality at the heart of knowledge production. Through fusing decolonial scholarship, visual arts, and participatory pedagogy, the project enacts an epistemic refusal that seeks to resist disciplinary silos and hierarchical modes of knowledge-making. It offers an imaginative, practice-led vision of what decolonial futures in higher education might look like: plural, embodied, and co-created
Addressing school absence in clinical practice
Full text linkIntroduction
School absence is a major challenge, with one in five pupils persistently absent in 2022/2023. School attendance is an important predictor of long-term educational, health, economic and social outcomes in children and young people (CYP).
Methods
This article reviews recent trends, determinants, effects and proposed strategies relating to school absence. It provides practical guidance for paediatricians to address absence in consultations and draws out key themes for future research. While focusing mainly on the English context, common challenges and solutions in the USA and other countries are also discussed.
Conclusions
The importance of CYP–parent–school partnerships, special educational needs and disabilities and mental health provision, collaborative interagency support, flexible, individualised plans and curricula for absence and positive school cultures is raised. Despite current challenges, there may be opportunities for improvement by engaging further with integrated neighbourhood teams and mental health support teams in schools
Evaluation of the Awareness of Health Risks Associated with Air Pollution among the Elderly in Sunderland, United Kingdom
Full text linkAir pollution is a global problem, with its health impact disproportionately affecting certain age groups, including the elderly. It is a complex issue driven by human activities, and addressing it requires a strong focus on health literacy and risk communication. Understanding public awareness of air pollution exposure and its health consequences is essential for developing effective interventions. This study aimed to evaluate awareness of the health risks associated with air pollution among the elderly in Sunderland, United Kingdom. A total of 420 participants were recruited, and their responses to questionnaires were collected and analysed using a Chi-square test. The results showed an awareness index of 0.8, indicating that participants were generally aware of the health risks associated with air pollution in the study area. Several factors influenced awareness among older people. The Chi-square test was highly significant (p < 0.01), and the Pseudo R-square value of 0.731 indicated that the explanatory variables accounted for 73.1% of the variation in awareness levels. However, less than half of the sample was fully aware of the health risks posed by air pollution. Enhancing public awareness and promoting exposure-reduction strategies could help protect the elderly and individuals with respiratory diseases
Medication Adherence Following Stroke and TIA: A Qualitative Synthesis of Patient, Caregiver and Clinician Perspectives
Full text linkBackground/Objectives: Stroke survivors require life-long secondary prevention to reduce recurrence, but they also often face long-term impairments that may limit medication adherence (MA) including cognitive, physical, and psychological effects. This updated qualitative meta-synthesis aims to descriptively explore and synthesise the experiences and perspectives of stroke/TIA survivors, informal and formal carers of stroke survivors, and healthcare professionals involved in post-stroke/TIA care, with a focus on factors influencing and hindering MA. Methods: A qualitative meta-synthesis was conducted in accordance with PRISMA guidance. Searches were undertaken across MEDLINE, CINAHL, Embase, PsycINFO, Scopus and Web of Science for studies published from 1 January 2018. Study quality was assessed using the Joanna Briggs Institute checklist and data synthesised using Thomas and Harden’s method. Results: Of 5463 titles and abstracts screened, 212 underwent full-text review with 13 papers meeting inclusion criteria from eight countries with a total of 435 participants. Seven key themes were identified: knowledge and understanding, beliefs and attitudes, practical barriers, social support, healthcare system, psychological factors and medication characteristics. Survivors showed a varied understanding of their condition and prescribed medicines, with unclear communication often contributing to confusion. Beliefs and attitudes shaped adherence, ranging from confidence in treatment to scepticism. Practical barriers included financial costs, physical impairments, and limited access to services. Social support from family, friends, and healthcare professionals was also important. Psychological wellbeing, coping strategies, and medication side effects further influenced adherence, highlighting the challenges faced by this patient group. Conclusions: Medication adherence post-stroke/TIA is shaped by multiple complex factors including knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and lived experience. As a descriptive synthesis of qualitative evidence, these findings do not permit conclusions regarding causality or intervention effectiveness but provide insight into perceived barriers and facilitators that may inform future intervention development and clinical questioning
A Comparative Analysis of Adaptive and Scheduled Dynamic Loss Weighting Strategies in Quantum Physics-Informed Neural Networks (QPINNs) for Solving the 1D TimeIndependent Schrodinger Equation
Full text linkIn recent years, Quantum Computing has revolutionized the field of physics by enabling researchers to tackle complex problems that were previously unsolvable. The ability to simulate and analyze phenomena at a quantum level has led to significant breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe. In this article, we describe and discuss how quantum computers are being used for cutting-edge research in quantum physics. The time-independent Schrödinger equation is a cornerstone of quantum mechanics, yet its solution for complex systems is a formidable computational challenge. Quantum Physics-Informed Neural Networks (QPINNs) have emerged as a promising paradigm, leveraging Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) as a wavefunction ansatz within a physics-informed machine learning framework. A critical and often overlooked aspect of training these models is the management of the multi-term loss function, which balances adherence to the governing Partial Differential Equation (PDE) with physical constraints such as normalization. This paper presents a comprehensive implementation and comparative analysis of two distinct Dynamic Loss Weighting (DLW) strategies for training QPINNs to solve the 1D time-independent Schrödinger equation. The first strategy is an adaptive, gradient-based method that dynamically balances loss components based on their real-time impact on model parameters. The second is a pre-scheduled annealing method that follows a curriculum-like approach, prioritizing different physical constraints at different stages of training. We apply these methods to two benchmark systems: the Quantum Harmonic Oscillator (QHO) and the Finite Square Well. Our results demonstrate that the adaptive, gradient-based DLW, when paired with a physic informed wavefunction ansatz for the QHO, achieves remarkable accuracy, converging to the exact ground state energy of = 0.5. Conversely, the scheduled annealing strategy applied to Square Well, using a more generic ansatz, converges to a plausible energy but with a higher residual loss. This comparative analysis reveals a crucial insight: the effectiveness of a DLW strategy is deeply intertwined with the physical-informedness of the underlying wavefunction ansatz. This suggests that a synergistic co-design philosophy, which considers the interplay between the quantum model's architecture and the adaptive training algorithm, is essential for developing robust and accurate QPINN-based solvers for quantum systems
Physician Care as a Moral Obligation in Health Care Practice
No full textFrom the beginning of their education and training, health care professionals are introduced to the principles of patient-centered care. Across health care systems internationally, professional codes of practice emphasize that the primary obligation is to prioritize the interests of patients,1,2 reflecting the moral ethos of the profession. It shapes not only what clinicians do but also their identity as moral agents.
However, the emphasis on prioritizing patients has had an unintended consequence: the systematic marginalization of health care professionals’ own well-being. Although patient-centered care remains morally foundational, its near-exclusive focus risks obscuring a parallel ethical responsibility; namely, the duty to maintain the conditions that enable safe, compassionate, and sustainable practice. This duty demands recognition of a moral obligation at the level of health care systems, not merely a matter of personal preservation or resilience on behalf of the physician
‘Time to talk’: what partner professionals expect from social workers to enhance understanding of safeguarding referral thresholds in order to improve partnership working
No full textThis paper presents findings from an exploratory study co-conducted by practitioners, researchers and educators engaging in a Facilitated Practice-based Research (FPR) programme (Deacon 2022, 2023) to explore how partner-professionals perceive and experience safeguarding of children and adults at risk, in North-east England. Reviews of safeguarding practice often highlight challenges in multi-agency working in communication, information sharing and working together; and different professions have different cultural perspectives regarding risk (Peckover and Golding, 2017, Ratcliffe et al. 2020).
Qualitative online surveys were distributed across the NESWA networks and responses were received (n=63) from partner-professionals including those from health, education, the police, housing and other charitable organisations. Data was analysed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006; and Clarke and Braun, 2013) six-stage thematic analysis framework in three-phases, which acted as both a teaching and quality control measure to enable each member of the project team to engage in thematic analysis.
Findings suggest partner-professionals, regardless of whether they worked with adults’ or children’s social workers, highlight the importance of transactional communication, understanding of profession-specific risk, and professional respect. It is posited that if more emphasis was given to the importance of social workers engaging in dialogue with partner professionals, this could potentially reduce unnecessary referrals and increase understanding between different professionals and agencies.
*NB. NESWA is a charitable body that oversees the social work teaching partnership in the North-east of England
Taste of Things to Come: Craving Responses to Ingestion of and Mouth Rinse with a Sugary Drink in Connection with Food Cues and Associations with Continuous Interstitial Glucose Measurement in a Healthy Population.
Full text linkBackground/Objectives: Food cravings are common with high-palatability foods that are high in sugar and/or fat. Food cues can strongly induce food craving, and heightened food cue reactivity is associated with eating disorders and obesity. Sweet taste signalling is suggested to be an important regulator of appetite and food intake, with sensory-metabolic mismatch potentially relevant for the food craving experience. This study investigated the interaction between taste and food cues and food craving in healthy people with and without ingestion of a sugary drink. Methods: This study had a randomised crossover design with 47 healthy individuals who participated in two experimental trials. Fasted individuals were exposed to food cues, and food craving pre- and post-exposure was measured via a newly validated method using handgrip force as a response modality. This was followed either by ingestion (ingestion trial) or mouth rinse (mouth rinse trial) of a sugary drink and reassessment of food cue craving responses. Continuous interstitial glucose monitoring was performed using a glucose sensor inserted into the upper arm, and a blood sample for leptin levels was taken. Results: A strong food craving response to food cues was bound to the fasted state, while ingestion of a sugary drink blunted food cue reactivity and reduced craving levels. Mouth rinse induced a stable increase in food craving, which reached a maximum after food cues. Interstitial glucose levels over the after-trial periods (incremental area under the curve, iAUC) were significantly higher for the rinse trial day than for the ingestion trial day, which may suggest higher carbohydrate/sugar intake after the rinse trial, while craving levels were associated with iAUC in the rinse trial. Conclusions: Outcomes indicate that taste/flavour in connection with food cues may generate an error signal experienced as food craving, whereas receipt of sugars, with concomitant physiological responses, reduces the signal and diminishes food craving. These results highlight the importance of sensory-metabolic mismatch in the food craving experience