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Development of a Microcontroller-Based Recurrent Neural Network Predictive System for Lower Limb Exoskeletons
Get PDFPractical deployments of exoskeletons can often be limited by cost, limiting access to their usage by those that would benefit from them. Minimising cost whilst not harming effectiveness is therefore desirable for exoskeleton development. For Control Systems governing assistive and rehabilitative exoskeletons that react to the wearer’s movements, there will inevitably be some delay between when their wearer intends to move and when the exoskeleton can assist with this movement. This can lead to situations where a user may be limited by their own assistive exoskeleton, reducing their ability to move freely. A potential solution to this is to provide a proactive method of control, where the most likely path of the wearer’s movement is predicted ahead of the wearer making the motion themselves. This can be used to give the user assistance immediately as they are walking, as well as potentially pre-emptively adjust their gait if they suffer from predictable gait deficiencies. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the Data Collection, Implementation, and Effectiveness of an LSTM Recurrent Neural Network dynamically predicting future movement based off of prior movement. These methods were developed to use off the shelf, Low-Cost Microcontrollers as to minimise their Financial, Weight, and Power Impact on an overall Low-Cost exoskeleton design, as well as to evaluate how effective such an implementation would be when compared to running such a Neural Network on a more powerful processor. The created model was capable of achieving similar accuracies to far more powerful models on High-Powered Laptops
From deregulation to the twin transition: Exploring banking strategies for sustainability and digitalisation
No full textThis article explores the evolution of empirical banking research in developed countries over the past 30 years, reflecting the sector’s adaptation to changing regulatory and economic environments. We identify key areas that have shaped banking research, including priorities and strategies during the deregulation era and the culture crisis triggered by the global financial crisis. The discussion then shifts to two critical emerging themes: sustainability and digitalisation, highlighting their convergence in a ‘twin transition’ that addresses the interconnected challenges of climate change and technological disruption, both of which demand transformative approaches to banking practices, strategies, and policies
Energy-Efficient STAR-RIS Enhanced UAV-Enabled MEC Networks with Bi-Directional Task Offloading
Get PDFThis paper introduces a novel multi-user mobile edge computing (MEC) scheme facilitated by a simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) and a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Unlike existing MEC approaches, the proposed scheme enables bi-directional offloading, allowing users to concurrently offload tasks to the MEC servers located at ground base station (BS) and UAV with the support of the STAR-RIS. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed MEC scheme, we first formulate an optimization problem aiming at maximizing the energy efficiency of the system while ensuring the quality of service (QoS) constraints by jointly optimizing the resource allocation, user scheduling, passive beamforming of the STAR-RIS, and the UAV trajectory. A block coordinate descent (BCD) iterative algorithm designed with the Dinkelbach's algorithm and the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique is proposed to effectively handle the formulated non-convex optimization problem characterized by significant coupling among variables. Simulation results indicate that the proposed STAR-RIS enhanced UAV-enabled MEC scheme possesses significant advantages in enhancing the system energy efficiency over other baseline schemes including the conventional RIS-aided scheme
The False Start: British Electrification, 1880-1888
Get PDFUsing abundant London stock Exchange data, we examine in detail the amounts of capital for electrical projects raised in the period 1880-1888, when electricity was first becoming commercialized. We find that initially British investors committed through IPOs unprecedented amounts of capital to electrical ventures, some eight times the amount Thomas Edison was able to raise in New York. This lavish initial funding was egregiously squandered through managerial incompetence and greed, resulting in electrical projects finding a once welcoming market closed, affecting most directly putative electrical engineering enterprises
Increasing perceived happiness in neutral faces by posing a smile: an EEG frequency-tagging study
Get PDFPrevious research using EEG has so far failed to provide strong and convincing evidence for the effects of facial feedback on the visual processing of emotional facial expressions. To fill this gap, we harnessed the power of EEG frequency tagging, which offers excellent objective indication of implicit stimulus processing with high signal to noise ratio. Healthy adult participants (N=47) from diverse backgrounds (tested in 2023/2024) viewed rare happy and angry oddball faces, interspersed with frequent neutral faces, while either producing a smile or keeping a neutral face. Smiling resulted in reduced neural discrimination of happy vs. neutral faces over the left occipito-temporal region, as shown by decreased power at the oddball frequency. These findings could reflect that voluntary smiling, and the associated change in facial feedback, leads to neutral faces being perceived as happier, providing evidence for the facial feedback hypothesis
A data-driven approach for magnetic microswarm steering
No full textOne way to improve current medical standards is to investigate methods that aim to reduce the scale and severity of trauma caused while treating ailment. Here microswarms, collections of nano-scale particles that respond to electromagnetic forces, come into their own. Microswarms are a remotely controlled entity, requiring no onboard power or intelligence, as user controlled external electromagnets are used for articulation. Accurate simulation is key to improving this technique, and there exist microswarm simulators that can perform very accurate modelling. However, these simulations are not performed in real time, preventing implementation of human-in-the-loop control schemes. Human-in-the-loop control may result in improved patient trust and can aid in increasing input (and, thus, control) accuracy for users who are experts in their medical field, but not in the technology being used. This thesis documents a novel approach to fill the outlined gap, by implementing a human-in-the-loop control scheme into a bespoke real-time simulator, with haptic assistance to untrained users provided by a machine learning model. The efficacy of this system in its current form is compared to how a user may interact directly with the produced simulator. The real-time simulation was implemented in MATLAB and was verified against real world experimental data. Users provided input using a Novint Falcon haptic device. Data collection was performed by means of experimentation with participants. This data was then used as a training set for a neural network. To guide the microswarm to the goal outlet, the network was trained to map the spatial position of the particles in the swarm at each time step of the simulation to a suitable magnetic force to be applied. The neural network was implemented into a shared control approach interfacing with the haptic device. This form of haptic assistance effectiveness was evaluated in a further experiment with human participants
Industry tournament incentives and auditors' professional judgment
Get PDFPurpose – This study examines whether CEO’s industry tournament incentives are associated with auditors’ professional judgements, particularly in determining key audit matters (KAM) and setting materiality levels (MAT).
Design/methodology/approach – We use a sample of UK firms and measure auditors’ judgment through the number of KAM and the MAT levels, where a higher number of KAM indicates a broader audit scope, and a lower MAT level suggests a more detailed audit inspection. The analysis also examines cases in which CEOs possess financial expertise and employs various alternative specifications and robustness checks to address potential endogeneity.
Findings – Findings show that a larger industry tournament gap is associated with a decrease in KAM and an increase in MAT levels. However, this relationship is nuanced: when CEOs have a financial background, auditors perceive the higher in-industry pay gap as increasing business and fraud risks, prompting a deeper audit approach. Specifically, auditors lower materiality threshold and increase the depth of audit procedures to address these perceived risks. These findings underscore the importance of compensation and financial expertise dynamics in shaping audit practices.
Originality – While prior research has primarily focused on audit fees, this study offers novel insights by shifting the focus to auditors’ professional judgments. Specifically, it is the first to examine how industry tournament incentives influence auditors’ judgment, thereby providing new evidence on new channels, namely, the number of Key Audit Matters and Materiality levels, through which auditors respond to CEO industry tournament pressures. These channels are arguably less prone to measurement bias than audit fee-based. Furthermore, the study extends the literature by demonstrating how auditors adjust their judgments in response to CEOs’ financial backgrounds, which may serve as a signal of heightened strategic reporting risk
“You Coach Coaches?” A Rationale for the Coach Developer Role and Practical Guidelines for Effective Working Relationships with Coaches.
Get PDFThere has been an increased focus on the role of the coach developer within the academic literature and coaching frameworks. However, limited attention has been given to the practical workings of the coach developer and coach relationship. Therefore, in this article, we share practical lessons learned from two coach developers who have worked extensively one-on-one with coaches and in situ. This article contains seven themes that have emerged from our experiences as coach developers in the field: (1) The Value of an Outside Opinion, (2) Payments and Contracts, (3) ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’: Recognizing the Complexity of Problems, (4) Practical Use of Theory, (5) Impact and Transformation, (6) Coach Development Conversations as a Therapeutic Experience and, (7) Disengagement. The practical lessons within this article demonstrate the value of coach developers in helping, supporting, and working with coaches in unique situations and using individualized methods. However, the working relationship is complex and requires mutual trust to be effective. Finally, we assert that the coach developer role requires extensive knowledge and resources, which should be fairly compensated, as in other jobs
Experiences of Developing Evidence-Informed Decision-Making Competence in Trainee Sport Psychology Practitioners: Supervisor and Supervisee Perspectives
Get PDFThe purpose of the study was to explore how supervision influences trainee sport psychology practitioners’ development of evidence-informed decision-making competence. Six trainees (3 female, 3 male, average age 26.7±1.9 years, average years in training 1.4±0.9 years) and 6 training supervisors (3 female, 3 male, average age 44.7±14.2 years, years supervising 19.5±4.2 years) participated in semi-structured interviews. Participants represented all three sport and exercise psychologist training routes within the UK. Employing an interpretive phenomenological analysis methodology, three superordinate themes emerged that represent applied experiences of developing evidence-informed decision-making competencies: understanding the athlete and environment, translating research to practice, and becoming self-aware. A further three superordinate themes highlighted learning experiences during supervision that contributed to the development of evidence-informed decision-making competence: knowledge exchange, exploring thought processes, and self-development. The findings provide a better understanding of how trainees can develop competent and confident evidence-informed decision-making capabilities for applied sport psychology practice through supervision
Forecasting oil price volatility: does oil price uncertainty matter?
No full textIn this paper we empirically examine the predictive power of oil price uncertainty on time varying volatility in the oil futures market. Quantifying oil price uncertainty as the purely unforecastable component of oil price changes, we find this measure has significant predictive power for the return volatility of crude oil futures for horizons up to nine months ahead. Moreover, our oil price uncertainty factor outperforms the realized oil price volatility. In addition, our SVAR model shows that the effect of oil price uncertainty shock on oil market volatility is higher in magnitude and persistence when compared with the effect of aggregate demand, oil demand, supply and oil price volatility shocks