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Design of energy-efficient approximate arithmetic circuits for error tolerant medical image processing applications
No full textMedical image processing encompasses the use and investigation of human body image collections, usually from a Computed Tomography (CT) to diagnose pathologies for disease detection. Energy efficiency is one of the key parameters in the design of very large-scale integrated circuits. For more power consuming circuits, the traditional methodologies deal with limited approaches. In recent years, approximate computing techniques improve the design metrics power, delay, and area with a limitation on accuracy. High performance computing and Error tolerant applications are preferred to implement Approximation techniques. Many multimedia applications, such as digital image and video processing, can introduce minor errors in the processed output. For these applications, approximate computational approach offers good performance in terms of low power consumption at a trade-off of accuracy. This is best suited for arithmetic circuits. Several improved versions of Approximate adders (PAA_s) and Approximate Subtractors (APSC8-APSC10) have been proposed in this paper for basic operations. Based on these designs, multipliers and dividers have developed and also performance is compared with previous designs. The proposed designs achieve a better peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR)
The entrepreneurial academic: leveraging finite resources
No full textThis presentation was delivered at the Business and Management Research Institute Seminar series on the 6th of February 2024. Academics adopting an entrepreneurial mindset can leverage more resources to further their research and scholarly objectives. The theories and philosophies of entrepreneurship to the role of an academic using an author-ethnographic method to narrate the research journey of the presenter
An institutional perspective on the shifts in banking and capitalist ideology: sustainability, social, and environmental insights
Get PDFPurpose: This paper investigates the development of moralised business ideologies (MBIs) amongst sustainable banks as they navigate social and environmental business prospects. Design/methodology/approach: Empirical evidence is drawn from top-management-level interviews with 16 UK-based small and medium-sized banks that specialise in financing social and environmental projects. Findings: MBIs have emerged in the literature review and empirical data analysis as a new concept taken on by sustainable banks with roots closer to sustainability such as ethical practices, moralised values, sustainable business models and ecological standards. The results confirm that MBIs help banking institutions create a more sustained positive impact in terms of social and environmental business opportunities. Originality/value: This paper offers novel evidence on the intersection between banking and MBIs, with a focus on social, sustainability and environmental considerations.</p
Forced migration:a relational wellbeing approach
Get PDFEditorial. In this Special Issue, we consider the ways in which a relational wellbeing approach can be used to understand the lives and trajectories of refugees in general and young refugees in particular. We mainly focus on the lives of young adults who came to the global North as unaccompanied children—that is, without an adult responsible for them when they claimed asylum. Many of the papers report from the Drawing Together project (see https://www.drawingtogetherproject.org/, accessed on 11 January 2024). The project focus is on ‘relational wellbeing’ for young refugees—that is, wellbeing that is experienced through actions that repair and amplify a sense of responsibility they and other people have to each other. Hospitality and reciprocity emerge through small acts of fellowship. In time, these build patterns of exchanges between young refugees and those important to them, leading to a mutual sense of ‘having enough’, ‘being connected’, and ‘feeling good’ (White and Jha 2020). This is wellbeing as a shared endeavour. Overall, the project and many contributions in this Special Issue stand at the conjunction between fields of research into wellbeing and refugee studies. The papers span contexts and countries, offering a sense of an international array of experiences, joined by an issue of supra-national importance—that is, the ways interaction and relationality mediate the experiences of becoming and being a refugee
Centrifugal pump fault detection with convolutional neural network transfer learning
Get PDFThe centrifugal pump is the workhorse of many industrial and domestic applications, such as water supply, wastewater treatment and heating. While modern pumps are reliable, their unexpected failures may jeopardise safety or lead to significant financial losses. Consequently, there is a strong demand for early fault diagnosis, detection and predictive monitoring systems. Most prior work on machine learning-based centrifugal pump fault detection is based on either synthetic data, simulations or data from test rigs in controlled laboratory conditions. In this research, we attempted to detect centrifugal pump faults using data collected from real operational pumps deployed in various places in collaboration with a specialist pump engineering company. The detection was done by the binary classification of visual features of DQ/Concordia patterns with residual networks. Besides using a real dataset, this study employed transfer learning from the image detection domain to systematically solve a real-life problem in the engineering domain. By feeding DQ image data into a popular and high-performance residual network (e.g., ResNet-34), the proposed approach achieved up to 85.51% classification accuracy
Relational epistemic safety: what young people facing harm in their communities want and need from professionals tasked with helping them
Get PDFWhen young people are harmed beyond their families, what kinds of professional relationships help to keep them safe? Contextual Safeguarding is an approach to creating safety in community and school contexts that asks how changes can be made in the environment to create safer contexts. However, (mis)interpretations of the approach have given rise to practice devoid of relationships with the young people affected by professional decisions, and which override their rights and ways of knowing. We draw on consultations with young people about what they need from professional relationships when they experience extra-familial harm – called the Young People's Relationship Framework (YPRF). We then use this to analyse three pilot studies of multi-agency practice aimed at creating safety in extra-familial contexts. The findings show that, for a relational orientation to be achieved, professionals need to be guided by how young people know the world. We argue that this requires professionals to undergo a process of ‘undoing’: giving up privileged ways of knowing and making decisions, leading to what we have termed relational epistemic safety. We offer this to support professionals in developing relationships with young people who experience extra-familial harm that are characterised by equality and respect
Promoting workplace retention during global crises:an international survey of the preventive role of psychological support among victims of social discrimination in long-term care facilities
Get PDFThis international cross-sectional survey examined the potential role of organizational psychological support in mitigating the association between experiencing social discrimination against long-term care (LTC) facilities' healthcare professionals (HCPs) and their intention to stay in the current workplace during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants included a convenience sample of 2,143 HCPs (nurses [21.5 %], nurse aids or residential care workers [40.1 %], social workers [12.1 %], and others [26.4 %]) working at 223 LTC facilities in 13 countries/regions. About 37.5 % of the participants reported experiencing social discrimination, and the percentage ranged from 15.3 % to 77.9 % across countries/regions. Controlling for socio-demographic and work-related variables, experiencing social discrimination was significantly associated with a lower intention to stay, whereas receiving psychological support showed a statistically significant positive association (p-value=0.015 and <0.001, respectively). The interaction term between social discrimination and psychological support showed a statistically significant positive association with the intention to stay, indicating a moderating role of the psychological support
Artificial intelligence detects awareness of functional relation with the environment in 3 month old babies
Get PDFA recent experiment probed how purposeful action emerges in early life by manipulating infants' functional connection to an object in the environment (i.e., tethering an infant's foot to a colorful mobile). Vicon motion capture data from multiple infant joints were used here to create Histograms of Joint Displacements (HJDs) to generate pose-based descriptors for 3D infant spatial trajectories. Using HJDs as inputs, machine and deep learning systems were tasked with classifying the experimental state from which snippets of movement data were sampled. The architectures tested included k-Nearest Neighbour (kNN), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Fully connected network (FCNet), 1D-Convolutional Neural Network (1D-Conv), 1D-Capsule Network (1D-CapsNet), 2D-Conv and 2D-CapsNet. Sliding window scenarios were used for temporal analysis to search for topological changes in infant movement related to functional context. kNN and LDA achieved higher classification accuracy with single joint features, while deep learning approaches, particularly 2D-CapsNet, achieved higher accuracy on full-body features. For each AI architecture tested, measures of foot activity displayed the most distinct and coherent pattern alterations across different experimental stages (reflected in the highest classification accuracy rate), indicating that interaction with the world impacts the infant behaviour most at the site of organism~world connection
Students' perspectives of a study support (Studiosity) service at a University
Get PDFSupporting students’ success and achievement is a key mission of WP (Widening Participation) institutions such as the University of Bedfordshire. An essential step in ensuring students succeed is the development of academic writing skills – these are vital during students’ studies and when students leave university study and undertake further study or enter graduate-level employment. During the 2021–2022 academic year, the University of Bedfordshire implemented a study support service called Studiosity, a service designed to provide students with formative feedback on drafts of their assessment tasks. This study utilises a survey instrument exploring Studiosity’s Writing Feedback (WF) service and addresses a gap in the literature where there is very little understanding of the details of students’ engagement with the system. The survey’s results indicate a mismatch between students’ assumptions about formative feedback provided by Studiosity. However, when students utilise Studiosity’s WF service, the personalised and specific feedback raises students’ confidence in their ability to write academically
Effects of urban land-use planning on housing prices in Chiang Mai, Thailand
Get PDFChiang Mai is an emerging tourism-oriented city in Thailand. The booming tourism industry during the past decades has triggered significant expansion in its urban land area, resulting in a large number of newly-built residential communities appearing on unplanned land. In this study, we used multiscale geographically weighted regression (MGWR)-based hedonic price analysis to investigate 4624 housing transactions from 524 residential communities in Chiang Mai. This showed that the recent land-use planning in Chiang Mai has had unusual effects on housing prices; specifically, the effects of accessibility to hospitals, primary and secondary schools, green parks, and shopping malls could be ignored, demonstrating that local residents were well satisfied with land-use planning for high-quality medical and education sources and good living environments throughout the whole of Chiang Mai, and that no more land-use planning and investment on these facilities was needed. However, limited bus routes were only used for tourism and could not provide convenient routes for local residents, leading to their negative effects on housing prices in downtown areas, so the local government should lower the bus stop density in downtown areas and strengthen the transportation links between downtown areas and suburbs. Our study will not only support the urban land planning department of Chiang Mai to optimize residential communities and nearby facilities, but can also provide insights into housing price formation mechanisms in similar tourism-oriented cities in Thailand and beyond
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