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A novel framework for melanoma lesion segmentation using multiparallel depthwise separable and dilated convolutions with swish activations
Get PDFSkin cancer remains one of the deadliest kinds of cancer, with a survival rate of about 18–20%. Early diagnosis and segmentation of the most lethal kind of cancer, melanoma, is a challenging and critical task. To diagnose medicinal conditions of melanoma lesions, different researchers proposed automatic and traditional approaches to accurately segment the lesions. However, visual similarity among lesions and intraclass differences are very high, which leads to low-performance accuracy. Furthermore, traditional segmentation algorithms often require human inputs and cannot be utilized in automated systems. To address all of these issues, we provide an improved segmentation model based on depthwise separable convolutions that act on each spatial dimension of the image to segment the lesions. The fundamental idea behind these convolutions is to divide the feature learning steps into two simpler parts that are spatial learning of features and a step for channel combination. Besides this, we employ parallel multidilated filters to encode multiple parallel features and broaden the view of filters with dilations. Moreover, for performance evaluation, the proposed approach is evaluated on three different datasets including DermIS, DermQuest, and ISIC2016. The finding indicates that the suggested segmentation model has achieved the Dice score of 97% for DermIS and DermQuest and 94.7% for the ISBI2016 dataset, respectively
Towards engineering higher quality intelligent environments
No full textThis study is motivated by the need to engineer higher quality intelligent environments. Intelligent Environments possess certain unique characteristics and requirements compared to traditional information systems. Additionally, there is little guidance on how to manage and evaluate quality during their development. To address these concerns, this study has three main objectives. First, it proposes a novel quality-in-use model for evaluating intelligent environments according to their guiding principles. Second, it presents a quality enhanced version of the User Centred Intelligent Environment Development Process to manage quality during the development lifecycle. Third, we report on application of a multiple case study which investigated the effects of our proposed approaches to projects from three different contexts. We can say that quality is built into the systems by incorporating quality characteristics, from the ISO/IEC 25000 standards, with functional requirements. It was found that stakeholders collaborating with the project team are better able to define targets using measures from the quality standards. Quality metrics allowed developers to keep track of deviations from quality targets and fix problems early during development, enabling better evaluation of the application quality. The proposed quality-in-use model was found to be insightful in guiding the development of a system by offering a more objective perspective on the expected capabilities of the system. Stakeholders’ involvement during the entire process ensures that the delivered systems deliver the best value. However, the challenge is to shorten the development cycle so that feedback can be obtained early and regularly from them. It was also noted that there is a significant increase in number of system tests which could impact delivery time, budget and necessitates a highly experienced project team
How can the Cypriot potato industry sustain itself within the current local, EU and global marketplace?
Get PDFMy research investigates the strategic connections between product management and marketing to sustain the Cypriot potato industry within the current local EU and global marketplaces. Facing dynamic market forces, European regulatory changes and evolving consumer demands, this study aims to strengthen the industry's sustainability and competitiveness.
Using qualitative data gathered from interviews with market experts and growers of various scales, the research highlights the enduring marketing practices and strategic initiatives fundamental for enhancing the industry's sustainability.
My research is focused on sustaining the Cypriot potato industry encompassing a comprehensive review of literature, research methodology, project activity, findings, and recommendations. Key findings suggest that while 'Fresh Cypriot Potatoes' have traditionally been marketed similarly over the past fifty years, significant changes such us a dramatic decrease in growers’ numbers and potato quantities necessitate a revaluation of current strategies.
The research aims to address unexplored aspects and provide valuable insights, focusing on practical improvements in product management and marketing to counter challenges focused on three major findings: the European everchanging regulations, marketing insufficiency and rising customer expectations.
Through reframing the problem, my research did more than just alter the interpretation of the data; it also revolutionized the research approach itself. By improving perception and critical thinking to a higher level, my research identified gaps, overlaps, and potential areas for further exploration, and helped me set the stage for actionable recommendations that are both innovative and aligned with broader sustainability goals.
My findings reveal the industry’s crucial challenges, including climate change, water scarcity, production costs, and inadequate agricultural practices, impacting sustainability and sales. My research offers strategies and insights into managing these issues and achieving sustainable growth, emphasizing proactive regulation measures, dynamic marketing and customer focused strategy.
My research not only contributes to the theoretical landscape by addressing gaps in current literature but also proposes actionable insights and strategic recommendations aimed at strengthening the industry's market position and sustainability via direct input to the industry via my professional position as general Director of the biggest exporting organisation for the last 20 years
Mental health context for minoritised ethnic individuals
Get PDFA review of the importance of context for individuals seeking mental health care who are of minoritised ethnic background
Finance and funding for upscaling sustainable fashion
Get PDFIn Chapter 7, Lyon, Elf, Owen and Werner explore the issues related to financing early-stage sustainable fashion businesses. As these businesses grow, the demand for finance to support their scaling grows. Examining a sample of fashion businesses that have sought external finance, we demonstrate the existence of a finance escalator with early-stage businesses reliant on entrepreneurs’ own investment and that of family and friends, complemented by grant finance. As businesses grow and mature, they seek other types of finance but may be excluded from conventional sources of bank and institutional investment because of their ‘liability of newness and smallness’ and their focus on sustainability. Therefore, businesses seek alternative forms of borrowing and equity investment from social investors and business angels who are also well aligned with their sustainability goals. The authors also show that many businesses decide not to take on external finance as their business models show limited potential to generate a surplus for repayment, or they prioritise control of their sustainability goals over growth
Disputing the history of Ottoman violence: an American missionary and an original counternarrative of the Bulgarian atrocities of 1876
No full textWithout the earliest reports of Edwin Pears, Eugene Schuyler, Walter Baring, Januarius MacGahan, and William Gladstone there would not be a historiography of the Bulgarian Atrocities of 1876. Their reports were formative for not one but three historiographic traditions: the dominant English-Western tradition, but also the Bulgarian and Turkish nationalist traditions. For each of these, even those whose outlook is revisionist, the earliest reports function determinatively.
The heretofore unconsidered counternarrative of the Bulgarian Atrocities by American missionary Henry O. Dwight proves upsetting, therefore, both to the earliest reports and to the century and a half of historiographic development since. Written contemporaneously and predicated upon eyewitness testimony––a feature shared only by Schuyler, Baring, and MacGahan––Dwight’s counternarrative credibly challenged the popular narrative on six points: (1) By copying the structure of the other eyewitness reports Dwight takes aim at these reports in particular, deliberately setting the stage for a confrontation––one ultimately avoided when Dwight decided against publishing his report; (2) By exhibiting the same anti-Turkish bias as his opponents, Dwight inadvertently lends credibility to his pro-Turkish conclusions, which are not easily explained by his bias; and (3–6) By contradicting the claims of the popular narrative on four integral themes, Dwight disputes the authority of the other earliest reports. These themes are (3) the historicity of the April Uprising; (4) the role of the American missionaries in the earliest reporting of the Ottoman violence; (5) the total death toll; and (6) the methodological foundation for ascertaining this figure.
Dwight’s counternarrative thus strikes at the very foundation of the popular narrative as it was predicated upon the earliest reports of Pears, Schuyler, Baring, MacGahan, and Gladstone. Further still, it upsets the historical assumptions about the Bulgarian Atrocities that continue to prop up the Western historiographic tradition, as well as the Bulgarian and Turkish nationalist traditions. Therefore, for the earliest reports and the secondary literature, Dwight’s counternarrative is remedial and invites both the careful reconsideration of the Bulgarian Atrocities themselves as well as that of the literature that continues to form around these events
HANNA: Human-friendly provisioning and configuration of smart devices
Get PDFToday, there are billions of connected IoT devices and their number continues to grow as they contribute to the digitalization of infrastructures. However, the deployment process of these smart wireless devices when delivered to customer premises is slow and error prone as each of them needs to be provisioned with authentication credentials to access the corporate network. In this paper, we propose HANNA, a human-friendly provisioning and configuration framework for smart devices, that extends the zero-touch paradigm to large IoT deployments by introducing voice assisted configuration in combination with large scale ad-hoc communications to overcome the initial installation effort of IoT deployments. The most prominent role in HANNA is played by the assisting device, which includes a voice assistant capable of correctly understanding a minimum number of keywords required for initial provisioning and configuration of the devices. The device’s role is to interact with the user and ensure that all provisioning details are received. These are then converted into appropriate machine instructions for further use by the mass provisioning mechanism. We provide an example prototype implementation of HANNA and evaluate the performance of the assisting device in the human-to-machine communication phase and the performance of the selected communication technique in the machine-to-machine communication phase. Our results show the potential of existing speech-to-text engines for this application area and also reveal shortcomings with respect to the robustness of the engines in office-like working environments as well as with respect to user’s gender and language proficiency level. Additionally we show that the proposed machine-to-machine provisioning approach is always faster compared to manual provisioning for cases with more than ten devices
Eavesdropping on speech in wild carrion crows
No full textLarge-billed crows wild-caught in Tokyo respond more to playback of Dutch than to Japanese without any prior training or rewards, but it remains unclear why they would respond differently to different languages. It is conceivable that they eavesdrop on human speech as an indicator to human presence (similar to eavesdropping on predator calls) and have subsequently habituated to Japanese, the locally spoken language. In this thesis, I aimed to investigate this response to speech in another corvid species, the carrion crow (Corvus corone). I found that wild carrion crows in both London and Milton Keynes responded to speech with increased vigilance compared to parakeet and pigeon calls (non-speech control vocalizations), but they did not respond differently to the local English compared to the foreign Vietnamese. To test whether this is due to a lack of ability or a lack of relevance, I then conducted a learning experiment in which playback of Vietnamese was paired with a food reward, while English was not. The crows in this experiment did not learn to discriminate the two languages. To understand whether encounters with humans are primarily positive, neutral, or negative for crows, I asked London and Milton Keynes residents about their behaviour towards crows. I found that while most people do not engage with crows, a small minority do regularly feed or chase them. I also surveyed carrion crows’ foraging locations across Milton Keynes to examine under which environmental conditions they may benefit from eavesdropping on speech. Finally, I wrote an agent-based model to understand whether eavesdropping could improve the crows’ survival odds, thus potentially providing a fitness benefit. The findings presented in this thesis contribute to research on corvid cognition, speech processing in non-human animals, and urban ecology
The bridge between technique and presence: an inquiry into the lived experience of group leader presence
Get PDFThis research set out to inquire into the lived experience of group leaders’ and group psychotherapists understanding of the meaning of presence. Presence was chosen as a medium to understand the gap between the technique-driven group leader and one whose leadership is relationally focused. With fewer training programmes providing in-depth training in group leadership, the current trend of reliance on learning techniques and skills-based training of group leaders has grown exponentially. Training programmes have provided a formulaic and relationally avoidant approach to leading groups, rendering outdated the artistry and complexity of training group leaders.
The research methodology frame was based on a Heideggerian interpretative hermeneutic phenomenological approach. A group of nine professionals from different areas of expertise in group leadership came together over six consecutive sessions to explore their lived experience and understanding of group leader presence. Principles from Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) were initially used as a springboard for the analysis of the research narratives, along with other steps which were creatively added. Criteria for analysis of participants’ body language in the video recordings, with the sound muted, were developed to meet the needs of the research project.
From the findings, three key themes emerged. The first theme provides compelling evidence of group leader presence as sensory, experienced as an embodied sense of something to be noticed and attuned to before engaging in articulation. The second theme acknowledges group leader presence as relationally focused on multiple levels of awareness to include the self, the other, and the group as a complex connective network. The third theme distinguishes presence, not as a fixed entity, but simply as continually changing in meaning construction, flow, and movement.
The research findings have implications for the future direction of group leader training. A bridge connecting group leadership technique with presence has been identified in a merging of Eugene Gendlin’s ‘philosophy of the implicit’ and Aristotle’s virtuous practical wisdom, charting the growth of the group leader from technique towards sensory presence
An invitation to thought: ambiguity in the apologetic of C. S. Lewis
Get PDFThis thesis examines the role of ambiguity within the apologetic of C.S. Lewis. Though the nature and value of ambiguity remain contested across scholarship, there is agreement that ambiguity has some role to play in creating understanding. That role is almost entirely unexplored within Christian apologetics and Lewis studies. Through an exposition of examples from selected primary works, I will argue that the ambiguity evidenced in Lewis, while at times errant, is often employed with great strategic value, carrying the reader further along Lewis’s desired apologetic path.
Chapter one provides an introduction to the thesis. Chapter two provides a systematic literature review for works related to ambiguity, Lewis, and his use of clarity versus ambiguity. A taxonomy of Lewis’s works and the methodology and criteria for primary sources are established. Chapter three examines Lewis’s apologetic approach, including his theological self-awareness, reasons and motives for his use of strategic ambiguity, and distinctives within his methodology.
Chapter four presents the critical examination of ambiguity from the selected primary apologetic sources: The Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity, and Miracles. The examination is expository with findings organized by the date of publication for each primary source.
The Conclusions chapter, in addition to presenting research outcomes and relationship to current scholarship, addresses objections and presents recommendations for further research