Ambient Multi-Camera Personal Documentary

Polymnia is an automated solution for the creation of ambient multi-camera personal documentary films. This short paper introduces the system, emphasising the rule-based documentary generation engine that we have created to assemble an edited narrative from source footage. We describe how such automatically generated media can be integrated with and augment personally-authored images and videos as a contribution to an individual’s personal digital memory

Planning the digitisation, storage and access of large scale audiovisual archives

This paper presents ongoing work in PrestoSpace on how broadcast archives can plan large-scale, long-term digitization and storage projects. In our approach, carrier decay, technical obsolescence, and rapidly falling costs of mass storage are represented as a series of statistical and predictive models. The models include ongoing migration within a digital archive. The objective is to allow archive managers to investigate the trade-offs between how many items to transfer, the cost of transfer and storage, how long it will take, what quality can be achieved, how much will be lost, and what digital storage solutions to adopt over time. The process and models are based on digitization projects conducted by large broadcast archives that are currently migrating their collections into digital form. Whilst our focus is on broadcast archives, our findings should be readily transferable to other scenarios where there is a need to store large volumes of digital data over long periods of time

A Feature-Augmented Grammar for Automated Media Production

The IST Polymnia project is creating a fully automated system for personalised video generation, including content creation, selection and composition. This paper presents a linguistically motivated solution using context-free feature-augmented grammar rules to describe editing tasks and hence automate video editing. The solution is media and application independent

A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure

Coproduction and health: Public and clinicians' perceptions of the barriers and facilitators

Background Coproduction is an approach increasingly recognized across public services internationally. However, awareness of the term and the barriers and facilitators to its implementation in the NHS are not widely understood. This study examines clinician and public perceptions of coproduction within the context of the Prudent Healthcare initiative. Objectives To provide insights into how coproduction is viewed by clinicians and the public and identify perceived barriers and facilitators to its implementation. Design Using qualitative research methods, interviews were conducted with the public (n = 40) and clinicians (n = 40). Five focus groups were also conducted with the public (n = 45) and six focus groups with clinicians (n = 26). The COM‐B model was used to analyse the data; key domains include Capability, Opportunity and Motivation. Setting This is an all‐Wales study, involving six Health Boards, an NHS trust and community and patient groups. Results Key barriers relating to Capability include lack of awareness of the term coproduction and inadequate communication between clinicians and citizens. Opportunity‐centred barriers include service and time constraints. Conversely, facilitators included utilizing partnerships with community organizations. Motivation‐related barriers included preconceptions about patients’ limitations to coproduce. Conclusions There were broadly positive perceptions among participants regarding coproduction, despite initial unfamiliarity with the term. Despite study limitations including underrepresentation of employed public participants and junior doctors, our analysis may assist researchers and policymakers who are designing, implementing and evaluating interventions to promote coproduction

Re-imagining the future:repetition decreases hippocampal involvement in future simulation

Imagining or simulating future events has been shown to activate the anterior right hippocampus (RHC) more than remembering past events does. One fundamental difference between simulation and memory is that imagining future scenarios requires a more extensive constructive process than remembering past experiences does. Indeed, studies in which this constructive element is reduced or eliminated by “pre-imagining” events in a prior session do not report differential RHC activity during simulation. In this fMRI study, we examined the effects of repeatedly simulating an event on neural activity. During scanning, participants imagined 60 future events; each event was simulated three times. Activation in the RHC showed a significant linear decrease across repetitions, as did other neural regions typically associated with simulation. Importantly, such decreases in activation could not be explained by non-specific linear time-dependent effects, with no reductions in activity evident for the control task across similar time intervals. Moreover, the anterior RHC exhibited significant functional connectivity with the whole-brain network during the first, but not second and third simulations of future events. There was also evidence of a linear increase in activity across repetitions in right ventral precuneus, right posterior cingulate and left anterior prefrontal cortex, which may reflect source recognition and retrieval of internally generated contextual details. Overall, our findings demonstrate that repeatedly imagining future events has a decremental effect on activation of the hippocampus and many other regions engaged by the initial construction of the simulation, possibly reflecting the decreasing novelty of simulations across repetitions, and therefore is an important consideration in the design of future studies examining simulation

Grey and white matter correlates of recent and remote autobiographical memory retrieval:Insights from the dementias

The capacity to remember self-referential past events relies on the integrity of a distributed neural network. Controversy exists, however, regarding the involvement of specific brain structures for the retrieval of recently experienced versus more distant events. Here, we explored how characteristic patterns of atrophy in neurodegenerative disorders differentially disrupt remote versus recent autobiographical memory. Eleven behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia, 10 semantic dementia, 15 Alzheimer's disease patients and 14 healthy older Controls completed the Autobiographical Interview. All patient groups displayed significant remote memory impairments relative to Controls. Similarly, recent period retrieval was significantly compromised in behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease, yet semantic dementia patients scored in line with Controls. Voxel-based morphometry and diffusion tensor imaging analyses, for all participants combined, were conducted to investigate grey and white matter correlates of remote and recent autobiographical memory retrieval. Neural correlates common to both recent and remote time periods were identified, including the hippocampus, medial prefrontal, and frontopolar cortices, and the forceps minor and left hippocampal portion of the cingulum bundle. Regions exclusively implicated in each time period were also identified. The integrity of the anterior temporal cortices was related to the retrieval of remote memories, whereas the posterior cingulate cortex emerged as a structure significantly associated with recent autobiographical memory retrieval. This study represents the first investigation of the grey and white matter correlates of remote and recent autobiographical memory retrieval in neurodegenerative disorders. Our findings demonstrate the importance of core brain structures, including the medial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, irrespective of time period, and point towards the contribution of discrete regions in mediating successful retrieval of distant versus recently experienced events

The application of predictive modelling for determining bio-environmental factors affecting the distribution of blackflies (Diptera: Simuliidae) in the Gilgel Gibe watershed in Southwest Ethiopia

Blackflies are important macroinvertebrate groups from a public health as well as ecological point of view. Determining the biological and environmental factors favouring or inhibiting the existence of blackflies could facilitate biomonitoring of rivers as well as control of disease vectors. The combined use of different predictive modelling techniques is known to improve identification of presence/absence and abundance of taxa in a given habitat. This approach enables better identification of the suitable habitat conditions or environmental constraints of a given taxon. Simuliidae larvae are important biological indicators as they are abundant in tropical aquatic ecosystems. Some of the blackfly groups are also important disease vectors in poor tropical countries. Our investigations aim to establish a combination of models able to identify the environmental factors and macroinvertebrate organisms that are favourable or inhibiting blackfly larvae existence in aquatic ecosystems. The models developed using macroinvertebrate predictors showed better performance than those based on environmental predictors. The identified environmental and macroinvertebrate parameters can be used to determine the distribution of blackflies, which in turn can help control river blindness in endemic tropical places. Through a combination of modelling techniques, a reliable method has been developed that explains environmental and biological relationships with the target organism, and, thus, can serve as a decision support tool for ecological management strategies