Month: June 2013

EMESP Masters Prize 2013

Oliver Szymanezyk / / Uncategorized

On Thursday, 19th June 2013, Olivier Szymanezyk, a PhD games computing student at the Lincoln School of Computer Science travelled to Leicester to represent the University of Lincoln at the East Midlands Engineering and Science Professionals (EMESP) Masters Prize.

As described on their homepage, the EMESP provides a voice for the engineering and science profession in the East Midlands. It aims to make people aware and appreciative of the contributions of engineering and science to the economy, prosperity and quality of life. The yearly EMESP Masters Prize aims to link research with industry, allowing prosperous candidates to show their research, ideas and innovations in front of a well-chosen panel of industry experts and academics.

Upon his arrival, Olivier was warmly welcomed by the EMESP Chairman, Ian Treacy, who introduced him to other Masters Prize University representatives. This was shortly followed by a twenty minute presentation of each candidate of their ongoing work. Presentations were most interesting and included talks about blood clotting countermeasures, climate change dwelling adaptations, big data visualisations and novel approaches to the control of quad-rotor helicopters. Olivier talked about his games computing related work on the verification and validation process of simulated crowds for serious applications and video-game environments.

“It was most honourable to have been appointed by a panel of University of Lincoln academics as the representative of the University of Lincoln for the EMESP Masters Prize Event”, says Olivier, “This was a fantastic opportunity to show my work – I highly enjoy talking about my interdisciplinary crowd simulation research, and this was a great opportunity to do so. Furthermore, this was a most well organised event to see research presentations from other EMESP Masters Prize candidates from a wide array of research fields.”

Olivier was awarded the prize as the University’s representative, for his project and presentation, which, in the view of the EMESP Masters Prize 2013 judges and the evidence of its content, was of a high standard and has the potential to make commercial impact. Pictures of the award can be seen below – more pictures of the event will follow shortly.

New Conference paper Accepted to the “ World Congress on Engineering 2013”

Saddam Bekhet / / Conference, Uncategorized

New Conference paper accepted for publishing in  “World Congress on Engineering 2013“.

The paper title is “Video Matching Using DC-image and Local Features ”

Abstract:

This paper presents a suggested framework for video matching based on local features extracted from the DC-image of MPEG compressed videos, without decompression. The relevant arguments and supporting evidences are discussed for developing video similarity techniques that works directly on compressed videos, without decompression, and especially utilising small size images. Two experiments are carried to support the above. The first is comparing between the DC-image and I-frame, in terms of matching performance and the corresponding computation complexity. The second experiment compares between using local features and global features in video matching, especially in the compressed domain and with the small size images. The results confirmed that the use of DC-image, despite its highly reduced size, is promising as it produces at least similar (if not better) matching precision, compared to the full I-frame. Also, using SIFT, as a local feature, outperforms precision of most of the standard global features. On the other hand, its computation complexity is relatively higher, but it is still within the real-time margin. There are also various optimisations that can be done to improve this computation complexity.

Well done and congratulations to Saddam Bekhet .

PGRs Research Presentations – June 2013

Amr Ahmed / / Uncategorized

The May’s PGRs Research Presentations was held on Wed. 14th June, 11am, Meeting Room, MC3108 (3rd floor).

This session we had the following presentations:

Title: “Automatic Analysis of the Social Behaviours of Fish using Computer Vision“. Title:   “Investigating text analysis of user-generated contents for health related applications”

By: Alaa Al-Zoubi

By: Deema Abdal Hafeth
Abstract: The development of computer vision as a method for automatically monitoring and analysing human activities is a well established research area. However, the application of this technology to support analysis of animal behaviour is a relatively new area of research that is attracting increasing attention from both the computer science and biological science communities.
Current state-of-the-art fish monitoring systems are lack of intelligent in interpreting fish behaviors automatically. Sticklebacks have been a model species in behavioral biology for over half a century.  Traditional methods of studying the social behavior of these fish involve manual observation and recording. However, these methods are time-consuming, potentially error prone, and a limiting factor on the amount of data which can be analysed. To tackle these problems, We are developing a computer vision system to automatically detect and track the social behaviors of sticklebacks, under laboratory conditions. Our system will provide automated quantitative measurements for researchers to collect and analysis stickleback’s behaviors. The system will have the ability to deal with large dataset for a long period of time to facilitate studying the sticklebacks life cycle.		 Abstract: Data in patients’ records includes free-form text, which have valuable medical related information embedded in. This data can be extremely useful in aiding and providing better patient care. Text analysis techniques have demonstrated the potential to unlock such information from text. One challenge with clinical reports’ data is their strict availability and difficulties in accessing them. On the other hand, people are expressing themselves more widely nowadays and the online user-generated contents (UGC), like forums and blogs, are becoming more available. The aim of this work is to investigate the potential of text analysis techniques in predicting the smoking status but from user-generated contents such as forums. This especially includes the use of Psycholinguistic features on analysing forums, with the hypothesis that forum posts have different linguistic features and are rich in personal stories, fresh opinions, and thoughts.

 

 

 

The Q/A was followed by a brief cath-up meeting.