Category: Uncategorized

The monthly PGR meeting was held at Room MC3108 at 14:00 on Wednesday, 9th November.

We had 1 speaker for this month seminar:

Speaker: Francesco Caliva

Title: Extraction of the retinal vascular trees

Abstract: The retina is a non-invasive access point to the vascular network, and several studies have shown that systemic (and local) disorders can affect blood vessels geometry and alter haemodynamic conditions within. Fundus photography is the gold standard screening technique of the retina. Therefore fundus images are employed in our research. This talk will present the subject of our research, which aims at identifying the retinal vascular trees and differentiate them as arterial and venous.

 

This was followed by discussions regarding the PGR studies in the School, organised by Dr Marc Hanheide.

 

The next seminar will be held in December. The date and venue for the next meeting will be announced.

The monthly PGR meeting was held at Room MC3108 at 14:00 on Wednesday, 12th October.

We had 2 speakers for this month seminar:

Speaker: Qinbing Fu

Title: Bio-inspired Collision Detector with Enhanced Selectivity for Ground Robotic Vision System

Abstract: There are many ways of building collision-detecting systems. We propose a novel collision selective visual neural network inspired by LGMD2 neurons in the juvenile locusts. Such collision-sensitive neuron matures early in the first-aged or even hatching locusts, and is only selective to detect looming dark objects against bright background in depth, represents swooping predators, a situation which is similar to ground robots or vehicles. However, little has been done on modeling LGMD2, let alone its potential applications in robotics and other vision-based areas. Compared to other state-of-the-arts,our major contributions are first, enhancing the collision selectivity in a bio-inspired way, via constructing a computing efficient visual sensor, and realizing the revealed specific characteristics of LGMD2. Second,we applied the neural network to help near range path navigation of an autonomous ground miniature robot in an arena. We also examined its neural properties through systematic experiments challenged against image streams from a visual sensor of the micro-robot.

 

Speaker: Xuqiang Zheng

Title: “A 5-50 Gb/s Quarter Rate Transmitter with a 4-Tap Multiple-MUX based FFE in 65 nm CMOS”

Abstract: We present a 5-50 Gb/s quarter-rate transmitter with a 4-tap feed-forward equalization (FFE) based on multiple-multiplexer (MUX). A bandwidth enhanced 4:1 MUX with the capability of eliminating charge-sharing effect is proposed to increase the maximum operating speed. To produce the quarter-rate parallel data streams with appropriate delays,a compact latch array associated with an interleaved-retiming technique is designed. Implemented in 65 nm CMOS technology, the transmitter occupying an area of 0.6 mm2 achieves a maximum data rate of 50 Gb/s with an energy efficiency of 3.1 pJ/bit.

 

 

The next seminar will be held in November. The date and venue for the next meeting will be announced.

The monthly PGR meeting was held on Wednesday 21st September, 10:00-12:00, Room MC3108.

We had 1 speakers for this month seminar:

Miss Grace Ataguba

Exploring Story Telling Technologies for Memorialization in Cemetery and Living Spaces

Abstract: Memories are interesting part of everyday lives and storytelling is one form we adopt to share memories. Memorialization of the dead which involves remembering the dead through story telling has been in existence since time immemorial. The rise in digital death has relatively brought about a rise in digital memorialization as compared to an existing practice where the bereaved is constrained by cultural and religious beliefs as well as a certain space to commemorate their dead; especially the cemetery. Therefore the shift in the use of current technologies for memorialization is one of the indicators of how well people are willing to continuously establish bonds with the dead. In our study, we wish to consider stories people are willing to share in memory of their loved ones to identify relationship that exist among the likely variables that influences their response. These variables include: the length of time since the loss: closeness of the relationship measured in various forms and the story teller. The research will be adopting participatory research design approach in getting the focused group involved in the study. However we designed our instrument- an online survey to collect these stories which has been given ethical consideration and approval. Participants for the study are being recruited through emails, university news blogs, advertisements, social media and discussion groups. The data collected will be analysed using basic concepts of data sciences – emotion mining and statistics. Results of the analysis will serve as a pilot study to our main study.

 

The next seminar will be held in October. The date and venue for the next meeting will be announced.

The monthly PGRs Research Presentations was held on Wed. 9^th March, 2pm, Room MC3108.

This session we had the following presentations:

		Title: Facilitating Individualised Collaboration with Robots (FInCoR).
		By: Peter Lightbody
AGEDNA: Speaker –> Break & refreshments Farewell & Thank you to previous PGRs Student Reps and those who have been actively helping & supporting the PGRs activities & community. Brief about the responsibilities and benefits of being a PGR Student Rep.       Reps Election. (By SU Rep.) Announcements, AOB, & closing		Abstract: Enabling a robot to seamlessly collaborate with a human counterpart requires a robot to not only identify human preferences, but also to adapt in order to decrease the likelihood of distress and discomfort for the human collaborator. This work presents the use of qualitative spacial relations, combined with hidden Markov models, to identify and learn the unique characteristics inherent in the way a person performs a task. By doing this in real-time, a collaborative robot will be able to adapt it’s behaviour in order to best accommodate the person intuitive way of performing a task.