Category: Postgraduate

The Postgraduate Research Experience Survey 2018 is still open

Marc Hanheide / / Postgraduate
The Postgraduate Research Experience Survey for 2018 is still open for postgraduate students to complete. The current institutional response rate is currently sat at 21.6% for the enrolled postgraduate cohort. We would appreciate your help in making all postgraduate students aware of the survey to ensure the University receives reflective and thorough feedback with regards to the postgraduate experience.
About the Survey:
The national Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES) is run by the Higher Education Academy in conjunction with the university, and is the only UK higher education sector-wide survey to gain insight from postgraduate research students about their learning and supervision experience.

The survey is your opportunity to tell us of your experiences as a postgraduate researcher at the University of Lincoln, whether you are new or have nearly completed, are studying part- or full-time, for a Masters by Research, a PhD, or a professional doctorate. Your views matter to us and are crucial in ensuring that the University provides the experience postgraduate research students need, and to improve provision for current and future PGRs.

To complete the survey, students can follow the link below using the login information sent via email from Bristol Online Surveys on Wednesday 21st February. 
Complete the survey

PGR meeting and Research Presentations – July 2016

Massoud Zolgharni / / Postgraduate

The monthly PGR meeting was held on Wednesday 13th July, 14:00-16:00, Room MC3108.

We had 2 speakers for this month seminar:

 
* Claudio Coppola

We investigate how incremental learning of long-term human activity patterns improves the accuracy of activity classification over time.Rather than trying to improve the classification methods themselves, we assume that they can take into account prior probabilities of activities occurring at a particular time and location.We use the classification results to build spatial and temporal models that can provide these priors to the classifiers.As our system gradually learns about typical patterns of human activities, the accuracy of activity classification improves, which results in even more accurate priors. Two datasets collected over several months containing hand-annotated activity in residential and office environments were chosen to evaluate the approach.Several types of spatial and temporal models were evaluated for each of these datasets.The results indicate that incremental learning of daily routines leads to a significant improvement in activity classification.

 

 
* Evangelia Kotsiliti

Diabetic retinopathy is a complication of diabetes affecting the eye and a leading cause of blindness worldwide. In many countries around the world, systematic screening for diabetic retinopathy is provided to the patients diagnosed with diabetes in order to reduce the burden of blindness. However, considering the rising numbers of people who are diagnosed with diabetes every year, it is plausible to think that the provision of screening services to an increased demand may no longer be affordable. This projects aims at the utilisation of simple, commonly available patient characteristics and biochemical measures to identify patients at high risk of having retinopathy at the time of screening. A subsequent step aims at the development of a cost-effectiveness model to compare the cost and consequences of the risk model against the current manual grading. The ultimate outcome would be the development of reliable clinical model that can reduce the overall screening cost and retain effectiveness.

 

There will be no seminar in August. The date and venue for the next meeting in September 2016 will be announced.

PGR meeting and Research Presentations – June 2016

Massoud Zolgharni / / Postgraduate

The monthly PGR meeting was held on Wednesday 8th June, 14:00-16:00, Room MC3108.

This month speaker was Dr Saddam Bekhet who gave a talk on his latest research findings. The title of his talk was ‘Signature-based Videos’ Visual Similarity Detection and Measurement’.

Dr Massoud Zolgharni  and Dr Marc Hanheide also discussed different issues including:

  • presentations schedule
  • encouragement of PGR students to participate in monthly meetings and present their work
  • PGR progress

 

The date and venue for the next meeting will be announced.

 

 

 

PGRs meeting and Research Presentations – May 2016

Amr Ahmed / / Postgraduate

The monthly PGRs Research Presentations was held on Thursday 12th May, 2pm, Room MC3108.

This session we had the following presentations:

 

 IMG_20160512_141102[1]

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Title: A ROS framework for single antenna RFID tag localisation with mobile robots.

 

By: George Broughton

 IMG_20160512_141116[1] Abstract: 

Over the last few years, RFID technology has evolved to give mobile robots an extra dimension to sense their surroundings. By determining whether certain tags, often fixed to interesting objects, can be read or not, the robot can effectively sense the objects presence. This is not just useful for finding lost objects, but has also been used for activity recognition. Additionally, tags have been used as landmarks within environments to aid with navigation.

This presentation looks at the development of a ROS framework for localising RFID tags from a mobile robot. The framework combines several different approaches to make use of the information provided by the tag and from the reader, to estimate possible locations of the tag. This is done by taking the output of the different algorithms, and then combining and feeding them into a densely populated occupancy grid using a bayesian update system to calculate the most probable tag location. Rather than rely on multiple antennas for trilateration, the framework exploits a robot’s ability to move within its environment to seek optimal positions to hone in on a tag. This also has the additional benefit of providing resistance to multipath signal errors.

This will lead to a framework that is future-proof, robust, works with multiple models of readers, and can be moulded to suit many needs.