Search

The Wales Institute of Digital Information has developed a flexible model of education, CPD, research and innovation for the Welsh health and care sectors, in the digital arena. The co-produced model had produced significant benefits for both health employers and the Universities involved in the partnership. The model is continuing to develop collaborative educational provision from level 2 to level 8 and is concentrating on expanding its digital research and innovation offering to the health and care sector in a similar co-developed collaborative way.

The ability for automated technologies to correctly identify a human’s actions provides considerable scope for systems that make use of human-machine interaction. Thus, automatic3D Human Action Recognition is an area that has seen significant research effort. In work described here, a human’s everyday 3D actions recorded in the NTU RGB+D dataset are identified using a novel structured-tree neural network. The nodes of the tree represent the skeleton joints, with the spine joint being represented by the root. The connection between a child node and its parent is known as the incoming edge while the reciprocal connection is known as the outgoing edge. The uses of tree structure lead to a system that intuitively maps to human movements. The classifier uses the change in displacement of joints and change in the angles between incoming and outgoing edges as features for classification of the actions performed

The effect of weather elements on the incidence of different types of crime has been the focus of a number of research studies. However, the detailed geographical dimension of this relation-ship has been largely ignored. The aim of this paper is to broaden the research on weather and crime to consider the effect of weather parameters on the spatial arrangement of crime within an urban area of the UK. A novel combination of techniques that are capable of both evaluating statistically and visualising geographically the effect of weather variables on the incidence of one type of crime, namely calls for police service for disorder or disturbances, is presented. These techniques are examined in relation to the theories that have traditionally been put forward to explain such trends. We conclude that, in our study area, both temperature and humidity exert significant effects on the spatial patterning of incidents of disorder or disturbances. Rainfall, wind speed, and wind direction were found not to have a significant effect for this type of call for service. More research is needed to see how transferable these findings are to other geographical areas with different climatic regimes.

This article reports on the results from a spatiotemporal analysis of disaggregate fire incident data. The innovative analysis presented here focuses on the exploration of spatial and temporal patterns for four principal fire incident categories: property, vehicle, secondary fires, and malicious false alarms. This research extends previous work on spatial exploration of spatiotemporal patterns by demonstrating the benefits of comaps and kernel density estimation in examining temporal and spatiotemporal dynamics in calls for services. Results indicate that fire incidents are not static in either time or space and that spatiotemporal variation is related to incident type. The application of these techniques has the potential to inform policy decisions both from a reactive, resource-allocation perspective and from a more proactive perspective, such as through spatial targeting of preventive measures.

The application of mapping and spatial analytical techniques to explore geographical patterns of crime incidence is well established. In contrast, the analysis of operational incident data routinely collected by fire brigades has received relatively less research attention, certainly in the UK academic literature. The aim of this paper is to redress this balance through the application of spatial analyt- ical techniques that permit an exploration of the spatial dynamics of fire incidents and their relation- ships with socio-economic variables. By examining patterns for different fire incident types, including household fires, vehicle fires, secondary fires and malicious false alarms in relation to 2001 Census of Population data for an area of South Wales, we demonstrate the potential of such techniques to reveal spatial patterns that may be worthy of further contextual study. Further research is needed to establish how transferable these findings are to other geographical settings and how replicable the findings are at different geographical scales. The paper concludes by drawing attention to the cur- rent gaps in knowledge in analysing trends in fire incidence and proposes an agenda to advance such research using spatial analytical techniques.

Spatial composition tables are fundamental tools for the realisation of qualitative spatial reasoning techniques. Studying the properties of these tables in relation to the spatial calculi they are based on is essential for understanding the applicability of these calculi and how they can be extended and generalised. An extensional interpretation of a spatial composition table is an important property that has been studied in the literature and is used to determine the validity of the table for the models it is proposed for. It provides means for consistency checking of ground sets of relations and for addressing spatial constraint satisfaction problems. Furthermore, two general conditions that can be used to test for extensionality of spatial composition tables are proposed and applied to the RCC8 composition table to verify the allowable models in this calculus.