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This meeting report gives an overview of the DAFx 2019 conference held in September 2019 at Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK. The conference had the same theme as this special issue: digital audio effects. In total, 51 papers were presented at DAFx 2019 either in oral or in poster sessions. The conference had 157 delegates, almost half from industry and the rest from universities around the world. As the number of submissions and participants remains sufficiently high, it is planned that the DAFx conference series will be continued every autumn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Positron emission particle tracking (PEPT), a powerful technique for studying fluid and granular flows, has been developed at Birmingham over the last 30 years. In PEPT, a "positron camera" is used to detect the pairs of back-to-back photons emitted from positron annihilation. Accurate high-speed tracking of small tracer particles requires a positron camera with high sensitivity and data rate. In this paper, we compare the sensitivity and data rates obtained from the three principal cameras currently used at Birmingham. The recently constructed SuperPEPT and MicroPEPT systems have much higher sensitivity than the longstanding ADAC Forte and can generate data at much higher rates, greatly extending the potential for PEPT studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this special issue we present a selection of papers from the Symposium on Natural/Unconventional Computing and its Philosophical Significance, held during the AISB/IACAP 2012 World Congress in Birmingham (UK). This article is an editorial, introducing the special issue of the journal with the selected papers and the research program of Natural/Unconventional Computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

UK air pollutant data collected over a 10-year period (2010–2019) from 46 sites with Urban Traffic, Urban Background, Suburban Background, Rural Background, and Urban Industrial environmental types were analysed to study the relationships between [NO] vs. [PM2.5] and [O3] vs. [PM2.5] during the summer for each site type. These results were used to describe the consequence of recent PM2.5 reductions on NO and O3 concentrations at different site types across the UK. The strongest positive [NO] vs. [PM2.5] correlation was observed for the Urban Traffic site type overall, but it displayed the weakest positive [O3] vs. [PM2.5] correlation. Analysis of individual Urban Traffic sites revealed an overall negative [O3] vs. [PM2.5] gradient at the London Marylebone Road (LMR) site. A sharp 35% PM2.5 decrease occurred at LMR between 2011 and 2015 before annual mean concentrations plateaued. Further examination of annual correlations revealed negative [O3] vs. [PM2.5] gradients in each year directly proceeding the sharp 35% PM2.5 decrease at LMR. NOx fluctuations were minimal and accompanied by comparable volatile organic compound (VOC) decreases; thus, VOC-limited chemistry at LMR was deemed to not be the primary cause of O3 increases. Instead, PM2.5 reductions are suggested to be a more significant factor in causing O3 increases, as suppression of O3 production by PM2.5 chemistry decreases with declining [PM2.5]. The remaining two Urban Traffic sites in Birmingham did not display a negative [O3] vs. [PM2.5] correlation in the years studied. This was partly ascribed to the Birmingham measurement sites not being under the influence of the street canyon effect like LMR. Principal attribution was to the lower-average absolute initial PM2.5 concentrations and absence of a significant (>26%) continuous mean PM2.5 decline of greater than 2 years. This study therefore proposed a threshold initial PM2.5 concentration (t) above which O3 suppression by PM2.5 chemistry is sufficient to induce O3 increases when average PM2.5 concentrations significantly decline (by >26% across >2 years), where 17 μg m−3 < t < 26 μg m−3. Extending this analysis to additional cities across the UK as sufficient data become available would allow refinement of the proposed threshold and improved understanding of the influence from the street canyon effect. These results inform future air pollution policies, in the UK and across the globe, in which further joint reductions of PM2.5 and O3 are crucial to achieve maximum benefits to human health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Successful transitioning to a circular economy city requires a holistic and inclusive approach that involves bringing together diverse actors and disciplines who may not have shared aims and objectives. It is desirable that stakeholders work together to create jointly-held perceptions of value, and yet cooperation in such an environment is likely to prove difficult in practice. The contribution of this paper is to show how collaboration can be engendered, or discord made transparent, in resource decision-making using a hybrid Game Theory approach that combines its inherent strengths with those of scenario analysis and multi-criteria decision analysis. Such a methodology consists of six steps: (1) define stakeholders and objectives; (2) construct future scenarios for Municipal Solid Waste Management; (3) survey stakeholders to rank the evaluation indicators; (4) determine the weights for the scenarios criteria; (5) reveal the preference order of the scenarios; and (6) analyse the preferences to reveal the cooperation and competitive opportunities. To demonstrate the workability of the method, a case study is presented: The Tyseley Energy Park, a major Energy-from-Waste facility that treats over two-thirds of the Municipal Solid Waste of Birmingham in the UK. The first phase of its decision-making involved working with the five most influential actors, resulting in recommendations on how to reach the most preferred and jointly chosen sustainable scenario for the site. The paper suggests a supporting decision-making tool so that cooperation is embedded in circular economy adoption and decisions are made optimally (as a collective) and are acceptable to all the stakeholders, although limited by bounded rationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intelligent traffic management is an important issue for smart cities. City councils try to implement the newest techniques and performant technologies in order to avoid traffic congestion, to optimize the use of traffic lights, to efficiently use car parking, etc. To find the best solution to this problem, Birmingham City Council decided to allow open-source predictive traffic forecasting by making the real-time datasets available. This paper proposes a multi-agent system (MAS) approach for intelligent urban traffic management in Birmingham using forecasting and classification techniques. The designed agents have the following tasks: forecast the occupancy rates for traffic flow, road junctions and car parking; classify the faults; control and monitor the entire process. The experimental results show that k-nearest neighbor forecasts with high accuracy rates for the traffic data and decision trees build the most accurate model for classifying the faults for their detection and repair in the shortest possible time. The whole learning process is coordinated by a monitoring agent in order to automate Birmingham city's traffic management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the global net-zero strategy implementation, decarbonisation of transport by massive deployment of electric vehicles (EVs) has been considered to be an essential solution. However, charging EVs and integration into electricity grids is going to be a fundamental challenge to future electricity systems. Hence, in this situation, how to effectively deploy massive numbers of EVs, and in the meantime what can be developed to deliver vehicle-to-grid (V2G) services, become a fundamental yet interesting tech-economical issues. Furthermore, uncertainty in lack of vehicle availability and EV battery degradation could lead to revenue loss when using EVs as ancillary services aggregators. With such considerations, this paper presents a new optimised V2G aggregator scheduling service that has taken into consideration of a number of risks, including EV availability and battery degradation through conditional value-at-risk. The proposed method for V2G scheduling service, as an independent aggregator, is formulated as a bi-level optimisation problem. The performance of the proposed method is to be evaluated through case studies on the Birmingham International Airport parking lot with onsite renewable generation. Uncertainties of EVs and the differences in weekdays and weekends are also compared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical measurements are usually used to build assimilation models in sequential data assimilation (S-DA) systems. However, they are always disturbed by local noises. Simultaneously, the accuracy of assimilation model construction and assimilation forecasting results will be affected. The fast Fourier transform (FFT) method can be used to acquire de-noised historical traffic flow measurements to reduce the influence of local noises on constructed assimilation models and improve the accuracy of assimilation results. In the practical signal de-noising applications, the FFT method is commonly used to de-noise the noisy signal with known noise frequency. However, knowing the noise frequency is difficult. Thus, a proper cutoff frequency should be chosen to separate high-frequency information caused by noises from the low-frequency part of useful signals under the unknown noise frequency. If the cutoff frequency is too high, too much noisy information will be treated as useful information. Conversely, if the cutoff frequency is too low, part of the useful information will be lost. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an adaptive cutoff frequency selection (A-CFS) method based on cross-validation. The proposed method can determine a proper cutoff frequency and ensure the quality of de-noised outputs for a given dataset using the FFT method without noise frequency information. Experimental results of real-world traffic flow data measurements in a sub-area of a highway near Birmingham, England, demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed A-CFS method in noisy information separation using the FFT method. The differences between true and predicted traffic flow values are evaluated using the mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), and mean absolute percentage (MAPE) values. Compared to the results of the two commonly used de-noising methods, i.e., discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) methods, the short-term traffic flow forecasting results of the proposed A-CFS method are much more reliable. In terms of the MAE value, the average relative improvements of the assimilation model built using the proposed method are 19.26%, 3.47%, and 4.25%, compared to the model built using raw data, DWT method, and EEMD method, respectively; the corresponding average relative improvements in RMSE are 19.05%, 5.36%, and 3.02%, respectively; lastly, the corresponding average relative improvements in MAPE are 18.88%, 2.83%, and 2.28%, respectively. The test results show that the proposed method is effective in separating noises from historical measurements and can improve the accuracy of assimilation model construction and assimilation forecasting results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short review paper highlights some of the research works undertaken over the years by Pollet's research groups in Birmingham, Cape Town, and Trondheim, in the use of power ultrasound for the fabrication of low temperature fuel cell and electrolyzer catalysts and electrodes. Since the publication of 'The use of ultrasound for the fabrication of fuel cell materials' in 2010, there has been an upsurge of international interest in the use of power ultrasound, sonochemistry, and sonoelectrochemistry for the production of low temperature fuel cell and electrolyzer materials. This is because power ultrasound offers many advantages over traditional synthetic methods. The attraction of power ultrasound is the ability to create localized transient high temperatures and pressures, as a result of cavitation, in solutions at room temperature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) was one of 16 collegiate teams from around the world that participated in the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2017 competition. An interdisciplinary team of students from across the university was engaged in a 2-year long process to design and build a house that is powered completely by solar power. The house was equipped to run all the typical appliances of an average modern house at similar levels on a conventional power grid. The net-zero house was built and tested on the UAB campus. Considering Birmingham's weather, a safe room was built to ensure the safety of occupants during events of extreme weather, such as a tornado. A ductless HVAC unit consisting of an inverter-type 3-speed outdoor unit supplied refrigerant to four high-wall indoor units providing the primary source of space conditioning. To achieve a model of efficiency and cost effectiveness, the house incorporated a heavily insulated envelope and precise glazing protection. The roof, floor framing and walls had R-30 batt and foam insulation. With a design informed by southern vernacular language, the building is oriented to maximize solar access and to use roof planes for shading the majority of the year. Peak power generation of the panels was recorded at 9.6 kW. The home has a centralized energy management system that can provide access to energy consumption data and allow control of lighting, appliances, and plug loads remotely. Energy modeling showed that the annual electricity consumption for heating and cooling with variation in wall types were 8470 to 11,661 kWh. For the month of October, it was calculated varying from 683 to 763 kWh, with varying air changes per hour from 0 to 1.5. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Urban Heat Island (UHI) is one of the most well documented phenomena in urban climatology. Although a range of measurements and modelling techniques can be used to assess the UHI, the paucity of traditional meteorological observations in urban areas has been an ongoing limitation for studies. The availability of remote sensing data has therefore helped fill a scientific need by providing high resolution temperature data of our cities. However, satellite-mounted sensors measure land surface temperatures (LST) and not canopy air temperatures with the latter being the key parameter in UHI investigations. Fortunately, such data is becoming increasingly available via urban meteorological networks, which now provide an opportunity to quantify and compare surface and canopy UHI on an unprecedented scale. For the first time, this study uses high resolution air temperature data from the Birmingham Urban Climate Laboratory urban meteorological network and MODIS LST to quantify and identify the spatial pattern of the daytime and night-time UHI in Birmingham, UK (a city with an approximate population of 1 million). This analysis is performed under a range of atmospheric stability classes and investigates the relationship between surface and canopy UHI in the city. A significant finding of this work is that it demonstrates, using observations, that the distribution of the surface UHI appears to be clearly linked to landuse, whereas for canopy UHI, advective processes appear to play an increasingly important role. Strong relationships were found between air temperatures and LST during both the day and night at a neighbourhood scale, but even with the use of higher resolution urban meteorological datasets, relationships at the city scale are still limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The health provider Umbrella delivers several SRHS through more than 120 pharmacies in Birmingham (England). Umbrella pharmacy data collected between August 2015 and August 2018 were used to descriptively analyse the uptake and user characteristics for emergency contraception, short-acting oral contraception, condoms and chlamydia treatment. In total, 54,309 pharmacy visits were analysed. A total of 30,473 females presented for emergency contraception. Most were supplied with an emergency contraceptive pill (98.6%, 30,052 out of 30,473), which was levonorgestrel in 57.4% of cases (17,255 out of 30,052). Of those females who attended for short-acting oral contraception, 54.3% (1764 out of 3247) were provided with the progesterone-only pill. Of those who were given chlamydia treatment, the majority received doxycycline (76.8%, 454 out of 591). A total of 74% (14,888 out of 19,998) of those who requested condoms were not provided with specific instructions on their use. Pharmacies have the potential to make a substantial contribution to the delivery of an integrated sexual health service including rapid access to emergency contraception, convenient delivery of short-acting hormonal contraception and treatment of chlamydia. Appropriate education, support and audit is required to ensure the delivery of high-quality care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]