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The pixel to metre scale of video of the ocean surface provides information about the length of objects present in the measured scene, such as ships and can be used to infer information about the state of the measured ocean surface. In this work we present two techniques for remote observations of the ocean surface, the pixel to metre scale technique and the sea state technique. We use radar measurements as a surrogate of ocean surface video with the measuring camera in a vertical position, but with the advantage of having accurate information about the underlying truth. The pixel to metre scale technique provides an estimation of the correspondence between each pixel on the video and real world distance metrics, such as metres. The sea state technique provides sea state information, such as the wind speed that caused the sea condition, the wavelength and period of the significant wave, an upper limit on the significant wave height and an estimation of the energy spectrum in the measured ocean surface. The sea state is validated with in situ buoy measurements.

Modern data-driven drug discovery requires integrated resources to support decision-making and enable new discoveries. The Open PHACTS Discovery Platform (http://dev.openphacts.org) was built to address this requirement by focusing on drug discovery questions that are of high priority to the pharmaceutical industry. Although complex, most of these frequently asked questions (FAQs) revolve around the combination of data concerning compounds, targets, pathways and diseases. Computational drug discovery using workflow tools and the integrated resources of Open PHACTS can deliver answers to most of these questions. Here, we report on a selection of workflows used for solving these use cases and discuss some of the research challenges. The workflows are accessible online from myExperiment (http://www.myexperiment.org) and are available for reuse by the scientific community.

The Mental Attributes Profiling System was developed in 2002 (Laouris and Makris, Proceedings of multilingual & cross-cultural perspectives on Dyslexia, Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington, D.C, 2002), to provide a multimodal evaluation of the learning potential and abilities of young children’s brains. The method is based on the assessment of non-verbal abilities using video-like interfaces and was compared to more established methodologies in (Papadopoulos, Laouris, Makris, Proceedings of IDA 54th annual conference, San Diego, 2003), such as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (Watkins et al., Psychol Sch 34(4):309–319, 1997). To do so, various tests have been applied to a population of 134 children aged 7–12 years old. This paper addresses the issue of identifying a minimal set of variables that are able to accurately predict the learning abilities of a given child. The use of Machine Learning technologies to do this provides the advantage of making no prior assumptions about the nature of the data and eliminating natural bias associated with data processing carried out by humans. Kohonen’s Self Organising Maps (Kohonen, Biol Cybern 43:59–69, 1982) algorithm is able to split a population into groups based on large and complex sets of observations. Once the population is split, the individual groups can then be probed for their defining characteristics providing insight into the rationale of the split. The characteristics identified form the basis of classification systems that are able to accurately predict which group an individual will belong to, using only a small subset of the tests available. The specifics of this methodology are detailed herein, and the resulting classification systems provide an effective tool to prognose the learning abilities of new subjects.

The Open PHACTS Discovery Platform aims to provide an integrated information space to advance pharmacological research in the area of drug discovery. Effective drug discovery requires comprehensive data coverage, i.e. integrating all available sources of pharmacology data. While many relevant data sources are available on the linked open data cloud, their content needs to be combined with that of commercial datasets and the licensing of these commercial datasets respected when providing access to the data. Additionally, pharmaceutical companies have built up their own extensive private data collections that they require to be included in their pharmacological dataspace. In this paper we discuss the challenges of incorporating private and commercial data into a linked dataspace: focusing on the modelling of these datasets and their interlinking. We also present the graph-based access control mechanism that ensures commercial and private datasets are only available to authorized users.