Coastalock™ Performance on a Permeable Breakwater Slope: Model Tests on the Influence of a Permeable Core, Unit Modifications and Toe Support on the Hydraulic Performance of an Ecological Armour Unit

Coastal areas face increasing threat from erosion. The use of coastal protection structures is imperative to counter this. Concrete “armouring” is widely used due to durability and cost-effectiveness. Conventional methods of “armouring” result in habitat degradation and loss of biodiversity. ECOncrete developed Coastalock, an armour unit...

Using our tools backwards, AF detection by confusing time and frequency

Atrial Fibrillation or AF is the most common heart rhythm anomaly affecting millions of people. This work explores the possibilities of reinterpreting speech processing techniques for use in atrial fibrillation detection. An existing method of modelling single heartbeat, single lead ECG signals by means of an ARMA model's amplitude response as a...

Do Object Detection Localization Errors Affect Human Performance and Trust?: An Observer Performance Study

Bounding boxes are often used to communicate automatic object detection results to humans, aiding humans in a multitude of tasks. We investigate the relationship between bounding box localization errors and human task performance. We use observer performance studies on a visual multi-object counting task to measure both human trust and...

Representations of DNA Sequence Context and Mutational Spectra for Prediction of Repair Deficiencies

Double-strand break (DSB) repair is a critical cellular process which repairs breaks in both strands of the DNA double helix. Different repair mechanisms are tasked with repairing such breaks. Predicting deficiencies in repair mechanisms has been widely used for therapeutic purposes, such as targeting cancer cells that have specific DNA repair...

Feature extraction and classification on heart rate time series for cardiovascular diseases

Cardiovascular diseases are one of the primary causes of mortality worldwide. Paroxysmal atrial fibrillation is a specific type that is difficult to detect and diagnose in a short time frame. To overcome this, we investigated if long-term wearable data can be used for the detection of heart diseases. The BigIdeasLab_STEP dataset and long-term...

Hydraulic performance of CoastaLock armour units

With the advance of urbanisation in coastal regions comes an increase in armoured shorelines and the destruction of coastal marine habitats. To combat this, ECOncrete Tech Ltd has developed a new eco-friendly armour unit, the CoastaLock. With its ecological advantages proven, its hydraulic performance is still largely unknown. This thesis aims...

Loudspeakers as recording devices in public address systems

Public address (PA) systems are an integral part of every building. Their function as a safety and security system could benefit from adding recording capabilities. With such capabilities, people could be located during evacuation or announcements could be adjusted to room acoustics for better intelligibility. However, adding microphones to a PA...

Towards Silent Open Windows: An Open-loop Wave-domain Algorithm for Control of Noise through Apertures

Noise pollution is a major health threat to society. Active noise control systems that attenuate noise through open windows have the potential to create quieter homes while maintaining ventilation and sight. Such systems are commonly realized with closed-loop LMS algorithms. However, these algorithms require a large number of error microphones...

On the Integration of Acoustics and LiDAR: A LiDAR-aided approach for detection of acoustically reflective surfaces from microphone measurements

Loudspeakers are placed in an environment unknown to the loudspeaker designers. The room influences the acoustic experience for the user. Having information about the room makes it possible to better reproduce the sound field as intended. Using microphone measurements, the location of acoustic reflectors can be inferred. Current state-of-the-art...

Exploring the Potential of Performance Bounds in Multi-Source Domain Adaptation

Currently, trained machine learning models are readily available, but their training data might not be (for example due to privacy reasons). This thesis investigates how pre-trained models can be combined for performance on all their source domains, without access to data. This problem is formulated as a Multiple-Source Domain Adaptation (MSA)...