WIMU instrumentation of assassin trainer & skeleton sled

Skeleton is a high‐speed Winter Olympic sport performed on the same twisting, downhill ice tracks used for Bobsleigh & Luge. The single rider sprints and pushes their sled for 20‐30m on a level start section before loading and going through a twisting course of over 1km, at speeds up to 140km/h, experiencing up to 5g. In competition, the top athletes can be within a fraction of a second of each other. The initial short pushing period is believed to be critical to overall performance but it is not well understood. A collaborative project between University of Bath, UK Sport and Tyndall National Institute is instrumenting skeleton athletes, training equipment and test tracks with Tyndall’s Wireless Inertial Measurement Unit technology in order to investigate and improve understanding of this phase of a skeleton run. It is hoped this will lead to improved training regimes and better performance of such elite, Olympic level athletes. This work presents an initial look at the system as implemented and data recorded.

WIMU instrumentation of assassin trainer & skeleton sled – initial data capture

Science Foundation Ireland (CSET - Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology, Grant No. 07/CE/11147)

Ryanodine receptor expression in trophoblasts

Trophoblasts of the placenta are the frontline cells involved in communication and exchange of materials between the mother and fetus. Within trophoblasts, calcium signalling proteins are richly expressed. Intracellular free calcium ions are a key second messenger, regulating various cellular activities. Transcellular Ca2+ transport through trophoblasts is essential in fetal skeleton formation. Ryanodine receptors (RyRs) are high conductance cation channels that mediate Ca2+ release from intracellular stores to the cytoplasm. To date, the roles of RyRs in trophoblasts have not been reported. By use of reverse transcription PCR and western blotting, the current study revealed that RyRs are expressed in model trophoblast cell lines (BeWo and JEG-3) and in human first trimester and term placental villi. Immunohistochemistry of human placental sections indicated that both syncytiotrophoblast and cytotrophoblast cell layers were positively stained by antibodies recognising RyRs; likewise, expression of RyR isoforms was also revealed in BeWo and JEG-3 cells by immunofluorescence microscopy. In addition, changes in [Ca2+]i were observed in both BeWo and JEG-3 cells upon application of various RyR agonists and antagonists, using fura-2 fluorescent videomicroscopy. Furthermore, endogenous placental peptide hormones, namely angiotensin II, arginine vasopressin and endothelin 1, were demonstrated to increase [Ca2+]i in BeWo cells, and such increases were suppressed by RyR antagonists and by blockers of the corresponding peptide hormone receptors. These findings indicate that 1) multiple RyR subtypes are expressed in human trophoblasts; 2) functional RyRs in BeWo and JEG-3 cells response to both RyR agonists and antagonists; 3) RyRs in BeWo cells mediate Ca2+ release from intracellular store in response to the indirect stimulation by endogenous peptides. These observations suggest that RyR contributes to trophoblastic cellular Ca2+ homeostasis; trophoblastic RyRs are also involved in the functional regulation of human placenta by coupling to endogenous placental peptide-induced signalling pathways.

Simplified decoding techniques for linear block codes

Error correcting codes are combinatorial objects, designed to enable reliable transmission of digital data over noisy channels. They are ubiquitously used in communication, data storage etc. Error correction allows reconstruction of the original data from received word. The classical decoding algorithms are constrained to output just one codeword. However, in the late 50’s researchers proposed a relaxed error correction model for potentially large error rates known as list decoding. The research presented in this thesis focuses on reducing the computational effort and enhancing the efficiency of decoding algorithms for several codes from algorithmic as well as architectural standpoint. The codes in consideration are linear block codes closely related to Reed Solomon (RS) codes. A high speed low complexity algorithm and architecture are presented for encoding and decoding RS codes based on evaluation. The implementation results show that the hardware resources and the total execution time are significantly reduced as compared to the classical decoder. The evaluation based encoding and decoding schemes are modified and extended for shortened RS codes and software implementation shows substantial reduction in memory footprint at the expense of latency. Hermitian codes can be seen as concatenated RS codes and are much longer than RS codes over the same aphabet. A fast, novel and efficient VLSI architecture for Hermitian codes is proposed based on interpolation decoding. The proposed architecture is proven to have better than Kötter’s decoder for high rate codes. The thesis work also explores a method of constructing optimal codes by computing the subfield subcodes of Generalized Toric (GT) codes that is a natural extension of RS codes over several dimensions. The polynomial generators or evaluation polynomials for subfield-subcodes of GT codes are identified based on which dimension and bound for the minimum distance are computed. The algebraic structure for the polynomials evaluating to subfield is used to simplify the list decoding algorithm for BCH codes. Finally, an efficient and novel approach is proposed for exploiting powerful codes having complex decoding but simple encoding scheme (comparable to RS codes) for multihop wireless sensor network (WSN) applications.

Integration of micro- and macroscopic models for pedestrian evacuation simulation

Simulation of pedestrian evacuations of smart buildings in emergency is a powerful tool for building analysis, dynamic evacuation planning and real-time response to the evolving state of evacuations. Macroscopic pedestrian models are low-complexity models that are and well suited to algorithmic analysis and planning, but are quite abstract. Microscopic simulation models allow for a high level of simulation detail but can be computationally intensive. By combining micro- and macro- models we can use each to overcome the shortcomings of the other and enable new capability and applications for pedestrian evacuation simulation that would not be possible with either alone. We develop the EvacSim multi-agent pedestrian simulator and procedurally generate macroscopic flow graph models of building space, integrating micro- and macroscopic approaches to simulation of the same emergency space. By “coupling” flow graph parameters to microscopic simulation results, the graph model captures some of the higher detail and fidelity of the complex microscopic simulation model. The coupled flow graph is used for analysis and prediction of the movement of pedestrians in the microscopic simulation, and investigate the performance of dynamic evacuation planning in simulated emergencies using a variety of strategies for allocation of macroscopic evacuation routes to microscopic pedestrian agents. The predictive capability of the coupled flow graph is exploited for the decomposition of microscopic simulation space into multiple future states in a scalable manner. By simulating multiple future states of the emergency in short time frames, this enables sensing strategy based on simulation scenario pattern matching which we show to achieve fast scenario matching, enabling rich, real-time feedback in emergencies in buildings with meagre sensing capabilities.