Peanut Allergen Threshold Study (PATS): validation of eliciting doses using a novel single-dose challenge protocol

Background: The eliciting dose (ED) for a peanut allergic reaction in 5% of the peanut allergic population, the ED05, is 1.5 mg of peanut protein. This ED05 was derived from oral food challenges (OFC) that use graded, incremental doses administered at fixed time intervals. Individual patients’ threshold doses were used to generate population dose-distribution curves using probability distributions from which the ED05 was then determined. It is important to clinically validate that this dose is predictive of the allergenic response in a further unselected group of peanut-allergic individuals. Methods/Aims: This is a multi-centre study involving three national level referral and teaching centres. (Cork University Hospital, Ireland, Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne, Australia and Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, U.S.A.) The study is now in process and will continue to run until all centres have recruited 125 participates in each respective centre. A total of 375 participants, aged 1–18 years will be recruited during routine Allergy appointments in the centres. The aim is to assess the precision of the predicted ED05 using a single dose (6 mg peanut = 1.5 mg of peanut protein) in the form of a cookie. Validated Food Allergy related Quality of Life Questionnaires-(FAQLQ) will be self-administered prior to OFC and 1 month after challenge to assess the impact of a single dose OFC on FAQL. Serological and cell based in vitro studies will be performed. Conclusion: The validation of the ED05 threshold for allergic reactions in peanut allergic subjects has potential value for public health measures. The single dose OFC, based upon the statistical dose-distribution analysis of past challenge trials, promises an efficient approach to identify the most highly sensitive patients within any given food-allergic population.

Cryptographic coprocessors for embedded systems

In the field of embedded systems design, coprocessors play an important role as a component to increase performance. Many embedded systems are built around a small General Purpose Processor (GPP). If the GPP cannot meet the performance requirements for a certain operation, a coprocessor can be included in the design. The GPP can then offload the computationally intensive operation to the coprocessor; thus increasing the performance of the overall system. A common application of coprocessors is the acceleration of cryptographic algorithms. The work presented in this thesis discusses coprocessor architectures for various cryptographic algorithms that are found in many cryptographic protocols. Their performance is then analysed on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platform. Firstly, the acceleration of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) algorithms is investigated through the use of instruction set extension of a GPP. The performance of these algorithms in a full hardware implementation is then investigated, and an architecture for the acceleration the ECC based digital signature algorithm is developed. Hash functions are also an important component of a cryptographic system. The FPGA implementation of recent hash function designs from the SHA-3 competition are discussed and a fair comparison methodology for hash functions presented. Many cryptographic protocols involve the generation of random data, for keys or nonces. This requires a True Random Number Generator (TRNG) to be present in the system. Various TRNG designs are discussed and a secure implementation, including post-processing and failure detection, is introduced. Finally, a coprocessor for the acceleration of operations at the protocol level will be discussed, where, a novel aspect of the design is the secure method in which private-key data is handled

MyRoom: A user-centred model of affective responsive architecture

Can my immediate physical environment affect how I feel? The instinctive answer to this question must be a resounding “yes”. What might seem a throwaway remark is increasingly borne out by research in environmental and behavioural psychology, and in the more recent discipline of Evidence-Based Design. Research outcomes are beginning to converge with findings in neuroscience and neurophysiology, as we discover more about how the human brain and body functions, and reacts to environmental stimuli. What we see, hear, touch, and sense affects each of us psychologically and, by extension, physically, on a continual basis. The physical characteristics of our daily environment thus have the capacity to profoundly affect all aspects of our functioning, from biological systems to cognitive ability. This has long been understood on an intuitive basis, and utilised on a more conscious basis by architects and other designers. Recent research in evidence-based design, coupled with advances in neurophysiology, confirm what have been previously held as commonalities, but also illuminate an almost frightening potential to do enormous good, or alternatively, terrible harm, by virtue of how we make our everyday surroundings. The thesis adopts a design methodology in its approach to exploring the potential use of wireless sensor networks in environments for elderly people. Vitruvian principles of “commodity, firmness and delight” inform the research process and become embedded in the final design proposals and research conclusions. The issue of person-environment fit becomes a key principle in describing a model of continuously-evolving responsive architecture which makes the individual user its focus, with the intention of promoting wellbeing. The key research questions are: What are the key system characteristics of an adaptive therapeutic single-room environment? How can embedded technologies be utilised to maximise the adaptive and therapeutic aspects of the personal life-space of an elderly person with dementia?.

The architecture of influence: Paul Rudolph's Art and Architecture Building at Yale

Focussing on Paul Rudolph’s Art & Architecture Building at Yale, this thesis demonstrates how the building synthesises the architect’s attitude to architectural education, urbanism and materiality. It tracks the evolution of the building from its origins – which bear a relationship to Rudolph’s pedagogical ideas – to later moments when its occupants and others reacted to it in a series of ways that could never have been foreseen. The A&A became the epicentre of the university’s counter culture movement before it was ravaged by a fire of undetermined origins. Arguably, it represents the last of its kind in American architecture, a turning point at the threshold of postmodernism. Using an archive that was only made available to researchers in 2009, this is the first study to draw extensively on the research files of the late architectural writer and educator, C. Ray Smith. Smith’s 1981 manuscript about the A&A entitled “The Biography of a Building,” was never published. The associated research files and transcripts of discussions with some thirty interviewees, including Rudolph, provide a previously unavailable wealth of information. Following Smith’s methodology, meetings were recorded with those involved in the A&A including, where possible, some of Smith’s original interviewees. When placed within other significant contexts – the physicality of the building itself as well as the literature which surrounds it – these previously untold accounts provide new perspectives and details, which deepen the understanding of the building and its place within architectural discourse. Issues revealed include the importance of the influence of Louis Kahn’s Yale Art Gallery and Yale’s Collegiate Gothic Campus on the building’s design. Following a tumultuous first fifty years, the A&A remains an integral part of the architectural education of Yale students and, furthermore, constitutes an important didactic tool for all students of architecture.

Context-aware real-time assistant architecture for pervasive healthcare

The aging population in many countries brings into focus rising healthcare costs and pressure on conventional healthcare services. Pervasive healthcare has emerged as a viable solution capable of providing a technology-driven approach to alleviate such problems by allowing healthcare to move from the hospital-centred care to self-care, mobile care, and at-home care. The state-of-the-art studies in this field, however, lack a systematic approach for providing comprehensive pervasive healthcare solutions from data collection to data interpretation and from data analysis to data delivery. In this thesis we introduce a Context-aware Real-time Assistant (CARA) architecture that integrates novel approaches with state-of-the-art technology solutions to provide a full-scale pervasive healthcare solution with the emphasis on context awareness to help maintaining the well-being of elderly people. CARA collects information about and around the individual in a home environment, and enables accurately recognition and continuously monitoring activities of daily living. It employs an innovative reasoning engine to provide accurate real-time interpretation of the context and current situation assessment. Being mindful of the use of the system for sensitive personal applications, CARA includes several mechanisms to make the sophisticated intelligent components as transparent and accountable as possible, it also includes a novel cloud-based component for more effective data analysis. To deliver the automated real-time services, CARA supports interactive video and medical sensor based remote consultation. Our proposal has been validated in three application domains that are rich in pervasive contexts and real-time scenarios: (i) Mobile-based Activity Recognition, (ii) Intelligent Healthcare Decision Support Systems and (iii) Home-based Remote Monitoring Systems.

A distributed architecture for the monitoring and analysis of time series data

It is estimated that the quantity of digital data being transferred, processed or stored at any one time currently stands at 4.4 zettabytes (4.4 × 2 70 bytes) and this figure is expected to have grown by a factor of 10 to 44 zettabytes by 2020. Exploiting this data is, and will remain, a significant challenge. At present there is the capacity to store 33% of digital data in existence at any one time; by 2020 this capacity is expected to fall to 15%. These statistics suggest that, in the era of Big Data, the identification of important, exploitable data will need to be done in a timely manner. Systems for the monitoring and analysis of data, e.g. stock markets, smart grids and sensor networks, can be made up of massive numbers of individual components. These components can be geographically distributed yet may interact with one another via continuous data streams, which in turn may affect the state of the sender or receiver. This introduces a dynamic causality, which further complicates the overall system by introducing a temporal constraint that is difficult to accommodate. Practical approaches to realising the system described above have led to a multiplicity of analysis techniques, each of which concentrates on specific characteristics of the system being analysed and treats these characteristics as the dominant component affecting the results being sought. The multiplicity of analysis techniques introduces another layer of heterogeneity, that is heterogeneity of approach, partitioning the field to the extent that results from one domain are difficult to exploit in another. The question is asked can a generic solution for the monitoring and analysis of data that: accommodates temporal constraints; bridges the gap between expert knowledge and raw data; and enables data to be effectively interpreted and exploited in a transparent manner, be identified? The approach proposed in this dissertation acquires, analyses and processes data in a manner that is free of the constraints of any particular analysis technique, while at the same time facilitating these techniques where appropriate. Constraints are applied by defining a workflow based on the production, interpretation and consumption of data. This supports the application of different analysis techniques on the same raw data without the danger of incorporating hidden bias that may exist. To illustrate and to realise this approach a software platform has been created that allows for the transparent analysis of data, combining analysis techniques with a maintainable record of provenance so that independent third party analysis can be applied to verify any derived conclusions. In order to demonstrate these concepts, a complex real world example involving the near real-time capturing and analysis of neurophysiological data from a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) was chosen. A system was engineered to gather raw data, analyse that data using different analysis techniques, uncover information, incorporate that information into the system and curate the evolution of the discovered knowledge. The application domain was chosen for three reasons: firstly because it is complex and no comprehensive solution exists; secondly, it requires tight interaction with domain experts, thus requiring the handling of subjective knowledge and inference; and thirdly, given the dearth of neurophysiologists, there is a real world need to provide a solution for this domain