Gordon Hunter

Kingston University · School of Computer Science & Mathematics

Nowadays, people may have to deal with electronically-transmitted messages of a variety of types: e-mails (potentially with attached files), SMS text messages and (digitised) telephone messages. Many e-mail systems allow users to browse through their e-mail archives, and search for specific e-mail messages, by subject, by sender or recipient(s), or...

Cricket is one of the most-followed sports around the World. T20 is a short version of the game, growing in popularity over the past 20 years due to high profile tournaments such as the Indian Premier League. There is much demand for analysis of player performance, but traditional measures of this-batting and bowling averages, strike and economy ra...

This paper describes the early phase of a framework being developed to identify infestation levels of pests and parasites of the Western Honey Bee. Image processing techniques and two classical machine learning algorithms have been used to examine close-up images of the material falling on a varroa board beneath the mesh floor of a bee hive and ide...

Honeybees are vital to both the agricultural industry and the wider ecological system, most importantly for their role as major pollinators of flowering plants, many of which are food crops. Honeybee colonies are dependent on having a healthy queen for their long-term survival since the queen bee is the only reproductive female in the colony. Thus,...

This paper catalogues a dataset drawn from Metropolitan Police records in the period 2004-2015 regarding drowning victims recovered from a tidal stretch of the River Thames and provides a comparative study with a similar dataset from the time period 1956-1959 by the County of London (Western District), H.M. Coroner of that time, Gavin Thurston, fro...

Osteoarthritis is a major cause of mobility problems in older people and is a particular problem in former sportspeople. The objective of this study was to develop and characterise a new system for the detection, monitoring and analysis of acoustic emissions from knee joints. 15 adult volunteers participated in the study. The participants performed...

We develop a discrete model of type-token dynamics based on random type selection from the Zipf-Mandelbrot probability distribution, with a view to examining the relationships between the constants of Zipf’s and Heaps’ laws. Analysis of items randomly selected items from the Standardised Project Gutenberg Corpus (SPGC) reveal a significant low-freq...

About fifty years ago, the world’s first fully automated system for trading securities was introduced by Instinet in the US. Since then the world of trading has been revolutionised by the introduction of electronic markets and automatic order execution. Nowadays, financial institutions exploit the associated flow of daily data using more and more a...

Honeybees are of vital importance to both agriculture and ecology. Unfortunately, their populations have been in serious decline over recent years. Swarms from hives are both of great importance to wider success of a colony and of major significance to beekeepers. In this paper, we contribute to the challenge of predicting when a swarm is going to...

We introduce here a new index of diversity based on consideration of reasonable propositions that such an index should have in order to represent diversity. The behaviour of the index is compared with that of the Gini-Simpson diversity index, and is found to predict more realistic values of diversity for small communities, in particular when each s...

Honeybees are of vital importance to both agriculture and ecology, but honeybee populations have been in serious decline over recent years. The queen bee is of crucial importance to the success of a colony. In this paper, we contribute to addressing these problems by employing Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) Neural Net...

We investigate the predictive capability of mathematical models of the type-token relationship applied to the vocabulary growth profiles of selected of English language documents. We compare the existing Good-Toulmin and Heaps formulae with an alternative approach based on Bernoulli trial word selection from a fixed finite vocabulary using the Zipf...

On 23rd May 2019, an unexploded World War II era bomb was discovered on a building site in Kingston-upon-Thames, approximately just 50 metres away from the back of Kingston University’s Penrhyn Road campus. The bomb was believed to contain around 250kg of high explosive material, resulting in Police evacuating the University campus, and all homes i...

While Shannon’s differential entropy adequately quantifies a dimensioned random variable’s information deficit under a given measurement system, the same cannot be said of differential weighted entropy in its existing formulation. We develop weighted and residual weighted entropies of a dimensioned quantity from their discrete summation origins, ex...

Environmental factors, including air pollution, noise, and decline in biodiversity, have become issues of major concern over recent decades. Air pollution and other environmental contaminants (such as pesticides) have led to concerns relating to the health and well-being of human, animal and plant populations, whilst changes in temperature and rain...

This study investigates the application and evaluation of existing indirect methods, namely point-based registration techniques, for the estimation and compensation of observed motion included in the 2-D image plane of contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) cine-loops recorded for the characterization and diagnosis of focal liver lesions (FLLs). The v...

The need for technology assisted (or ambient assisted) living is increasing all the time as the population ages and the number of people with dementia and other conditions impairing memory and cognitive ability increases. In such applications, amongst others, it is necessary to identify and assess potentially hazardous situations. These include sce...

Automatic speech recognition and automatic speech understanding systems have, over recent years, improved to the extent that they are used in many practical applications ranging from dictation systems to voice control of household devices (through systems such as Alexa and Amazon Echo) and dialogue systems for telephone shopping and customer servic...

Assessment of focal liver lesions (FLLs) in contrast-enhanced ultrasound requires the delineation of the FLL in at least one frame of the acquired data, which is currently performed manually by experienced radiologists. Such a task leads to subjective results, is time-consuming and prone to misinterpretation and human error. This paper describes an...

Post-examination interpretation of contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) cineloops of focal liver lesions (FLLs) requires offline manual assessment by experienced radiologists, which is time-consuming and generates subjective results. Such assessment usually starts by manually identifying a reference frame, where FLL and healthy parenchyma are well-d...

Many people experience mobility problems as they age, often due to damage to bone joints and to the cartilage between the bones in these joints, which can eventually lead to osteoarthritis and severe pain. Such problems are particularly common in former athletes, since injuries sustained during intensive “high impact” exercise activities can easily...

Mobility problems consequential to knee injuries are common in people as they age, and are particularly prevalent amongst former athletes. In this paper, we describe a pilot study, including preliminary results, using a multi-modal approach employing video, audio, force monitoring and muscle activity sensors, to investigate the health of knee joint...

Intelligent Environments often require the integration of multi-modal sensing and actuating technologies with high performance real-time computation, including artificial intelligence systems for analysis, learning patterns and reasoning. Such systems may be complex, and involve multiple components. However, in order to make them affordable, Intell...

Computer Programming remains a difficult discipline to teach. E-learning can help improve student engagement and outcomes but offerings designed to teach programming in a University context are rudimentary when compared to publicly available sites such as Code Academy. This paper describes Noob Lab, an e-learning platform for teaching programming....

Assessment of focal liver lesions (FLLs) in Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasound data requires initialisation tasks that are currently performed manually by experienced radiologists. These tasks lead to subjective results, are time-consuming and prone to misinterpretation and human error. This paper describes an attempt to improve this clinical practice by...

The problem of automatically segmenting images into different components of interest, and then tracking such components through a sequence of frames in a video, is relevant to many applications of video analysis in Intelligent Environments. Several video capture technologies pre-process the image frames, by adding false-colour, in order to improve...

PURPOSE: To provide a computer-aided evaluation tool (ET) that optimises the assessment, quantification and characterisation of Focal Liver Lesions (FLLs) in Contrast Enhanced Ultrasound (CEUS), based on automated tracking of the FLL and parenchyma regions. METHOD AND MATERIALS: Data of 107 FLL cases are assessed, 93 obtained on a Siemens S2000 (...

Difficulties in accessibility to resources for, and writing documents in, mathematical notation, has limited the educational and career opportunities of people with disabilities such as visual impairments and/or limited (or no) use of their hands or arms. In this paper, we describe a system, TalkMaths, aiming to help address these issues. TalkMaths...

In this paper, we discuss issues relating to phoneme (in particular, vowel) production in a subject's second language, focusing on the vowel systems of Standard Southern British English (SSBE) and Cypriot Turkish. We describe a study wherein first language Turkish speakers, who were experienced second language speakers of SSBE, were recorded attemp...

This paper discusses ICT-related needs, with particular reference to studying mathematically-based disciplines, of several types of users – notably people with physical disabilities, online (distance) learners and people working or studying “on the move”, relying on mobile devices. We note the inadequacy of existing interfaces for mathematical inpu...

A real-time range flow based ego-motion estimator for a moving depth sensor is presented. The estimator recovers the translation and rotation components of a sensor’s motion and integrates these temporally. To ensure accurate inter-frame motion estimates, an iterative form of the estimator is developed. To minimise drift in the pose, additional tem...

This paper describes a contribution to a wider project which aims to provide an intelligent automated assistant to radiologists performing the skilled and time-intensive task of detecting and characterising cancerous lesions within a human liver from Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasound (CEUS) video sequences. This particular contribution relates to automa...

We discuss the demand for intelligent systems to assist both teachers and students in the teaching and learning of computer programming, then describe the design, implementation of Nooblab, an integrated system offering instruction, a programming test bed and assessment for several programming languages, and its deployment in real university classr...

This paper presents a method for localising and recognising vehicle manufacturer logos in both the front and rear views. The method assumes that the vehicle registration plate is visible and an estimate of its location is available. Features are constructed out of local histograms of gradients, in both conventional and hierarchical arrangements. Th...

The honeybee, Apis Mellifera, is of vital importance to the agricultural sector across the World, primarily due to it exceptional abilities to pollinate crops. In 2006, honeybee colony numbers in developed countries experienced a dramatic decline, due to a diverse range of factors collectively known as Colony Collapse Disorder. At about the same ti...

Computer programming is a highly practical subject and it is essential that those new to the discipline engage in hands-on experimentation as part of the learning process. However, when faced with large cohorts and an increasing demand for distance and student flexible learning, incorporating this into a programming course can be difficult. There i...

This paper presents two tools that employ novel human computer interaction methods, allowing users to create and edit mathematical content in electronic documents. We apply one of these in a study in a classroom environment which aims to investigate whether this system can assist students to learn mathematical concepts via creating mathematical e-c...

The aim of this work is to provide an informative evaluation tool to assist clinicians diagnose focal liver lesions (FLLs) in Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasound (CEUS). A methodology to track and characterise a single FLL is presented. We propose a histogram-based motion segmentation approach, in combination with Lowe's SIFT keypoints, to track the locat...

This paper presents a methodology for tracking a hypo- or hyper-enhanced focal liver lesion (FLL) and a healthy liver region in a video sequence of a Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasound (CEUS) examination. The outcome allows the differentiation between benign and malignant cases, by characterising FLLs of typical behaviour, according to their Time-Intensi...

This paper describes the development and evaluation of an intelligent web-based interface for editing mathematical text that assists the user with the aid of the predictive and corrective power of statistical language models. It offers options for predicting what will appear next (analogous to predictive text for SMS messages) and identifying likel...

Learning and using mathematical notation poses particular difficulties for people with various disabilities, partly due to its wide range of symbols and rather complicated layout. These pose great challenges, often affecting the educational and career opportunities of people who are visually impaired or have limited (or no) use of their hands or ar...

Threads is a Cloud-based software service the authors describe as a message hub. It allows an organisation to store, search and share all its digital messages – emails and phone calls – to improve collaboration and productivity and to extract otherwise hidden information. Information overload and privacy concerns have conspired to suffocate the att...

We outline a system, called TalkMaths, which has been under development for some time, to allow users to create, access and edit Mathematical text documents using speech. This interface system could prove to be of particular advantage to people with a range of disabilities, amongst others. We describe initial results of a study to evaluate how easy...

We note the disadvantages which many people with disabilities have regarding learning and using mathematics. We then describe work in progress on developing intelligent systems to assist such people by allowing them to dictate mathematical expressions in relatively natural language into either a system which can interpret and display the expression...

The detection, classification and prediction of significant events by means of sounds has the potential to be a useful complement to video monitoring, motion sensing and other modes in applications including security surveillance, care of the sick, infirm and elderly. Here, we apply methods inspired by approaches used in the automatic recognition a...

Some significant events in sports matches occur too quickly to be detected by conventional video. Audio signals, normally sampled at a much higher rate, provide a way to detect such short events. Here, we employ methods used in automatic speech recognition - templates of Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) over several adjacent time windows...

This paper was presented at the Institute of Acoustics Spring Conference at the University of Reading, U.K. in April 2008. It was published in Volume 30 of Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics and is available at https://www.ioa.org.uk/system/files/proceedings/k_zienowicz_g_hunter_a_shihab_the_use_of_spectrographic_template_matching_to_identi...

This paper was presented at the 3rd IET International Conference on Intelligent Environments held in Ulm, Germany in September 2007. It is subject to IEEE copyright, but is available via IEEE Xplore at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4449921?arnumber=4449921

In this paper, we suggest that the contrasting nature of (transcribed) spoken dialogue and written text implies that they should be modelled separately – particularly with a view to employing such models in natural language interfaces for machines. We carry out statistical studies on large datasets – taken from the British National Corpus – of mode...

Spoken language dialogue systems (SLDSs) are becoming more and more widespread as interfaces between human users and automated systems. The speech recogniser is a key component of an SLDS, and a statistical language model is at the core of most successful recognisers. In this paper, we describe and compare several cluster-based strategies for model...

The use of spoken dialogue interfaces is becoming quite commonplace in many everyday situations such as cinema ticket bookings and much effort is being put into making such systems reliable and easy to use. There is strong evidence that the performance of the language model component of a speech recognition system is heavily dependent on the nature...

Statistical language modelling may not only be used to uncover the patterns which underlie the composition of utterances and texts, but also to build practical language processing technology. Contemporary language applications in automatic speech recognition, sentence interpretation and even machine translation exploit statistical models of languag...

The current approach to the training of large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) systems involves the use of large corpora of text and labelled audio recordings (1). These resources are analysed and statistics extracted so that the recogniser can determine the likelihood that the observed signal would have been generated from each sen...

Describes the development of high-temperature series expansions for general mixed spin-S-spin-S' Ising models on simple loose-packed lattices. It extends previous work on the simpler special case S'=1/2. Coefficients of the series for the initial susceptibility and specific heat of these models on the square, SC and BCC lattices are presented. A pr...

We describe a computer algorithm, justified by graph-theoretic results, which aids the calculation of high-temperature series coefficients for Ising models. This algorithm has been efficiently implemented on a AMT DAP, and preliminary results for mixed-spin Ising model spinel ferrimagnets are presented here.

We describe two studies of ferrimagnetic ordering phenomena in 3-D systems. In the first, the Monte Carlo and cumulant expansion methods have been applied to the S=1, S′=3/2 mixed spin Ising system. In the second, the critical equations of state of Ising S=5/2 and isotropic classical Heisenberg models of lithium ferrite determined by Monte Carlo si...

Sports can contain events that occur too quickly to be captured by 25 frames-per-second video. An audio signal, sampled at a much higher temporal rate, provides a way to detect events over a shorter timescale. However, there are complications such as noise, echoes and latencies. Nevertheless, we have found statistical evidence that could allow an a...

We describe the development of a speech-driven user interface system, TalkMaths, which enables the dictation of mathematical expressions into electronic documents without the user needing extensive knowledge of any specialized markup language. This system should be of value to many students and teachers, particularly those with disabilities -for wh...

In this paper, we overview the development of the TalkMaths speech interface system for dictating and editing mathematical text in electronic documents. We describe a study evaluating how effective the current version of the system is, then proceed to discuss recent work into how the system can be improved, using improved editing strategies and inc...

Recent advances in speech technology have meant that much more is now possible than just dictation of text documents. Control of devices through spoken commands is now feasible and other more sophisticated ways of communicating with machines, such as spoken language dialogue systems, are entering common usage in paying bills, booking theatre, cinem...

Most people interact with each other effortlessly using speech. From an early age we learn how to speak to express our thoughts, wishes and to ask questions. At present, to interact with computers we normally use a text-based communication method such as a programming language or operating system and initiate actions by using a mouse, clicking