Publications

Publications from our Researchers

Several of our current PhD candidates and fellow researchers at the Data Science Institute have published, or in the proccess of publishing, papers to present their research.  

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  • Journal article
    Dekkers G, Rosas F, van Waterschoot T, Vanrumste B, Karsmakers Pet al., 2022,

    Dynamic sensor activation and decision-level fusion in wireless acoustic sensor networks for classification of domestic activities

    , Information Fusion, Vol: 77, Pages: 196-210, ISSN: 1566-2535

    For the past decades there has been a rising interest for wireless sensor networks to obtain information about an environment. One interesting modality is that of audio, as it is highly informative for numerous applications including speech recognition, urban scene classification, city monitoring, machine listening and classifying domestic activities. However, as they operate at prohibitively high energy consumption, commercialisation of battery-powered wireless acoustic sensor networks has been limited. To increase the network's lifetime, this paper explores the joint use of decision-level fusion and dynamic sensor activation. Hereby adopting a topology where processing – including feature extraction and classification – is performed on a dynamic set of sensor nodes that communicate classification outputs which are fused centrally. The main contribution of this paper is the comparison of decision-level fusion with different dynamic sensor activation strategies on the use case of automatically classifying domestic activities. Results indicate that using vector quantisation to encode the classification output, computed at each sensor node, can reduce the communication per classification output to 8 bit without loss of significant performance. As the cost for communication is reduced, local processing tends to dominate the overall energy budget. It is indicated that dynamic sensor activation, using a centralised approach, can reduce the average time a sensor node is active up to 20% by leveraging redundant information in the network. In terms of energy consumption, this resulted in an energy reduction of up to 80% as the cost for computation dominates the overall energy budget.
  • Journal article
    Vermeulen T, Reynders B, Rosas FE, Verhelst M, Pollin Set al., 2021,

    Performance analysis of in-band collision detection for dense wireless networks

    , Eurasip Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, Vol: 2021, Pages: 1-23, ISSN: 1687-1472

    With the massive growth of wireless networks comes a bigger impact of collisions and interference, which has a negative effect on throughput and energy efficiency. To deal with this problem, we propose an in-band wireless collision and interference detection scheme based on full-duplex technology. To study its performance, we compare its throughput and energy efficiency with the performance of traditional half-duplex and symmetric in-band full-duplex transmissions. Our analysis considers a realistic protocol and overhead modeling, and a measurement-based self-interference model. Our results indicate that our proposed collision detection scheme can provide significant gains in terms of throughput and energy efficiency in large wireless networks. Moreover, when compared to half-duplex and symmetric full-duplex, our analysis shows that this scheme allows up to 45% more nodes in the network for the same energy consumption per bit. These results suggest that this could be an enabling technology towards efficient, dense wireless networks.
  • Journal article
    Kettlun F, Rosas F, Oberli C, 2021,

    A low-complexity channel training method for efficient SVD beamforming over MIMO channels

    , Eurasip Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, Vol: 2021, Pages: 1-22, ISSN: 1687-1472

    Singular value decomposition (SVD) beamforming is an attractive tool for reducing the energy consumption of data transmissions in wireless sensor networks whose nodes are equipped with multiple antennas. However, this method is often not practical due to two important shortcomings: it requires channel state information at the transmitter and the computation of the SVD of the channel matrix is generally too complex. To deal with these issues, we propose a method for establishing an SVD beamforming link without requiring feedback of actual channel or SVD coefficients to the transmitter. Concretely, our method takes advantage of channel reciprocity and a power iteration algorithm (PIA) for determining the precoding and decoding singular vectors from received preamble sequences. A low-complexity version that performs no iterations is proposed and shown to have a signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) loss within 1 dB of the bit error rate of SVD beamforming with least squares channel estimates. The low-complexity method significantly outperforms maximum ratio combining diversity and Alamouti coding. We also show that the computational cost of the proposed PIA-based method is less than the one of using the Golub–Reinsch algorithm for obtaining the SVD. The number of computations of the low-complexity version is an order of magnitude smaller than with Golub–Reinsch. This difference grows further with antenna array size.
  • Journal article
    Gan HM, Fernando S, Molina-Solana M, 2021,

    Scalable object detection pipeline for traffic cameras: Application to Tfl JamCams

    , Expert Systems with Applications, Vol: 182, Pages: 1-15, ISSN: 0957-4174

    With CCTV systems being installed in the transport infrastructures of many cities, there is an abundance of data to be extracted from the footage. This paper explores the application of the YOLOv3 object detection algorithm trained on the COCO dataset to the Transport for London’s (TfL) JamCam feed. The result, open-sourced and publicly available, is a series of easy to deploy Docker pipelines to create, store and serve (through a REST API) data on identified objects on that feed. The pipelines can be deployed to any Linux machine with an NVIDIA GPU to support accelerated computation. We studied how different confidence thresholds affect detections of relevant objects (cars, trucks and pedestrians) in London JamCam scenes. By running the system continuously for 3 weeks, we built a dataset of more than 2200 detection datapoints for each camera (̃6 datapoints an hour). We further visualised the detections on an animated geospatial map, showcasing their effectiveness in identifying traffic patterns typical of an urban city like London, portraying the variation on different object population levels throughout the day.
  • Journal article
    Gatica M, Cofré R, Mediano PAM, Rosas FE, Orio P, Diez I, Swinnen SP, Cortes JMet al., 2021,

    High-Order Interdependencies in the Aging Brain.

    , Brain Connect, Vol: 11, Pages: 734-744

    Background: Brain interdependencies can be studied from either a structural/anatomical perspective ("structural connectivity") or by considering statistical interdependencies ("functional connectivity" [FC]). Interestingly, while structural connectivity is by definition pairwise (white-matter fibers project from one region to another), FC is not. However, most FC analyses only focus on pairwise statistics and they neglect higher order interactions. A promising tool to study high-order interdependencies is the recently proposed O-Information, which can quantify the intrinsic statistical synergy and the redundancy in groups of three or more interacting variables. Methods: We analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data obtained at rest from 164 healthy subjects with ages ranging in 10 to 80 years and used O-Information to investigate how high-order statistical interdependencies are affected by age. Results: Older participants (from 60 to 80 years old) exhibited a higher predominance of redundant dependencies compared with younger participants, an effect that seems to be pervasive as it is evident for all orders of interaction. In addition, while there is strong heterogeneity across brain regions, we found a "redundancy core" constituted by the prefrontal and motor cortices in which redundancy was evident at all the interaction orders studied. Discussion: High-order interdependencies in fMRI data reveal a dominant redundancy in functions such as working memory, executive, and motor functions. Our methodology can be used for a broad range of applications, and the corresponding code is freely available. Impact statement Past research has showcased multiple changes to the brain's structural and functional properties caused by aging. Here we expand prior work through recent advancements in multivariate information theory, which provide richer and more theoretically principled analyses than existing alternatives. We show that the
  • Conference paper
    Rosas FE, Mediano PAM, Gastpar M, 2021,

    Learning, compression, and leakage: Minimising classification error via meta-universal compression principles

    , 2020 IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW), Publisher: IEEE, Pages: 1-5

    Learning and compression are driven by the common aim of identifying and exploiting statistical regularities in data, which opens the door for fertile collaboration between these areas. A promising group of compression techniques for learning scenarios is normalised maximum likelihood (NML) coding, which provides strong guarantees for compression of small datasets — in contrast with more popular estimators whose guarantees hold only in the asymptotic limit. Here we consider a NMLbased decision strategy for supervised classification problems, and show that it attains heuristic PAC learning when applied to a wide variety of models. Furthermore, we show that the misclassification rate of our method is upper bounded by the maximal leakage, a recently proposed metric to quantify the potential of data leakage in privacy-sensitive scenarios.
  • Journal article
    Medina-Mardones AM, Rosas FE, Rodríguez SE, Cofré Ret al., 2021,

    Hyperharmonic analysis for the study of high-order information-theoretic signals

    , Journal of Physics: Complexity, Vol: 2, Pages: 1-16, ISSN: 2632-072X

    Network representations often cannot fully account for the structural richness of complex systems spanning multiple levels of organisation. Recently proposed high-order information-theoretic signals are well-suited to capture synergistic phenomena that transcend pairwise interactions; however, the exponential-growth of their cardinality severely hinders their applicability. In this work, we combine methods from harmonic analysis and combinatorial topology to construct efficient representations of high-order information-theoretic signals. The core of our method is the diagonalisation of a discrete version of the Laplace–de Rham operator, that geometrically encodes structural properties of the system. We capitalise on these ideas by developing a complete workflow for the construction of hyperharmonic representations of high-order signals, which is applicable to a wide range of scenarios.
  • Journal article
    Huitzil I, Molina-Solana M, Gómez-Romero J, Bobillo Fet al., 2021,

    Minimalistic fuzzy ontology reasoning: An application to Building Information Modeling

    , Applied Soft Computing, Vol: 103, Pages: 1-15, ISSN: 1568-4946

    This paper presents a minimalistic reasoning algorithm to solve imprecise instance retrieval in fuzzy ontologies with application to querying Building Information Models (BIMs)—a knowledge representation formalism used in the construction industry. Our proposal is based on a novel lossless reduction of fuzzy to crisp reasoning tasks, which can be processed by any Description Logics reasoner. We implemented the minimalistic reasoning algorithm and performed an empirical evaluation of its performance in several tasks: interoperation with classical reasoners (Hermit and TrOWL), initialization time (comparing TrOWL and a SPARQL engine), and use of different data structures (hash tables, databases, and programming interfaces). We show that our software can efficiently solve very expressive queries not available nowadays in regular or semantic BIMs tools.
  • Journal article
    Tajnafoi G, Arcucci R, Mottet L, Vouriot C, Molina-Solana M, Pain C, Guo Y-Ket al., 2021,

    Variational Gaussian process for optimal sensor placement

    , Applications of Mathematics, Vol: 66, Pages: 287-317, ISSN: 0373-6725

    Sensor placement is an optimisation problem that has recently gained great relevance. In order to achieve accurate online updates of a predictive model, sensors are used to provide observations. When sensor location is optimally selected, the predictive model can greatly reduce its internal errors. A greedy-selection algorithm is used for locating these optimal spatial locations from a numerical embedded space. A novel architecture for solving this big data problem is proposed, relying on a variational Gaussian process. The generalisation of the model is further improved via the preconditioning of its inputs: Masked Autoregressive Flows are implemented to learn nonlinear, invertible transformations of the conditionally modelled spatial features. Finally, a global optimisation strategy extending the Mutual Information-based optimisation and fine-tuning of the selected optimal location is proposed. The methodology is parallelised to speed up the computational time, making these tools very fast despite the high complexity associated with both spatial modelling and placement tasks. The model is applied to a real three-dimensional test case considering a room within the Clarence Centre building located in Elephant and Castle, London, UK.
  • Journal article
    Kettner HS, Rosas F, Timmermann C, Kärtner L, Carhart-Harris RL, Roseman Let al., 2021,

    Psychedelic Communitas: intersubjective experience during psychedelic group sessions predicts enduring changes in psychological wellbeing and social connectedness

    , Frontiers in Pharmacology, Vol: 12, ISSN: 1663-9812

    Background: Recent years have seen a resurgence of research on the potential of psychedelic substances to treat addictive and mood disorders. Historically and contemporarily, psychedelic studies have emphasized the importance of contextual elements ('set and setting') in modulating acute drug effects, and ultimately, influencing long-term outcomes. Nevertheless, current small-scale clinical and laboratory studies have tended to bypass a ubiquitous contextual feature of naturalistic psychedelic use: its social dimension. This study introduces and psychometrically validates an adapted Communitas Scale, assessing acute relational experiences of perceived togetherness and shared humanity, in order to investigate psychosocial mechanisms pertinent to psychedelic ceremonies and retreats.Methods: In this observational, web-based survey study, participants (N = 886) were measured across five successive time-points: 2 weeks before, hours before, and the day after a psychedelic ceremony; as well as the day after, and 4 weeks after leaving the ceremony location. Demographics, psychological traits and state variables were assessed pre-ceremony, in addition to changes in psychological wellbeing and social connectedness from before to after the retreat, as primary outcomes. Using correlational and multiple regression (path) analyses, predictive relationships between psychosocial 'set and setting' variables, communitas, and long-term outcomes were explored.Results: The adapted Communitas Scale demonstrated substantial internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.92) and construct validity in comparison with validated measures of intra-subjective (visual, mystical, challenging experiences questionnaires) and inter-subjective (perceived emotional synchrony, identity fusion) experiences. Furthermore, communitas during ceremony was significantly correlated with increases in psychological wellbeing (r = 0.22), social connectedness (r = 0.25), and other salient mental health outcomes. Path
  • Journal article
    Szigeti B, Kartner L, Blemings A, Rosas F, Feilding A, Nutt DJ, Carhart-Harris RL, Erritzoe Det al., 2021,

    Self-blinding citizen science to explore psychedelic microdosing

    , eLife, Vol: 10, Pages: 1-26, ISSN: 2050-084X

    Microdosing is the practice of regularly using low doses of psychedelic drugs. Anecdotal reports suggest that microdosing enhances well-being and cognition; however, such accounts are potentially biased by the placebo effect. This study used a ‘self-blinding’ citizen science initiative, where participants were given online instructions on how to incorporate placebo control into their microdosing routine without clinical supervision. The study was completed by 191 participants, making it the largest placebo-controlled trial on psychedelics to-date. All psychological outcomes improved significantly from baseline to after the 4 weeks long dose period for the microdose group; however, the placebo group also improved and no significant between-groups differences were observed. Acute (emotional state, drug intensity, mood, energy, and creativity) and post-acute (anxiety) scales showed small, but significant microdose vs. placebo differences; however, these results can be explained by participants breaking blind. The findings suggest that anecdotal benefits of microdosing can be explained by the placebo effect.
  • Journal article
    Turkheimer FE, Rosas FE, Dipasquale O, Martins D, Fagerholm ED, Expert P, Vasa F, Lord L-D, Leech Ret al., 2021,

    A complex systems perspective on neuroimaging studies of behavior and its disorders

    , The Neuroscientist: reviews at the interface of basic and clinical neurosciences, Pages: 1-18, ISSN: 1073-8584

    The study of complex systems deals with emergent behavior that arises as a result of nonlinear spatiotemporal interactions between a large number of components both within the system, as well as between the system and its environment. There is a strong case to be made that neural systems as well as their emergent behavior and disorders can be studied within the framework of complexity science. In particular, the field of neuroimaging has begun to apply both theoretical and experimental procedures originating in complexity science—usually in parallel with traditional methodologies. Here, we illustrate the basic properties that characterize complex systems and evaluate how they relate to what we have learned about brain structure and function from neuroimaging experiments. We then argue in favor of adopting a complex systems-based methodology in the study of neuroimaging, alongside appropriate experimental paradigms, and with minimal influences from noncomplex system approaches. Our exposition includes a review of the fundamental mathematical concepts, combined with practical examples and a compilation of results from the literature.
  • Journal article
    Balaban G, Halliday B, Bradley P, Bai W, Nygaard S, Owen R, Hatipoglu S, Ferreira ND, Izgi C, Tayal U, Corden B, Ware J, Pennell D, Rueckert D, Plank G, Rinaldi CA, Prasad SK, Bishop Met al., 2021,

    Late-gadolinium enhancement interface area and electrophysiological simulations predict arrhythmic events in non-ischemic dilated cardiomyopathy patients

    , JACC: Clinical Electrophysiology, Vol: 7, Pages: 238-249, ISSN: 2405-5018

    BACKGROUND: The presence of late-gadolinium enhancement (LGE) predicts life threatening ventricular arrhythmias in non-ischemic dilated cardiomyopathy (NIDCM); however, risk stratification remains imprecise. LGE shape and simulations of electrical activity may be able to provide additional prognostic information.OBJECTIVE: This study sought to investigate whether shape-based LGE metrics and simulations of reentrant electrical activity are associated with arrhythmic events in NIDCM patients.METHODS: CMR-LGE shape metrics were computed for a cohort of 156 NIDCM patients with visible LGE and tested retrospectively for an association with an arrhythmic composite end-point of sudden cardiac death and ventricular tachycardia. Computational models were created from images and used in conjunction with simulated stimulation protocols to assess the potential for reentry induction in each patient’s scar morphology. A mechanistic analysis of the simulations was carried out to explain the associations. RESULTS: During a median follow-up of 1611 [IQR 881-2341] days, 16 patients (10.3%) met the primary endpoint. In an inverse probability weighted Cox regression, the LGE-myocardial interface area (HR:1.75; 95% CI:1.24-2.47; p=0.001), number of simulated reentries (HR: 1.4; 95% CI: 1.23-1.59; p<0.01) and LGE volume (HR:1.44; 95% CI:1.07-1.94; p=0.02) were associated with arrhythmic events. Computational modeling revealed repolarisation heterogeneity and rate-dependent block of electrical wavefronts at the LGE-myocardial interface as putative arrhythmogenic mechanisms directly related to LGE interface area.CONCLUSION: The area of interface between scar and surviving myocardium, as well as simulated reentrant activity, are associated with an elevated risk of major arrhythmic events in NIDCM patients with LGE and represent novel risk predictors.
  • Journal article
    Xiong Z, Xia Q, Hu Z, Huang N, Bian C, Zheng Y, Vesal S, Ravikumar N, Maier A, Yang X, Heng P-A, Ni D, Li C, Tong Q, Si W, Puybareau E, Khoudli Y, Geraud T, Chen C, Bai W, Rueckert D, Xu L, Zhuang X, Luo X, Jia S, Sermesant M, Liu Y, Wang K, Borra D, Masci A, Corsi C, de Vente C, Veta M, Karim R, Preetha CJ, Engelhardt S, Qiao M, Wang Y, Tao Q, Nunez-Garcia M, Camara O, Savioli N, Lamata P, Zhao Jet al., 2021,

    A global benchmark of algorithms for segmenting the left atrium from late gadolinium-enhanced cardiac magnetic resonance imaging

    , Medical Image Analysis, Vol: 67, Pages: 1-14, ISSN: 1361-8415

    Segmentation of medical images, particularly late gadolinium-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (LGE-MRI) used for visualizing diseased atrial structures, is a crucial first step for ablation treatment of atrial fibrillation. However, direct segmentation of LGE-MRIs is challenging due to the varying intensities caused by contrast agents. Since most clinical studies have relied on manual, labor-intensive approaches, automatic methods are of high interest, particularly optimized machine learning approaches. To address this, we organized the 2018 Left Atrium Segmentation Challenge using 154 3D LGE-MRIs, currently the world's largest atrial LGE-MRI dataset, and associated labels of the left atrium segmented by three medical experts, ultimately attracting the participation of 27 international teams. In this paper, extensive analysis of the submitted algorithms using technical and biological metrics was performed by undergoing subgroup analysis and conducting hyper-parameter analysis, offering an overall picture of the major design choices of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and practical considerations for achieving state-of-the-art left atrium segmentation. Results show that the top method achieved a Dice score of 93.2% and a mean surface to surface distance of 0.7 mm, significantly outperforming prior state-of-the-art. Particularly, our analysis demonstrated that double sequentially used CNNs, in which a first CNN is used for automatic region-of-interest localization and a subsequent CNN is used for refined regional segmentation, achieved superior results than traditional methods and machine learning approaches containing single CNNs. This large-scale benchmarking study makes a significant step towards much-improved segmentation methods for atrial LGE-MRIs, and will serve as an important benchmark for evaluating and comparing the future works in the field. Furthermore, the findings from this study can potentially be extended to other imaging datasets and modalitie
  • Journal article
    Andersen MM, Schjoedt U, Price H, Rosas FE, Scrivner C, Clasen Met al., 2020,

    Playing with fear: a field study in recreational horror

    , Psychological Science, Vol: 31, Pages: 1497-1510, ISSN: 0956-7976

    Haunted attractions are illustrative examples of recreational fear in which people voluntarily seek out frightening experiences in pursuit of enjoyment. We present findings from a field study at a haunted-house attraction where visitors between the ages of 12 and 57 years (N = 110) were equipped with heart rate monitors, video-recorded at peak scare points during the attraction, and asked to report on their experience. Our results show that enjoyment has an inverted-U-shaped relationship with fear across repeated self-reported measures. Moreover, results from physiological data demonstrate that the experience of being frightened is a linear function of large-scale heart rate fluctuations, whereas there is an inverted-U-shaped relationship between participant enjoyment and small-scale heart rate fluctuations. These results suggest that enjoyment is related to forms of arousal dynamics that are “just right.” These findings shed light on how fear and enjoyment can coexist in recreational horror.

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