While an abundance of real-time maritime information exists and is readily available to monitoring authorities, there are still many instances in which ships are found to be engaged in dangerous or illegal activities. In order to prevent such activities, authorities employ Vessel Traffic Services systems since they promote safety at sea while also assisting in management of ports. In this paper we report on research done in cooperation with Denbridge Marine Ltd., a global provider of maritime solutions, and present an application integrated in a Vessel Tracking Services system that allows the detection of normal vessel activity as well as dangerous or illegal situations in real-time, using information from the Automatic Identification System, a radar sensor and other information. We use a set of phenomena representing maritime activities of interest in the language of Phenesthe, our Complex Event Processing engine, and detect them on real maritime data streams from the area of Liverpool, United Kingdom. We evaluate our application and show that our system is capable of detecting and visualising maritime activities on the map in real time. Finally, we study and demonstrate the significance of using data from the Automatic Identification System along with radar data for maritime monitoring.

MOTIVATION: Trimming and filtering tools are useful in DNA sequencing analysis because they increase the accuracy of sequence alignments and thus the reliability of results. Oxford nanopore technologies (ONT) trimming and filtering tools are currently rudimentary, generally only filtering reads based on whole read average quality. This results in discarding reads that contain regions of high-quality sequence. Here, we propose Prowler, a trimmer that uses a window-based approach inspired by algorithms used to trim short read data. Importantly, we retain the phase and read length information by optionally replacing trimmed sections with Ns. RESULTS: Prowler was applied to mammalian and bacterial datasets, to assess its effect on alignment and assembly, respectively. Compared to data filtered with Nanofilt, alignments of data trimmed with Prowler had lower error rates and more mapped reads. Assemblies of Prowler trimmed data had a lower error rate than those filtered with Nanofilt; however, this came at some cost to assembly contiguity. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Prowler is implemented in Python and is available at https://github.com/ProwlerForNanopore/ProwlerTrimmer. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Space-based radar observations have transformed our understanding of Earth over the last several decades. Driven by increasingly complex science questions, space radar missions have grown ever more sophisticated with costs rising often to hundreds of millions of dollars. At the other end of the cost and complexity spectrum, CubeSats have emerged in recent years as a disruptive innovation in the satellite sector and are now considered a means to address targeted science questions in a rapid and affordable manner. CubeSats enable new kinds of constellation-based Earth science observations not previously affordable with traditional spacecraft. Constellations of low-cost sensors provide both global spatial and high temporal coverage. As such, CubeSats are not only viable platforms to address current Earth science goals, but they also open a new realm of possibilities for science advancement and unique applications. Radar instruments have often been regarded as unsuitable for small satellite platforms due to their traditionally large size, weight, and power (SWaP). Burgeoning missions such as Radar in a CubeSat (RainCube) and CubeSat Imaging Radar for Earth Science (CIRES), being developed by Jet Propulsion Laboratory and SRI International, respectively, and funded by NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO), are slated to dispel this notion. The key to the simplification and miniaturization of the radar subsystems in a manner that still offers compelling science and applications is 1) component technological advancement; and 2) an integrated instrument architecture and mission design that exploits the capabilities offered by CubeSat platforms. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art and future developments of CubeSat radar missions for Earth remote sensing and the implications for NASA’s current and future Earth Science program. The key enabling technologies for radio frequency (RF), digital, and antennas are surveyed, as well as the evolution of the CubeSat avionics, in the aspects that mostly impact radar development, namely power, volume, and attitude control and knowledge and precision orbit determination (POD). We investigate various radar applications that could benefit from low-cost CubeSat platforms, such as altimetry, sounding, precipitation profiling, scatterometry, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and interferometric SAR (InSAR). We also explore the science motivation and impact of future missions that are based on these technological advancements.

Many authors have used the diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory of Rogers (1995) to study factors affecting citizen e-Gov adoption. But none of these authors studied the moderating role of the digital divide on the relationship between innovation characteristics and veterans' intention to adopt e-Gov. Our research model postulates that a veteran's intention to adopt e-Gov services is determined by the interaction between the digital divide and five innovation characteristics: relative advantage, perceived compatibility, perceived complexity, subjective norms and perceived risk. Data was collected from 183 veterans in a US state where a government website is designed to deliver e-services to veterans. We found that the digital divide did not moderate the effect of relative advantage and subjective norms on the veteran decision to adopt e-Gov services. However, the digital divide moderates the effect of some factors: perceived compatibility, perceived complexity and perceived risk. Discussion and implications are provided.

There is an eco-revolution going on, but not many people are joining it. Meeco intends to guide, encourage and commit people to live eco-friendlier lives in a more social and enjoyable way. It uses Location Based Services, Web Services and Game mechanics to create an engaging service that wants to make a difference in everyday life, one green action at a time. This paper is an overview of the research and analysis done, the concept creation, game design and prototype implementation of the Meeco platform.

This paper is an extension of work by He and Kundu (1991) in which the task of object recognition is performed on silhouettes or outlines. He and Kundu reduce a 2-dimensional image to a 1-dimensional segment sequence and use the autoregressive (AR) model for feature extraction and hidden Markov model (HMM) for classification. We show that due to the AR model's inability to estimate abrupt changes (i.e. where the signal is not bandlimited), poor image modelling is obtained. By direct application of vector quantization (VQ) to the normalized data segments, the image features are retained better than with AR modelling. Furthermore, by replacing the HMM classification with VQ distortion, better recognition results are obtained with reduced training times as compared to the HMM algorithm.>

Abstract Progress on a system to monitor the development of glaucoma by measuring the topography of the optic disk is reported. The need for an accurate method for doing this using passive vision is explained. Sparse depth measurements from stereo matching of blood vessels provide insufficient constraint for reconstructing the surface of the optic disk. Shape from shading has to contend with a spatially-varying albedo. We show how a particular arrangement of fundus cameras allows us to apply a technique akin to homomorphic filtering to recover estimates of δz δx that can be smoothed by appropriate regularization. Stereo is integrated with these photometric stereo depth estimates. Examples of artificial object and optic disk surface reconstructions are presented.