Genomic testing is becoming increasingly used within the UK National Health Service (NHS) in an effort to deliver precision medicine that can directly benefit patient management and care. Typically, in hospital settings clinical scientists interpret genomic results and store the output in reports (unstructured format). Recent advances in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques have significant advantage over the common time-consuming and laborious manual extraction of the relevant information from the reports. There are a plethora of open-source NLP models available, but limited evidence of their performance on real-world healthcare tasks, specifically for paediatric data. In this paper, we describe the development of an automated pipeline that uses a hybrid approach of combining rules and pretrained NLP models to extract gene variants, related information of these variants and any gene panel information present within the genomic test reports. We evaluated the performance of the pipeline against a manually-curated, expert-annotated, in-house data containing 372 reports. Our results and evaluation highlights the advantages and limitations of using existing pretrained models in a real-world setting, and in particular, when there are computation and resource constraints within the hospital setting.

Automated mood recognition has been studied in recent times with great emphasis on stress in particular. Other affective states are also of great importance, as studying them can help in understanding human behaviours in more detail. Most of the studies conducted in the realisation of an automated system that is capable of recognising human moods have established that mood is personal—that is, mood perception differs amongst individuals. Previous machine learning--based frameworks confirm this hypothesis, with personalised models almost always outperforming the generalised methods. In this article, we propose a novel system for grouping individuals in what we refer to as “perception clusters” based on their physiological signals. We evaluate perception clusters with a trial of nine users in a work environment, recording physiological and activity data for at least 10 days. Our results reveal no significant difference in performance with respect to a personalised approach and that our method performs equally better against traditional generalised methods. Such an approach significantly reduces computational requirements that are otherwise necessary for personalised approaches requiring individual models developed separately for each user. Further, perception clusters manifest a direction towards semi-supervised affective modelling in which individual perceptions are inferred from the data.

Environmental monitoring allows authorities to understand the impact of potentially harmful phenomena, such as air pollution, excessive noise, and radiation. Recently, there has been considerable interest in participatory sensing as a paradigm for such large-scale data collection because it is cost-effective and able to capture more fine-grained data than traditional approaches that use stationary sensors scattered in cities. In this approach, ordinary citizens (non-expert contributors) collect environmental data using low-cost mobile devices. However, these participants are generally self-interested actors that have their own goals and make local decisions about when and where to take measurements. This can lead to highly inefficient outcomes, where observations are either taken redundantly or do not provide sufficient information about key areas of interest. To address these challenges, it is necessary to guide and to coordinate participants, so they take measurements when it is most informative. To this end, we develop a computationally-efficient coordination algorithm (adaptive Best-Match) that suggests to users when and where to take measurements. Our algorithm exploits probabilistic knowledge of human mobility patterns, but explicitly considers the uncertainty of these patterns and the potential unwillingness of people to take measurements when requested to do so. In particular, our algorithm uses a local search technique, clustering and random simulations to map participants to measurements that need to be taken in space and time. We empirically evaluate our algorithm on a real-world human mobility and air quality dataset and show that it outperforms the current state of the art by up to 24% in terms of utility gained.

Participatory sensing (PS) has gained significant attention as a crowdsourcing methodology that allows ordinary citizens (non-expert contributors) to collect data using low-cost mobile devices. In particular, it has been useful in the collection of environmental data. However, current PS applications suffer from two problems. First, they do not coordinate the measurements taken by their users, which is required to maximise system efficiency. Second, they are vulnerable to malicious behaviour. In this context, we propose a novel algorithm that simultaneously addresses both of these problems. Specifically, we use heteroskedastic Gaussian Processes to incorporate users' trustworthiness into a Bayesian spatio-temporal regression model. The model is trained with measurements taken by participants, thus it is able to estimate the value of the phenomenon at any spatio-temporal location of interest and also learn the level of trustworthiness of each user. Given this model, the coordination system is able to make informed decisions concerning when, where and who should take measurements over a period of time. We empirically evaluate our algorithm on a real-world human mobility and air quality dataset, where malicious behaviour is synthetically produced, and show that our algorithm outperforms the current state of the art by up to 60.4% in terms of RMSE while having a reasonable runtime.

Participatory sensing is a promising new low-cost approach for collecting environmental data. However, current large-scale environmental participatory sensing campaigns typically do not coordinate the measurements of participants, which can lead to gaps or redundancy in the collected data. While some work has considered this problem, it has made several unrealistic assumptions. In particular, it assumes that complete and accurate knowledge about the participants future movements is available and it does not consider constraints on the number of measurements a user is willing to take. To address these shortcomings, we develop a computationally-efficient coordination algorithm (Best-match) to suggest to users where and when to take measurements. Our algorithm exploits human mobility patterns, but explicitly considers the inherent uncertainty of these patterns. We empirically evaluate our algorithm on a real-world human mobility and air quality dataset and show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art greedy and pull-based proximity algorithms in dynamic environments.