Self-managing chronic conditions typically involves a diverse network of individuals and devices, forming a self-management ecosystem. For this ecosystem to be effective, components need to work together cohesively. The rapid advancement of technology means new devices need to be repeatedly integrated into existing self-management ecosystems. To examine this process, we used the case study of young adults with type 1 diabetes (T1D) in the UK who were given a smartwatch. Over six months, interviews and focus groups were performed to explore their smartwatch use alongside T1D management. Thematic analysis highlighted that smartwatches have potential as a display, interface and data source in T1D management, which is of particular importance as artificial intelligence plays a growing role in self-management ecosystems. It also emphasised the need for customisation, flexibility and adaptability, and automation in the design of technology to promote integration into existing self-management ecosystems for both T1D and other chronic conditions.

Abstract A key aspect of temporal domains is the ability to make predictions multiple time-steps into the future, a process known as multi-step forecasting (MSF). At the core of this process is selecting a forecasting strategy; however, with no existing frameworks to map out the space of strategies, practitioners are left with ad-hoc methods for strategy selection. In this work, we propose Stratify , a parameterised framework that addresses multi-step forecasting, unifying existing strategies and introducing novel, improved strategies. We evaluate Stratify on 18 benchmark datasets, five function classes, and short to long forecast horizons (10, 20, 40, 80) in the univariate setting. In over 84% of 1080 experiments, novel strategies in Stratify improved performance compared to all existing ones. Importantly, we find that no single strategy consistently outperforms others in all task settings, highlighting the need for practitioners to explore the Stratify space to carefully search and select forecasting strategies based on task-specific requirements. Our results are the most comprehensive benchmarking of known and novel forecasting strategies. We share the code ( https://github.com/zs18656/stratify_unifying_MSF ) to reproduce our results.

Self-managing a chronic condition involves adapting management strategies to life’s continual change. Among these changes, moments of significant life transition can render routine self-management practices obsolete without significant modification to the new context. In this study, we examine one significant life transition for young adults living with Type 1 Diabetes, the move from home to university, to understand how near future AI-enhanced technologies might provide opportunities and challenges for supporting care. From interviews with 24 students in the UK who had moved away from their childhood homes, we used sensemaking literature to frame the process of initial disruption to the rebuilding of self-care practices around a new lifestyle and support networks. By studying a significant life transition, we uncover implications for the design of T1D technology, particularly closed-loop systems, through AI enhancements and human-centred design approaches, then extrapolate for other significant life transitions and chronic conditions.

Mechanistic models have been used for centuries to describe complex interconnected processes, including biological ones. As the scope of these models has widened, so have their computational demands. This complexity can limit their suitability when running many simulations or when real-time results are required. Surrogate machine learning (ML) models can be used to approximate the behaviour of complex mechanistic models, and once built, their computational demands are several orders of magnitude lower. This paper provides an overview of the relevant literature, both from an applicability and a theoretical perspective. For the latter, the paper focuses on the design and training of the underlying ML models. Application-wise, we show how ML surrogates have been used to approximate different mechanistic models. We present a perspective on how these approaches can be applied to models representing biological processes with potential industrial applications (e.g., metabolism and whole-cell modelling) and show why surrogate ML models may hold the key to making the simulation of complex biological systems possible using a typical desktop computer.

Abstract Time series classification (TSC) is a challenging task that attracted many researchers in the last few years. One main challenge in TSC is the diversity of domains where time series data come from. Thus, there is no “one model that fits all” in TSC. Some algorithms are very accurate in classifying a specific type of time series when the whole series is considered, while some only target the existence/non-existence of specific patterns/shapelets. Yet other techniques focus on the frequency of occurrences of discriminating patterns/features. This paper presents a new classification technique that addresses the inherent diversity problem in TSC using a nature-inspired method. The technique is stimulated by how flies look at the world through “compound eyes” that are made up of thousands of lenses, called ommatidia. Each ommatidium is an eye with its own lens, and thousands of them together create a broad field of vision. The developed technique similarly uses different lenses and representations to look at the time series, and then combines them for broader visibility. These lenses have been created through hyper-parameterisation of symbolic representations (Piecewise Aggregate and Fourier approximations). The algorithm builds a random forest for each lens, then performs soft dynamic voting for classifying new instances using the most confident eyes, i.e., forests. We evaluate the new technique, coined Co-eye, using the recently released extended version of UCR archive, containing more than 100 datasets across a wide range of domains. The results show the benefits of bringing together different perspectives reflecting on the accuracy and robustness of Co-eye in comparison to other state-of-the-art techniques.

In this paper, we focus on simultaneous inference of transportation modes and human activities in daily life via modelling and inference from multivariate time series data, which are streamed from off-the-shelf mobile sensors (e.g. embedded in smartphones) in real-world dynamic environments. The transportation mode will be inferred from the structured hierarchical contexts associated with human activities. Through our mobile context recognition system, an accurate and robust solution can be obtained to infer transportation mode, human activity and their associated contexts (e.g. whether the user is in moving or stationary environment) simultaneously. There are many challenges in analysing and modelling human mobility patterns within urban areas due to the ever-changing environments of mobile users. For instance, a user could stay at a particular location and then travel to various destinations depending on the tasks they carry within a day. Consequently, there is a need to reduce the reliance on location-based sensors (e.g. GPS), since they consume a significant amount of energy on smart devices, for the purpose of intelligent mobile sensing (i.e. automatic inference of transportation mode, human activity and associated contexts). Nevertheless, our system is capable of outperforming the simplistic approach that only considers independent classifications of multiple context label sets on data streamed from low-energy sensors.

We are witnessing a new revolution in computing and communication involving symbiotic networks of people (social networks), intelligent devices, smart mobile computing, and communication devices that will form cyber-physical social systems. The emergence of intelligent devices with monitoring, sensing, and actuation capabilities referred to as Internet of Things and social networks have increased the popularity of novel social applications such as crowdsourcing and crowdsensing. The upsurge of such applications has fostered the need for scalable cost-efficient platforms that can enable distributed data analytics. In this paper, we propose CARDAP, a scalable, energy-efficient, generic and extensible component-based distributed data analytics platform for mobile crowdsensing (MCS) applications. CARDAP incorporates on-the-move activity recognition and a number of energy efficient data delivery strategies using real-time mobile data stream mining. We propose and develop theoretical cost models for typical crowdsensing application scenarios. Experimental evaluations of CARDAP using a proof-of-concept MCS scenario validate the theoretical cost model estimates and demonstrate the platform's ability to deliver significant benefits in energy, resource, and query processing efficiency.

Activity recognition focuses on inferring current user activities by leveraging sensory data available on todayÕs sensor rich environment. Supervised learning has been applied pervasively for activity recognition. Typical activity recognition techniques process sensory data based on point-by-point approaches. In this paper, we propose a novel cluster-based classification for activity recognition Systems, termed StreamAR. The system incorporates incremental and active learning for mining user activities in data streams. The novel approach processes activities as clusters to build a robust classification framework. StreamAR integrates supervised, unsupervised and active learning and applies hybrid similarity measures technique for recognising activities. Extensive experimental results using real activity recognition datasets have evidenced that our new approach shows improved performance over other existing state-of-the-art learning methods.

Data classification has attracted considerable research attention in the field of computational statistics and data mining due to its wide range of applications. K Best Cluster Based Neighbour (KB-CB-N) is our novel classification technique based on the integration of three different similarity measures for cluster based classification. The basic principle is to apply unsupervised learning on the instances of each class in the dataset and then use the output as an input for the classification algorithm to find the K best neighbours of clusters from the density, gravity and distance perspectives. Clustering is applied as an initial step within each class to find the inherent in-class grouping in the dataset. Different data clustering techniques use different similarity measures. Each measure has its own strength and weakness. Thus, combining the three measures can benefit from the strength of each one and eliminate encountered problems of using an individual measure. Extensive experimental results using eight real datasets have evidenced that our new technique typically shows improved or equivalent performance over other existing state-of-the-art classification methods.