Abstract

Abstract
Background The efforts to contain SARS-CoV-2 and reduce the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic have been supported by Test, Trace and Isolate (TTI) systems in many settings, including the United Kingdom. Mathematical models of transmission and TTI interventions, used to inform design and policy choices, make assumptions about the public’s behaviour in the context of a rapidly unfolding and changeable emergency. This study investigates public perceptions and interactions with UK TTI policy in July 2021, assesses them against how TTI processes are conceptualised and represented in models, and then interprets the findings with modellers who have been contributing evidence to TTI policy. Methods 20 members of the public recruited via social media were interviewed for one hour about their perceptions and interactions with the UK TTI system. Thematic analysis identified key themes, which were then presented back to a workshop of pandemic infectious disease modellers who assessed these findings against assumptions made in TTI intervention modelling. Workshop members co-drafted this report. Results Themes included education about SARS-CoV-2, perceived risks, trust, mental health and practical concerns. Findings covered testing practices, including the uses of and trust in different types of testing, and the challenges of testing and isolating faced by different demographic groups. This information was judged as consequential to the modelling process, from guiding the selection of research questions, influencing choice of model structure, informing parameter ranges and validating or challenging assumptions, to highlighting where model assumptions are reasonable or where their poor reflection of practice might lead to uninformative results. Conclusions We conclude that deeper engagement with members of the public should be integrated at regular stages of public health intervention modelling.

Abstract
Ventricular tachyarrhythmia (VTA), mainly ventricular tachycardia (VT) and ventricular fibrillation (VF) are the major causes of sudden cardiac death in the world. This work uses deep learning, more precisely, LSTM and biLSTM networks to predict VTA events. The Spontaneous Ventricular Tachyarrhythmia Database from PhysioNET was chosen, which contains 78 patients, 135 VTA signals, and 135 control rhythms. After the pre-processing of these signals and feature extraction, the classifiers were able to predict whether a patient was going to suffer a VTA event or not. A better result using a biLSTM was obtained, with a 5-fold-cross-validation, reaching an accuracy of 96.30%, 94.07% of precision, 98.45% of sensibility, and 96.17% of F1-Score.

Abstract
Mobile devices, as smartphones and tablets, have presented an exponential growth, being part of our everyday life, particularly considering children [1]. Their daily habits are undoubtedly influenced by technology and the applications they use can affect socialization and learning processes [2]. Specifically, games are the most popular type of applications and have the potential to change attitudes and behaviours. Emphasizing the importance of this area, we decided to create a serious game that stimulates the children' responsibility for taking care of pets while they play, called My Buddy. In this paper, we present the development and assessment process of a 3D serious game, where the user is asked to interact with a pet and nurture it. The interface was developed based on the universal design philosophy, presenting itself attractive to children without disabilities, but also accessible to children with visual or motor disabilities. As such, we present a multimodal interface based on touch and speech commands. The game was tested in terms of usability, with a heuristic evaluation, and the results obtained highlight the potential of such interfaces.

Abstract
Bin picking is a challenging problem that involves using a robotic manipulator to remove, one-by-one, a set of objects randomly stacked in a container. In order to provide ground truth data for evaluating heuristic or machine learning perception systems, this paper proposes using simulation to create bin picking environments in which a procedural generation method builds entangled tubes that can have curvatures throughout their length. The output of the simulation is an annotated point cloud, generated by a virtual 3D depth camera, in which the tubes are assigned with unique colors. A general metric based on micro-recall is proposed to compare the accuracy of point cloud annotations with the ground truth. The synthetic data is representative of a high quality 3D scanner, given that the performance of a tube modeling system when given 640 simulated point clouds was similar to the results achieved with real sensor data. Therefore, simulation is a promising technique for the automated evaluation of solutions for bin picking tasks.

Abstract
In this paper, a flexibility oriented stochastic scheduling framework is presented to evaluate short-term reliability and economic of islanded microgrids (MGs) under different incentive-based DR (IBDR) programs. A multi-period islanding constraint is considered to prepare the MG for a resilient response once a disturbance occurs in the main grid. Also, a multi-segment optimal power flow (OPF) approach is used to model the IBDR actions and reserve resources. Moreover, uncertainties associated with electricity prices, loads, renewable generation, calls for reserve as well as uncertainties of islanding duration of the MG are considered. The ultimate goal of the MG operator is to maximize its expected profit under a certain level of security and reliability in conjunction with the minimization of energy procurement costs of customers. The MG's economy and reliability indices are studied considering normal operation and resilient condition based on appliances characteristics, customers' and operator's behaviors. The proposed model can effectively manage MGs operation in both normal and resilient conditions in order to improve economic and reliability indices. Numerical results demonstrate that by implementing IBDR, in cases of normal and resilient operation, the expected profit of the MG operator increases about 4% and 2.7% and reliability indicator improved 60% and 56%, respectively.