This thesis presents the simulation of approximated Gaussian process autoregressive models. Gaussian process models are a Bayesian nonparametric regression method, the main advantage of which is the quantification of uncertainty in closed-form. However, the closedform solution for the marginal likelihood results in a cubic computational complexity with respect to the …
The area of risk assessment continues to be challenged by foundational issues that limit its potential to inform public health decisions. This doctoral work improves our understanding of the interaction between science and public and environmental health policy by addressing specific challenges in risk assessment within and for decision-making. The …
Although large research efforts on web application security have been invested for more than a decade, the security of web applications is still a challenging problem. The main focus of the cybersecurity community has been to make operating systems and communication networks more secure and harder for attackers to penetrate. …
Access to clean water is a key requirement for a good quality of life. However, due to climate change, population growth and lack of proper water treatment, the availability of clean water is in constant decline. Among the many waterborne contaminants, viruses present an increasing concern. Human waterborne viruses infect …
Wear is one of the key problems with many types of engineering components as it can limit their life expectancy. The same is true for tools and tool steels, which are the focus of this doctoral thesis. Tool-wear response and behaviour are closely related to a material’s final microstructure and …
In this thesis, we look at networking functionality as a set of services which can be composed dynamically. We argue that the dynamic composition of communication services can speed up design and experimentation with new protocol stacks. The reference Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) architecture of communication networks splits network functionality …
The thesis addresses the development of novel knowledge discovery scenarios in a modern data mining platform by utilising principles of service-oriented architecture with web services, interactive scientific workflows, knowledge discovery ontologies and automated construction of data mining workflows. We present the developed Orange4WS platform which upgrades Orange, a mature open-source …
Nitrogen (N) is an essential nutrient for plant growth and one which has the greatest effect on the yield. Since effective indigenous sources are insufficient by far to support current levels of global agricultural outputs, N is intensively applied by farmers in the form of N-based fertilisers. However, excessive rates …