No / The use of matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionisation time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometry on intact cell microorganisms, Intact Cell MALDI (ICM), has been shown by numerous workers to yield effective species level identification. Early work highlighted the significant effect that variation in culture media, incubation conditions and length of incubation had on the spectra produced. Therefore, in order to achieve reliable and reproducible species level identification and sub-typing of microorganisms from ICM fingerprints, it has been essential to develop standardised methods. For methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a major nosocomial pathogen, we have developed such a standardised method. In this paper we present the experimental parameters, namely, the incubation period, the number of passages required from lyophilised or stored isolates, the method of deposition of the bacterial cells, the concentration of matrix solution, the drying time of bacterial cells prior to the addition of the matrix solution, the time between preparation of the bacterial/matrix sample and analysis and the MALDI pulsed extraction setting, which were considered during the development of defined methods.

An iterative travel time forecasting scheme, named the Advanced Multilane Prediction based Real-time Fastest Path (AMPRFP) algorithm, is presented in this dissertation. This scheme is derived from the conventional kernel estimator based prediction model by the association of real-time nonlinear impacts that caused by neighboring arcs’ traffic patterns with the historical traffic behaviors. The AMPRFP algorithm is evaluated by prediction of the travel time of congested arcs in the urban area of Jacksonville City. Experiment results illustrate that the proposed scheme is able to significantly reduce both the relative mean error (RME) and the root-mean-squared error (RMSE) of the predicted travel time. To obtain high quality real-time traffic information, which is essential to the performance of the AMPRFP algorithm, a data clean scheme enhanced empirical learning (DCSEEL) algorithm is also introduced. This novel method investigates the correlation between distance and direction in the geometrical map, which is not considered in existing fingerprint localization methods. Specifically, empirical learning methods are applied to minimize the error that exists in the estimated distance. A direction filter is developed to clean joints that have negative influence to the localization accuracy. Synthetic experiments in urban, suburban and rural environments are designed to evaluate the performance of DCSEEL algorithm in determining the cellular probe’s position. The results show that the cellular probe’s localization accuracy can be notably improved by the DCSEEL algorithm. Additionally, a new fast correlation technique for overcoming the time efficiency problem of the existing correlation algorithm based floating car data (FCD) technique is developed. The matching process is transformed into a 1-dimensional (1-D) curve matching problem and the Fast Normalized Cross-Correlation (FNCC) algorithm is introduced to supersede the Pearson product Moment Correlation Co-efficient (PMCC) algorithm in order to achieve the real-time requirement of the FCD method. The fast correlation technique shows a significant improvement in reducing the computational cost without affecting the accuracy of the matching process.