Axel Montout

Huimin Liu, Jing Gao, Daria Baran et al.

Cattle behaviour is a crucial indicator of an individual animal health, productivity and overall well-being. Video-based monitoring, combined with deep learning techniques, has become a mainstream approach in animal biometrics, and it can offer high accuracy in some behaviour recognition tasks. We present Cattle-CLIP, a multimodal deep learning framework for cattle behaviour recognition, using semantic cues to improve the performance of video-based visual feature recognition. It is adapted from the large-scale image-language model CLIP by adding a temporal integration module. To address the domain gap between web data used for the pre-trained model and real-world cattle surveillance footage, we introduce tailored data augmentation strategies and specialised text prompts. Cattle-CLIP is evaluated under both fully-supervised and few-shot learning scenarios, with a particular focus on data-scarce behaviour recognition - an important yet under-explored goal in livestock monitoring. To evaluate the proposed method, we release the CattleBehaviours6 dataset, which comprises six types of indoor behaviours: feeding, drinking, standing-self-grooming, standing-ruminating, lying-self-grooming and lying-ruminating. The dataset consists of 1905 clips collected from our John Oldacre Centre dairy farm research platform housing 200 Holstein-Friesian cows. Experiments show that Cattle-CLIP achieves 96.1% overall accuracy across six behaviours in a supervised setting, with nearly 100% recall for feeding, drinking and standing-ruminating behaviours, and demonstrates robust generalisation with limited data in few-shot scenarios, highlighting the potential of multimodal learning in agricultural and animal behaviour analysis.

Yujie Dai, Brian Sullivan, Axel Montout et al.

The use of machine learning and AI on electronic health records (EHRs) holds substantial potential for clinical insight. However, this approach faces challenges due to data heterogeneity, sparsity, temporal misalignment, and limited labeled outcomes. In this context, we leverage a linked EHR dataset of approximately one million de-identified individuals from Bristol, North Somerset, and South Gloucestershire, UK, to characterize urinary tract infections (UTIs). We implemented a data pre-processing and curation pipeline that transforms the raw EHR data into a structured format suitable for developing predictive models focused on data fairness, accountability and transparency. Given the limited availability and biases of ground truth UTI outcomes, we introduce a UTI risk estimation framework informed by clinical expertise to estimate UTI risk across individual patient timelines. Pairwise XGBoost models are trained using this framework to differentiate UTI risk categories with explainable AI techniques applied to identify key predictors and support interpretability. Our findings reveal differences in clinical and demographic predictors across risk groups. While this study highlights the potential of AI-driven insights to support UTI clinical decision-making, further investigation of patient sub-strata and extensive validation are needed to ensure robustness and applicability in clinical practice.