Exposed

Curation of a fashion parade (Exposed) of QUT student swimwear designs held in conjunction with the ‘Woollen Mermaids’ (history of swimwear) exhibition at QLD Museum. The research explored the exhibition of ‘cutting edge’ swimwear produced with non-traditional fabrics (wool) and experimented with display /presentation styles for fashion parades in museum settings. The paid ticketed event was attended by over 800 people.

Applications of medical image processing in the diagnosis and treatment of spinal deformity

In Chapter 10, Adam and Dougherty describe the application of medical image processing to the assessment and treatment of spinal deformity, with a focus on the surgical treatment of idiopathic scoliosis. The natural history of spinal deformity and current approaches to surgical and non-surgical treatment are briefly described, followed by an overview of current clinically used imaging modalities. The key metrics currently used to assess the severity and progression of spinal deformities from medical images are presented, followed by a discussion of the errors and uncertainties involved in manual measurements. This provides the context for an analysis of automated and semi-automated image processing approaches to measure spinal curve shape and severity in two and three dimensions.

Environmental Awareness in Game Agents

Agents make up an important part of game worlds, ranging from the characters and monsters that live in the world to the armies the player controls. Despite their importance, agents in current games rarely display an awareness of their environment or react appropriately, which severely detracts from the believability of the game. Most games use agents that have a basic awareness of the player and other agents, but are still unaware of important game events or environmental conditions. This article describes an agent design that combines cellular automata for environmental modeling with influence maps for agent decision-making. The result is simple, flexible game agents that are able to respond to dynamic changes to the environment (e.g., rain or fire) while pursuing a goal.

Using cost-effective multimedia to create engaging learning experiences in law and other disciplines

This is the final report of an Australian Learning and Teaching Council Teaching Fellowship which addressed the needs of two separate groups of learners: (1) final year law students studying ethics and (2) law academics and other interested educators in higher education wishing to use information and communication technologies (ICT) to create engaging learning environments for their students but lacking the capacity to do so. The Fellowship resulted in final year law students being infused with an improved appreciation of ethical practice than they receive from traditional lecture/tutorial means by the development of an integrated program of blended learning including an online program entitled "Entry into Valhalla". This "ethics capstone‟ utilises multimedia produced using cost effective resources (including the "Second Life" virtual environment) to create engaging, contextualised learning experiences. The Fellowship also constructed the knowledge of producing cost-effective multimedia projects in other law academics and other educators in higher education by staff development activities comprising workshops, conference presentations and an interactive website using the "Entry into Valhalla" program as a case study exemplar.

Designing an immersive environment for public use

Bystander is a multi-user, immersive, interactive environment intended for public display in a museum or art gallery. It is designed to make available heritage collections in novel and culturally responsible ways. We use its development as a case study to examine the role played in that process by a range of tools and techniques from participatory design traditions. We describe how different tools were used within the design process, specifically: the ways in which the potential audience members were both included and represented; the prototypes that have been constructed as a way of envisioning how the final work might be experienced; and how these tools have been brought together in ongoing designing and evaluation. We close the paper with some reflections on the extension of participatory commitments into still-emerging areas of technology design that prioritise the design of spaces for human experience and reflective interaction.

Human corneal epithelial equivalents constructed on Bombyx mori silk fibroin membranes

Membranes prepared from a protein, fibroin, isolated from domesticated silkworm (Bombyx mori) silk, support the cultivation of human limbal epithelial (HLE) cells and thus display significant potential as biomaterials for ocular surface reconstruction. We presently extend this promising avenue of research by directly comparing the attachment, morphology and phenotype of primary HLE cell cultures grown on fibroin to that observed on donor amniotic membrane (AM), the current clinical standard substrate for HLE transplantation. Fibroin membranes measuring 6.3 ± 0.5 μm (mean ± sd) in thickness and permeable to FITC dextran of a molecular weight up to 70 kDa, were used. Attachment of HLE cells to fibroin was similar to that supported by tissue culture plastic but approximately 6-fold less than that observed on AM. Nevertheless, epithelia constructed from HLE on fibroin maintained evidence of corneal phenotype (K3/K12 expression) and displayed a comparable number and distribution of ΔNp63+ progenitor cells to that seen in cultures grown on AM. These results support the suitability of membranes constructed from Bombyx mori silk fibroin as substrata for HLE cultivation and encourage progression to studies of efficacy in preclinical models.

Grotesque gestures or sensuous signs? Rethinking notions of apprenticeship in early childhood education

Education might be conceptualized as a swarm of signs. Deleuze, in Proust and Signs (1964/2000) suggests that “Everything that teaches us something emits signs” (p. 4). Such conceptualizations regard education as fluid, multiple and temporal; a young child can display great skill in decoding some signs but not others. Regarding education as temporal and complex operates at some distance to the sociocultural concepts suggested by Vygotsky (1978) which focus on linear sequences of gaining managed, culturally-loaded knowledge from more experienced others. Despite differing theorizations around apprenticeship, during early years education a child becomes sensitive to signs that collectively prioritize conventionalized knowledge acquisition and communication practices. Drawing for learning and communicating exemplifies apprenticeship as a creative process rather than as sequential or culturally driven, and serves to exemplify Deleuzian concepts around the relationships between time and learning, rather than age or development stage and learning.

eBILITY : from tool use to partnerships

In this article we identify how computational automation achieved through programming has enabled a new class of music technologies with generative music capabilities. These generative systems can have a degree of music making autonomy that impacts on our relationships with them; we suggest that this coincides with a shift in the music-equipment relationship from tool use to a partnership. This partnership relationship can occur when we use technologies that display qualities of agency. It raises questions about the kinds of skills and knowledge that are necessary to interact musically in such a partnership. These are qualities of musicianship we call eBility. In this paper we seek to define what eBility might consist of and how consideration of it might effect music education practice. The 'e' in eBility refers not only to the electronic nature of computing systems but also to the ethical, enabling, experiential and educational dimensions of the creative relationship with technologies with agency. We hope to initiate a discussion around differentiating what we term representational technologies from those with agency and begin to uncover the implications of these ideas for music educators in schools and communities. We hope also to elucidate the emergent theory and practice that has enabled the development of strategies for optimising this kind of eBility where the tool becomes partner. The identification of musical technologies with agency adds to the authors’ list of metaphors for technology use in music education that previously included tool, medium and instrument. We illustrate these ideas with examples and with data from our work with the jam2jam interactive music system. In this discussion we will outline our experiences with jam2jam as an example of a technology with agency and describe the aspects of eBility that interaction with it promotes.

Text mining and probabilistic language modeling for online review spam detecting

In the era of Web 2.0, huge volumes of consumer reviews are posted to the Internet every day. Manual approaches to detecting and analyzing fake reviews (i.e., spam) are not practical due to the problem of information overload. However, the design and development of automated methods of detecting fake reviews is a challenging research problem. The main reason is that fake reviews are specifically composed to mislead readers, so they may appear the same as legitimate reviews (i.e., ham). As a result, discriminatory features that would enable individual reviews to be classified as spam or ham may not be available. Guided by the design science research methodology, the main contribution of this study is the design and instantiation of novel computational models for detecting fake reviews. In particular, a novel text mining model is developed and integrated into a semantic language model for the detection of untruthful reviews. The models are then evaluated based on a real-world dataset collected from amazon.com. The results of our experiments confirm that the proposed models outperform other well-known baseline models in detecting fake reviews. To the best of our knowledge, the work discussed in this article represents the first successful attempt to apply text mining methods and semantic language models to the detection of fake consumer reviews. A managerial implication of our research is that firms can apply our design artifacts to monitor online consumer reviews to develop effective marketing or product design strategies based on genuine consumer feedback posted to the Internet.

The introduction of an interactive teaching and learning activity (TLA) in class and its relationship to students’ learning-outcomes

In the university education arena, it is becoming apparent that traditional methods of conducting classes are not the most effective ways to achieve desired learning outcomes. The traditional class/method involves the instructor verbalizing information for passive, note-taking students who are assumed to be empty receptacles waiting to be filled with knowledge. This method is limited in its effectiveness, as the flow of information is usually only in one direction. Furthermore, “It has been demonstrated that students in many cases can recite and apply formulas in numerical problems, but the actual meaning and understanding of the concept behind the formula is not acquired (Crouch & Mazur)”. It is apparent that memorization is the main technique present in this approach. A more effective method of teaching involves increasing the students’ level of activity during, and hence their involvement in the learning process. This technique stimulates self- learning and assists in keeping these students’ levels of concentration more uniform. In this work, I am therefore interested in studying the influence of a particular TLA on students’ learning-outcomes. I want to foster high-level understanding and critical thinking skills using active learning (Silberman, 1996) techniques. The TLA in question aims to promote self-study by students and to expose them to a situation where their learning-outcomes can be tested. The motivation behind this activity is based on studies which suggest that some sensory modalities are more effective than others. Using various instruments for data collection and by means of a thorough analysis I present evidence of the effectiveness of this action research project which aims to improve my own teaching practices, with the ultimate goal of enhancing student’s learning.

An audio wiki supporting mobile collaboration

Wikis have proved to be very effective collaboration and knowledge management tools in large variety of fields thanks to their simplicity and flexible nature. Another important development for the internet is the emergence of powerful mobile devices supported by fast and reliable wireless networks. The combination of these developments begs the question of how to extend wikis on mobile devices and how to leverage mobile devices' rich modalities to supplement current wikis. Realizing that composing and consuming through auditory channel is the most natural and efficient way for mobile device user, this paper explores the use of audio as the medium of wiki. Our work, as the first step towards this direction, creates a framework called Mobile Audio Wiki which facilitates asynchronous audio-mediated collaboration on the move. In this paper, we present the design of Mobile Audio Wiki. As a part of such design, we propose an innovative approach for a light-weight audio content annotation system for enabling group editing, versioning and cross-linking among audio clips. To elucidate the novel collaboration model introduced by Mobile Audio Wiki, its four usage modes are identified and presented in storyboard format. Finally, we describe the initial design for presentation and navigation of Mobile Audio Wiki.

The use of dashboards in performance management : evidence from sales managers

The purpose of this paper is to identify and empirically examine the key features, purposes, uses, and benefits of performance dashboards. We find that only about a quarter of the sales managers surveyed1 in Finland used a dashboard, which was lower than previously reported. Dashboards were used for four distinct purposes: (i) monitoring, (ii) problem solving, (iii) rationalizing, and (iv) communication and consistency. There was a high correlation between the different uses of dashboards and user productivity indicating that dashboards were perceived as effective tools in performance management, not just for monitoring one‟s own performance but for other purposes including communication. The quality of the data in dashboards did not seem to be a concern (except for completeness) but it was a critical driver regarding its use. This is the first empirical study on performance dashboards in terms of adoption rates, key features, and benefits. The study highlights the research potential and benefits of dashboards, which could be valuable for future researchers and practitioners.

A mask-based approach for the geometric calibration of thermal-infrared cameras

Accurate and efficient thermal-infrared (IR) camera calibration is important for advancing computer vision research within the thermal modality. This paper presents an approach for geometrically calibrating individual and multiple cameras in both the thermal and visible modalities. The proposed technique can be used to correct for lens distortion and to simultaneously reference both visible and thermal-IR cameras to a single coordinate frame. The most popular existing approach for the geometric calibration of thermal cameras uses a printed chessboard heated by a flood lamp and is comparatively inaccurate and difficult to execute. Additionally, software toolkits provided for calibration either are unsuitable for this task or require substantial manual intervention. A new geometric mask with high thermal contrast and not requiring a flood lamp is presented as an alternative calibration pattern. Calibration points on the pattern are then accurately located using a clustering-based algorithm which utilizes the maximally stable extremal region detector. This algorithm is integrated into an automatic end-to-end system for calibrating single or multiple cameras. The evaluation shows that using the proposed mask achieves a mean reprojection error up to 78% lower than that using a heated chessboard. The effectiveness of the approach is further demonstrated by using it to calibrate two multiple-camera multiple-modality setups. Source code and binaries for the developed software are provided on the project Web site.

Computer planning of stereotactic iodine-125 seed brachytherapy for recurrent malignant gliomas

At St Thomas' Hospital, we have developed a computer program on a Titan graphics supercomputer to plan the stereotactic implantation of iodine-125 seeds for the palliative treatment of recurrent malignant gliomas. Use of the Gill-Thomas-Cosman relocatable frame allows planning and surgery to be carried out at different hospitals on different days. Stereotactic computed tomography (CT) and positron emission tomography (PET) scans are performed and the images transferred to the planning computer. The head, tumour and frame fiducials are outlined on the relevant images, and a three-dimensional model generated. Structures which could interfere with the surgery or radiotherapy, such as major vessels, shunt tubing etc., can also be outlined and included in the display. Catheter target and entry points are set using a three-dimensional cursor controlled by a set of dials attached to the computer. The program calculates and displays the radiation dose distribution within the target volume for various catheter and seed arrangements. The CT co-ordinates of the fiducial rods are used to convert catheter co-ordinates from CT space to frame space and to calculate the catheter insertion angles and depths. The surgically implanted catheters are after-loaded the next day and the seeds left in place for between 4 and 6 days, giving a nominal dose of 50 Gy to the edge of the target volume. 25 patients have been treated so far.