A customisable dashboard display for environmental performance visualisations

We conducted an exploratory study of a mobile energy monitoring tool: The Dashboard. Our point of departure from prior work was the emphasis of end-user customisation and social sharing. Applying extensive feedback, we deployed the Dashboard in real-world conditions to socially linked research participants for a period of five weeks. Participants were encouraged to devise, construct, place, and view various data feeds. The aim of our study was to test the assumption that participants, having control over their Dashboard configuration, would engage, and remain engaged, with their energy feedback throughout the trial. Our research points to a set of design issues surrounding the adoption and continued use of such tools. A novel finding of our study is the impact of social links between participants and their continued engagement with the Dashboard. Our results also illustrate the emergence of energy-voyeurism, a form of social energy monitoring by peers.

Social innovation and social enterprise : evidence from Australia

‘Social innovation’ is a construct increasingly used to explain the practices, processes and actors through which sustained positive transformation occurs in the network society (Mulgan, G., Tucker, S., Ali, R., Sander, B. (2007). Social innovation: What it is, why it matters and how can it be accelerated. Oxford:Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship; Phills, J. A., Deiglmeier, K., & Miller, D. T. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 6(4):34–43, 2008.). Social innovation has been defined as a “novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just than existing solutions, and for which the value created accrues primarily to society as a whole rather than private individuals.” (Phills,J. A., Deiglmeier, K., & Miller, D. T. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 6 (4):34–43, 2008: 34.) Emergent ideas of social innovation challenge some traditional understandings of the nature and role of the Third Sector, as well as shining a light on those enterprises within the social economy that configure resources in novel ways. In this context, social enterprises – which provide a social or community benefit and trade to fulfil their mission – have attracted considerable policy attention as one source of social innovation within a wider field of action (see Leadbeater, C. (2007). ‘Social enterprise and social innovation: Strategies for the next 10 years’, Cabinet office,Office of the third sector http://www.charlesleadbeater.net/cms xstandard/social_enterprise_innovation.pdf. Last accessed 19/5/2011.). And yet, while social enterprise seems to have gained some symbolic traction in society, there is to date relatively limited evidence of its real world impacts.(Dart, R. Not for Profit Management and Leadership, 14(4):411–424, 2004.) In other words, we do not know much about the social innovation capabilities and effects of social enterprise. In this chapter, we consider the social innovation practices of social enterprise, drawing on Mulgan, G., Tucker, S., Ali, R., Sander, B. (2007). Social innovation: What it is, why it matters and how can it be accelerated. Oxford: Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship: 5) three dimensions of social innovation: new combinations or hybrids of existing elements; cutting across organisational, sectoral and disciplinary boundaries; and leaving behind compelling new relationships. Based on a detailed survey of 365 Australian social enterprises, we examine their self-reported business and mission-related innovations, the ways in which they configure and access resources and the practices through which they diffuse innovation in support of their mission. We then consider how these findings inform our understanding of the social innovation capabilities and effects of social enterprise,and their implications for public policy development.

Curbing resource consumption using team-based feedback : paper printing in a longitudinal case study

This paper details a team-based feedback approach for reducing resource consumption. The approach uses paper printing within office environments as a case study. It communicates the print usage of each participant’s team rather than the participant’s individual print usage. Feedback is provided weekly via emails and contains normative information, along with eco-metrics and team-based comparative statistics. The approach was empirically evaluated to study the effectiveness of the feedback method. The experiment comprised of 16 people belonging to 4 teams with data on their print usage gathered over 58 weeks, using the first 30-35 weeks as a baseline. The study showed a significant reduction in individual printing with an average of 28%. The experiment confirms the underlying hypothesis that participants are persuaded to reduce their print usage in order to improve the overall printing behaviour of their teams. The research provides clear pathways for future research to qualitatively investigate our findings.

Third international workshop on empirical research in business process management (ER-BPM 2012)

Empirical research in business process management(BPM) is coming of age. In 2009, when the inaugural ER-BPM workshop was held, the field of BPM research was characterized by a strong emphasis on solution development, but also by an increasing demand for insights or evaluations of BPM technology based on dedicated empirical research strategies. The ER-BPM workshop series was created to provide an international forum for researchers to discuss and present such research.

'Savoir fare': are cooking skills a new morality

There has been a recent surge of interest in cooking skills in a diverse range of fields, such as health, education and public policy. There appears to be an assumption that cooking skills are in decline and that this is having an adverse impact on individual health and well-being, and family wholesomeness. The problematisation of cooking skills is not new, and can be seen in a number of historical developments that have specified particular pedagogies about food and eating. The purpose of this paper is to examine pedagogies on cooking skills and the importance accorded them. The paper draws on Foucault’s work on governmentality. By using examples from the USA, UK and Australia, the paper demonstrates the ways that authoritative discourses on the know how and the know what about food and cooking – called here ‘savoir fare’ – are developed and promulgated. These discourses, and the moral panics in which they are embedded, require individuals to make choices about what to cook and how to cook, and in doing so establish moral pedagogies concerning good and bad cooking. The development of food literacy programmes, which see cooking skills as life skills, further extends the obligations to ‘cook properly’ to wider populations. The emphasis on cooking knowledge and skills has ushered in new forms of government, firstly, through a relationship between expertise and politics which is readily visible through the authority that underpins the need to develop skills in food provisioning and preparation; secondly, through a new pluralisation of ‘social’ technologies which invites a range of private-public interest through, for example, television cooking programmes featuring cooking skills, albeit it set in a particular milieu of entertainment; and lastly, through a new specification of the subject can be seen in the formation of a choosing subject, one which has to problematise food choice in relation to expert advice and guidance. A governmentality focus shows that as discourses develop about what is the correct level of ‘savoir fare’, new discursive subject positions are opened up. Armed with the understanding of what is considered expert-endorsed acceptable food knowledge, subjects judge themselves through self-surveillance. The result is a powerful food and family morality that is both disciplined and disciplinary.

Retrieving information from microblog using pattern mining and relevance feedback

Retrieving information from Twitter is always challenging due to its large volume, inconsistent writing and noise. Most existing information retrieval (IR) and text mining methods focus on term-based approach, but suffers from the problems of terms variation such as polysemy and synonymy. This problem deteriorates when such methods are applied on Twitter due to the length limit. Over the years, people have held the hypothesis that pattern-based methods should perform better than term-based methods as it provides more context, but limited studies have been conducted to support such hypothesis especially in Twitter. This paper presents an innovative framework to address the issue of performing IR in microblog. The proposed framework discover patterns in tweets as higher level feature to assign weight for low-level features (i.e. terms) based on their distributions in higher level features. We present the experiment results based on TREC11 microblog dataset and shows that our proposed approach significantly outperforms term-based methods Okapi BM25, TF-IDF and pattern based methods, using precision, recall and F measures.

The ECOS green buildings project : data dramatization, visualization and manipulation

Buildings are key mediators between human activity and the environment around them, but details of energy usage and activity in buildings is often poorly communicated and understood. ECOS is an Eco-Visualization project that aims to contextualize the energy generation and consumption of a green building in a variety of different climates. The ECOS project is being developed for a large public interactive space installed in the new Science and Engineering Centre of the Queensland University of Technology that is dedicated to delivering interactive science education content to the public. This paper focuses on how design can develop ICT solutions from large data sets to create meaningful engagement with environmental data.

Glider path-planning for optimal sampling of mesocale eddies

Ocean gliders constitute an important advance in the highly demanding ocean monitoring scenario. Their effciency, endurance and increasing robustness make these vehicles an ideal observing platform for many long term oceanographic applications. However, they have proved to be also useful in the opportunis-tic short term characterization of dynamic structures. Among these, mesoscale eddies are of particular interest due to the relevance they have in many oceano-graphic processes.

MAVwork : a framework for unified interfacing between micro aerial vehicles and visual controllers

Debugging control software for Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV) can be risky out of the simulator, especially with professional drones that might harm people around or result in a high bill after a crash. We have designed a framework that enables a software application to communicate with multiple MAVs from a single unified interface. In this way, visual controllers can be first tested on a low-cost harmless MAV and, after safety is guaranteed, they can be moved to the production MAV at no additional cost. The framework is based on a distributed architecture over a network. This allows multiple configurations, like drone swarms or parallel processing of drones' video streams. Live tests have been performed and the results show comparatively low additional communication delays, while adding new functionalities and flexibility. This implementation is open-source and can be downloaded from github.com/uavster/mavwork

Automated risk mitigation in business processes

This paper proposes a concrete approach for the automatic mitigation of risks that are detected during process enactment. Given a process model exposed to risks, e.g. a financial process exposed to the risk of approval fraud, we enact this process and as soon as the likelihood of the associated risk(s) is no longer tolerable, we generate a set of possible mitigation actions to reduce the risks' likelihood, ideally annulling the risks altogether. A mitigation action is a sequence of controlled changes applied to the running process instance, taking into account a snapshot of the process resources and data, and the current status of the system in which the process is executed. These actions are proposed as recommendations to help process administrators mitigate process-related risks as soon as they arise. The approach has been implemented in the YAWL environment and its performance evaluated. The results show that it is possible to mitigate process-related risks within a few minutes.

Microanalysis of clays at low temperature

Accurate thin-film energy dispersive spectroscopic (EDS) analyses of clays with low-atomic-number (low Z) elements (e.g. Na, Al, Si), presents a challenge to the microscopist not only because of the spatial resolution required, but also because of their susceptibility to electron beam-induced radiation damange and very low X-ray count rates. Most common clays, such as kaolinite, smectite and illite occur as submicrometer crystallites with varying degrees of structural disorder in at least two directions and may have dimensions as small as one or two unit cells along the basal direction. Thus, even clays with relatively large a-b dimenstions (e.g., 100 x 100 nm) may be <5nm in the c-axis direction. For typical conditions in an analytical electron microscope (AEM), this sample thickness gives rise to very poor count rates (<200cps) and necessitates long counting times (>300s) in order to obtain satisfactory statistical precision. Unfortunately, beam damage rates for the common clays are very rapid (<10s in imaging mode) between 100kV and 200kV. With a focussed probe for elemental analyses, the damage rate is exacerbated by a high current density and may result in loss of low-Z elements during data collection and consequent loss of analytical accuracy.

Overview of the INEX 2011 relevance feedback track

The INEX 2011 Relevance Feedback track offered a refined approach to the evaluation of Focused Relevance Feedback algorithms through simulated exhaustive user feedback. Run in largely identical fashion to the Relevance Feedback track in INEX 2010[2], we simulated a user-in-the loop by re-using the assessments of ad-hoc retrieval obtained from real users who assess focused ad-hoc retrieval submissions. We present the evaluation methodology, its implementation, and experimental results obtained for four submissions from two participating organisations. As the task and evaluation methods did not change between INEX 2010 and now, explanations of these details from the INEX 2010 version of the track have been repeated verbatim where appropriate.

Overview of the INEX 2011 snippet retrieval track

This paper gives an overview of the INEX 2011 Snippet Retrieval Track. The goal of the Snippet Retrieval Track is to provide a common forum for the evaluation of the effectiveness of snippets, and to investigate how best to generate snippets for search results, which should provide the user with sufficient information to determine whether the underlying document is relevant. We discuss the setup of the track, and the evaluation results.

Vertical infrastructure inspection using a quadcopter and shared autonomy control

This paper presents a shared autonomy control scheme for a quadcopter that is suited for inspection of vertical infrastructure — tall man-made structures such as streetlights, electricity poles or the exterior surfaces of buildings. Current approaches to inspection of such structures is slow, expensive, and potentially hazardous. Low-cost aerial platforms with an ability to hover now have sufficient payload and endurance for this kind of task, but require significant human skill to fly. We develop a control architecture that enables synergy between the ground-based operator and the aerial inspection robot. An unskilled operator is assisted by onboard sensing and partial autonomy to safely fly the robot in close proximity to the structure. The operator uses their domain knowledge and problem solving skills to guide the robot in difficult to reach locations to inspect and assess the condition of the infrastructure. The operator commands the robot in a local task coordinate frame with limited degrees of freedom (DOF). For instance: up/down, left/right, toward/away with respect to the infrastructure. We therefore avoid problems of global mapping and navigation while providing an intuitive interface to the operator. We describe algorithms for pole detection, robot velocity estimation with respect to the pole, and position estimation in 3D space as well as the control algorithms and overall system architecture. We present initial results of shared autonomy of a quadrotor with respect to a vertical pole and robot performance is evaluated by comparing with motion capture data.

Cross-Lingual knowledge discovery : Chinese-to-English article linking in Wikipedia

In this paper we examine automated Chinese to English link discovery in Wikipedia and the effects of Chinese segmentation and Chinese to English translation on the hyperlink recommendation. Our experimental results show that the implemented link discovery framework can effectively recommend Chinese-to-English cross-lingual links. The techniques described here can assist bi-lingual users where a particular topic is not covered in Chinese, is not equally covered in both languages, or is biased in one language; as well as for language learning.