Coating of biomaterial scaffolds with the collagen-mimetic peptide GFOGER for bone defect repair

Healing large bone defects and non-unions remains a significant clinical problem. Current treatments, consisting of auto and allografts, are limited by donor supply and morbidity, insufficient bioactivity and risk of infection. Biotherapeutics, including cells, genes and proteins, represent promising alternative therapies, but these strategies are limited by technical roadblocks to biotherapeutic delivery, cell sourcing, high cost, and regulatory hurdles. In the present study, the collagen-mimetic peptide, GFOGER, was used to coat synthetic PCL scaffolds to promote bone formation in critically-sized segmental defects in rats. GFOGER is a synthetic triple helical peptide that binds to the [alpha]2[beta]1 integrin receptor involved in osteogenesis. GFOGER coatings passively adsorbed onto polymeric scaffolds, in the absence of exogenous cells or growth factors, significantly accelerated and increased bone formation in non-healing femoral defects compared to uncoated scaffolds and empty defects. Despite differences in bone volume, no differences in torsional strength were detected after 12 weeks, indicating that bone mass but not bone quality was improved in this model. This work demonstrates a simple, cell/growth factor-free strategy to promote bone formation in challenging, non-healing bone defects. This biomaterial coating strategy represents a cost-effective and facile approach, translatable into a robust clinical therapy for musculoskeletal applications.

Up the junction? Exploiting knowledge-based development through supply chain and SME cluster interactions

Maximisation of Knowledge-Based Development (KBD) benefits requires effective dissemination and utilisation mechanisms to accompany the initial knowledge creation process. This work highlights the potential for interactions between Supply Chains (SCs) and Small and Medium sized Enterprise Clusters (SMECs), (including via ‘junction’ firms which are members of both networks), to facilitate such effective dissemination and utilisation of knowledge. In both these network types there are firms that readily utilise their relationships and ties for ongoing business success through innovation. The following chapter highlights the potential for such beneficial interactions between SCs and SMECs in key elements of KBD, particularly knowledge management, innovation and technology transfer. Because there has been little focus on the interactions between SCs and SMECs, particularly when firms simultaneously belong to both, this chapter examines the conduits through which information and knowledge can be transferred and utilised. It shows that each network type has its own distinct advantages in the types of information searched for and transferred amongst network member firms. Comparing and contrasting these advantages shows opportunities for both networks to leverage the knowledge sharing strengths of each other, through these ‘junctions’ to address their own weaknesses, allowing implications to be drawn concerning new ways of utilising relationships for mutual network gains.

Best basis-based intelligent machine fault diagnosis

The wavelet packet transform decomposes a signal into a set of bases for time–frequency analysis. This decomposition creates an opportunity for implementing distributed data mining where features are extracted from different wavelet packet bases and served as feature vectors for applications. This paper presents a novel approach for integrated machine fault diagnosis based on localised wavelet packet bases of vibration signals. The best basis is firstly determined according to its classification capability. Data mining is then applied to extract features and local decisions are drawn using Bayesian inference. A final conclusion is reached using a weighted average method in data fusion. A case study on rolling element bearing diagnosis shows that this approach can greatly improve the accuracy ofdiagno sis.

Delay distribution based robust H∞ control of networked control systems with uncertainties

Network induced delay in networked control systems (NCS) is inherently non-uniformly distributed and behaves with multifractal nature. However, such network characteristics have not been well considered in NCS analysis and synthesis. Making use of the information of the statistical distribution of NCS network induced delay, a delay distribution based stochastic model is adopted to link Quality-of-Control and network Quality-of-Service for NCS with uncertainties. From this model together with a tighter bounding technology for cross terms, H∞ NCS analysis is carried out with significantly improved stability results. Furthermore, a memoryless H∞ controller is designed to stabilize the NCS and to achieve the prescribed disturbance attenuation level. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Extraction of road lanes from high-resolution stereo aerial imagery based on maximum likelihood segmentation and texture enhancement

Accurate road lane information is crucial for advanced vehicle navigation and safety applications. With the increasing of very high resolution (VHR) imagery of astonishing quality provided by digital airborne sources, it will greatly facilitate the data acquisition and also significantly reduce the cost of data collection and updates if the road details can be automatically extracted from the aerial images. In this paper, we proposed an effective approach to detect road lanes from aerial images with employment of the image analysis procedures. This algorithm starts with constructing the (Digital Surface Model) DSM and true orthophotos from the stereo images. Next, a maximum likelihood clustering algorithm is used to separate road from other ground objects. After the detection of road surface, the road traffic and lane lines are further detected using texture enhancement and morphological operations. Finally, the generated road network is evaluated to test the performance of the proposed approach, in which the datasets provided by Queensland department of Main Roads are used. The experiment result proves the effectiveness of our approach.

A short-term evaluation of a school-based early adolescent injury prevention program

This paper reports on the development of a school-based intervention to reduce risk-taking and associated injuries. There is limited but important evidence that intervention design should ensure participation does not lead to an increase in target risk behaviors with some studies in alcohol and drug prevention finding unexpected negative effects. The short-term evaluation of Skills for Preventing Injury in Youth (SPIY) examined change in interpersonal violence, alcohol and transport-related risks. Intervention (n = 360) and comparison (n = 180) students were surveyed pre/post-intervention. A qualitative analysis based on focus groups (70 students) explored experiences of change. Findings indicate significant positive changes reinforced by students’ reports. A decrease in reported risk-taking for the intervention group and an increase in the comparison group were observed. These findings endorse SPIY as a useful curriculum approach to reducing injuries and lend support to the future conduct of a long-term outcome evaluation.

Image synthesis based on a model of human vision

Modern computer graphics systems are able to construct renderings of such high quality that viewers are deceived into regarding the images as coming from a photographic source. Large amounts of computing resources are expended in this rendering process, using complex mathematical models of lighting and shading. However, psychophysical experiments have revealed that viewers only regard certain informative regions within a presented image. Furthermore, it has been shown that these visually important regions contain low-level visual feature differences that attract the attention of the viewer. This thesis will present a new approach to image synthesis that exploits these experimental findings by modulating the spatial quality of image regions by their visual importance. Efficiency gains are therefore reaped, without sacrificing much of the perceived quality of the image. Two tasks must be undertaken to achieve this goal. Firstly, the design of an appropriate region-based model of visual importance, and secondly, the modification of progressive rendering techniques to effect an importance-based rendering approach. A rule-based fuzzy logic model is presented that computes, using spatial feature differences, the relative visual importance of regions in an image. This model improves upon previous work by incorporating threshold effects induced by global feature difference distributions and by using texture concentration measures. A modified approach to progressive ray-tracing is also presented. This new approach uses the visual importance model to guide the progressive refinement of an image. In addition, this concept of visual importance has been incorporated into supersampling, texture mapping and computer animation techniques. Experimental results are presented, illustrating the efficiency gains reaped from using this method of progressive rendering. This visual importance-based rendering approach is expected to have applications in the entertainment industry, where image fidelity may be sacrificed for efficiency purposes, as long as the overall visual impression of the scene is maintained. Different aspects of the approach should find many other applications in image compression, image retrieval, progressive data transmission and active robotic vision.

Bayes factor based speaker clustering for speaker diarization

This paper proposes the use of the Bayes Factor to replace the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) as a criterion for speaker clustering within a speaker diarization system. The BIC is one of the most popular decision criteria used in speaker diarization systems today. However, it will be shown in this paper that the BIC is only an approximation to the Bayes factor of marginal likelihoods of the data given each hypothesis. This paper uses the Bayes factor directly as a decision criterion for speaker clustering, thus removing the error introduced by the BIC approximation. Results obtained on the 2002 Rich Transcription (RT-02) Evaluation dataset show an improved clustering performance, leading to a 14.7% relative improvement in the overall Diarization Error Rate (DER) compared to the baseline system.

An analysis of cyclists crashes to identify ITS-based intervention

Cycling provides a number of health and environmental benefits. However, cyclists are more likely to suffer serious injury or be killed in traffic accidents than car drivers and the estimated cost of crashes in Australia is $1.25AU billion per year. Current interventions to reduce bicycle crashes include compulsory helmet use, media campaigns, and the provision of cycling lanes, as well as road user education and training. It is difficult to assess the effectiveness of current interventions as there is no accurate measure of cyclist exposure in South East Queensland (SEQ). This paper analyses cyclist crash characteristics in Queensland with the view to identifying appropriate Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) based intervention to reduce cyclist injury and death. The inappropriateness of some ITS interventions to improve cyclist safety is highlighted and a set of ITS interventions are identified, based on Queensland crash data 2002-2006.

Load–frequency control : a GA-based multi-agent reinforcement learning

The load–frequency control (LFC) problem has been one of the major subjects in a power system. In practice, LFC systems use proportional–integral (PI) controllers. However since these controllers are designed using a linear model, the non-linearities of the system are not accounted for and they are incapable of gaining good dynamical performance for a wide range of operating conditions in a multi-area power system. A strategy for solving this problem because of the distributed nature of a multi-area power system is presented by using a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approach. It consists of two agents in each power area; the estimator agent provides the area control error (ACE) signal based on the frequency bias estimation and the controller agent uses reinforcement learning to control the power system in which genetic algorithm optimisation is used to tune its parameters. This method does not depend on any knowledge of the system and it admits considerable flexibility in defining the control objective. Also, by finding the ACE signal based on the frequency bias estimation the LFC performance is improved and by using the MARL parallel, computation is realised, leading to a high degree of scalability. Here, to illustrate the accuracy of the proposed approach, a three-area power system example is given with two scenarios.

Power system stability analysis based on descriptive study of electrical indices

In a power network, when a propagation energy wave caused by a disturbance hits a weak link, a reflection is appeared and some of energy is transferred across the link. In this work, an analytical descriptive methodology is proposed to study the dynamical stability of a large scale power system. For this purpose, the measured electrical indices (angle, or voltage/frequency) following a fault in different points among the network are used, and the behaviors of the propagated waves through the lines, nodes and buses are studied. This work addresses a new tool for power system stability analysis based on a descriptive study of electrical measurements. The proposed methodology is also useful to detect the contingency condition and synthesis of an effective emergency control scheme.

FAB-MAP + RatSLAM : appearance-based SLAM for multiple times of day

Appearance-based mapping and localisation is especially challenging when separate processes of mapping and localisation occur at different times of day. The problem is exacerbated in the outdoors where continuous change in sun angle can drastically affect the appearance of a scene. We confront this challenge by fusing the probabilistic local feature based data association method of FAB-MAP with the pose cell filtering and experience mapping of RatSLAM. We evaluate the effectiveness of our amalgamation of methods using five datasets captured throughout the day from a single camera driven through a network of suburban streets. We show further results when the streets are re-visited three weeks later, and draw conclusions on the value of the system for lifelong mapping.

How can we exploit mobile data to customise learning based on a student’s environmental surroundings?

User-Based intelligent systems are already commonplace in a student’s online digital life. Each time they browse, search, buy, join, comment, play, travel, upload, download, a system collects, analyses and processes data in an effort to customise content and further improve services. This panel session will explore how intelligent systems, particularly those that gather data from mobile devices, can offer new possibilities to assist in the delivery of customised, personal and engaging learning experiences. The value of intelligent systems for education lies in their ability to formulate authentic and complex learner profiles that bring together and systematically integrate a student’s personal world with a formal curriculum framework. As we well know, a mobile device can collect data relating to a student’s interests (gathered from search history, applications and communications), location, surroundings and proximity to others (GPS, Bluetooth). However, what has been less explored is the opportunity for a mobile device to map the movements and activities of a student from moment to moment and over time. This longitudinal data provides a holistic profile of a student, their state and surroundings. Analysing this data may allow us to identify patterns that reveal a student’s learning processes; when and where they work best and for how long. Through revealing a student’s state and surroundings outside of schools hour, this longitudinal data may also highlight opportunities to transform a student’s everyday world into an inventory for learning, punctuating their surroundings with learning recommendations. This would in turn lead to new ways to acknowledge and validate and foster informal learning, making it legitimate within a formal curriculum.

Vision-based topological mapping and localisation

Competent navigation in an environment is a major requirement for an autonomous mobile robot to accomplish its mission. Nowadays, many successful systems for navigating a mobile robot use an internal map which represents the environment in a detailed geometric manner. However, building, maintaining and using such environment maps for navigation is difficult because of perceptual aliasing and measurement noise. Moreover, geometric maps require the processing of huge amounts of data which is computationally expensive. This thesis addresses the problem of vision-based topological mapping and localisation for mobile robot navigation. Topological maps are concise and graphical representations of environments that are scalable and amenable to symbolic manipulation. Thus, they are well-suited for basic robot navigation applications, and also provide a representational basis for the procedural and semantic information needed for higher-level robotic tasks. In order to make vision-based topological navigation suitable for inexpensive mobile robots for the mass market we propose to characterise key places of the environment based on their visual appearance through colour histograms. The approach for representing places using visual appearance is based on the fact that colour histograms change slowly as the field of vision sweeps the scene when a robot moves through an environment. Hence, a place represents a region of the environment rather than a single position. We demonstrate in experiments using an indoor data set, that a topological map in which places are characterised using visual appearance augmented with metric clues provides sufficient information to perform continuous metric localisation which is robust to the kidnapped robot problem. Many topological mapping methods build a topological map by clustering visual observations to places. However, due to perceptual aliasing observations from different places may be mapped to the same place representative in the topological map. A main contribution of this thesis is a novel approach for dealing with the perceptual aliasing problem in topological mapping. We propose to incorporate neighbourhood relations for disambiguating places which otherwise are indistinguishable. We present a constraint based stochastic local search method which integrates the approach for place disambiguation in order to induce a topological map. Experiments show that the proposed method is capable of mapping environments with a high degree of perceptual aliasing, and that a small map is found quickly. Moreover, the method of using neighbourhood information for place disambiguation is integrated into a framework for topological off-line simultaneous localisation and mapping which does not require an initial categorisation of visual observations. Experiments on an indoor data set demonstrate the suitability of our method to reliably localise the robot while building a topological map.

Correctness ensuring process configuration : an approach based on partner synthesis

A configurable process model describes a family of similar process models in a given domain. Such a model can be configured to obtain a specific process model that is subsequently used to handle individual cases, for instance, to process customer orders. Process configuration is notoriously difficult as there may be all kinds of interdependencies between configuration decisions.} In fact, an incorrect configuration may lead to behavioral issues such as deadlocks and livelocks. To address this problem, we present a novel verification approach inspired by the ``operating guidelines'' used for partner synthesis. We view the configuration process as an external service, and compute a characterization of all such services which meet particular requirements using the notion of configuration guideline. As a result, we can characterize all feasible configurations (i.\,e., configurations without behavioral problems) at design time, instead of repeatedly checking each individual configuration while configuring a process model.