The ghost in the machine: Legal challenges of neural interface devices

Neural interface devices and the melding of mind and machine, challenge the law in determining where civil liability for injury, damage or loss should lie. The ability of the human mind to instruct and control these devices means that in a negligence action against a person with a neural interface device, determining the standard of care owed by him or her will be of paramount importance. This article considers some of the factors that may influence the court’s determination of the appropriate standard of care to be applied in this situation, leading to the conclusion that a new standard of care might evolve.

Design of a tablet sized human-computer interface and its effect on situation awareness

Emergency Response Teams increasingly use interactive technology to help manage information and communications. The challenge is to maintain a high situation awareness for different interactive devices sizes. This research specifically compared a handheld interactive device in the form of an iPad with a large interactive multi-touch tabletop. A search and rescue inspired simulator was designed to test operator situation awareness for the two sized devices. The results show that operators had better situation awareness on the tabletop device when the operation related to detecting of moving targets, searching target locations, distinguishing target types, and comprehending displayed information.

User centred engineering in automotive design: A shift from technology-driven product development

The research assessed how best to transition engineering-based automotive firms towards more customer-orientated design and development approaches, whilst identifying the main barriers and concerns facing such a shift. The research investigates the ability of a firm to empower individual engineers with user centred design tools traditionally used by designers, whilst understanding the company-wide needs to facilitate their implementation.

Introduction to the Proceedings of the Workshop on User-Focused Service Engineering, Consumption and Aggregation (USECA) 2011

The first User-Focused Service Engineering, Consumption and Aggregation workshop (USECA) in 2011 was held in conjunction with the WISE 2011 conference in Sydney, Australia. Web services and related technology are a widely accepted standard architectural paradigm for application development. The idea of reusing existing software components to build new applications has been well documented and supported for the world of enterprise computing and professional developers. However, this powerful idea has not been transferred to end-users who have limited or no computing knowledge. The current methodologies, models, languages and tools developed for Web service composition are suited to IT professionals and people with years of training in computing technologies. It is still hard to imagine any of these technologies being used by business professionals, as opposed to computing professionals. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.

Compensation or consideration for a statutory right of user?

Section 180 of the Property Law Act 1974 (Qld) makes provision for an applicant to seek a statutory right of user over a neighbour’s property where such right of use is reasonably necessary in the interests of effective use in any reasonable manner of the dominant land. A key issue in an application under s 180 is compensation. Unfortunately, while s 180 expressly contemplates that an order for compensation will include provision for payment of compensation to the owner of servient land there are certain issues that are less clear. One of these is the basis for determination of the amount of compensation. In this regard, s 180(4)(a) provides that, in making an order for a statutory right of user, the court: (a) shall, except in special circumstances, include provision for payment by the applicant to such person or persons as may be specified in the order of such amount by way of compensation or consideration as in the circumstances appears to the court to be just The operation of this statutory provision was considered by de Jersey CJ (as he then was) in Peulen v Agius [2015] QSC 137.

An analysis of user engagement in student Facebook groups

Analysing the engagement of students in university-based Facebook groups can shed light on the nature of their learning experience and highlight leverage points to build on student success. While post-semester surveys and demographic participation data can highlight who was involved and how they subsequently felt about the experience, these techniques do not necessarily reflect real-time engagement. One way to gain insight into in-situ student experiences is by categorising the original posts and comments into predetermined frameworks of learning. This paper offers a systematic method of coding Facebook contributions within various engagement categories: motivation, discourse, cognition and emotive responses.

Irrational addicts and responsible pleasure seekers: Constructions of the drug user

Historically, drug use has been understood as a problem of epidemiology, psychiatry, physiology, and criminality requiring legal and medical governance. Consequently drug research tends to be underpinned by an imperative to better govern, and typically proposes policy interventions to prevent or solve drug problems. We argue that categories of ‘addictive’ and ‘recreational’ drug use are discursive forms of governance that are historically, politically and socially contingent. These constructions of the drug problem shape what drug users believe about themselves and how they enact these beliefs in their drug use practices. Based on qualitative interviews with young illicit drug users in Brisbane, Australia, this paper uses Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality to provide insights into how the governance of illicit drugs intersects with self-governance to create a drug user self. We propose a reconceptualisation of illicit drug use that takes into account the contingencies and subjective factors that shape the drug experience. This allows for an understanding of the relationships between discourses, policies, and practices in constructions of illicit drug users.

Revisiting the Task-Capability interface model for incorporating human factors into car-following models

Human factors such as distraction, fatigue, alcohol and drug use are generally ignored in car-following (CF) models. Such ignorance overestimates driver capability and leads to most CF models’ inability in realistically explaining human driving behaviors. This paper proposes a novel car-following modeling framework by introducing the difficulty of driving task measured as the dynamic interaction between driving task demand and driver capability. Task difficulty is formulated based on the famous Task Capability Interface (TCI) model, which explains the motivations behind driver’s decision making. The proposed method is applied to enhance two popular CF models: Gipps’ model and IDM, and named as TDGipps and TDIDM respectively. The behavioral soundness of TDGipps and TDIDM are discussed and their stabilities are analyzed. Moreover, the enhanced models are calibrated with the vehicle trajectory data, and validated to explain both regular and human factor influenced CF behavior (which is distraction caused by hand-held mobile phone conversation in this paper). Both the models show better performance than their predecessors, especially in presence of human factors.