Looking Yonder : Longitudinal Research and Evaluation of the Yonder Participative Arts-based Learning Model Report 2010-2012

Since 2007, KITE Arts Education Program @ QPAC has been engaged in a series of arts and drama-based experiences for students in selected primary schools on the edges of Brisbane and in regional Queensland. The in-school workshop experiences of the program have culminated in a performance by the children for their school community, parents and carers at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre or a regional cultural venue. In conducting an analysis of the Yonder project, the researcher aimed to provide evidence of outcomes brought about through participation by schools, school staff, students and their communities in the Yonder project. To develop longitudinal data project initiators, participants were interviewed at six-monthly intervals to establish patterns of engagement and participation. The report analyses arts-based workshops conducted by the teacher artist in edge-city Brisbane and a regional centre; interviews with teachers and school administrators from the participating schools; interviews with teacher artist and professional artists; interviews with community partners; teacher professional development workshops; community-based workshops; performance outcomes that were the culminating events of the workshop program; student work samples and student reflections on the program. This document covers data and project outputs from February 2010 to July 2012. There have been five iterations of the Yonder project since its commencement in mid-2009 — three in regional Queensland (February–April 2010; February–May 2011; February–May 2012) and two in edge-city1 Brisbane (July–September 2010; August–October 2011). This report is a result of a research partnership between Queensland Performing Arts Centre and Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Creative Industries Faculty(Drama).

TiltZoom : tilt-based zooming control for easy one-handed mobile interactions

In this paper, we present TiltZoom, a collection of tilt-based interaction techniques designed for easy one-handed zooming on mobile devices. TiltZoom represents novel gestural interaction techniques, implemented using rate-of-rotation readings from a gyroscope, a sensor commonly embedded on current generation smart phones. We designed and experimented three variants of TiltZoom - Tilt Level, Tilt and Hold and Flip Gesture. The design decisions for all three variants are discussed in this paper and their performance, as well as subjective user experience are evaluated and compared against conventional touch-based zooming techniques. TiltZoom appears to be a worthy addition to current established collection of gesture-based mobile interaction techniques for zooming controls, especially when user has only one hand available when moving about.

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.

Licensing age issues : deliberations from a workshop devoted to this topic

Objective: To highlight the issues and discuss the research evidence regarding safety, mobility, and other consequences of different licensing ages. Methods: Information included is based on presentations and discussions at a one-day workshop on licensing age issues, and a review and synthesis of the international literature. Results: The literature indicates that higher licensing ages are associated with safety benefits. There is an associated mobility loss, more likely to be an issue in rural states. Legislative attempts to raise the minimum age for independent driving in the United States, e.g., from 16 to 17, have been resisted, although in some states the age has been raised indirectly through graduated driver licensing (GDL) policies. Conclusions: Jurisdictions can achieve reductions in teenage crashes by raising the licensing age. This can be done directly, or indirectly by strengthening GDL systems, in particular extending the minimum length of the learner period.

Product reputation model : an opinion mining based approach

Product rating systems are very popular on the web, and users are increasingly depending on the overall product ratings provided by websites to make purchase decisions or to compare various products. Currently most of these systems directly depend on users’ ratings and aggregate the ratings using simple aggregating methods such as mean or median [1]. In fact, many websites also allow users to express their opinions in the form of textual product reviews. In this paper, we propose a new product reputation model that uses opinion mining techniques in order to extract sentiments about product’s features, and then provide a method to generate a more realistic reputation value for every feature of the product and the product itself. We considered the strength of the opinion rather than its orientation only. We do not treat all product features equally when we calculate the overall product reputation, as some features are more important to customers than others, and consequently have more impact on customers buying decisions. Our method provides helpful details about the product features for customers rather than only representing reputation as a number only.

Disaster strikes, then what? Using evaluation in narrative driven (oral history & digital storytelling) community-based projects

In 2011 Queensland suffered both floods and cyclones, leaving residents without homes and their communities in ruins (2011). This paper presents how researchers from QUT, who are also members of the Oral History Association of Australia (OHAA) Queensland’s chapter, are using oral history, photographs, videography and digital storytelling to help heal and empower rural communities around the state and how evaluation has become a key element of our research. QUT researchers ran storytelling workshops in the capital city of Brisbane i early 2011, after the city suffered sever flooding. Cyclone Yasi then struck the town of Cardwell (in February 2011) destroying their historical museum and recording equipment. We delivered an 'emergency workshop', offering participants hands on use of the equipment, ethical and interviewing theory, so that the community could start to build a new collection. We included oral history workshops as well as sessions on how best to use a video camera, digital camera and creative writing sessions, so the community would also know how to make 'products' or exhibition pieces out of the interviews they were recording. We returned six months later to conduct follow-up workshops and the material produced by and with the community had been amazing. More funding has now been secured to replicate audio/visual/writing workshops in other remote rural Queensland communities including Townsville, Mackay and Cunnamulla and Toowoomba in 2012, highlighting the need for a multi media approach, to leverage the most out of OH interviews as a mechanism to restore and promote community resilience and pride.

Cohort normalization based sparse representation for undersampled face recognition

Abstract. In recent years, sparse representation based classification(SRC) has received much attention in face recognition with multipletraining samples of each subject. However, it cannot be easily applied toa recognition task with insufficient training samples under uncontrolledenvironments. On the other hand, cohort normalization, as a way of mea-suring the degradation effect under challenging environments in relationto a pool of cohort samples, has been widely used in the area of biometricauthentication. In this paper, for the first time, we introduce cohort nor-malization to SRC-based face recognition with insufficient training sam-ples. Specifically, a user-specific cohort set is selected to normalize theraw residual, which is obtained from comparing the test sample with itssparse representations corresponding to the gallery subject, using poly-nomial regression. Experimental results on AR and FERET databases show that cohort normalization can bring SRC much robustness against various forms of degradation factors for undersampled face recognition.

Heteroscedastic probabilistic linear discriminant analysis for manifold learning in video-based face recognition

To recognize faces in video, face appearances have been widely modeled as piece-wise local linear models which linearly approximate the smooth yet non-linear low dimensional face appearance manifolds. The choice of representations of the local models is crucial. Most of the existing methods learn each local model individually meaning that they only anticipate variations within each class. In this work, we propose to represent local models as Gaussian distributions which are learned simultaneously using the heteroscedastic probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA). Each gallery video is therefore represented as a collection of such distributions. With the PLDA, not only the within-class variations are estimated during the training, the separability between classes is also maximized leading to an improved discrimination. The heteroscedastic PLDA itself is adapted from the standard PLDA to approximate face appearance manifolds more accurately. Instead of assuming a single global within-class covariance, the heteroscedastic PLDA learns different within-class covariances specific to each local model. In the recognition phase, a probe video is matched against gallery samples through the fusion of point-to-model distances. Experiments on the Honda and MoBo datasets have shown the merit of the proposed method which achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art technique.

Liveness detection based on 3D face shape analysis

In recent years face recognition systems have been applied in various useful applications, such as surveillance, access control, criminal investigations, law enforcement, and others. However face biometric systems can be highly vulnerable to spoofing attacks where an impostor tries to bypass the face recognition system using a photo or video sequence. In this paper a novel liveness detection method, based on the 3D structure of the face, is proposed. Processing the 3D curvature of the acquired data, the proposed approach allows a biometric system to distinguish a real face from a photo, increasing the overall performance of the system and reducing its vulnerability. In order to test the real capability of the methodology a 3D face database has been collected simulating spoofing attacks, therefore using photographs instead of real faces. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Second international workshop on theory and applications of process visualization

The representation of business process models has been a continuing research topic for many years now. However, many process model representations have not developed beyond minimally interactive 2D icon-based representations of directed graphs and networks, with little or no annotation for information overlays. In addition, very few of these representations have undergone a thorough analysis or design process with reference to psychological theories on data and process visualization. This dearth of visualization research, we believe, has led to problems with BPM uptake in some organizations, as the representations can be difficult for stakeholders to understand, and thus remains an open research question for the BPM community. In addition, business analysts and process modeling experts themselves need visual representations that are able to assist with key BPM life cycle tasks in the process of generating optimal solutions. With the rise of desktop computers and commodity mobile devices capable of supporting rich interactive 3D environments, we believe that much of the research performed in computer human interaction, virtual reality, games and interactive entertainment have much potential in areas of BPM; to engage, provide insight, and to promote collaboration amongst analysts and stakeholders alike. We believe this is a timely topic, with research emerging in a number of places around the globe, relevant to this workshop. This is the second TAProViz workshop being run at BPM. The intention this year is to consolidate on the results of last year's successful workshop by further developing this important topic, identifying the key research topics of interest to the BPM visualization community.

MODAM: A MODular Agent-based Modelling framework

Designing the smart grid requires combining varied models. As their number increases, so does the complexity of the software. Having a well thought architecture for the software then becomes crucial. This paper presents MODAM, a framework designed to combine agent-based models in a flexible and extensible manner, using well known software engineering design solutions (OSGi specification [1] and Eclipse plugins [2]). Details on how to build a modular agent-based model for the smart grid are given in this paper, illustrated by an example for a small network.

Approximate Bayesian computation using auxiliary model based estimates

We present a novel approach for developing summary statistics for use in approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) algorithms using indirect infer- ence. We embed this approach within a sequential Monte Carlo algorithm that is completely adaptive. This methodological development was motivated by an application involving data on macroparasite population evolution modelled with a trivariate Markov process. The main objective of the analysis is to compare inferences on the Markov process when considering two di®erent indirect mod- els. The two indirect models are based on a Beta-Binomial model and a three component mixture of Binomials, with the former providing a better ¯t to the observed data.

Using performance-based evaluation to close the loop between biological and robotic navigation

In this paper we describe the benefits of a performance-based approach to modeling biological systems for use in robotics. Specifically, we describe the RatSLAM system, a computational model of the navigation processes thought to drive navigation in a part of the rodent brain called the hippocampus. Unlike typical computational modeling approaches, which focus on biological fidelity, RatSLAM’s development cycle has been driven primarily by performance evaluation on robots navigating in a wide variety of challenging, real world environments. We briefly describe three seminal results, two in robotics and one in biology. In addition, we present current research on brain-inspired learning algorithms with the aim of enabling a robot to autonomously learn how best to use its sensor suite to navigate, without requiring any specific knowledge of the robot, sensor types or environment characteristics. Our aim is to drive discussion on the merits of practical, performance-focused implementations of biological models in robotics.

Living City 2013 Workshop

Living City 2013 Workshop, as part of a school term’s design-based curriculum connected to the KGSC/QUT Design Excellence Program and run from 11 February – 1 May, 2013, was essentially a three-day place-based urban design immersion workshop program for 25 Year 11 Visual Art and Design Students and 2 Teachers from Kelvin Grove State College (KGSC) held at both Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Gardens Point Campus and The Edge, State Library of Queensland. Mentored by 4 design professionals, 2 tertiary design academics, 2 public artists, and 12 QUT tertiary design students, the workshop explored youth-inspired public space design solutions for the active Brisbane City Council redevelopment site of Queens Wharf Road precinct. As well as the face-to-face workshops, for Living City 2013, an interactive web environment was introduced to enable students to connect with each other and program mentors throughout the course of the program. The workshop, framed within notions of ecological, economic, social and cultural sustainability, aimed to raise awareness of the layered complexity and perspectives involved in the design of shared city spaces and to encourage young people to voice their own concerns as future citizens about the shape and direction of their city. The program commenced with an introductory student briefing by stakeholders and mentors at KGSC on 11 February, an introduction to site appraisal and site visit held at QUT and Queens Wharf Road on 20 February, and a follow up site analysis session on 6 March. Day 1 Workshop on April 17 at the Edge, State Library of Queensland, as part of the Design Minds partnership (http://designminds.org.au/kelvin-grove-state-college-excellence-in-art-design/), focused on mentoring team development of a concept design for a range of selected sites. Two workshops on April 22 and 23 at QUT, to develop these designs and presentation schemes, followed this. The workshop program culminated in a visual presentation of concept design ideas and discussion with a public audience in the Ideas Gallery on The Deck, King George Square during the Brisbane City Council City Centre Master Plan Ideas Fiesta on 1 May, 2013, as referenced in the Ideas Fiesta Wrap-up Report (http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/planning-building/planning-guidelines-tools/city-centre-master-plan/city-centre-master-plan-ideas-fiesta). Students were introduced to design methodology, team thinking strategies, the scope of design practices and professions, presentation skills and post-secondary pathways, while participating teachers acquired content and design learning strategies transferable in many other contexts. The program was fully documented on the Living City website (http://www.livingcity.net.au/LC2013x/index.html) and has been recognised by the Brisbane City Council Youth Strategy 2014-2019 as a best practice model for making Brisbane a well-designed, subtropical city.

An algebraic analysis of trivium ciphers based on the boolean satisfiability problem

Trivium is a stream cipher candidate of the eStream project. It has successfully moved into phase three of the selection process under the hardware category. No attacks faster than the exhaustive search have so far been reported on Trivium. Bivium-A and Bivium-B are simplified versions of Trivium that are built on the same design principles but with two registers. The simplified design is useful in investigating Trivium type ciphers with a reduced complexity and provides insight into effective attacks which could be extended to Trivium. This paper focuses on an algebraic analysis which uses the boolean satisfiability problem in propositional logic. For reduced variants of the cipher, this analysis recovers the internal state with a minimal amount of keystream observations.