Climate change adaptation in urban systems : strategies for planning regimes

Adaptation is increasingly being viewed as a necessary response tool in respect of climate change effects. Though the subject of significant scholarly and professional attention, adaptation still continues to lag behind mitigation in the climate change discourse. However, this situation looks likely to change over the coming years due to a increasing scientific acceptance that certain climate change effects are now inevitable. The purpose of this research is to illustrate, consider and demonstrate how urban planning regimes can use some of their professional tools to develop adaptation strategies and interventions in urban systems. These tools include plan-making, development management, urban design and place-making. Urban systems contribute disproportionately to climate change and will also likely suffer considerably from the resulting effects. Moreover, the majority of the world’s population is now urbanised, suggesting that adaptation will be crucial in order to develop urban systems that are resilient to climate change effects. Informed by a reflexive, qualitative methodology, this paper offers an informed understanding and illustration of adaptation as a climate change response, its use in urban systems and some of the roles and strategies that planning may take in developing and implementing urban adaptation. It concludes that urban planning regimes can have key roles in adapting urban systems to numerous climate change effects.

Accountable-eHealth systems : the next step forward for privacy

eHealth systems promise enviable benefits and capabilities for healthcare delivery. However, the technologies that make these capabilities possible introduce undesirable drawbacks such as information security related threats, which need to be appropriately addressed. Lurking in these threats are information privacy concerns. Addressing them has proven to be difficult because they often conflict with information access requirements of healthcare providers. Therefore, it is important to achieve an appropriate balance between these requirements. We contend that information accountability (IA) can achieve this balance. In this paper, we introduce accountable-eHealth (AeH) systems, which are eHealth systems that utilise IA as a measure of information privacy. We discuss how AeH system protocols can successfully achieve the aforementioned balance of requirements. As a means of implementation feasibility, we compare characteristics of AeH systems with Australia’s Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) sys-tem and identify similarities and highlight the differences and the impact those differences would have to the eHealth domain.

Homeostatic epistemology : reliability, coherence and coordination in a Bayesian virtue epistemology

How do agents with limited cognitive capacities flourish in informationally impoverished or unexpected circumstances? Aristotle argued that human flourishing emerged from knowing about the world and our place within it. If he is right, then the virtuous processes that produce knowledge, best explain flourishing. Influenced by Aristotle, virtue epistemology defends an analysis of knowledge where beliefs are evaluated for their truth and the intellectual virtue or competences relied on in their creation. However, human flourishing may emerge from how degrees of ignorance are managed in an uncertain world. Perhaps decision-making in the shadow of knowledge best explains human wellbeing—a Bayesian approach? In this dissertation I argue that a hybrid of virtue and Bayesian epistemologies explains human flourishing—what I term homeostatic epistemology. Homeostatic epistemology supposes that an agent has a rational credence p when p is the product of reliable processes aligned with the norms of probability theory; whereas an agent knows that p when a rational credence p is the product of reliable processes such that: 1) p meets some relevant threshold for belief (such that the agent acts as though p were true and indeed p is true), 2) p coheres with a satisficing set of relevant beliefs and, 3) the relevant set of beliefs is coordinated appropriately to meet the integrated aims of the agent. Homeostatic epistemology recognizes that justificatory relationships between beliefs are constantly changing to combat uncertainties and to take advantage of predictable circumstances. Contrary to holism, justification is built up and broken down across limited sets like the anabolic and catabolic processes that maintain homeostasis in the cells, organs and systems of the body. It is the coordination of choristic sets of reliably produced beliefs that create the greatest flourishing given the limitations inherent in the situated agent.

Improving ecological performance of industrialized building systems in Malaysia

For construction stakeholders to fully embrace sustainability, its long-term benefits and associated risks need to be identified through holistic approaches. Consensus among key stakeholders is very important to the improvement of the ecological performance of industrialized building systems (IBS), a building construction method gaining momentum in Malaysia. A questionnaire survey examines the relative significance of 16 potentially important sustainability factors for IBS applications. To present possible solutions,semi-structured interviews solicit views from experienced IBS practitioners, representing the professions involved. Three most critical factors agreed by key stakeholders are material consumption, waste generation and waste disposal. Using SWOT analysis, the positive and negative aspects of these factors are investigated, with action plans formulated for IBS design practitioners. The SWOT analysis based guidelines have the potential to become part of IBS design briefing documents against which sustainability solutions are contemplated, selected and implemented. Existing knowledge on ecological performance issues is extended by considering the unique characteristics of IBS and identifying not only the benefits, but also the potential risks and challenges of pursuing sustainability. This is largely missing in previous research efforts. Findings to date focus on providing much-needed assistance to IBS designers, who are at the forefront of decision-making with a significant level of project influence. Ongoing work will be directed towards other project development phases and consider the inherent linkage between design decisions and subsequent sustainability deliverables in the project life cycle.

A simple test method for profiled steel cladding systems under wind uplift

A new simple test method using small scale models has been developed for testing profiled steel cladding systems under wind uplift/suction forces. This simple method should replace the large scale test method using two-span claddings used at present. It can be used for roof or wall cladding systems fastened with screw fasteners at crests or valleys.

Liminal moments : designing, thinking and learning

This paper provides a contextual reflection for understanding best practice teaching to first year design students. The outcome (job) focused approach to higher education has lead to some unanticipated collateral damage for students, and in the case we discuss, has altered the students’ expectations of course delivery with specific implications and challenges for design educators. This tendency in educational delivery systems is further compounded by the distinct characteristics of Generation Y students within a classroom context. It is our belief that foundational design education must focus more on process than outcomes, and through this research with first year design students we analyse and raise questions relative to the curriculum for a Design and Creative Thinking course—in which students not only benefit from learning the theories and processes of design thinking, conceptualisation and creativity, but also are encouraged to see it as an essential tool for their education and development as designers. This study considers the challenges within a design environment; specifically, we address the need for process based learning in contrast to the outcome-focused approach taken by most students. The authors base their reflections on teaching design students at a university in Queensland, Australia.

Understanding requirements of novel healthcare information systems for management of advanced prostate cancer

Effective management of chronic diseases is a global health priority. A healthcare information system offers opportunities to address challenges of chronic disease management. However, the requirements of health information systems are often not well understood. The accuracy of requirements has a direct impact on the successful design and implementation of a health information system. Our research describes methods used to understand the requirements of health information systems for advanced prostate cancer management. The research conducted a survey to identify heterogeneous sources of clinical records. Our research showed that the General Practitioner was the common source of patient's clinical records (41%) followed by the Urologist (14%) and other clinicians (14%). Our research describes a method to identify diverse data sources and proposes a novel patient journey browser prototype that integrates disparate data sources.

User expertise in contemporary information systems : conceptualization, measurement and application

This research proposes a method for identifying user expertise in contemporary Information Systems (IS). It also proposes and develops a model for evaluating expertise. The aim of this study was to offer a common instrument that addresses the requirements of a contemporary Information System in a holistic way. This study demonstrates the application of the expertise construct in Information System evaluations, and shows that users of different expertise levels evaluate systems differently.

On effective accounting information systems in a dynamic business environment : the role of complementing capabilities

The global business environment is witnessing tough times, and this situation has significant implications on how organizations manage their processes and resources. Accounting information system (AIS) plays a critical role in this situation to ensure appropriate processing of financial transactions and availability to relevant information for decision-making. We suggest the need for a dynamic AIS environment for today’s turbulent business environment. This environment is possible with a dynamic AIS, complementary business intelligence systems, and technical human capability. Data collected through a field survey suggests that the dynamic AIS environment contributes to an organization’s accounting functions of processing transactions, providing information for decision making, and ensuring an appropriate control environment. These accounting processes contribute to the firm-level performance of the organization. From these outcomes, one can infer that a dynamic AIS environment contributes to organizational performance in today’s challenging business environment.

Design LED innovation to rejuvenate local food systems and healthy communities : an emerging research agenda

Food Sovereignty (food freedom) is about empowering people to develop their own local food system. Food Sovereignty challenges designers to enable people to innovate the local food system, rather than having a food system which is dictated by corporate interests and failed business ethics. Communities are realising the potential for design to assist in the innovation process, and add strategic value to potentially localise the food system. Design Led Innovation (DLI) offers a strategic framework to address large-scale cultural, systemic and economic changes. The DLI approach empowers communities to take organised action to achieve a healthy, prosperous and happy way of life. DLI can assist with business models in the business world and it is evident this approach can assist with creating social change too. This paper presents on an emerging research agenda aimed to assist designer’s focus from individuals and systems to communities and urban problems. This paper also presents the research proposition that DLI and service design coupled with social entrepreneurial ventures such as local food projects and creative community inventions, have the potential to enable social innovation for healthy and happy communities.

The 4C spectrum of fundamental behavioral relations for concurrent systems

The design of concurrent software systems, in particular process-aware information systems, involves behavioral modeling at various stages. Recently, approaches to behavioral analysis of such systems have been based on declarative abstractions defined as sets of behavioral relations. However, these relations are typically defined in an ad-hoc manner. In this paper, we address the lack of a systematic exploration of the fundamental relations that can be used to capture the behavior of concurrent systems, i.e., co-occurrence, conflict, causality, and concurrency. Besides the definition of the spectrum of behavioral relations, which we refer to as the 4C spectrum, we also show that our relations give rise to implication lattices. We further provide operationalizations of the proposed relations, starting by proposing techniques for computing relations in unlabeled systems, which are then lifted to become applicable in the context of labeled systems, i.e., systems in which state transitions have semantic annotations. Finally, we report on experimental results on efficiency of the proposed computations.

A basis for instrusion detection in distributed systems using kernel-level data tainting

This project was a step forward in developing intrusion detection systems in distributed environments such as web services. It investigates a new approach of detection based on so-called "taint-marking" techniques and introduces a theoretical framework along with its implementation in the Linux kernel.

Decision making guidelines for sustainable construction of industrialised building systems

The construction industry has an obligation to respond to sustainability expectations of our society. Solutions that integrate innovative, intelligent and sustainability deliverables are vital for us to meet new and emerging challenges. Industrialised Building Systems (IBS), or known otherwise as prefabrication, employs a combination of ready-made components in the construction of buildings. They promote quality of production, enhance simplification of construction processes and minimise waste. The unique characteristics of this construction method respond well to sustainability. Despite the promises however, IBS has yet to be effectively implemented in Malaysia. There are often misconceptions among key stakeholders about IBS applications. The existing rating schemes fail to assess IBS against sustainability measures. To ensure the capture of full sustainability potential in buildings developed, the critical factors and action plans agreeable to all participants in the development processes need to be identified. Through questionnaire survey, eighteen critical factors relevant to IBS sustainability were identified and encapsulated into a conceptual framework to coordinate a systematic IBS decision making approach. Five categories were used to separate the critical factors into: ecological performance; economic value; social equity and culture; technical quality; and implementation and enforcement. This categorisation extends the "Triple Bottom Lines" to include social, economic, environmental and institutional dimensions. Semi-structured interviews help identify strategies of actions and solutions of potential problems through a SWOT analysis framework. These tools help the decision-makers maximise the opportunities by using available strengths, avoid weaknesses, and diagnose possible threats in the examined issues. The recommendations formed an integrated action plan to present information on what and how to improve sustainability through tackling each critical factor during IBS development. It can be used as part of the project briefing documents for IBS designers. For validation and finalisation the research deliverables, three case studies were conducted. The research fills a current gap by responding to IBS project scenarios in developing countries. It also provides a balanced view for designers to better understand sustainability potential and prioritize attentions to manage sustainability issues in IBS applications.

Building an augmented map for road risk assessment

Recent road safety statistics show that the decades-long fatalities decreasing trend is stopping and stagnating. Statistics further show that crashes are mostly driven by human error, compared to other factors such as environmental conditions and mechanical defects. Within human error, the dominant error source is perceptive errors, which represent about 50% of the total. The next two sources are interpretation and evaluation, which accounts together with perception for more than 75% of human error related crashes. Those statistics show that allowing drivers to perceive and understand their environment better, or supplement them when they are clearly at fault, is a solution to a good assessment of road risk, and, as a consequence, further decreasing fatalities. To answer this problem, currently deployed driving assistance systems combine more and more information from diverse sources (sensors) to enhance the driver's perception of their environment. However, because of inherent limitations in range and field of view, these systems' perception of their environment remains largely limited to a small interest zone around a single vehicle. Such limitations can be overcomed by increasing the interest zone through a cooperative process. Cooperative Systems (CS), a specific subset of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), aim at compensating for local systems' limitations by associating embedded information technology and intervehicular communication technology (IVC). With CS, information sources are not limited to a single vehicle anymore. From this distribution arises the concept of extended or augmented perception. Augmented perception allows extending an actor's perceptive horizon beyond its "natural" limits not only by fusing information from multiple in-vehicle sensors but also information obtained from remote sensors. The end result of an augmented perception and data fusion chain is known as an augmented map. It is a repository where any relevant information about objects in the environment, and the environment itself, can be stored in a layered architecture. This thesis aims at demonstrating that augmented perception has better performance than noncooperative approaches, and that it can be used to successfully identify road risk. We found it was necessary to evaluate the performance of augmented perception, in order to obtain a better knowledge on their limitations. Indeed, while many promising results have already been obtained, the feasibility of building an augmented map from exchanged local perception information and, then, using this information beneficially for road users, has not been thoroughly assessed yet. The limitations of augmented perception, and underlying technologies, have not be thoroughly assessed yet. Most notably, many questions remain unanswered as to the IVC performance and their ability to deliver appropriate quality of service to support life-saving critical systems. This is especially true as the road environment is a complex, highly variable setting where many sources of imperfections and errors exist, not only limited to IVC. We provide at first a discussion on these limitations and a performance model built to incorporate them, created from empirical data collected on test tracks. Our results are more pessimistic than existing literature, suggesting IVC limitations have been underestimated. Then, we develop a new CS-applications simulation architecture. This architecture is used to obtain new results on the safety benefits of a cooperative safety application (EEBL), and then to support further study on augmented perception. At first, we confirm earlier results in terms of crashes numbers decrease, but raise doubts on benefits in terms of crashes' severity. In the next step, we implement an augmented perception architecture tasked with creating an augmented map. Our approach is aimed at providing a generalist architecture that can use many different types of sensors to create the map, and which is not limited to any specific application. The data association problem is tackled with an MHT approach based on the Belief Theory. Then, augmented and single-vehicle perceptions are compared in a reference driving scenario for risk assessment,taking into account the IVC limitations obtained earlier; we show their impact on the augmented map's performance. Our results show that augmented perception performs better than non-cooperative approaches, allowing to almost tripling the advance warning time before a crash. IVC limitations appear to have no significant effect on the previous performance, although this might be valid only for our specific scenario. Eventually, we propose a new approach using augmented perception to identify road risk through a surrogate: near-miss events. A CS-based approach is designed and validated to detect near-miss events, and then compared to a non-cooperative approach based on vehicles equiped with local sensors only. The cooperative approach shows a significant improvement in the number of events that can be detected, especially at the higher rates of system's deployment.

Sensemaking and sustainable practicing: Functional affordances of information systems in green transformations

This paper explores how a world-wide operating software solutions provider implemented environmentally sustainable business practices in response to emerging environmental concerns. Through an interpretive case study, we develop a theoretical framework that identifies four important functional affordances originating in information systems, which are required in environmental sustainability transformations as they create an actionable context in which (1) organizations can engage in a sensemaking process related to understanding emerging environmental requirements, and (2) individuals can implement environmentally sustainable work practices. Through our work, we provide several contributions, including a better understanding of IS-enabled organizational change and the types of functional affordances of information systems that are required in sustainability transformations. We describe implications relating to (1) how information systems can contribute to the creation of environmentally sustainable organizations, (2) the design of information systems to create required functional affordances, (3) the management of sustainability transformations, and (4) the further development of the concept of functional affordances in IS research.