GO423 - the second Game On / brIGDA Independant Game Symposium

GO423 was initiated in 2012 as part of a community effort to ensure the vitality of the Queensland Games Sector. In common with other industrialised nations, the game industry in Australia is a reasonably significant contributor to Gross National Product (GNP). Games are played in 92% of Australian homes and the average adult player has been playing them for at least twelve years with 26% playing for more than thirty years (Brand, 2011). Like the games and interactive entertainment industries in other countries, the Australian industry has its roots in the small team model of the 1980s. So, for example, Beam Software, which was established in Melbourne in 1980, was started by two people and Krome Studios was started in 1999 by three. Both these companies grew to employing over 100 people in their heydays (considered large by Antipodean standards), not by producing their own intellectual property (IP) but by content generation for off shore parent companies. Thus our bigger companies grew on a model of service provision and tended not to generate their own IP (Darchen, 2012). There are some no-table exceptions where IP has originated locally and been ac-quired by international companies but in the case of some of the works of which we are most proud, the Australian company took on the role of “Night Elf” – a convenience due to affordances of the time zone which allowed our companies to work while the parent companies slept in a different time zone. In the post GFC climate, the strong Australian dollar and the vulnerability of such service provision means that job security is virtually non-existent with employees invariably being on short-term contracts. These issues are exacerbated by the decline of middle-ground games (those which fall between the triple-A titles and the smaller games often produced for a casual audience). The response to this state of affairs has been the change in the Australian games industry to new recognition of its identity as a wider cultural sector and the rise (or return) of an increasing number of small independent game development companies. ’In-dies’ consist of small teams, often making games for mobile and casual platforms, that depend on producing at least one if not two games a year and who often explore more radical definitions of games as designed cultural objects. The need for innovation and creativity in the Australian context is seen as a vital aspect of the current changing scene where we see the emphasis on the large studio production model give way to an emerging cultural sector model where small independent teams are engaged in shorter design and production schedules driven by digital distribution. In terms of Quality of Life (QoL) this new digital distribution brings with it the danger of 'digital isolation' - a studio can work from home and deliver from home. Community events thus become increasingly important. The GO423 Symposium is a response to these perceived needs and the event is based on the understanding that our new small creative teams depend on the local community of practice in no small way. GO423 thus offers local industry participants the opportunity to talk to each other about their work, to talk to potential new members about their work and to show off their work in a small intimate situation, encouraging both feedback and support.

2 Hour game jam at SLQ Garage Gamer - Live performance with crowd participation

The 2 hour game jam was performed as part of the State Library of Queensland 'Garage Gamer' series of events, summer 2013, at the SLQ exhibition. An aspect of the exhibition was the series of 'Level Up' game nights. We hosted the first of these - under the auspices of brIGDA, Game On. It was a party - but the focal point of the event was a live streamed 2 hour game jam. Game jams have become popular amongst the game development and design community in recent years, particularly with the growth of the Global Game Jam, a yearly event which brings thousands of game makers together across different sites in different countries. Other established jams take place on-line, for example the Ludum Dare challenge which as been running since 2002. Other challenges follow the same model in more intimate circumstances and it is now common to find institutions and groups holding their own small local game making jams. There are variations around the format, some jams are more competitive than others for example, but a common aspect is the creation of an intense creative crucible centred around team work and ‘accelerated game development’. Works (games) produced during these intense events often display more experimental qualities than those undertaken as commercial projects. In part this is because the typical jam is started with a conceptual design brief, perhaps a single word, or in the case of the specific game jam described in this paper, three words. Teams have to envision the challenge key word/s as a game design using whatever skills and technologies they can and produce a finished working game in the time given. Game jams thus provide design researchers with extraordinary fodder and recent years have also seen a number of projects which seek to illuminate the design process as seen in these events. For example, Gaydos, Harris and Martinez discuss the opportunity of the jam to expose students to principles of design process and design spaces (2011). Rouse muses on the game jam ‘as radical practice’ and a ‘corrective to game creation as it is normally practiced’. His observations about his own experience in a jam emphasise the same artistic endeavour forefronted earlier, where the experience is about creation that is divorced from the instrumental motivations of commercial game design (Rouse 2011) and where the focus is on process over product. Other participants remark on the social milieu of the event as a critical factor and the collaborative opportunity as a rich site to engage participants in design processes (Shin et al, 2012). Shin et al are particularly interested in the notion of the site of the process and the ramifications of participants being in the same location. They applaud the more localized event where there is an emphasis on local participation and collaboration. For other commentators, it is specifically the social experience in the place of the jam is the most important aspect (See Keogh 2011), not the material site but rather the physical embodied experience of ‘being there’ and being part of the event. Participants talk about game jams they have attended in a similar manner to those observations made by Dourish where the experience is layered on top of the physical space of the event (Dourish 2006). It is as if the event has taken on qualities of place where we find echoes of Tuan’s description of a particular site having an aura of history that makes it a very different place, redolent and evocative (Tuan 1977). The 2 hour game jam held during the SLQ Garage Gamer program was all about social experience.

Beliefs underlying the intention to donate again among first-time blood donors who experience a mild adverse event

Using the belief basis of the theory of planned behavior (TPB), the current study explored the rate of mild reactions reported by donors in relation to their first donation and the intention and beliefs of those donors with regard to returning to donate again. A high proportion of first-time donors indicated that they had experienced a reaction to blood donation. Further, donors who reacted were less likely to intend to return to donate. Regression analyses suggested that targeting different beliefs for those donors who had and had not reacted would yield most benefit in bolstering donors’ intentions to remain donating. The findings provide insight into those messages that could be communicated via the mass media or in targeted communications to retain first-time donors who have experienced a mild vasovagal reaction.

The ZomPoc Project. A Large Scale Public ARG Event

An experiment in large scale, live, game design and public performance, bringing together participants from across the creative arts to design, deliver and document a project that was both a cooperative learning experience and an experimental public performance. The four month project, funded by the Edge Digital Centre, culminated into a 24 hour ARG event involving over 100 participants in December 2012. Using the premise of a viral outbreak, young enthusiasts auditioned for the roles of Survivor, Zombie, Medic and Military. The main objective was for the Survivors to complete a series of challenges over 24 hours, while the other characters fulfilled their opposing objectives of interference and sabotage supported by both scripted and free-form scenarios staged in constructed scenes throughout the venues. The event was set in the State Library of Queensland and the Edge Digital Centre who granted the project full access, night and day to all areas including public, office and underground areas. These venues were transformed into cinematic settings full of interactive props and various audio-visual effects. The ZomPoc Project was an innovative experiment in writing and directing a large scale, live, public performance, bringing together participants from across the creative industries. In order to design such an event a number of innovative resources were developed exploiting techniques of game design, theatre, film, television and tangible media production. A series of workshops invited local artists, scientists, technicians and engineers to find new ways of collaborating to create networked artifacts, experimental digital works, robotic props, modular set designs, sound effects and unique costuming guided by an innovative multi-platform script developed by Deb Polson. The result of this collaboration was the creation of innovative game and set props, both atmospheric and interactive. Such works animated the space, presented story clues and facilitated interactions between strangers who found themselves sharing a unique experience in unexpected places.

Real-time video event detection in crowded scenes using MPEG derived features : a multiple instance learning approach

This paper presents an investigation into event detection in crowded scenes, where the event of interest co-occurs with other activities and only binary labels at the clip level are available. The proposed approach incorporates a fast feature descriptor from the MPEG domain, and a novel multiple instance learning (MIL) algorithm using sparse approximation and random sensing. MPEG motion vectors are used to build particle trajectories that represent the motion of objects in uniform video clips, and the MPEG DCT coefficients are used to compute a foreground map to remove background particles. Trajectories are transformed into the Fourier domain, and the Fourier representations are quantized into visual words using the K-Means algorithm. The proposed MIL algorithm models the scene as a linear combination of independent events, where each event is a distribution of visual words. Experimental results show that the proposed approaches achieve promising results for event detection compared to the state-of-the-art.

An evaluation of different features and learning models for anomalous event detection

The huge amount of CCTV footage available makes it very burdensome to process these videos manually through human operators. This has made automated processing of video footage through computer vision technologies necessary. During the past several years, there has been a large effort to detect abnormal activities through computer vision techniques. Typically, the problem is formulated as a novelty detection task where the system is trained on normal data and is required to detect events which do not fit the learned ‘normal’ model. There is no precise and exact definition for an abnormal activity; it is dependent on the context of the scene. Hence there is a requirement for different feature sets to detect different kinds of abnormal activities. In this work we evaluate the performance of different state of the art features to detect the presence of the abnormal objects in the scene. These include optical flow vectors to detect motion related anomalies, textures of optical flow and image textures to detect the presence of abnormal objects. These extracted features in different combinations are modeled using different state of the art models such as Gaussian mixture model(GMM) and Semi- 2D Hidden Markov model(HMM) to analyse the performances. Further we apply perspective normalization to the extracted features to compensate for perspective distortion due to the distance between the camera and objects of consideration. The proposed approach is evaluated using the publicly available UCSD datasets and we demonstrate improved performance compared to other state of the art methods.

Stored blood products augment inflammation in a two-event model of Transfusion Related Acute Lung Injury (TRALI)

Aim/Background TRALI is hypothesised to develop via a two-event mechanism involving both the patieint's underlying morbidity and blood product factors. The storage of cellular products has been implicated in cases of non-antibody mediated TRALI, however the pathophysiological mechanisms are undefined. We investigated blood product storage-related modulation of inflmmatory cells and medicators involved in TRALI. Methods In an in vitro mode, fresh human whole blood was mixed with culture media (control) or LPS as a 1st event and "transfused" with 10% (v/v) pooled supernatant (SN) from Day 1 (d1, n=75) or Day 42 (D42, n=113) packed red blood cells (PRBCs) as a 2nd event. Following 6hrs, culture SN was used to assess the overall inflammatory response (cytometric bead array) and a duplicate assay containing protein transport inhibitor was used to assess neutrophil- and monocyte-specific inflmamatory responses using multi-colour flow cytometry. Panels: IL-6, IL-8, IL-10, IL-12, IL-1, TNF, MCP-1, IP-10, MIP-1. One-way ANOVA 95% CI. Results In the absence of LPS, exposure to D1 or D42 PRBC-SN reduced monocyte expression of IL-6, IL-8 and Il-10. D42 PRBC-SN also reduced monocyte IP-10, and the overall IL-8 production was increased. In the presence of LPS, D1-PRBC SN only modified overall IP-10 levels which were reduced. However, cf LPS alone, the combination of LPS and D42 PRBC-SN resulted in increased neutrophil and monocyte productionof IL-1 and IL-8 as well as reduced monocyte TNF production. Additionally, LPS and D42 PRBC-SN resulted in overall inflmmatory changes: elevated IL-8,

Social event detection at MediaEval 2013 : challenges, datasets and evaluation

In this paper, we provide an overview of the Social Event Detection (SED) task that is part of the MediaEval Bench mark for Multimedia Evaluation 2013. This task requires participants to discover social events and organize the re- lated media items in event-specific clusters within a collection of Web multimedia. Social events are events that are planned by people, attended by people and for which the social multimedia are also captured by people. We describe the challenges, datasets, and the evaluation methodology.

Visualization of predictive distributions for discrete spatial-temporal log Cox processes approximated with MCMC

An important aspect of decision support systems involves applying sophisticated and flexible statistical models to real datasets and communicating these results to decision makers in interpretable ways. An important class of problem is the modelling of incidence such as fire, disease etc. Models of incidence known as point processes or Cox processes are particularly challenging as they are ‘doubly stochastic’ i.e. obtaining the probability mass function of incidents requires two integrals to be evaluated. Existing approaches to the problem either use simple models that obtain predictions using plug-in point estimates and do not distinguish between Cox processes and density estimation but do use sophisticated 3D visualization for interpretation. Alternatively other work employs sophisticated non-parametric Bayesian Cox process models, but do not use visualization to render interpretable complex spatial temporal forecasts. The contribution here is to fill this gap by inferring predictive distributions of Gaussian-log Cox processes and rendering them using state of the art 3D visualization techniques. This requires performing inference on an approximation of the model on a discretized grid of large scale and adapting an existing spatial-diurnal kernel to the log Gaussian Cox process context.

Shrinking the keys of discrete-log-type lossy trapdoor functions

To this day, realizations in the standard-model of (lossy) trapdoor functions from discrete-log-type assumptions require large public key sizes, e.g., about Θ(λ 2) group elements for a reduction from the decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption (where λ is a security parameter). We propose two realizations of lossy trapdoor functions that achieve public key size of only Θ(λ) group elements in bilinear groups, with a reduction from the decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption. Our first construction achieves this result at the expense of a long common reference string of Θ(λ 2) elements, albeit reusable in multiple LTDF instantiations. Our second scheme also achieves public keys of size Θ(λ), entirely in the standard model and in particular without any reference string, at the cost of a slightly more involved construction. The main technical novelty, developed for the second scheme, is a compact encoding technique for generating compressed representations of certain sequences of group elements for the public parameters.

Practices surrounding event photos

Sharing photos through mobile devices has a great potential for creating shared experiences of social events between co-located as well as remote participants. In order to design novel event sharing tools, we need to develop in-depth understanding of current practices surrounding these so called ‘event photos’- photos about and taken during different social events such as weddings picnics, and music concert visits among others. We studied people’s practices related to event photos through in-depth interviews, guided home visits and naturalistic observations. Our results show four major themes describing practices surrounding event photos: 1) representing events, 2) significant moments, 3) situated activities through photos, and 4) collectivism and roles of participants.

Psychosocial and communication variables involved in mediating the individual experience of older adults following a severe weather event

The recent floods in south-east Queensland have focused policy, academic and community attention on the challenges associated with severe weather events (SWE), specifically pre-disaster preparation, disaster-response and post-disaster community resilience. Financially, the cost of SWE was $9 billion in the 2011 Australian Federal Budget (Swan 2011); psychologically and emotionally, the impact on individual mental health and community wellbeing is also significant but more difficult to quantify. However, recent estimates suggest that as many as one in five will subsequently experience major emotional distress (Bonanno et al. 2010). With climate change predicted to increase the frequency and intensity of a wide range of SWE in Australia (Garnaut 2011; The Climate Institute 2011), there is an urgent and critical need to ensure that the unique psychological and social needs of more vulnerable community members - such as older residents - are better understood and integrated into disaster preparedness and response policy, planning and protocols. Navigating the complex dynamics of SWE can be particularly challenging for older adults and their disaster experience is frequently magnified by a wide array of cumulative and interactive stressors, which intertwine to make them uniquely vulnerable to significant short and long-term adverse effects. This current article provides a brief introduction to the current literature in this area and highlights a gap in the research relating to communication tools during and after severe weather events.

Open Access and Research Conference 2013: Discovery, Impact and Innovation (Event report)

Event report on the Open Access and Research 2013 conference which focused on recent developments and the strategic advantages they bring to the research sector.

Efficiency comparison of Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation with subset simulation (MCMC/ss) to standard Monte Carlo Simulation (sMC) for extreme event scenarios

Standard Monte Carlo (sMC) simulation models have been widely used in AEC industry research to address system uncertainties. Although the benefits of probabilistic simulation analyses over deterministic methods are well documented, the sMC simulation technique is quite sensitive to the probability distributions of the input variables. This phenomenon becomes highly pronounced when the region of interest within the joint probability distribution (a function of the input variables) is small. In such cases, the standard Monte Carlo approach is often impractical from a computational standpoint. In this paper, a comparative analysis of standard Monte Carlo simulation to Markov Chain Monte Carlo with subset simulation (MCMC/ss) is presented. The MCMC/ss technique constitutes a more complex simulation method (relative to sMC), wherein a structured sampling algorithm is employed in place of completely randomized sampling. Consequently, gains in computational efficiency can be made. The two simulation methods are compared via theoretical case studies.