How quantum theory is developing the field of information retrieval

This position paper provides an overview of work conducted and an outlook of future directions within the field of Information Retrieval (IR) that aims to develop novel models, methods and frameworks inspired by Quantum Theory (QT).

Automata modeling for cognitive interference in users' relevance judgement

Quantum theory has recently been employed to further advance the theory of information retrieval (IR). A challenging research topic is to investigate the so called quantum-like interference in users’ relevance judgement process, where users are involved to judge the relevance degree of each document with respect to a given query. In this process, users’ relevance judgement for the current document is often interfered by the judgement for previous documents, due to the interference on users’ cognitive status. Research from cognitive science has demonstrated some initial evidence of quantum-like cognitive interference in human decision making, which underpins the user’s relevance judgement process. This motivates us to model such cognitive interference in the relevance judgement process, which in our belief will lead to a better modeling and explanation of user behaviors in relevance judgement process for IR and eventually lead to more user-centric IR models. In this paper, we propose to use probabilistic automaton(PA) and quantum finite automaton (QFA), which are suitable to represent the transition of user judgement states, to dynamically model the cognitive interference when the user is judging a list of documents.

Performance recordivity : studio music in a live context

A broad range of positions is articulated in the academic literature around the relationship between recordings and live performance. Auslander (2008) argues that “live performance ceased long ago to be the primary experience of popular music, with the result that most live performances of popular music now seek to replicate the music on the recording”. Elliott (1995) suggests that “hit songs are often conceived and produced as unambiguous and meticulously recorded performances that their originators often duplicate exactly in live performances”. Wurtzler (1992) argues that “as socially and historically produced, the categories of the live and the recorded are defined in a mutually exclusive relationship, in that the notion of the live is premised on the absence of recording and the defining fact of the recorded is the absence of the live”. Yet many artists perform in ways that fundamentally challenge such positions. Whilst it is common practice for musicians across many musical genres to compose and construct their musical works in the studio such that the recording is, in Auslander’s words, the ‘original performance’, the live version is not simply an attempt to replicate the recorded version. Indeed in some cases, such replication is impossible. There are well known historical examples. Queen, for example, never performed the a cappella sections of Bohemian Rhapsody because it they were too complex to perform live. A 1966 recording of the Beach Boys studio creation Good Vibrations shows them struggling through the song prior to its release. This paper argues that as technology develops, the lines between the recording studio and live performance change and become more blurred. New models for performance emerge. In a 2010 live performance given by Grammy Award winning artist Imogen Heap in New York, the artist undertakes a live, improvised construction of a piece as a performative act. She invites the audience to choose the key for the track and proceeds to layer up the various parts in front of the audience as a live performance act. Her recording process is thus revealed on stage in real time and she performs a process that what would have once been confined to the recording studio. So how do artists bring studio production processes into the live context? What aspects of studio production are now performable and what consistent models can be identified amongst the various approaches now seen? This paper will present an overview of approaches to performative realisations of studio produced tracks and will illuminate some emerging relationships between recorded music and performance across a range of contexts.

Understanding user experience of mobile video : framework, measurement, and optimization

Since users have become the focus of product/service design in last decade, the term User eXperience (UX) has been frequently used in the field of Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI). Research on UX facilitates a better understanding of the various aspects of the user’s interaction with the product or service. Mobile video, as a new and promising service and research field, has attracted great attention. Due to the significance of UX in the success of mobile video (Jordan, 2002), many researchers have centered on this area, examining users’ expectations, motivations, requirements, and usage context. As a result, many influencing factors have been explored (Buchinger, Kriglstein, Brandt & Hlavacs, 2011; Buchinger, Kriglstein & Hlavacs, 2009). However, a general framework for specific mobile video service is lacking for structuring such a great number of factors. To measure user experience of multimedia services such as mobile video, quality of experience (QoE) has recently become a prominent concept. In contrast to the traditionally used concept quality of service (QoS), QoE not only involves objectively measuring the delivered service but also takes into account user’s needs and desires when using the service, emphasizing the user’s overall acceptability on the service. Many QoE metrics are able to estimate the user perceived quality or acceptability of mobile video, but may be not enough accurate for the overall UX prediction due to the complexity of UX. Only a few frameworks of QoE have addressed more aspects of UX for mobile multimedia applications but need be transformed into practical measures. The challenge of optimizing UX remains adaptations to the resource constrains (e.g., network conditions, mobile device capabilities, and heterogeneous usage contexts) as well as meeting complicated user requirements (e.g., usage purposes and personal preferences). In this chapter, we investigate the existing important UX frameworks, compare their similarities and discuss some important features that fit in the mobile video service. Based on the previous research, we propose a simple UX framework for mobile video application by mapping a variety of influencing factors of UX upon a typical mobile video delivery system. Each component and its factors are explored with comprehensive literature reviews. The proposed framework may benefit in user-centred design of mobile video through taking a complete consideration of UX influences and in improvement of mobile videoservice quality by adjusting the values of certain factors to produce a positive user experience. It may also facilitate relative research in the way of locating important issues to study, clarifying research scopes, and setting up proper study procedures. We then review a great deal of research on UX measurement, including QoE metrics and QoE frameworks of mobile multimedia. Finally, we discuss how to achieve an optimal quality of user experience by focusing on the issues of various aspects of UX of mobile video. In the conclusion, we suggest some open issues for future study.

Measuring bitrate and quality trade-off in a fast region-of-interest based video coding

Prevailing video adaptation solutions change the quality of the video uniformly throughout the whole frame in the bitrate adjustment process; while region-of-interest (ROI)-based solutions selectively retains the quality in the areas of the frame where the viewers are more likely to pay more attention to. ROI-based coding can improve perceptual quality and viewer satisfaction while trading off some bandwidth. However, there has been no comprehensive study to measure the bitrate vs. perceptual quality trade-off so far. The paper proposes an ROI detection scheme for videos, which is characterized with low computational complexity and robustness, and measures the bitrate vs. quality trade-off for ROI-based encoding using a state-of-the-art H.264/AVC encoder to justify the viability of this type of encoding method. The results from the subjective quality test reveal that ROI-based encoding achieves a significant perceptual quality improvement over the encoding with uniform quality at the cost of slightly more bits. Based on the bitrate measurements and subjective quality assessments, the bitrate and the perceptual quality estimation models for non-scalable ROI-based video coding (AVC) are developed, which are found to be similar to the models for scalable video coding (SVC).

Little Birung

The field of research was contemporary indigenous theatre practice. The aim of the project was to produce theatre that remained as close and true to its source as possible, in both form and content. Little Birung is the final part of a 6-year mentorship of young indigenous artist, Megan Samardin, conducted by renowned musician and composer, John Rodgers, producer Leah Cotterell and director Sean Mee. The culminating event of the mentorship was to develop to create an original music theatre piece, composed by John Rodgers and Megan Samardin, that featured both Megan’s prodigious talent as a singer and her family’s remarkable story. Creative development consisted of extensive interviews with family members, creative development workshops (supported by both State and Federal Government) and critique and input from leading indigenous creatives such as Wesley Enoch (artistic director, Queensland Theatre Company). The challenge was to keep faith with the family and their story whilst creating a work that would appeal to national/international producers and their audiences. The result is a song cycle of 12 original songs that presents an intensely personal exploration of 6 generations of Megan’s family down the maternal line, as told through Megan’s sometimes uneasy relationship with her great grandmother, Flora. Uniquely, each of the 12 songs presents the personal response of each of the women as they confronted the often-brutal consequences of institutionalised racism and government-imposed oppression. The work was produced in Cairns in 2011 as part of the Cairns Festival to substantial critical acclaim and was an official event of Cairns Indigenous Arts Fair. A revised version was successfully presented at the Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane in November 2011. As a result of the Brisbane season, Little Birung has been invited to make a presentation at the 2012 APAM (Australian Performing Arts Market) in Adelaide. Importantly, the family and the indigenous community have embraced the work and have continued their fervent support. It has strengthened them as a family and as a part of the indigenous people of Australia.

An aspect query language model based on query decomposition and high-order contextual term associations

In information retrieval (IR) research, more and more focus has been placed on optimizing a query language model by detecting and estimating the dependencies between the query and the observed terms occurring in the selected relevance feedback documents. In this paper, we propose a novel Aspect Language Modeling framework featuring term association acquisition, document segmentation, query decomposition, and an Aspect Model (AM) for parameter optimization. Through the proposed framework, we advance the theory and practice of applying high-order and context-sensitive term relationships to IR. We first decompose a query into subsets of query terms. Then we segment the relevance feedback documents into chunks using multiple sliding windows. Finally we discover the higher order term associations, that is, the terms in these chunks with high degree of association to the subsets of the query. In this process, we adopt an approach by combining the AM with the Association Rule (AR) mining. In our approach, the AM not only considers the subsets of a query as “hidden” states and estimates their prior distributions, but also evaluates the dependencies between the subsets of a query and the observed terms extracted from the chunks of feedback documents. The AR provides a reasonable initial estimation of the high-order term associations by discovering the associated rules from the document chunks. Experimental results on various TREC collections verify the effectiveness of our approach, which significantly outperforms a baseline language model and two state-of-the-art query language models namely the Relevance Model and the Information Flow model

Quantum-like non-separability of concept combinations, emergent associates and abduction

Consider the concept combination ‘pet human’. In word association experiments, human subjects produce the associate ‘slave’ in relation to this combination. The striking aspect of this associate is that it is not produced as an associate of ‘pet’, or ‘human’ in isolation. In other words, the associate ‘slave’ seems to be emergent. Such emergent associations sometimes have a creative character and cognitive science is largely silent about how we produce them. Departing from a dimensional model of human conceptual space, this article will explore concept combinations, and will argue that emergent associations are a result of abductive reasoning within conceptual space, that is, below the symbolic level of cognition. A tensor-based approach is used to model concept combinations allowing such combinations to be formalized as interacting quantum systems. Free association norm data is used to motivate the underlying basis of the conceptual space. It is shown by analogy how some concept combinations may behave like quantum-entangled (non-separable) particles. Two methods of analysis were presented for empirically validating the presence of non-separable concept combinations in human cognition. One method is based on quantum theory and another based on comparing a joint (true theoretic) probability distribution with another distribution based on a separability assumption using a chi-square goodness-of-fit test. Although these methods were inconclusive in relation to an empirical study of bi-ambiguous concept combinations, avenues for further refinement of these methods are identified.

Development priority zoning (DPZ)-led scenario simulation for regional land use change : the case of Suichang County, China

China has experienced an extraordinary level of economic development since the 1990s, following excessive competition between different regions. This has resulted in many resource and environmental problems. Land resources, for example, are either abused or wasted in many regions. The strategy of development priority zoning (DPZ), proposed by the Chinese National 11th Five-Year Plan, provides an opportunity to solve these problems by coordinating regional development and protection. In line with the rational utilization of land, it is proposed that the DPZ strategy should be integrated with regional land use policy. As there has been little research to date on this issue, this paper introduces a system dynamic (SD) model for assessing land use change in China led by the DPZ strategy. Land use is characterized by the prioritization of land development, land utilization, land harness and land protection (D-U-H-P). By using the Delphi method, a corresponding suitable prioritization of D-U-H-P for the four types of DPZ, including optimized development zones (ODZ), key development zones (KDZ), restricted development zones (RDZ), and forbidden development zones (FDZ) are identified. Suichang County is used as a case study in which to conduct the simulation of land use change under the RDZ strategy. The findings enable a conceptualization to be made of DPZ-led land use change and the identification of further implications for land use planning generally. The SD model also provides a potential tool for local government to combine DPZ strategy at the national level with land use planning at the local level.

When There's Love

This work is an installation featuring three video projections, music and mirror balls. The three projections fill the walls with scrolling text borrowed from love song lyrics. Headphones in the gallery space allow you to hear a male voice sing the same words to an impromptu tune. Mirror balls send fragments of light spinning around the room while The Righteous Brothers’ Unchained Melody plays on repeat. This work emphasizes fragmentary, repetitious and spatio-temporal experiences of language in order to question the symbolic conventions of romance. By exaggerating and mixing hackneyed symbolic elements, this work extends on some of Nicolas Bourriaud’s theoretical insights into the creative and critical strategies of ‘postproduction’. In particular, it toys with the intersections between popular culture and inter-subjective experiences.

A new implicit numerical method for the space and time fractional Bloch-Torrey equation

In recent years, it has been found that many phenomena in engineering, physics, chemistry and other sciences can be described very successfully by models using mathematical tools from fractional calculus. Recently, noted a new space and time fractional Bloch-Torrey equation (ST-FBTE) has been proposed (see Magin et al. (2008)), and successfully applied to analyse diffusion images of human brain tissues to provide new insights for further investigations of tissue structures. In this paper, we consider the ST-FBTE on a finite domain. The time and space derivatives in the ST-FBTE are replaced by the Caputo and the sequential Riesz fractional derivatives, respectively. Firstly, we propose a new effective implicit numerical method (INM) for the STFBTE whereby we discretize the Riesz fractional derivative using a fractional centered difference. Secondly, we prove that the implicit numerical method for the ST-FBTE is unconditionally stable and convergent, and the order of convergence of the implicit numerical method is ( T2 - α + h2 x + h2 y + h2 z ). Finally, some numerical results are presented to support our theoretical analysis.

Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other

This book examines public worrying over 'ethnic crime' and what it tells us about Australia today. How, for instance, can the blame for a series of brutal group sexual assaults in Sydney be so widely attributed to whole ethnic communities? How is it that the arrival of a foundering boatload of asylum-seekers mostly seeking refuge from despotic regimes in 'the Middle East' can be manipulated to characterise complete cohorts of applicants for refuge 'and their immigrant compatriots' as dangerous, dishonest, criminally inclined and inhuman? How did the airborne terror attacks on the USA on 11 September 2001 exacerbate existing tendencies in Australia to stereotype Arabs and Muslims as backward, inassimilable, without respect for Western laws and values, and complicit with barbarism and terrorism? Bin Laden in the Suburbs argues that we are witnessing the emergence of the 'Arab Other' as the pre-eminent 'folk devil' of our time. This Arab Other functions in the national imaginary to prop up the project of national belonging. It has little to do with the lived experiences of Arab, Middle Eastern or Muslim Australians, and everything to do with a host of social anxieties which overlap in a series of moral panics. Bin Laden in the Suburbs analyses a decisive moment in the history of multiculturalism in Australia. 'Unlike most migrants, the Arab migrant is a subversive will ... They invade our shores, take over our neighbourhood and rape our women. They are all little bin Ladens and they are everywhere: Explicit bin Ladens and closet bin Ladens; Conscious bin Ladens and unconscious bin Ladens; bin Ladens on the beach and bin Ladens in the suburbs, as this book is aptly titled. Within this register ... even a single Arab is a threat. Contain the Arab or exterminate the Arab? A 'tolerable' presence in the suburbs, or caged in a concentration camp? ... The politics of the Western post-colonial state is constantly and dangerously oscillating between these tendencies today. It is this dangerous oscillation that is so lucidly exposed in this book'.

Frames of Anime: Culture and Image-Building

With the rising popularity of anime amongst animation students, audiences and scholars around the world, it has become increasingly important to critically analyse anime as being more than a ‘limited’ form of animation, and thematically as encompassing more than super robots and pocket monsters. Frames of Anime: Culture and Image-Building charts the development of Japanese animation from its indigenous roots within a native culture, through Japan’s experience of modernity and the impact of the Second World War. This text is the result of a rigorous study that recognises the heterogeneous and polymorphous background of anime. As such, Tze-Yue has adopted an ‘interdisciplinary and transnational’ (p. 7) approach to her enquiry, drawing upon face-to-face interviews, on-site visits and biographical writings of animators. Tze-Yue delineates anime from other forms of animation by linking its visual style to pre-modern Japanese art forms and demonstrating the connection it shares with an indigenous folk system of beliefs. Via the identification of traditional Japanese art forms and their visual connectedness to Japanese animation, Tze-Yue shows that the Japanese were already heavily engaged in what was destined to become anime once technology had enabled its production. Tze-Yue’s efforts to connect traditional Japanese art forms, and their artistic elements, to contemporary anime reveals that the Japanese already had a rich culture of visual storytelling that pre-dates modern animation. She identifies the Japanese form of the magic lantern at the turn of the 19th century, utsushi-e, as the pre-modern ancestor of Japanese animation, describing it as ‘Edo anime’ (p. 43). Along with utsushi-e, the Edo period also saw the woodblock print, ukiyo-e, being produced for the rising middle class (p. 32). Highlighting the ‘resurfacing’ of ‘realist’ approaches to Japanese art in ukiyo-e, Tze-Yue demonstrates the visual connection of ukiyo-e and anime in the …

A Kallikrein 15 (KLK15) single nucleotide polymorphism located close to a novel exon shows evidence of association with poor ovarian cancer survival

KLK15 over-expression is reported to be a significant predictor of reduced progression-free survival and overall survival in ovarian cancer. Our aim was to analyse the KLK15 gene for putative functional single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and assess the association of these and KLK15 HapMap tag SNPs with ovarian cancer survival. Results In silico analysis was performed to identify KLK15 regulatory elements and to classify potentially functional SNPs in these regions. After SNP validation and identification by DNA sequencing of ovarian cancer cell lines and aggressive ovarian cancer patients, 9 SNPs were shortlisted and genotyped using the Sequenom iPLEX Mass Array platform in a cohort of Australian ovarian cancer patients (N = 319). In the Australian dataset we observed significantly worse survival for the KLK15 rs266851 SNP in a dominant model (Hazard Ratio (HR) 1.42, 95% CI 1.02-1.96). This association was observed in the same direction in two independent datasets, with a combined HR for the three studies of 1.16 (1.00-1.34). This SNP lies 15bp downstream of a novel exon and is predicted to be involved in mRNA splicing. The mutant allele is also predicted to abrogate an HSF-2 binding site. Conclusions We provide evidence of association for the SNP rs266851 with ovarian cancer survival. Our results provide the impetus for downstream functional assays and additional independent validation studies to assess the role of KLK15 regulatory SNPs and KLK15 isoforms with alternative intracellular functional roles in ovarian cancer survival.