Networked robots : flying robot navigation using a sensor net

This paper introduces the application of a sensor network to navigate a flying robot. We have developed distributed algorithms and efficient geographic routing techniques to incrementally guide one or more robots to points of interest based on sensor gradient fields, or along paths defined in terms of Cartesian coordinates. The robot itself is an integral part of the localization process which establishes the positions of sensors which are not known a priori. We use this system in a large-scale outdoor experiment with Mote sensors to guide an autonomous helicopter along a path encoded in the network. A simple handheld device, using this same environmental infrastructure, is used to guide humans.

A generative nervous system for the planet

Generative systems are now being proposed for addressing major ecological problems. The Complex Urban Systems Project (CUSP) founded in 2008 at the Queensland University of Technology, emphasises the ecological significance of the generative global networking of urban environments. It argues that the natural planetary systems for balancing global ecology are no longer able to respond sufficiently rapidly to the ecological damage caused by humankind and by dense urban conurbations in particular as evidenced by impacts such as climate change. The proposal of this research project is to provide a high speed generative nervous system for the planet by connecting major cities globally to interact directly with natural ecosystems to engender rapid ecological response. This would be achieved by active interactions of the global urban network with the natural ecosystem in the ecological principle of entropy. The key goal is to achieve ecologically positive cities by activating self-organising cities capable of full integration into natural eco-systems and to netowork the cities globally to provide the planet with a nervous system.

Creating fashion professionals for the 21st century : a tale of pedagogical tensions and emerging challenges

The ‘Fashion Tales’ Conference identifies three fashion discourses: that of making, that of media, and that of scholarship. We propose a fourth, which provides a foundational base for the others: the discourse of fashion pedagogy. We begin with the argument that to thrive in any of these discourses, all fashion graduates require the ability to navigate the complexities of the 21st century fashion industry. Fashion graduates emerge into a professional world which demands a range of high level capabilities above and beyond those traditionally acknowledged by the discipline. Professional education in fashion must transform itself to accommodate these imperatives. In this paper, we document a tale of fashion learning, teaching and scholarship – the tale of a highly successful future-orientated boutique university-based undergraduate fashion course in Queensland, Australia. The Discipline consistently maintains the highest student satisfaction and lowest attrition of any course in the university, achieves extremely competitive student satisfaction scores when compared with other courses nationally and internationally, and reports outstanding graduate employment outcomes. The core of the article addresses how the course effectively balances five key pedagogical tensions identified from the findings of in-depth focus groups with graduating students, and interviews with teaching staff. The pedagogical tensions are: high concept/ authenticity; high disciplinarity/ interdisciplinarity; high rigour/ play; high autonomy/ scaffolding; and high individuality/ community, where community can be further divided into high challenge and high support. We discuss each of these tensions and how they are characterised within the course, using rich descriptions given by the students. We also draw upon the wider andragogical and learning futures literatures to link the tensions with what is already known about excellence in 21st century higher and further education curriculum and pedagogic practice. We ask: as the fashion industry becomes truly globalised, virtualised, and diversified, and as initial professional training for the industry becomes increasingly massified and performatised, what are the best teaching approaches to produce autonomous, professionally capable, enterprising and responsible graduates into the future? Can the pedagogical balances described in this case study be maintained in the light of these powerful external forces, and if so, how?

Sleeping Beauty : global advertising self regulation awakens

The system of self regulation of advertising in mass-media was a dream scenario. If stakeholders complained and the advertisement was deemed offensive by an expert panel, it was an easy matter to withdraw the advertisement from mass media and from public attention. This was done locally, according to the cultural values and aesthetics of the population and the mandate of the self regulation board. To advertising regulators, the internet became their worst nightmare. The system of self regulation was no longer closed, and could be circumvented by placing the offending advertisements online. The system of self regulation was also no longer local, but global. All internet users had access to the same advertisements, regardless of cultural considerations. The awakening of global advertising self regulation is something that demands discussion. It is of value to all conference goers of AAA 2010 Europe, as it affects all advertising academics and all stakeholders in the advertising process. As the leading advertising body seeking to bring global advertising issues to a new venue in Europe, the AAA 2010 European Conference seems ripe for a special session on advertising self regulation. This is especially true as the panel contributes a European, US and Asia-Pacific viewpoint.

Contemporary research on parenting: conceptual, methodological, and translational issues.

Researchers over the last decade have documented the association between general parenting style and numerous factors related to childhood obesity (e.g., children's eating behaviors, physical activity, and weight status). Many recent childhood obesity prevention programs are family focused and designed to modify parenting behaviors thought to contribute to childhood obesity risk. This article presents a brief consideration of conceptual, methodological, and translational issues that can inform future research on the role of parenting in childhood obesity. They include: (1) General versus domain specific parenting styles and practices; (2) the role of ethnicity and culture; (3) assessing bidirectional influences; (4) broadening assessments beyond the immediate family; (5) novel approaches to parenting measurement, and; (6) designing effective interventions. Numerous directions for future research are offered.

Much ado about nothing? Tracing the progress of innovations borne on enterprise social network sites

Enterprise social networks are organizationally bounded online platforms for users to interact with another and maintain interpersonal relationships. The allure of these technologies is often seen in intra-organizational communication, collaboration and innovation. How these technologies actually support organizational innovation efforts remains unclear. A specific challenge is whether digital content on these platforms converts to actual innovation development efforts. In this study we set out to examine innovation-centric content flows on enterprise social networking platforms, and advance a conceptual model that seeks to explain which innovation conveyed in the digital content will traverse from the digital platform into regular processes. We describe important constructs of our model and offer strategies for the operationalization of the constructs. We conclude with an outlook to our ongoing empirical study that will explore and validate the key propositions of our model, and we sketch some potential implications for industry and academia.

A conceptualization of complexity in IS-driven organizational transformations

Organizational transformations reliant on successful ICT system developments (continue to) fail to deliver projected benefits even when contemporary governance models are applied rigorously. Modifications to traditional program, project and systems development management methods have produced little material improvement to successful transformation as they are unable to routinely address the complexity and uncertainty of dynamic alignment of IS investments and innovation. Complexity theory provides insight into why this phenomenon occurs and is used to develop a conceptualization of complexity in IS-driven organizational transformations. This research-in-progress aims to identify complexity formulations relevant to organizational transformation. Political/power based influences, interrelated business rules, socio-technical innovation, impacts on stakeholders and emergent behaviors are commonly considered as characterizing complexity while the proposed conceptualization accommodates these as connectivity, irreducibility, entropy and/or information gain in hierarchically approximation and scaling, number of states in a finite automata and/or dimension of attractor, and information and/or variety.

Are we there yet? A step closer to theorizing information systems success

The need for native Information Systems (IS) theories has been discussed by several prominent scholars. Contributing to their conjectural discussion, this research moves towards theorizing IS success as a native theory for the discipline. Despite being one of the most cited scholarly works to-date, IS success of DeLone and McLean (1992) has been criticized by some for lacking focus on the theoretical approach. Following theory development frameworks, this study improves the theoretical standing of IS success by minimizing interaction and inconsistency. The empirical investigation of theorizing IS success includes 1396 respondents, gathered through six surveys and a case study. The respondents represent 70 organisations, multiple Information Systems, and both private and public sector organizations.

Information systems development outsourcing : the role of control configurations

The Control Theory has provided a useful theoretical foundation for Information Systems development outsourcing (ISD-outsourcing) to examine the co-ordination between the client and the vendor. Recent research identified two control mechanisms: structural (structure of the control mode) and process (the process through which the control mode is enacted). Yet, the Control Theory research to-date does not describe the ways in which the two control mechanisms can be combined to ensure project success. Grounded in case study data of eight ISD-outsourcing projects, we derive three ‘control configurations’; i) aligned, ii) negotiated, and 3) self-managed, which describe the combinative patterns of structural and process control mechanisms within and across control modes.

The competing-complementarity of social media

This study presents the unique benevolent and malevolent nature of social media, intertwined to its capabilities, which influences its role as a benefactor and a competitor. We conceptualize this phenomenon as the competing-complementarity of social media. We explain competing-complementarity using Teece’s (1986) concept of complementary assets and Porter’s (2001) work on competitive forces shaping strategy and business on the Internet. We observe this phenomenon of competing-complementarity of social media on news firms and offer its evidence through opinionated data analysis.

A sequential Monte Carlo framework for adaptive Bayesian model discrimination designs using mutual information

In this paper we present a unified sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) framework for performing sequential experimental design for discriminating between a set of models. The model discrimination utility that we advocate is fully Bayesian and based upon the mutual information. SMC provides a convenient way to estimate the mutual information. Our experience suggests that the approach works well on either a set of discrete or continuous models and outperforms other model discrimination approaches.

Certified pseudonyms colligated with master secret key

A pseudonym provides anonymity by protecting the identity of a legitimate user. A user with a pseudonym can interact with an unknown entity and be confident that his/her identity is secret even if the other entity is dishonest. In this work, we present a system that allows users to create pseudonyms from a trusted master public-secret key pair. The proposed system is based on the intractability of factoring and finding square roots of a quadratic residue modulo a composite number, where the composite number is a product of two large primes. Our proposal is different from previously published pseudonym systems, as in addition to standard notion of protecting privacy of an user, our system offers colligation between seemingly independent pseudonyms. This new property when combined with a trusted platform that stores a master secret key is extremely beneficial to an user as it offers a convenient way to generate a large number of pseudonyms using relatively small storage.

Investigating subspace distances in semantic spaces

Semantic space models of word meaning derived from co-occurrence statistics within a corpus of documents, such as the Hyperspace Analogous to Language (HAL) model, have been proposed in the past. While word similarity can be computed using these models, it is not clear how semantic spaces derived from different sets of documents can be compared. In this paper, we focus on this problem, and we revisit the proposal of using semantic subspace distance measurements [1]. In particular, we outline the research questions that still need to be addressed to investigate and validate these distance measures. Then, we describe our plans for future research.

Robust and reversible numerical set watermarking

Numeric sets can be used to store and distribute important information such as currency exchange rates and stock forecasts. It is useful to watermark such data for proving ownership in case of illegal distribution by someone. This paper analyzes the numerical set watermarking model presented by Sion et. al in “On watermarking numeric sets”, identifies it’s weaknesses, and proposes a novel scheme that overcomes these problems. One of the weaknesses of Sion’s watermarking scheme is the requirement to have a normally-distributed set, which is not true for many numeric sets such as forecast figures. Experiments indicate that the scheme is also susceptible to subset addition and secondary watermarking attacks. The watermarking model we propose can be used for numeric sets with arbitrary distribution. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the scheme is strongly resilient against sorting, subset selection, subset addition, distortion, and secondary watermarking attacks.