Exploiting Web 2.0 technologies to forge live connectedness in class

The economics of supporting learning has seen institutional encouragement of a wide range of blended learning initiatives in face to face and online teaching and learning. This has become one of the key drivers for the adoption of technology in teaching, in a manner occassionally guilty of putting the cart before the horse. Learning spaces are increasingly equipped with a dizzying array of technological options testifying to institutional and governmental investment and commitment in supporting face to face blended learning (QUT, 2011, C/4.2). Yet innovation within traditional learning and teaching models faces a number of challenges both at an institutional level and at the teaching coal face. Web 2.0 technologies present a vast array of opportunities to harness and capture the attention of students in engaging learning opportunitites. This presentation will explore technologies supportive of active learning pedagogies.

Effective technologies for noninvasive remote monitoring in heart failure

Background Trials of new technologies to remotely monitor for signs and symptoms of worsening heart failure are continually emerging. The extent to which technological differences impact the effectiveness of non-invasive remote monitoring for heart failure management is unknown. Objective To examine the effect of specific technology used for non-invasive remote monitoring of people with heart failure on all-cause mortality and heart failure-related hospitalisations. Methods A sub-analysis of a large systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted. Studies were stratified according to the specific type of technology used and separate meta-analyses were performed. Four different types of non-invasive remote monitoring technologies were identified including structured telephone calls, videophone, interactive voice response devices and telemonitoring. Results Only structured telephone calls and telemonitoring were effective in reducing the risk of all-cause mortality (RR 0.87; 95% CI=0.75-1.01; p=0.06 and 0.62; 95% CI=0.50-0.77; p<0.0001) and heart failure-related hospitalisations (RR 0.77; 95% CI=0.68-0.87; p<0.001) and 0.75; 95% CI=0.63-0.91; p=0.003). More research data is required for videophone and interactive voice response technologies. Conclusions This sub-analysis identified that only two of the four specific technologies used for non-invasive remote monitoring in heart failure improved outcomes. When results of studies that involved these disparate technologies were combined in previous meta-analyses, significant improvements in outcomes were identified. As such, this study has highlighted implications for future meta-analyses of randomised controlled trials focused on evaluating the effectiveness of remote monitoring in heart failure.

Nondiscretionary residential water use : the impact of habits and water-efficient technologies

Several studies published in the last few decades have demonstrated a low price-elasticity for residential water use. In particular, it has been shown that there is a quantity of water demanded that remains constant regardless of prices and other economic factors. In this research, we characterise residential water demand based on a Stone-Geary utility function. This specification is not only theory-compatible but can also explicitly model a minimum level of consumption not dependent on prices or income. This is described as minimum threshold or nondiscretionary water use. Additionally, the Stone-Geary framework is used to model the subsistence level of water consumption that is dependent on the temporal evolution of consumer habits and stock of physical capital. The main aim of this study is to analyse the impact of water-saving habits and water-efficient technologies on residential water demand, while additionally focusing attention on nondiscretionary uses. This is informed by an empirical application using data from a survey conducted among residents of Brisbane City Council, Australia. The results will be especially useful in the design of water tariffs and other water-saving policies.

Talk in activity during young children’s use of digital technologies at home

Internet-connected tablets and smart phones are being used increasingly by young children. Little is known, however, about their social interactions with family members when engaged with these technologies. This article examines video-recorded interactions between a father and his two young children, one aged 18 months using an iPhone and one aged three years accessing an iPad. Drawing on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, analysis establishes ways the family members engage and disengage in talk so as to manage their individual activity with mobile devices and accomplish interaction with each other. Findings are relevant for understanding children’s everyday practices with mobile technologies.

Perdido ties together Shell digital oilfield technologies

Located in the Gulf of Mexico in nearly 8,000 ft of water, the Perdido project is the deepest spar application to date in the world and Shell’s first fully integrated application of its inhouse digital oilfield technology— called “Smart Field”—in the Western hemisphere. Developed by Shell on behalf of partners BP and Chevron, the spar and the subsea equipment connected to it will eventually capture about an order of magnitude more data than is collected from any other Shelldesigned and -managed development operating in the Gulf of Mexico. This article describes Shell’s digital oilfield design philosophy, briefly explains the five design elements that underpin “smartness” in Shell’s North and South American operations and sheds light on the process by which a highly customized digital oilfield development and management plan was put together for Perdido. Although Perdido is the first instance in North and South America in which these design elements and processes were applied in an integrated way, all of Shell’s future new developments in the Western hemisphere are expected to follow the same overarching design principles. Accordingly, this article uses Perdido as a real-world example to outline the high-level details of Shell’s digital oilfield design philosophy and processes.

Children and information communication technologies in the media : a study using moral panic theory

This thesis is an investigation of the media's representation of children and ICT. The study draws on moral panic theory and Queensland newspaper media, to identify the impact of newspaper reporting on the public's perceptions of young people and ICT.

Brain-inspired sensor fusion for navigating robots

Current state of the art robot mapping and navigation systems produce impressive performance under a narrow range of robot platform, sensor and environmental conditions, in contrast to animals such as rats that produce “good enough” maps that enable them to function under an incredible range of situations. In this paper we present a rat-inspired featureless sensor-fusion system that assesses the usefulness of multiple sensor modalities based on their utility and coherence for place recognition, without knowledge as to the type of sensor. We demonstrate the system on a Pioneer robot in indoor and outdoor environments with abrupt lighting changes. Through dynamic weighting of the sensors, the system is able to perform correct place recognition and mapping where the static sensor weighting approach fails.

Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Communities and Technologies

The Communities and Technologies 2013 conference received 46 submissions for full papers and 12 submissions for research in progress papers. From these submissions, 17 papers were selected to appear at the conference (29%). All submitted papers were subjected to double blind peer review by an independent international program committee of 51 experts.

Decision fusion from parts and samples for robust iris recognition

Fusion techniques can be used in biometrics to achieve higher accuracy. When biometric systems are in operation and the threat level changes, controlling the trade-off between detection error rates can reduce the impact of an attack. In a fused system, varying a single threshold does not allow this to be achieved, but systematic adjustment of a set of parameters does. In this paper, fused decisions from a multi-part, multi-sample sequential architecture are investigated for that purpose in an iris recognition system. A specific implementation of the multi-part architecture is proposed and the effect of the number of parts and samples in the resultant detection error rate is analysed. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture is then evaluated under two specific cases of obfuscation attack: miosis and mydriasis. Results show that robustness to such obfuscation attacks is achieved, since lower error rates than in the case of the non-fused base system are obtained.

Using digital technologies at home

Internet-connected tablets and smart phones are being used increasingly by young children. Little is known, however, about their social interactions with family members when engaged with these technologies. This article examines video recorded interactions between a father and his two young children, one aged 18 months using an iPhone, and one aged three years accessing an iPad. Drawing on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, this analysis establishes ways the family members engage and disengage in talk to manage their individual activity with mobile devices and accomplish interaction with each other. Findings are relevant for understanding children’s everyday practices with mobile technologies.

Laser-radar data fusion with Gaussian Process Implicit Surfaces

This work considers the problem of building high-fidelity 3D representations of the environment from sensor data acquired by mobile robots. Multi-sensor data fusion allows for more complete and accurate representations, and for more reliable perception, especially when different sensing modalities are used. In this paper, we propose a thorough experimental analysis of the performance of 3D surface reconstruction from laser and mm-wave radar data using Gaussian Process Implicit Surfaces (GPIS), in a realistic field robotics scenario. We first analyse the performance of GPIS using raw laser data alone and raw radar data alone, respectively, with different choices of covariance matrices and different resolutions of the input data. We then evaluate and compare the performance of two different GPIS fusion approaches. The first, state-of-the-art approach directly fuses raw data from laser and radar. The alternative approach proposed in this paper first computes an initial estimate of the surface from each single source of data, and then fuses these two estimates. We show that this method outperforms the state of the art, especially in situations where the sensors react differently to the targets they perceive.

Specification & design of safety technologies for complex socio-technical systems : low-cost level crossings case study

The introduction of safety technologies into complex socio-technical systems requires an integrated and holistic approach to HF and engineering, considering the effects of failures not only within system boundaries, but also at the interfaces with other systems and humans. Level crossing warning devices are examples of such systems where technically safe states within the system boundary can influence road user performance, giving rise to other hazards that degrade safety of the system. Chris will discuss the challenges that have been encountered to date in developing a safety argument in support of low-cost level crossing warning devices. The design and failure modes of level crossing warning devices are known to have a significant influence on road user performance; however, quantifying this effect is one of the ongoing challenges in determining appropriate reliability and availability targets for low-cost level crossing warning devices.

Targeted therapies in non-small cell lung cancer

The majority of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients present with advanced disease and with a 5 year survival rate of <15% for these patients, treatment outcomes are considered extremely disappointing. Standard chemotherapy regimens provide some improvement to ~40% of patients. However, intrinsic and acquired chemoresistance are a significant problem and hinder sustained long term benefits of such treatments. Advances in proteomic and genomic profiling have increased our understanding of the aberrant molecular mechanisms that are driving an individual's tumour. The increased sensitivity of these technologies has enabled molecular profiling at the stage of initial biopsy thus paving the way for a more personalised approach to the treatment of cancer patients. Improvements in diagnostics together with a wave of new targeted small molecule inhibitors and monoclonal antibodies have revolutionised the treatment of cancer. To date there are essentially three targeted agents approved for clinical use in NSCLC. The tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) erlotinib, which targets the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) TK domain, has proven to be an effective treatment strategy in patients who harbour activating mutations in the EGFR TK domain. Bevacizumab a monoclonal antibody targeting the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) can improve survival, response rates, and progression-free survival when used in combination with chemotherapy. Crizotinib, a small-molecule drug, inhibits the tyrosine kinase activity of the echinoderm microtubule-associated protein-like 4 anaplastic lymphoma kinase (EML4-ALK) fusion protein, resulting in decreased tumour cell growth, migration, and invasiveness in patients with locally advanced or metastatic NSCLC. The clinical relevance of several other targeted agents are under investigation in distinct molecular subsets of patients with key "driver" mutations including: KRAS, HER2, BRAF, MET, PIK3CA, AKT1,MAP2K1, ROS1 and RET. Often several pathways are activated simultaneously and crosstalk between pathways allows tumour cells to escape the inhibition of a single targeted agent. This chapter will explore the clinical development of currently available targeted therapies for NSCLC as well as those in clinical trials and will examine the synergy between cytotoxic therapies.

Treating the whole not the hole : necessary coupling of technologies for diabetic foot ulcer treatment

Highlights • Diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs) are a major complication of diabetes. • We describe the development of next-generation technologies for DFU repair. • We highlight the modest success of growth factor-, scaffold-, and cell-based DFU therapies. • We rationalize that combination therapies will be necessary to enable effective and reliable DFU repair.

Autonomous multisensor calibration and closed-loop fusion for SLAM

The vast majority of current robot mapping and navigation systems require specific well-characterized sensors that may require human-supervised calibration and are applicable only in one type of environment. Furthermore, if a sensor degrades in performance, either through damage to itself or changes in environmental conditions, the effect on the mapping system is usually catastrophic. In contrast, the natural world presents robust, reasonably well-characterized solutions to these problems. Using simple movement behaviors and neural learning mechanisms, rats calibrate their sensors for mapping and navigation in an incredibly diverse range of environments and then go on to adapt to sensor damage and changes in the environment over the course of their lifetimes. In this paper, we introduce similar movement-based autonomous calibration techniques that calibrate place recognition and self-motion processes as well as methods for online multisensor weighting and fusion. We present calibration and mapping results from multiple robot platforms and multisensory configurations in an office building, university campus, and forest. With moderate assumptions and almost no prior knowledge of the robot, sensor suite, or environment, the methods enable the bio-inspired RatSLAM system to generate topologically correct maps in the majority of experiments.