Mining specific features for acquiring user information needs

Term-based approaches can extract many features in text documents, but most include noise. Many popular text-mining strategies have been adapted to reduce noisy information from extracted features; however, text-mining techniques suffer from low frequency. The key issue is how to discover relevance features in text documents to fulfil user information needs. To address this issue, we propose a new method to extract specific features from user relevance feedback. The proposed approach includes two stages. The first stage extracts topics (or patterns) from text documents to focus on interesting topics. In the second stage, topics are deployed to lower level terms to address the low-frequency problem and find specific terms. The specific terms are determined based on their appearances in relevance feedback and their distribution in topics or high-level patterns. We test our proposed method with extensive experiments in the Reuters Corpus Volume 1 dataset and TREC topics. Results show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models.

Graph coloring applied to secure computation in non-Abelian groups

We study the natural problem of secure n-party computation (in the computationally unbounded attack model) of circuits over an arbitrary finite non-Abelian group (G,⋅), which we call G-circuits. Besides its intrinsic interest, this problem is also motivating by a completeness result of Barrington, stating that such protocols can be applied for general secure computation of arbitrary functions. For flexibility, we are interested in protocols which only require black-box access to the group G (i.e. the only computations performed by players in the protocol are a group operation, a group inverse, or sampling a uniformly random group element). Our investigations focus on the passive adversarial model, where up to t of the n participating parties are corrupted.

Decomposition construction for secret sharing schemes with graph access structures in polynomial time

The purpose of this paper is to describe a new decomposition construction for perfect secret sharing schemes with graph access structures. The previous decomposition construction proposed by Stinson is a recursive method that uses small secret sharing schemes as building blocks in the construction of larger schemes. When the Stinson method is applied to the graph access structures, the number of such “small” schemes is typically exponential in the number of the participants, resulting in an exponential algorithm. Our method has the same flavor as the Stinson decomposition construction; however, the linear programming problem involved in the construction is formulated in such a way that the number of “small” schemes is polynomial in the size of the participants, which in turn gives rise to a polynomial time construction. We also show that if we apply the Stinson construction to the “small” schemes arising from our new construction, both have the same information rate.

The mining boom and Western Australia's changing landscape : towards sustainability or business as usual?

The practices and public reputation of mining have been changing over time. In the past, mining operations frequently stood accused of being socially and environmentally disruptive, whereas mining today invests heavily in ‘socially responsible’ and ‘sustainable’ business practices. Changes such as these can be witnessed internationally as well as in places like Western Australia (WA), where the mining sector has matured into an economic pillar of the state, and indeed the nation in the context of the recent resources boom. This paper explores the role of mining in WA, presenting a multi-disciplinary perspective on the sector's contribution to sustainable development in the state. The perspectives offered here are drawn from community-based research and the associated academic literature as well as data derived from government sources and the not-for-profit sector. Findings suggest that despite noteworthy attitudinal and operational improvements in the industry, social, economic and environmental problem areas remain. As mining in WA is expected to grow in the years to come, these problem areas require the attention of business and government alike to ensure the long-term sustainability of development as well as people and place.

The ‘feminine revolution in mining’ : a critique

This paper presents an analysis of media reports of Australian women in mine management. It argues that a dominant storyline in the texts is one of gender change; in fact, a ‘feminine revolution’ is said to have occurred in the mining industry and corporate Australia more generally. Despite this celebratory and transformative discourse the female mine managers interviewed in the media texts seek to distance themselves from women/female identity/femininity and take up a script of gender neutrality. It is demonstrated, however, that this script is saturated with the assumptions and definitions of managerial masculinity.

“Scary” heterosexualities in a rural Australian mining town

This paper draws upon Hubbard's (1999, p. 57) term ‘scary heterosexualities,’ that is non-normative heterosexuality, in the context of the rural drawing on data from fieldwork in the remote Western Australian mining town of Kalgoorlie. Our focus is ‘the skimpie’ – a female barmaid who serves in her underwear and who, in both historical and contemporary times, is strongly associated with rural mining communities. Interviews with skimpies and local residents as well as participant observation reveal how potential fears and anxieties about skimpies are managed. We identify the discursive and spatial processes by which skimpie work is contained in Kalgoorlie so that the potential scariness ‘the skimpie’ represents to the rural is muted and buttressed in terms of a more conventional and less threatening rural heterosexuality.

The Australian mining industry and the ideal mining woman : mobilizing a public business case for gender equality

Despite ongoing ‘boom’ conditions in the Australian mining industry, women remain substantially and unevenly under-represented in the sector, as is the case in other resource-dependent countries. Building on the literature critiquing business-case rationales and strategies as a means to achieve women’s equality in the workplace, we examine the business case for employing more women as advanced by the Australian mining industry. Specifically, we apply a discourse analysis to seven substantial, publically-available documents produced by the industry’s national and state peak organizations between 2005 and 2013. Our study makes two contributions. First, we map the features of the business case at the sectoral rather than firm or workplace level and examine its public mobilization. Second, we identify the construction and deployment of a normative identity – ‘the ideal mining woman’ – as a key outcome of this business-case discourse. Crucially, women are therein positioned as individually responsible for gender equality in the workplace.

Flexible process graph : a prologue

Businesses document their operational processes as process models. The common practice is to represent process models as directed graphs. The nodes of a process graph represent activities and directed edges constitute activity ordering constraints. A flexible process graph modeling approach proposes to generalize process graph structure to a hypergraph. Obtained process structure aims at formalization of ad-hoc process control flow. In this paper we discuss aspects relevant to concurrent execution of process activities in a collaborative manner organized as a flexible process graph. We provide a real world flexible process scenario to illustrate the approach.

Interpretation of association rules with multi-tier granule mining

This study was a step forward to improve the performance for discovering useful knowledge – especially, association rules in this study – in databases. The thesis proposed an approach to use granules instead of patterns to represent knowledge implicitly contained in relational databases; and multi-tier structure to interpret association rules in terms of granules. Association mappings were proposed for the construction of multi-tier structure. With these tools, association rules can be quickly assessed and meaningless association rules can be justified according to the association mappings. The experimental results indicated that the proposed approach is promising.

Facilitating query decomposition in query language modeling by association rule mining using multiple sliding windows

This paper presents a novel framework to further advance the recent trend of using query decomposition and high-order term relationships in query language modeling, which takes into account terms implicitly associated with different subsets of query terms. Existing approaches, most remarkably the language model based on the Information Flow method are however unable to capture multiple levels of associations and also suffer from a high computational overhead. In this paper, we propose to compute association rules from pseudo feedback documents that are segmented into variable length chunks via multiple sliding windows of different sizes. Extensive experiments have been conducted on various TREC collections and our approach significantly outperforms a baseline Query Likelihood language model, the Relevance Model and the Information Flow model.

ACE research briefing paper 007 : Ken Talbot - an entrepreneur's contribution to the growth of the Australian Mining Industry

Ken Talbot was one of Australian mining’s most successful entrepreneurs and rose to the top of his industry to become one of Australia’s wealthiest men. Although the nation’s resources industry is synonymous with global names such as Xstrata, BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, Ken was an individual who made a big impact on the development and growth of the sector. This case study examines Ken’s achievements, his transition from employee to entrepreneur, and the qualities that enabled him to succeed at such a high level. In particular, it focuses on his Jellinbah and Coppabella mining developments that directly led to the creation of Macarthur Coal and the Talbot Group. By the time of his premature death in an African plane crash in 2010, Ken had amassed a fortune estimated at almost $1 billion and was aged just 59. The last publically available Talbot Group annual report for calendar year 2009 showed that the investment portfolio of the group returned 113 per cent that year. Even throughout the global financial crisis the portfolio made a positive return on investment of no less than 10 per cent. Ken’s sense of mateship and his tremendous people skills were keys to his success in the mining industry and the wider community. In addition to excelling in business, he is also remembered for his philanthropy and leaving 30 per cent of his estate to charity through the Talbot Family Foundation.

Dictionary learning and sparse coding on Grassmann manifolds : an extrinsic solution

Recent advances in computer vision and machine learning suggest that a wide range of problems can be addressed more appropriately by considering non-Euclidean geometry. In this paper we explore sparse dictionary learning over the space of linear subspaces, which form Riemannian structures known as Grassmann manifolds. To this end, we propose to embed Grassmann manifolds into the space of symmetric matrices by an isometric mapping, which enables us to devise a closed-form solution for updating a Grassmann dictionary, atom by atom. Furthermore, to handle non-linearity in data, we propose a kernelised version of the dictionary learning algorithm. Experiments on several classification tasks (face recognition, action recognition, dynamic texture classification) show that the proposed approach achieves considerable improvements in discrimination accuracy, in comparison to state-of-the-art methods such as kernelised Affine Hull Method and graph-embedding Grassmann discriminant analysis.

Gender, sexuality, and rurality in the mining industry

Sexuality is a subject that has been, at best, marginal in the significant body of literature that has examined gender and mining in contemporary Western nations. This is despite the fact that academics have circled, if not almost bumped into the topic in closely related discussions of hegemonic masculinity and mining work, and of patriarchal familial relations and mining communities. This scholarship has documented what has been and remains women’s primary relationship to mining—that is, as a “mining wife.” How patriarchal relations are manifest in and emerge from this state of affairs has been critiqued with research on the gendered implications of housing arrangements in mining towns, the division of household labor, changing shift-work mining rosters, and the gendered consequences of strikes and mine closures (Williams 1981; Gibson 1992; Gibson-Graham 1996; Rhodes 2005; McDonald, Mayes, and Pini 2012). Despite the centrality of the heterosexual relationship—and indeed heteronormativity—to these discussions, scholars of gender and mining have had little to say on the subject of sexuality. In response to this lacuna, this chapter takes an exploratory lens to the subject of sexuality and the mining industry. We approach the task from the perspective that the mining industry is gendered as masculine. That is, definitions of mining mobilize around masculinized notions of physicality, technical competence with machinery, and strength, as well as emphasize the harshness and dirtiness of the work (Mayes and Pini 2010).

Mining and (sustainable) local communities : transforming Ravensthorpe, Western Australia

This chapter examines local community experiences, understandings and changes attending the presence of mining activity, in particular as occurred in the Shire of Ravensthorpe in the South West of Western Australia (WA). It does so by drawing on an extensive ethnographic study spanning the development, opening, and closure of BHP Billiton’s Ravensthorpe Nickel Operation (RNO). Given that the negative consequences of mining activity are most evident and complex at the local level, it is crucial that we understand and address how communities (and the individuals and families who are both part of and are shaped by communities) experience the impacts of mining. Though difficult to measure, social and cultural dimensions of mining at the local scale, as this chapter demonstrates, are central to our understanding of mining as a curse or cure.

Using the SWAP to connect water, human rights and mining

It is important that industries’ water interactions respect the human right to water. Historically, within the mining industry there has been a disconnect between the management of sites’ internal water interactions and the consequences of their external impacts, including human rights impacts. This poses a challenge for the mining industry as it attempts to put the Ruggie Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights into practice, particularly as United Nations has recently recognised the human right to water. A technical framework such as the Minerals Council of Australia’s Water Accounting Framework (WAF) can help to bridge this disconnect and to integrate human rights considerations into business practice by connecting a site’s external and internal water interactions and by encouraging regular monitoring of performance. However, at present the connection is limited since the WAF lacks the capability to formalise a site’s social water context. This work presents the Social Water Assessment Protocol (SWAP), a scoping tool consisting of a set of questions organised into taxonomic themes that capture a site’s social water context and that can be combined with the WAF to better connect human rights with mine water interactions.