Towards a translational medical research ecosystem

In this paper we introduce a novel design for a translational medical research ecosystem. Translational medical research is an emerging field of work, which aims to bridge the gap between basic medical science research and clinical research/patient care. We analyze the key challenges of digital ecosystems for translational research, based on real world scenarios posed by the Lab for Translational Research at the Harvard Medical School and the Genomics Research Centre of the Griffith University, and show how traditional IT approaches fail to fulfill these challenges. We then introduce our design for a translational research ecosystem. Several key contributions are made: A novel approach to managing ad-hoc research ecosystems is introduced; a new security approach for translational research is proposed which allows each participating site to retain control over its data and define its own policies to ensure legal and ethical compliance; and a design for a novel interactive access control framework which allows users to easily share data, while adhering to their organization's policies is presented.

A grand challenge : reflecting on university science curriculum design, collaborative partnerships and integration of information literacy skills

In 2012, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) committed to the massive project of revitalizing its Bachelor of Science (ST01) degree. Like most universities in Australia, QUT has begun work to align all courses by 2015 to the requirements of the updated Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) which is regulated by the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA). From the very start of the redesigned degree program, students approach scientific study with an exciting mix of theory and highly topical real world examples through their chosen “grand challenge.” These challenges, Fukushima and nuclear energy for example, are the lenses used to explore science and lead to 21st century learning outcomes for students. For the teaching and learning support staff, our grand challenge is to expose all science students to multidisciplinary content with a strong emphasis on embedding information literacies into the curriculum. With ST01, QUT is taking the initiative to rethink not only content but how units are delivered and even how we work together between the faculty, the library and learning and teaching support. This was the desired outcome but as we move from design to implementation, has this goal been achieved? A main component of the new degree is to ensure scaffolding of information literacy skills throughout the entirety of the three year course. However, with the strong focus on problem-based learning and group work skills, many issues arise both for students and lecturers. A move away from a traditional lecture style is necessary but impacts on academics’ workload and comfort levels. Therefore, academics in collaboration with librarians and other learning support staff must draw on each others’ expertise to work together to ensure pedagogy, assessments and targeted classroom activities are mapped within and between units. This partnership can counteract the tendency of isolated, unsupported academics to concentrate on day-to-day teaching at the expense of consistency between units and big picture objectives. Support staff may have a more holistic view of a course or degree than coordinators of individual units, making communication and truly collaborative planning even more critical. As well, due to staffing time pressures, design and delivery of new curriculum is generally done quickly with no option for the designers to stop and reflect on the experience and outcomes. It is vital we take this unique opportunity to closely examine what QUT has and hasn’t achieved to be able to recommend a better way forward. This presentation will discuss these important issues and stumbling blocks, to provide a set of best practice guidelines for QUT and other institutions. The aim is to help improve collaboration within the university, as well as to maximize students’ ability to put information literacy skills into action. As our students embark on their own grand challenges, we must challenge ourselves to honestly assess our own work.

Training-free probability models for whole-image based place recognition

Whole-image descriptors such as GIST have been used successfully for persistent place recognition when combined with temporal filtering or sequential filtering techniques. However, whole-image descriptor localization systems often apply a heuristic rather than a probabilistic approach to place recognition, requiring substantial environmental-specific tuning prior to deployment. In this paper we present a novel online solution that uses statistical approaches to calculate place recognition likelihoods for whole-image descriptors, without requiring either environmental tuning or pre-training. Using a real world benchmark dataset, we show that this method creates distributions appropriate to a specific environment in an online manner. Our method performs comparably to FAB-MAP in raw place recognition performance, and integrates into a state of the art probabilistic mapping system to provide superior performance to whole-image methods that are not based on true probability distributions. The method provides a principled means for combining the powerful change-invariant properties of whole-image descriptors with probabilistic back-end mapping systems without the need for prior training or system tuning.

Developing a dashboard for real-time data stream composition and visualization

Technological advances have led to an influx of affordable hardware that supports sensing, computation and communication. This hardware is increasingly deployed in public and private spaces, tracking and aggregating a wealth of real-time environmental data. Although these technologies are the focus of several research areas, there is a lack of research dealing with the problem of making these capabilities accessible to everyday users. This thesis represents a first step towards developing systems that will allow users to leverage the available infrastructure and create custom tailored solutions. It explores how this notion can be utilized in the context of energy monitoring to improve conventional approaches. The project adopted a user-centered design process to inform the development of a flexible system for real-time data stream composition and visualization. This system features an extensible architecture and defines a unified API for heterogeneous data streams. Rather than displaying the data in a predetermined fashion, it makes this information available as building blocks that can be combined and shared. It is based on the insight that individual users have diverse information needs and presentation preferences. Therefore, it allows users to compose rich information displays, incorporating personally relevant data from an extensive information ecosystem. The prototype was evaluated in an exploratory study to observe its natural use in a real-world setting, gathering empirical usage statistics and conducting semi-structured interviews. The results show that a high degree of customization does not warrant sustained usage. Other factors were identified, yielding recommendations for increasing the impact on energy consumption.

Facial expression recognition experiments with data from television broadcasts and the world wide web

Facial expression recognition (FER) systems must ultimately work on real data in uncontrolled environments although most research studies have been conducted on lab-based data with posed or evoked facial expressions obtained in pre-set laboratory environments. It is very difficult to obtain data in real-world situations because privacy laws prevent unauthorized capture and use of video from events such as funerals, birthday parties, marriages etc. It is a challenge to acquire such data on a scale large enough for benchmarking algorithms. Although video obtained from TV or movies or postings on the World Wide Web may also contain ‘acted’ emotions and facial expressions, they may be more ‘realistic’ than lab-based data currently used by most researchers. Or is it? One way of testing this is to compare feature distributions and FER performance. This paper describes a database that has been collected from television broadcasts and the World Wide Web containing a range of environmental and facial variations expected in real conditions and uses it to answer this question. A fully automatic system that uses a fusion based approach for FER on such data is introduced for performance evaluation. Performance improvements arising from the fusion of point-based texture and geometry features, and the robustness to image scale variations are experimentally evaluated on this image and video dataset. Differences in FER performance between lab-based and realistic data, between different feature sets, and between different train-test data splits are investigated.

Bug reproduction : a collaborative practice within software maintenance activities

Software development settings provide a great opportunity for CSCW researchers to study collaborative work. In this paper, we explore a specific work practice called bug reproduction that is a part of the software bug-fixing process. Bug re-production is a highly collaborative process by which software developers attempt to locally replicate the ‘environment’ within which a bug was originally encountered. Customers, who encounter bugs in their everyday use of systems, play an important role in bug reproduction as they provide useful information to developers, in the form of steps for reproduction, software screenshots, trace logs, and other ways to describe a problem. Bug reproduction, however, poses major hurdles in software maintenance as it is often challenging to replicate the contextual aspects that are at play at the customers’ end. To study the bug reproduction process from a human-centered perspective, we carried out an ethnographic study at a multinational engineering company. Using semi-structured interviews, a questionnaire and half-a-day observation of sixteen software developers working on different software maintenance projects, we studied bug reproduction. In this pa-per, we present a holistic view of bug reproduction practices from a real-world set-ting and discuss implications for designing tools to address the challenges developers face during bug reproduction.

Active awareness : supporting the intentional disclosure of awareness information in collaborative systems

This thesis opens up the design space for awareness research in CSCW and HCI. By challenging the prevalent understanding of roles in awareness processes and exploring different mechanisms for actively engaging users in the awareness process, this thesis provides a better understanding of the complexity of these processes and suggests practical solutions for designing and implementing systems that support active awareness. Mutual awareness, a prominent research topic in the fields of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) refers to a fundamental aspect of a person’s work: their ability to gain a better understanding of a situation by perceiving and interpreting their co-workers actions. Technologically-mediated awareness, used to support co-workers across distributed settings, distinguishes between the roles of the actor, whose actions are often limited to being the target of an automated data gathering processes, and the receiver, who wants to be made aware of the actors’ actions. This receiver-centric view of awareness, focusing on helping receivers to deal with complex sets of awareness information, stands in stark contrast to our understanding of awareness as social process involving complex interactions between both actors and receivers. It fails to take into account an actors’ intimate understanding of their own activities and the contribution that this subjective understanding could make in providing richer awareness information. In this thesis I challenge the prevalent receiver-centric notion of awareness, and explore the conceptual foundations, design, implementation and evaluation of an alternative active awareness approach by making the following five contributions. Firstly, I identify the limitations of existing awareness research and solicit further evidence to support the notion of active awareness. I analyse ethnographic workplace studies that demonstrate how actors engage in an intricate interplay involving the monitoring of their co-workers progress and displaying aspects of their activities that may be of relevance to others. The examination of a large body of awareness research reveals that while disclosing information is a common practice in face-to-face collaborative settings it has been neglected in implementations of technically mediated awareness. Based on these considerations, I introduce the notion of intentional disclosure to describe the action of users actively and deliberately contributing awareness information. I consider challenges and potential solutions for the design of active awareness. I compare a range of systems, each allowing users to share information about their activities at various levels of detail. I discuss one of the main challenges to active awareness: that disclosing information about activities requires some degree of effort. I discuss various representations of effort in collaborative work. These considerations reveal that there is a trade-off between the richness of awareness information and the effort required to provide this information. I propose a framework for active awareness, aimed to help designers to understand the scope and limitations of different types of intentional disclosure. I draw on the identified richness/effort trade-off to develop two types of intentional disclosure, both of which aim to facilitate the disclosure of information while reducing the effort required to do so. For both of these approaches, direct and indirect disclosure, I delineate how they differ from related approaches and define a set of design criteria that is intended to guide their implementation. I demonstrate how the framework of active awareness can be practically applied by building two proof-of-concept prototypes that implement direct and indirect disclosure respectively. AnyBiff, implementing direct disclosure, allows users to create, share and use shared representations of activities in order to express their current actions and intentions. SphereX, implementing indirect disclosure, represents shared areas of interests or working context, and links sets of activities to these representations. Lastly, I present the results of the qualitative evaluation of the two prototypes and analyse the results with regard to the extent to which they implemented their respective disclosure mechanisms and supported active awareness. Both systems were deployed and tested in real world environments. The results for AnyBiff showed that users developed a wide range of activity representations, some unanticipated, and actively used the system to disclose information. The results further highlighted a number of design considerations relating to the relationship between awareness and communication, and the role of ambiguity. The evaluation of SphereX validated the feasibility of the indirect disclosure approach. However, the study highlighted the challenges of implementing cross-application awareness support and translating the concept to users. The study resulted in design recommendations aimed to improve the implementation of future systems.

The laws of the virtual worlds

What if you could check out of your world, and enter a place where the social environment was different, where real world laws didn't apply, and where the political system could be anything you wanted it to be? What if you could socialize there with family and friends, build your own palace, go skiing, and even hold down a job there? And what if there wasn't one alternate world, there were hundreds, and what if millions of people checked out of Earth and went there every day? Virtual worlds - online worlds where millions of people come to interact, play, and socialize - are a new type of social order. In this Article, we examine the implications of virtual worlds for our understanding of law, and demonstrate how law affects the interests of those within the world. After providing an extensive primer on virtual worlds, including their history and function, we examine two fundamental issues in detail. First, we focus on property, and ask whether it is possible to say that virtual world users have real world property interests in virtual objects. Adopting economic accounts that demonstrate the real world value of these objects and the exchange mechanisms for trading these objects, we show that, descriptively, these types of objects are indistinguishable from real world property interests. Further, the normative justifications for property interests in the real world apply - sometimes more strongly - in the virtual worlds. Second, we discuss whether avatars have enforceable legal and moral rights. Avatars, the user-controlled entities that interact with virtual worlds, are a persistent extension of their human users, and users identify with them so closely that the human-avatar being can be thought of as a cyborg. We examine the issue of cyborg rights within virtual worlds and whether they may have real world significance. The issues of virtual property and avatar rights constitute legal challenges for our online future. Though virtual worlds may be games now, they are rapidly becoming as significant as real-world places where people interact, shop, sell, and work. As society and law begin to develop within virtual worlds, we need to have a better understanding of the interaction of the laws of the virtual worlds with the law of this world.

An object-oriented design of a World Model for autonomous city vehicles

This paper presents an object-oriented world model for the road traffic environment of autonomous (driver-less) city vehicles. The developed World Model is a software component of the autonomous vehicle's control system, which represents the vehicle's view of its road environment. Regardless whether the information is a priori known, obtained through on-board sensors, or through communication, the World Model stores and updates information in real-time, notifies the decision making subsystem about relevant events, and provides access to its stored information. The design is based on software design patterns, and its application programming interface provides both asynchronous and synchronous access to its information. Experimental results of both a 3D simulation and real-world experiments show that the approach is applicable and real-time capable.

Towards increased road safety : real-time decision making for driverless city vehicles

This work elaborates on the topic of decision making for driverless city vehicles, particularly focusing on the aspects on how to develop a reliable approach which meets the requirements of safe city traffic. Decision making in this context refers to the problem of identifying the most appropriate driving maneuver to be performed in a given traffic situation. The overall decision making problem is decomposed into two consecutive stages. The first stage is safety-crucial, representing the decision regarding the set of feasible driving maneuvers. The second stage represents the decision regarding the most appropriate driving maneuver from the set of feasible ones. The developed decision making approach has been implemented in C++ and initially tested in a 3D simulation environment and, thereafter, in real-world experiments. The real-world experiments also included the integration of wireless communication between vehicles.

Multi-scale bio-inspired place recognition

This paper presents a novel place recognition algorithm inspired by the recent discovery of overlapping and multi-scale spatial maps in the rodent brain. We mimic this hierarchical framework by training arrays of Support Vector Machines to recognize places at multiple spatial scales. Place match hypotheses are then cross-validated across all spatial scales, a process which combines the spatial specificity of the finest spatial map with the consensus provided by broader mapping scales. Experiments on three real-world datasets including a large robotics benchmark demonstrate that mapping over multiple scales uniformly improves place recognition performance over a single scale approach without sacrificing localization accuracy. We present analysis that illustrates how matching over multiple scales leads to better place recognition performance and discuss several promising areas for future investigation.

Real-time decision making for autonomous city vehicles

This paper addresses the topic of real-time decision making by autonomous city vehicles. Beginning with an overview of the state of research, the paper presents the vehicle decision making & control systemarchitecture, explains the subcomponents which are relevant for decision making (World Model and Driving Maneuver subsystem), and presents the decision making process. Experimental test results confirmthe suitability of the developed approach to deal with the complex real-world urban traffic.

Real-time decision making by driverless city vehicles : a discrete event driven approach

This thesis addresses the topic of real-time decision making by driverless (autonomous) city vehicles, i.e. their ability to make appropriate driving decisions in non-simplified urban traffic conditions. After addressing the state of research, and explaining the research question, the thesis presents solutions for the subcomponents which are relevant for decision making with respect to information input (World Model), information output (Driving Maneuvers), and the real-time decision making process. TheWorld Model is a software component developed to fulfill the purpose of collecting information from perception and communication subsystems, maintaining an up-to-date view of the vehicle’s environment, and providing the required input information to the Real-Time Decision Making subsystem in a well-defined, and structured way. The real-time decision making process consists of two consecutive stages. While the first decision making stage uses a Petri net to model the safetycritical selection of feasible driving maneuvers, the second stage uses Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods to select the most appropriate driving maneuver, focusing on fulfilling objectives related to efficiency and comfort. The complex task of autonomous driving is subdivided into subtasks, called driving maneuvers, which represent the output (i.e. decision alternatives) of the real-time decision making process. Driving maneuvers are considered as implementations of closed-loop control algorithms, each capable of maneuvering the autonomous vehicle in a specific traffic situation. Experimental tests in both a 3D simulation and real-world experiments attest that the developed approach is suitable to deal with the complexity of real-world urban traffic situations.

Studio teaching in Australian planning curriculum

Planning studio pedagogy has long been a part of planning education and has recently re-emerged as a topic of investigation. Scholarship has: 1) critically examined the fluctuating popularity of studio teaching and the changing role of studio teaching in contemporary planning curricula in the USA and New Zealand; 2) challenged conceptualizations of the traditional studio and considered how emerging strategies for blended and online learning, and ‘real world engagement’ are producing new modes of studio delivery; 3) considered the benefits and outcomes of studio teaching, and; 4) provided recommendations for teaching practice by critically analysing studio experiences in different contexts (Aitken-Rose & Dixon, 2009; Balassiano, 2011; Balassiano & West, 2012; Balsas, 2012; Dandekar, 2009; Heumann & Wetmore, 1984; Higgins, Thomas & Hollander, 2010; Lang, 1983; Long, 2012; Németh & Long, 2012; Winkler, 2013). Twenty-three universities in Australia offer accredited planning degrees, yet data about the use of studio teaching in planning programs are limited. How, when and why are studio pedagogies used? If it is not a part of the curriculum – why?, and has this had any impact on student outcomes? What are the opportunities and limitations of new models of studio teaching for student, academic, professional and institutional outcomes? This paper presents early ideas from a QUT seed grant on the use of studio teaching in Australian planning education to gain a better understanding of the different roles of studio teaching in planning curricula at a National level and opportunities and challenges for this pedagogical mode in the face of dilemmas facing planning education.

How can partnerships between the universities and schools exploit new opportunities for pedagogies at the intersection of the arts/design and the sciences?

Driven by information accessibility-on-demand provided by the internet, education modes are changing from a teacher-led approach focused on content delivery and assessible outcomes, to a learner-based approach encouraging self-directed, peer-tutored, and cooperative learning. New pedagogies are required to extend learning beyond the classroom and traditional subject areas such as contemporary arts, in alignment with the cross disciplinary priorities of the Australian Curriculum and values of the International Baccalaureate Organisation. This research explores how partnerships with universities and cultural organisations are implicated in the generation of these new forms of pedagogy and contribute to the field of educational research within the context of Education Queensland’s Framework For Gifted Education. In particular, this paper explores a new pedagogical framework for highly capable year five to nine Queensland state school students at the intersection of arts, design and the sciences, which has arisen from an explicit secondary/ tertiary partnership between the Queensland University of Technology Creative Industries Faculty and Precincts and the Queensland Academies Young Scholars Program. The Young Scholars Program offers experiences in the International Baccalaureate and Australian Curriculum contexts to enhance outcomes via global understanding, unique industry partnerships and 21st century pedagogical innovation based not on 'content' but tacit/experiential learning concepts including immersive, creative, intellectual and social strategies. These strategies for highly capable students are centred around authentic opportunities, primary resources, transdisciplinary learning and relationships with likeminded peers including tertiary arts, design and STEM educators and students, professionals and researchers. The presentation details case studies which are hands-on real time workshops involving inquiry based challenges in the arts, design and sciences, mathematics, history, creative writing and other disciplines, with content drawn from collections from public institutions, academic research and tertiary pedagogy. Both programs implicate student collaboration and creative production as methodology/data capture for ongoing action research, in alignment with the Framework For Gifted Education’s emphasis on evidence-based practices. They also challenge gifted students “to continue their development through curricular activities that require depth of study, complexity of thinking, fast pace of learning, high-level skills development and/or creative and critical thinking (e.g. through independent investigations, tiered tasks, diverse real-world applications, mentors)”(Education Queensland, 2011:3). This presentation highlights the strengths of the ongoing collaboration between QUT Creative industries Faculty and Queensland Academies, which not only provides successful extra curricular activities for gifted students towards a place in the International Baccalaureate Program, but also provides mentoring opportunities for tertiary students in their field of endeavor to assist with their own learning, and unique research opportunities for the Faculty as it focuses on excellence in arts, design and creative education and research. Education Queensland.(2011). Framework For Gifted Education Revised Edition 2011 (accessed Nov 19 2011)