Ambient media for the third place in urban environments

As ambient computing blends into the fabric of the modern urban environment developing a positive interplay between people, places, and technology to create enlivened, interactive cities becomes a necessary priority in how we imagine, understand, design, and develop cities. Designing technology for art, culture and gastronomic experiences, that are rich in community, can provide the means for collaborative action to (re)create cities that are lively, engaging, and promote a sense of well being as well as belonging.

Sequential slotted amplify-and-forward with partial relay isolation

In this paper, we propose a novel relay ordering and scheduling strategy for the sequential slotted amplify-and-forward (SAF) protocol and evaluate its performance in terms of diversity-multiplexing trade-off (DMT). The relays between the source and destination are grouped into two relay clusters based on their respective locations. The proposed strategy achieves partial relay isolation and decreases the decoding complexity at the destination. We show that the DMT upper bound of sequential-SAF with the proposed strategy outperforms other amplify and forward protocols and is more practical compared to the relay isolation assumption made in the original paper [1]. Simulation result shows that the sequential-SAF protocol with the proposed strategy has better outage performance compared to the existing AF and non-cooperative protocols in high SNR regime.

Sequential slotted amplify-decode-and-forward

In this paper, we propose a novel slotted hybrid cooperative protocol named the sequential slotted amplify-decodeand-forward (SADF) protocol and evaluate its performance in terms of diversity-multiplexing trade-off (DMT). The relays between the source and destination are divided into two different groups and each relay either amplifies or decodes the received signal. We first compute the optimal DMT of the proposed protocol with the assumption of perfect decoding at the DF relays. We then derive the DMT closed-form expression of the proposed sequential-SADF and obtain the proximity gain bound for achieving the optimal DMT. With the proximity gain bound, we then found the distance ratio to achieve the optimal DMT performance. Simulation result shows that the proposed protocol with high proximity gain outperforms other cooperative communication protocols in high SNR regime.

Anomalous event detection using a semi-two dimensional hidden Markov model

The rapid increase in the deployment of CCTV systems has led to a greater demand for algorithms that are able to process incoming video feeds. These algorithms are designed to extract information of interest for human operators. During the past several years, there has been a large effort to detect abnormal activities through computer vision techniques. Typically, the problem is formulated as a novelty detection task where the system is trained on normal data and is required to detect events which do not fit the learned `normal' model. Many researchers have tried various sets of features to train different learning models to detect abnormal behaviour in video footage. In this work we propose using a Semi-2D Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to model the normal activities of people. The outliers of the model with insufficient likelihood are identified as abnormal activities. Our Semi-2D HMM is designed to model both the temporal and spatial causalities of the crowd behaviour by assuming the current state of the Hidden Markov Model depends not only on the previous state in the temporal direction, but also on the previous states of the adjacent spatial locations. Two different HMMs are trained to model both the vertical and horizontal spatial causal information. Location features, flow features and optical flow textures are used as the features for the model. The proposed approach is evaluated using the publicly available UCSD datasets and we demonstrate improved performance compared to other state of the art methods.

Spatio temporal feature evaluation for action recognition

Spatio-Temporal interest points are the most popular feature representation in the field of action recognition. A variety of methods have been proposed to detect and describe local patches in video with several techniques reporting state of the art performance for action recognition. However, the reported results are obtained under different experimental settings with different datasets, making it difficult to compare the various approaches. As a result of this, we seek to comprehensively evaluate state of the art spatio- temporal features under a common evaluation framework with popular benchmark datasets (KTH, Weizmann) and more challenging datasets such as Hollywood2. The purpose of this work is to provide guidance for researchers, when selecting features for different applications with different environmental conditions. In this work we evaluate four popular descriptors (HOG, HOF, HOG/HOF, HOG3D) using a popular bag of visual features representation, and Support Vector Machines (SVM)for classification. Moreover, we provide an in-depth analysis of local feature descriptors and optimize the codebook sizes for different datasets with different descriptors. In this paper, we demonstrate that motion based features offer better performance than those that rely solely on spatial information, while features that combine both types of data are more consistent across a variety of conditions, but typically require a larger codebook for optimal performance.

Triclosan and benzophenone-3 in Australian pooled infant urine

The period of developmental vulnerability begins at conception and extends through gestation, parturition, infanthood and adolescence. The World Health Organisation (WHO) acknowledges that children experience quantitatively and qualitatively different exposures to chemicals than adults, and that children may be more or less sensitive to a chemical than adults [1, 2]. For instance, because of mouthing behaviours, children have higher exposure to chemicals through non-dietary ingestion than adults [3, 4], and the possibility exists for different metabolism and/or toxicity between different groups due to the immaturity of defense mechanisms that are fully developed in adults [1]. Traditional toxicological studies are inappropriate for assessing the results of exposure at very low levels during critical periods of development. Biomonitoring data can be used to identify where policies should be directed in order to reduce exposure.

Framing Movements for Gesture Interface Design

Gesture interfaces are an attractive avenue for human-computer interaction, given the range of expression that people are able to engage when gesturing. Consequently, there is a long running stream of research into gesture as a means of interaction in the field of human-computer interaction. However, most of this research has focussed on the technical challenges of detecting and responding to people’s movements, or on exploring the interaction possibilities opened up by technical developments. There has been relatively little research on how to actually design gesture interfaces, or on the kinds of understandings of gesture that might be most useful to gesture interface designers. Running parallel to research in gesture interfaces, there is a body of research into human gesture, which would seem a useful source to draw knowledge that could inform gesture interface design. However, there is a gap between the ways that ‘gesture’ is conceived of in gesture interface research compared to gesture research. In this dissertation, I explore this gap and reflect on the appropriateness of existing research into human gesturing for the needs of gesture interface design. Through a participatory design process, I designed, prototyped and evaluated a gesture interface for the work of the dental examination. Against this grounding experience, I undertook an analysis of the work of the dental examination with particular focus on the roles that gestures play in the work to compare and discuss existing gesture research. I take the work of the gesture researcher McNeill as a point of focus, because he is widely cited within gesture interface research literature. I show that although McNeill’s research into human gesture can be applied to some important aspects of the gestures of dentistry, there remain range of gestures that McNeill’s work does not deal with directly, yet which play an important role in the work and could usefully be responded to with gesture interface technologies. I discuss some other strands of gesture research, which are less widely cited within gesture interface research, but offer a broader conception of gesture that would be useful for gesture interface design. Ultimately, I argue that the gap in conceptions of gesture between gesture interface research and gesture research is an outcome of the different interests that each community brings to bear on the research. What gesture interface research requires is attention to the problems of designing gesture interfaces for authentic context of use and assessment of existing theory in light of this.

Affecting interference

This collaborative project by Daniel Mafe and Andrew Brown, one of a number in they have been involved in together, conjoins painting and digital sound into a single, large scale, immersive exhibition/installation. The work as a whole acts as an interstitial point between contrasting approaches to abstraction: the visual and aural, the digital and analogue are pushed into an alliance and each works to alter perceptions of the other. For example, the paintings no longer mutely sit on the wall to be stared into. The sound seemingly emanating from each work shifts the viewer’s typical visual perception and engages their aural sensibilities. This seems to make one more aware of the objects as objects – the surface of each piece is brought into scrutiny – and immerses the viewer more viscerally within the exhibition. Similarly, the sonic experience is focused and concentrated spatially by each painted piece even as the exhibition is dispersed throughout the space. The sounds and images are similar in each local but not identical, even though they may seem to be the same from casual interaction, closer attention will quickly show this is not the case. In preparing this exhibition each artist has had to shift their mode of making to accommodate the other’s contribution. This was mainly done by a process of emptying whereby each was called upon to do less to the works they were making and to iterate the works toward a shared conception, blurring notions of individual imagination while maintaining material authorship. Empting was necessary to enable sufficient porosity where each medium allowed the other entry to its previously gated domain. The paintings are simple and subtle to allow the odd sonic textures a chance to work on the viewer’s engagement with them. The sound remains both abstract, using noise-like textures, and at a low volume to allow the audience’s attention to wander back and forth between aspects of the works.

From vision to reality : views of primary school principals on inclusive education in New South Wales, Australia

This paper discusses the findings of a research study that used semi-structured interviews to explore the views of primary school principals on inclusive education in New South Wales, Australia. Content analysis of the transcript data indicates that principals’ attitudes towards inclusive education and their success in engineering inclusive practices within their school are significantly affected by their own conception of what “inclusion” means, as well as the characteristics of the school community, and the attitudes and capacity of staff. In what follows, we present two parallel conversations that arose from the interview data to illustrate the main conceptual divisions existing between our participants’ conceptions of inclusion. First, we discuss the act of “being inclusive” which was perceived mainly as an issue of culture and pedagogy. Second, we consider the mechanics of “including,” which reflected a more instrumentalist position based on perceptions of individual student deficit, the level of support they may require and the amount of funding they can attract.

Creating 'saviour siblings' : the notion of harming by conceiving in the context of healthy children

Over the past decade there have been a number of families who have utilised assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) to create a tissue-matched child, with the purpose of using the child’s tissue to cure an existing sick child. This inevitably brings such families a sense of hope as the ultimate aim is to overcome a family health crisis. However, this specific use of reproductive technologies has been the subject of significant criticism, most of which is levelled against the potential harm to the ‘saviour’ child. In Australia, families seeking to access reproductive technologies in this context are therefore required to justify their motives to an ethics committee in order to establish, amongst other things, whether the child will suffer harm once born. This paper explores the concept of harm in the context of conception, focusing on whether it is possible to ‘harm’ a healthy child who has been conceived to save another. To achieve this, the paper will evaluate the impact of the ‘non-identity’ principle in the ‘saviour sibling’ context, and assess the existing body of literature which addresses ‘harm’ in the context of conception. As will be established, the majority of such literature has focused on ‘wrongful life’ cases which seek to address whether an existing child who has been born with a disability, has been harmed. Finally, this paper will distinguish the harm arguments in the ‘saviour sibling’ context based on the fact that the harm evaluation concerns the ‘future-life’ assessment of a healthy child.

A generic framework and runtime environment for development and evaluation of behavioral biometrics solutions

Increasing use of computerized systems in our daily lives creates new adversarial opportunities for which complex mechanisms are exploited to mend the rapid development of new attacks. Behavioral Biometrics appear as one of the promising response to these attacks. But it is a relatively new research area, specific frameworks for evaluation and development of behavioral biometrics solutions could not be found yet. In this paper we present a conception of a generic framework and runtime environment which will enable researchers to develop, evaluate and compare their behavioral biometrics solutions with repeatable experiments under the same conditions with the same data.

Behavioral biometrics for persistent single sign-on

Driven by the rapid development of ubiquitous and pervasive computing, personalized services and applications are deployed to support our lives. Accordingly, the number of interfaces and devices (smartphone, tablet computer, etc.) provided to access and consume these services is growing continuously. To simplify the complexity of managing many accounts with different credentials, Single Sign-On (SSO) solutions have been introduced. However, a single password for many accounts represents a single-point-of-failure. Furthermore, once initiated SSO session is a high potential risk when the working station is left unlocked and unattended. In this paper, we present a conception of a Persistent Single Sign-On (PSSO) for ubiquitous home environments by involving the capabilities of Behavioral Biometrics to check the identity of the user continuously in an unobtrusive manner.

Power electronic converters for high power ultrasound transducers

Piezoelectric transducers convert electrical energy to mechanical energy and play a great role in ultrasound systems. Ultrasound power transducer performance is strongly related to the applied electrical excitation. To have a suitable excitation for maximum energy conversion, it is required to analyze the effects of input signal waveform, medium and input signal distortion on the characteristic of a high power ultrasound system (including ultrasound transducer). In this research, different input voltage signals are generated using a single-phase power inverter and a linear power amplifier to excite a high power ultrasound transducer in different medium (water and oil) in order to study the characteristic of the system. We have also considered and analyzed the effect of power converter output voltage distortions on the performance of the high power ultrasound transducer using a passive filter.

Fans teaching fans how to consume : the role of ritual in the consumption of entertainment

The status of entertainment as both a dimension of human culture, and a booming global industry is increasing. Given more recent consumer-centric definitions of entertainment, the entertainment consumer has grown in prominence and is now coming under closer scrutiny. However viewing entertainment consumers as always behaving in a similar fashion towards entertainment as to other products may be selling them short. For a start, entertainment consumers can exhibit a strong loyalty towards their favourite entertainment products that is the envy of the marketing world. Academic researchers and marketers who are keen to investigate entertainment consumers would benefit from a theoretical base from which to commence. This essay therefore, takes a consumer-oriented focus in defining entertainment and conceptualises a model of entertainment consumption. In approaching the study of entertainment one axiomatic question remains: how should we define it? Richard Dyer notes that, considering that the category of entertainment can include – by its own definition in the song ‘That’s entertainment!’ – everything from Hamlet and Oedipus Rex to ‘the clown with his pants falling down’ and ‘the lights on the lady in tights’, it doesn’t make much sense to try to define entertainment as being marked by particular textual features (as is done, for example, by Avrich, 2002). Dyer’s position is rather that ‘entertainment is not so much a category of things as an attitude towards things’ (Dyer, 1973: 9). He traces the modern conception of entertainment back to the writings of Molière. This writer defended the purpose of his plays against attacks from the church that they were not sufficiently edifying by insisting that, as entertainments he had no interest in edifying audiences – his ‘real purpose …was to provide people pleasure – and the definition of that was to be decided by “the people”’(Dyer, 1973: 9). In my own discipline of Marketing this approach has been embraced – Kaser and Oelkers, for example, define entertainment as ‘whatever people are willing to spend their money and spare time viewing’ (2008, 18). That is the approach taken in this paper, where I see entertainment as ‘consumer-driven culture’ (McKee and Collis, 2009) – a definition that is closely aligned with the marketing concept. Within a marketing framework I explore what the consumption of entertainment can tell us about the relationships between consumers and culture more generally. For entertainment offers an intriguing case study, and is often consumed in ways that challenge many of our assumptions about marketing and consumer behaviour.

Integration of opinion into customer analysis model

As e-commerce is becoming more and more popular, the number of customer reviews that a product receives grows rapidly. In order to enhance customer satisfaction and their shopping experiences, it has become important to analysis customers reviews to extract opinions on the products that they buy. Thus, Opinion Mining is getting more important than before especially in doing analysis and forecasting about customers’ behavior for businesses purpose. The right decision in producing new products or services based on data about customers’ characteristics means profit for organization/company. This paper proposes a new architecture for Opinion Mining, which uses a multidimensional model to integrate customers’ characteristics and their comments about products (or services). The key step to achieve this objective is to transfer comments (opinions) to a fact table that includes several dimensions, such as, customers, products, time and locations. This research presents a comprehensive way to calculate customers’ orientation for all possible products’ attributes.