Come together : forging publics in Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art

The Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Brisbane, Australia’s third largest city, recently staged ‘21st Century: Art of the First Decade’. The gallery spaces were replete with a commissioned slide by Carsten Höller, an installation of Rivane Neuenschwande’s I Wish Your Wish (2003), a table of white Legos, a room of purple balloons and other participatory or interactive artworks designed to engage multiple publics and encourage audience participation in a variety of ways. Many of the featured projects used day-to-day experiences and offered new conceptions about art practice and what they can elicit in their public – raise awareness about local issues, help audiences imagine different ways of negotiating their environs or experi-ence a museum in a new way. At times, the bottom floor galleries resembled a theme park – adults and children playing with Legos and using Höller’s slide. This article examines the benefits and limitations of such artistic interventions by relating the GoMA exhibition to Brisbane City Council’s campaign of ‘Together Brisbane’ (featuring images of Neunenschwande’s ribbons); a response to the devastation brought to the city and its surrounds in January 2011. During the Brisbane floods, GoMA’s basement was damaged, the museum closed and upon reopening, visitor numbers soared. In this context, GoMA’s use of engaged art practice – always verging on the ephemeral and ‘fun’ – has been used to project a wider notion of a collective urban public. What questions does this raise, not only regarding the cultural politics around the social and participatory ‘turn’ in art practice, but its use to address a much wider urban public in a moment of crisis.

Kernel analysis on Grassmann manifolds for action recognition

Modelling video sequences by subspaces has recently shown promise for recognising human actions. Subspaces are able to accommodate the effects of various image variations and can capture the dynamic properties of actions. Subspaces form a non-Euclidean and curved Riemannian manifold known as a Grassmann manifold. Inference on manifold spaces usually is achieved by embedding the manifolds in higher dimensional Euclidean spaces. In this paper, we instead propose to embed the Grassmann manifolds into reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces and then tackle the problem of discriminant analysis on such manifolds. To achieve efficient machinery, we propose graph-based local discriminant analysis that utilises within-class and between-class similarity graphs to characterise intra-class compactness and inter-class separability, respectively. Experiments on KTH, UCF Sports, and Ballet datasets show that the proposed approach obtains marked improvements in discrimination accuracy in comparison to several state-of-the-art methods, such as the kernel version of affine hull image-set distance, tensor canonical correlation analysis, spatial-temporal words and hierarchy of discriminative space-time neighbourhood features.

Speaker linking using complete-linkage clustering

Speaker diarization determines instances of the same speaker within a recording. Extending this task to a collection of recordings for linking together segments spoken by a unique speaker requires speaker linking. In this paper we propose a speaker linking system using linkage clustering and state-of-the-art speaker recognition techniques. We evaluate our approach against two baseline linking systems using agglomerative cluster merging (AC) and agglomerative clustering with model retraining (ACR). We demonstrate that our linking method, using complete-linkage clustering, provides a relative improvement of 20% and 29% in attribution error rate (AER), over the AC and ACR systems, respectively.

Cutting on action : interference strategies in contemporary art practice

The domestication of creative software and hardware has been a significant factor in the recent proliferation of still and moving image creation. Booming numbers of amateur image-makers have the resources, skills and ambitions to create and distribute their work on a mass scale. At the same time, contemporary art seems increasingly dominated by ‘post-medium’ practices that adopt and adapt the representational techniques of mass culture, rather than overtly reject or oppose them. As a consequence of this network of forces, the field of image and video production is no longer the exclusive specialty of art and the mass media, and art may no longer be the most prominent watchdog of mass image culture. Intuitively and intentionally, contemporary artists are responding to these shifting conditions. From the position of a creative practitioner and researcher, this paper examines the strategies that contemporary artists use to engage with the changing relationships between image culture, lived experience and artistic practice. By examining the intersections between W.J.T. Mitchell’s detailed understanding of visual literacy and Jacques Derrida’s philosophical models of reading and writing, I identify ‘editing’ as a broad methodology that describes how practitioners creatively and critically engage with the field of still and moving images. My contention is that by emphasising the intersections of looking and making, ‘reading’ and ‘writing’, artists provide crucial jump cuts, pauses and distortions in the medley of our mediated experiences.

Contemporary Australia : women, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane 21 April–22 July 2012

'Contemporary Australia: Women' is the second in a series of triennial exhibitions at the Gallery of Modern Art in Queensland, providing a survey of contemporary art practices across the country. This exhibition's focus on women artists comes in the wake of a number of high profile international exhibitions looking at women artists in both contemporary and historical contexts. This review situates the exhibition within this field and considers its significance.

"What is contemporary art? A review of two books by Terry Smith'

What is contemporary art and what are the key components of contemporary culture? This review demonstrates where Terry Smith provides important answers to this question. The books thus help to improve understanding of how art has changed in recent decades and how a global culture now shapes its parameters. This review does not however concur that Smith provides a convincing case for a complete cultural paradigm transformation.

Wherefore art thou, inclusion? Analysing the development of inclusive education in New South Wales, Finland and Alberta

Over the last two decades, moves toward “inclusion” have prompted change in the formation of education policies, schooling structures and pedagogical practice. Yet, exclusion through the categorisation and segregation of students with diverse abilities has grown; particularly for students with challenging behaviour. This paper considers what has happened to inclusive education by focusing on three educational jurisdictions known to be experiencing different rates of growth in the identification of special educational needs: New South Wales (Australia), Alberta (Canada) and Finland (Europe). In our analysis, we consider the effects of competing policy forces that appear to thwart the development of inclusive schools in two of our case-study regions.

Shift

Shift was an exhibition held in October 2008, and was the culmination of a 10 month artist in residence held at Metro Arts, Brisbane in 2008. A number of works were produced and exhibited, and were a response to the ambient urban landscape of inner city Brisbane. The research component contributes to the discussion of the form and display of digital animation, and builds upon strategies of presentation developed from series of works completed in 2005-2007 as part of an MA (research) at QUT, Brisbane. For the two week exhibition, one interactive kiosk and several large scale digital prints were produced, and also a site specific digital animation sequence was projected onto urban landscape features next to the gallery.

100Hz onboard vision for quadrotor state estimation

This paper introduces a high-speed, 100Hz, visionbased state estimator that is suitable for quadrotor control in close quarters manoeuvring applications. We describe the hardware and algorithms for estimating the state of the quadrotor. Experimental results for position, velocity and yaw angle estimators are presented and compared with motion capture data. Quantitative performance comparison with state-of-the-art achievements are also presented.

Image Region Salience for Improving Appearance-Based Place Recognition using a Supervised Classifier System

Many state of the art vision-based Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping (SLAM) and place recognition systems compute the salience of visual features in their environment. As computing salience can be problematic in radically changing environments new low resolution feature-less systems have been introduced, such as SeqSLAM, all of which consider the whole image. In this paper, we implement a supervised classifier system (UCS) to learn the salience of image regions for place recognition by feature-less systems. SeqSLAM only slightly benefits from the results of training, on the challenging real world Eynsham dataset, as it already appears to filter less useful regions of a panoramic image. However, when recognition is limited to specific image regions performance improves by more than an order of magnitude by utilising the learnt image region saliency. We then investigate whether the region salience generated from the Eynsham dataset generalizes to another car-based dataset using a perspective camera. The results suggest the general applicability of an image region salience mask for optimizing route-based navigation applications.

Towards brain-based 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 during a navigation task, 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.

On the statistical determination of optimal camera configurations in large scale surveillance networks

The selection of optimal camera configurations (camera locations, orientations etc.) for multi-camera networks remains an unsolved problem. Previous approaches largely focus on proposing various objective functions to achieve different tasks. Most of them, however, do not generalize well to large scale networks. To tackle this, we introduce a statistical formulation of the optimal selection of camera configurations as well as propose a Trans-Dimensional Simulated Annealing (TDSA) algorithm to effectively solve the problem. We compare our approach with a state-of-the-art method based on Binary Integer Programming (BIP) and show that our approach offers similar performance on small scale problems. However, we also demonstrate the capability of our approach in dealing with large scale problems and show that our approach produces better results than 2 alternative heuristics designed to deal with the scalability issue of BIP.

Towards a secure human-and-computer mutual authentication protocol

We blend research from human-computer interface (HCI) design with computational based crypto- graphic provable security. We explore the notion of practice-oriented provable security (POPS), moving the focus to a higher level of abstraction (POPS+) for use in providing provable security for security ceremonies involving humans. In doing so we high- light some challenges and paradigm shifts required to achieve meaningful provable security for a protocol which includes a human. We move the focus of security ceremonies from being protocols in their context of use, to the protocols being cryptographic building blocks in a higher level protocol (the security cere- mony), which POPS can be applied to. In order to illustrate the need for our approach, we analyse both a protocol proven secure in theory, and a similar proto- col implemented by a �nancial institution, from both HCI and cryptographic perspectives.

Extending and validating the is-impact model in Saudi Arabia : accounting for computer network quality

Organizations from every industry sector seek to enhance their business performance and competitiveness through the deployment of contemporary information systems (IS), such as Enterprise Systems (ERP). Investments in ERP are complex and costly, attracting scrutiny and pressure to justify their cost. Thus, IS researchers highlight the need for systematic evaluation of information system success, or impact, which has resulted in the introduction of varied models for evaluating information systems. One of these systematic measurement approaches is the IS-Impact Model introduced by a team of researchers at Queensland University of technology (QUT) (Gable, Sedera, & Chan, 2008). The IS-Impact Model is conceptualized as a formative, multidimensional index that consists of four dimensions. Gable et al. (2008) define IS-Impact as "a measure at a point in time, of the stream of net benefits from the IS, to date and anticipated, as perceived by all key-user-groups" (p.381). The IT Evaluation Research Program (ITE-Program) at QUT has grown the IS-Impact Research Track with the central goal of conducting further studies to enhance and extend the IS-Impact Model. The overall goal of the IS-Impact research track at QUT is "to develop the most widely employed model for benchmarking information systems in organizations for the joint benefit of both research and practice" (Gable, 2009). In order to achieve that, the IS-Impact research track advocates programmatic research having the principles of tenacity, holism, and generalizability through extension research strategies. This study was conducted within the IS-Impact Research Track, to further generalize the IS-Impact Model by extending it to the Saudi Arabian context. According to Hofsted (2012), the national culture of Saudi Arabia is significantly different from the Australian national culture making the Saudi Arabian culture an interesting context for testing the external validity of the IS-Impact Model. The study re-visits the IS-Impact Model from the ground up. Rather than assume the existing instrument is valid in the new context, or simply assess its validity through quantitative data collection, the study takes a qualitative, inductive approach to re-assessing the necessity and completeness of existing dimensions and measures. This is done in two phases: Exploratory Phase and Confirmatory Phase. The exploratory phase addresses the first research question of the study "Is the IS-Impact Model complete and able to capture the impact of information systems in Saudi Arabian Organization?". The content analysis, used to analyze the Identification Survey data, indicated that 2 of the 37 measures of the IS-Impact Model are not applicable for the Saudi Arabian Context. Moreover, no new measures or dimensions were identified, evidencing the completeness and content validity of the IS-Impact Model. In addition, the Identification Survey data suggested several concepts related to IS-Impact, the most prominent of which was "Computer Network Quality" (CNQ). The literature supported the existence of a theoretical link between IS-Impact and CNQ (CNQ is viewed as an antecedent of IS-Impact). With the primary goal of validating the IS-Impact model within its extended nomological network, CNQ was introduced to the research model. The Confirmatory Phase addresses the second research question of the study "Is the Extended IS-Impact Model Valid as a Hierarchical Multidimensional Formative Measurement Model?". The objective of the Confirmatory Phase was to test the validity of IS-Impact Model and CNQ Model. To achieve that, IS-Impact, CNQ, and IS-Satisfaction were operationalized in a survey instrument, and then the research model was assessed by employing the Partial Least Squares (PLS) approach. The CNQ model was validated as a formative model. Similarly, the IS-Impact Model was validated as a hierarchical multidimensional formative construct. However, the analysis indicated that one of the IS-Impact Model indicators was insignificant and can be removed from the model. Thus, the resulting Extended IS-Impact Model consists of 4 dimensions and 34 measures. Finally, the structural model was also assessed against two aspects: explanatory and predictive power. The analysis revealed that the path coefficient between CNQ and IS-Impact is significant with t-value= (4.826) and relatively strong with â = (0.426) with CNQ explaining 18% of the variance in IS-Impact. These results supported the hypothesis that CNQ is antecedent of IS-Impact. The study demonstrates that the quality of Computer Network affects the quality of the Enterprise System (ERP) and consequently the impacts of the system. Therefore, practitioners should pay attention to the Computer Network quality. Similarly, the path coefficient between IS-Impact and IS-Satisfaction was significant t-value = (17.79) and strong â = (0.744), with IS-Impact alone explaining 55% of the variance in Satisfaction, consistent with results of the original IS-Impact study (Gable et al., 2008). The research contributions include: (a) supporting the completeness and validity of IS-Impact Model as a Hierarchical Multi-dimensional Formative Measurement Model in the Saudi Arabian context, (b) operationalizing Computer Network Quality as conceptualized in the ITU-T Recommendation E.800 (ITU-T, 1993), (c) validating CNQ as a formative measurement model and as an antecedent of IS Impact, and (d) conceptualizing and validating IS-Satisfaction as a reflective measurement model and as an immediate consequence of IS Impact. The CNQ model provides a framework to perceptually measure Computer Network Quality from multiple perspectives. The CNQ model features an easy-to-understand, easy-to-use, and economical survey instrument.