Remote monitoring of underwater objects

A system for monitoring conditions in a remote environment. The system comprising a data transmission network including a plurality of data sensing nodes. Each data sensing node includes an environment sensing means for periodically sensing the environment around node, a transmission means for periodic wireless transmission of sensed data to adjacent data sensing nodes. These adjacent data sensing nodes combining their sensed data with the received data from other data sensing nodes and on transmit the combined data.

Perceiving the interactive body in dance: Enhancing kinesthetic empathy through art objects

Through a consideration of audience experience of embodiment in contemporary dance performance, this project used kinesthetic empathy as a theoretical construct to inform choreographic decision-making. The research outcome challenged the traditional performer/audience relationship through an interactive dance performance work entitled Planets. This acted as a platform that allowed both audience and performer to collaboratively listen to, process and form movement in a shared kinesthetic state. This connection was enabled through the distribution of interactive art objects, which responded to the shifting proximity between performer and audience. The performance was thus experienced through following a shared goal as instigated by the interactive technology. Through practice-led research, knowledge from kinesthetic empathy, embodied cognition and the mirror neuron system were used to develop the project’s aim in encouraging interactive audiences to engage in movement. This aim influenced studio explorations of movement through an enquiry into the kinesthetic self in dance. Investigations used movement quality, tension, mobility and acceleration to access a familiar movement vocabulary appropriate for a broad interactive audience. This informed the role of the researcher as performer. Planets was developed as a collaborative project between Michael Smith and interactive visual designer Andy Bates and performed over three nights at the Ars Electronica Festival 2014 in Linz, Austria. Supported by documented footage from Planets and audience responses to the performances, this paper draws together the theoretical underpinnings behind the development of the work and includes the experiential perspective of the performer.

The ways of things: Objects in the studio

Conventions of the studio presuppose the artist as the active agent, imposing his/her will upon and through objects that remain essentially inert. However, this characterisation of practice overlooks the complex object dynamics that underpin the art-making process. Far from passive entities, objects are resistant, ‘speaking back’ to the artist, impressing their will upon their surroundings. Objects stick to one another, fall over, drip, spill, spatter and chip one another. Objects support, dismantle, cover and transform one another. Objects are both the apparatus of the studio and its products. It can be argued that the work of art is as much shaped by objects as it is by human impulse. Within this alternate ontology, the artist becomes but one element in a constellation of objects. Drawing upon Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology and a selection of photographs of my studio processes, this practice-led paper will explore the notion of agentive objects and the ways in which the contemporary art studio can be reconsidered as a primary site for the production of new object relationships.

Leveraging the repository infrastructure to curate institutional heritage materials, learning objects and data assets

Developing and maintaining a successful institutional repository for research publications requires a considerable investment by the institution. Most of the money is spent on developing the skill-sets of existing staff or hiring new staff with the necessary skills. The return on this investment can be magnified by using this valuable infrastructure to curate collections of other materials such as learning objects, student work, conference proceedings and institutional or local community heritage materials. When Queensland University of Technology (QUT) implemented its repository for research publications (QUT ePrints) over 11 years ago, it was one of the first institutional repositories to be established in Australia. Currently, the repository holds over 29,000 open access research publications and the cumulative total number of full-text downloads for these document now exceeds 16 million. The full-text deposit rate for recently-published peer reviewed papers (currently over 74%) shows how well the repository has been embraced by QUT researchers. The success of QUT ePrints has resulted in requests to accommodate a plethora of materials which are ‘out of scope’ for this repository. QUT Library saw this as an opportunity to use its repository infrastructure (software, technical know-how and policies) to develop and implement a metadata repository for its research datasets (QUT Research Data Finder), a repository for research-related software (QUT Software Finder) and to curate a number of digital collections of institutional and local community heritage materials (QUT Digital Collections). This poster describes the repositories and digital collections curated by QUT Library and outlines the value delivered to the institution, and the wider community, by these initiatives.

Negative priming in naming of categorically related objects: An fMRI study

Ignoring an object slows subsequent naming responses to it, a phenomenon known as negative priming (NP). A central issue in NP research concerns the level of representation at which the effect occurs. As object naming is typically considered to involve access to abstract semantic representations, Tipper 1985 proposed that the NP effect occurred at this level of processing, and other researchers supported this proposal by demonstrating a similar result with categorically related objects (e.g., Allport et al., 1985; Murray, 1995), an effect referred to as semantic NP. However, objects within categories share more physical or structural features than objects from different categories. Consequently, the NP effect observed with categorically related objects might occur at a structural rather than semantic level of representation. We used event related fMRI interleaving overt object naming and image acquisition to demonstrate for the first time that the semantic NP effect activates the left posterior-mid fusiform and insular-opercular cortices. Moreover, both naming latencies and left posterior-mid fusiform cortex responses were influenced by the structural similarity of prime-probe object pairings in the categorically related condition, increasing with the number of shared features. None of the cerebral regions activated in a previous fMRI study of the identity NP effect (de Zubicaray et al., 2006) showed similar activation during semantic NP, including the left anterolateral temporal cortex, a region considered critical for semantic processing. The results suggest that the identity and semantic NP effects differ with respect to their neural mechanisms, and the label "semantic NP" might be a misnomer. We conclude that the effect is most likely the result of competition between structurally similar category exemplars that determines the efficiency of object name retrieval.

Rationality, governmentality, natio(norm)ality: Shaping social science, scientific objects, and the invisible

The discipline of education in Anglophone-dominant contexts has always grappled with a kind of status anxiety relative to other disciplines. This is in part due to the ways in which evidence has been thought about in the theoretico-experimental sciences relative to the ethico-redemptive ones. By examining that which was considered to fall to the side of science, even of social science, this paper complexifies contemporary debates over educational science and research, including debates over evidence-based education or assumed divisions between the quantitative/qualitative and empirical/conceptual. It reapproaches historical vagaries in discourses of vision that underscore the arbitrariness of approaches to social scientific research and its objects. A less-considered set of spatializations and regionalisms in social scientific conceptions of rationality especially are exposed through a close reading of the Harvard University philosopher William James' more marginalized texts.

The purposes of history? Curriculum studies, invisible objects and twenty-first century societies

A new intellectual epoch has generated new enterprises to suit changed beliefs and circumstances. A widespread sentiment in both formal historiography and curriculum studies reduces the “new” to the question of how knowledge is recognized as such, how it is gained, and how it is represented in narrative form. Whether the nature of history and conceptions of knowledge are, or ought to be, central considerations in curriculum studies and reducible to purposes or elevated as present orientated requires rethinking. This paper operates as an incitement to discourse that disrupts the protection and isolation of primary categories in the field whose troubling is overdue. In particular, the paper moves through several layers that highlight the lack of settlement regarding the endowment of objects for study with the status of the scientific. It traces how some “invisible” things have been included within the purview of curriculum history as objects of study and not others. The focus is the making of things deemed invisible into scientific objects (or not) and the specific site of analysis is the work of William James (1842-1910). James studied intensely both child mind and the ghost, the former of which becomes scientized and legitimated for further study, the latter abjected. This contrast opens key points for reconsideration regarding conditions of proof, validation criteria, and subject matters and points to opportunities to challenge some well-rehearsed foreclosures within progressive politics and education.

Transonic Properties of Accretion Disk Around Compact Objects

An accretion flow is necessarily transonic around a black hole.However, around a neutron star it may or may not be transonic, depending on the inner disk boundary conditions influenced by the neutron star. I will discuss various transonic behavior of the disk fluid in general relativistic (or pseudo general relativistic) framework. I will address that there are four types of sonic/critical point. possible to form in an accretion disk. It will be shown that how the fluid properties including location of sonic point's vary with angular momentum of the compact object which controls the overall disk dynamics and outflows.

On Visual Detection of Highly-occluded Objects for Harvesting Automation in Horticulture

Developing accurate and reliable crop detection algorithms is an important step for harvesting automation in horticulture. This paper presents a novel approach to visual detection of highly-occluded fruits. We use a conditional random field (CRF) on multi-spectral image data (colour and Near-Infrared Reflectance, NIR) to model two classes: crop and background. To describe these two classes, we explore a range of visual-texture features including local binary pattern, histogram of oriented gradients, and learn auto-encoder features. The pro-posed methods are evaluated using hand-labelled images from a dataset captured on a commercial capsicum farm. Experimental results are presented, and performance is evaluated in terms of the Area Under the Curve (AUC) of the precision-recall curves.Our current results achieve a maximum performance of 0.81AUC when combining all of the texture features in conjunction with colour information.

A comparative study of side-band Fresnel holograms recorded with self-imaging and general objects

This paper deals with new results obtained in regard to the reconstruction properties of side-band Fresnel holograms (SBFH) of self-imaging type objects (for example, gratings) as compared with those of general objects. The major finding is that a distribution I2, which appears on the real-image plane along with the conventional real-image I1, remains a 2Z distribution (where 2Z is the axial distance between the object and its self-imaging plane) under a variety of situations, while its nature and focusing properties differ from one situation to another. It is demonstrated that the two distributions I1 and I2 can be used in the development of a novel technique for image subtraction.

Recommendation of Multimedia Objects Using Metadata and Link Analysis

We investigate methods for recommending multimedia items suitable for an online multimedia sharing community and introduce a novel algorithm called UserRank for ranking multimedia items based on link analysis. We also take the initiative of applying EigenRumor from the domain of blogosphere to multimedia. Furthermore, we present a strategy for making personalized recommendation that combines UserRank with collaborative filtering. We evaluate our method with an informal user study and show that results obtained are promising.

From mundane to smart: Exploring interactions with ‘smart' design objects

In addition to functional and technological features, the role of augmented objects should also be seen in terms of how effectively they fit into the everyday practices of users and how they enhance users' experiences. In this article, the authors introduce a low-tech, internet-of-things technology called CAM (Cooperative Artefact Memory) that is used as a collaborative tool in design studio environments. CAM works as an object memory technology and allows industrial and product designers to collaboratively store relevant information onto their physical design objects, such as sketches, collages, storyboards, and physical mock-ups in the form of messages, annotations and external web links. In the context of this study, CAM serves as an important probing device to understand designers' interaction and experiences with augmented design objects, in their natural environment. The authors carried out a small-scale field trial of CAM in an academic design studio, over three student design projects. In this article, they discuss the findings of their field trial and show how CAM was used by the participants, how it was integrated into the design process and how it was appropriated for different purposes. The authors also found that CAM supported coordination and awareness within the design teams, yet its serendipitous and asynchronous nature facilitated creative and playful interactions between team members. In general, the results show how CAM transformed mundane design objects into “smart” objects that made the creative and playful side of cooperative design visible.