Virtual prototyping for planning bridge construction

4D simulation, building information modeling, virtual construction, computer simulation and virtual prototyping are emerging topics in the building construction industry. These techniques not only relate to the buildings themselves, but can also be applied to other forms of construction, including bridges. Since bridge construction is a complex process involving multiple types of plant and equipment, applying such virtual methods benefits the understanding of all parties in construction practice. This paper describes the relationship between temporary platforms, plant and equipment resources and a proposed-built model in the construction planning and use of Virtual Prototyping Simulation (VPS) to implement different construction scenarios in order to help planners identify an optimal construction plan. A case study demonstrates the use of VPS integrated with temporary platform design and plant and equipment-resource allocation to generate different construction scenarios.

The role of the rule of law in virtual communities

Please see the updated published version of this work at http://eprints.qut.edu.au/37850/ There is a severe tendency in cyberlaw theory to delegitimize state intervention in the governance of virtual communities. Much of the existing theory makes one of two fundamental flawed assumptions: that communities will always be best governed without the intervention of the state; or that the territorial state can best encourage the development of communities by creating enforceable property rights and allowing the market to resolve any disputes. These assumptions do not ascribe sufficient weight to the value-laden support that the territorial state always provides to private governance regimes, the inefficiencies that will tend to limit the development utopian communities, and the continued role of the territorial state in limiting autonomy in accordance with communal values...

The social car : new interactive vehicular applications derived from social media and urban informatics

Digital information that is place- and time-specific, is increasingly becoming available on all aspects of the urban landscape. People (cf. the Social Web), places (cf. the Geo Web), and physical objects (cf. ubiquitous computing, the Internet of Things) are increasingly infused with sensors, actuators, and tagged with a wealth of digital information. Urban informatics research explores these emerging digital layers of the city at the intersection of people, place and technology. However, little is known about the challenges and new opportunities that these digital layers may offer to road users driving through today’s mega cities. We argue that this aspect is worth exploring in particular with regards to Auto-UI’s overarching goal of making cars both safer and more enjoyable. This paper presents the findings of a pilot study, which included 14 urban informatics research experts participating in a guided ideation (idea creation) workshop within a simulated environment. They were immersed into different driving scenarios to imagine novel urban informatics type of applications specific to the driving context.

Envisaging alternatives for practice : a study into the way concepts of sustain-ability can be explored within an interactive media arts practice

This practice-led study explores different ways the subject of sustain-ability can be addressed within an Interactive Media Arts practice. The exploration encompasses three creative projects, Charmed, Distracted and e. Menura superba. Grounded in an ecological philosophy inspired by vegetarianism and the critical design philosophy of defuturing, the work shows how such a philosophical position can guide the redirection of practice. The concern for sustain-ability within my practice, and more generally the question of Interactive Media Arts and sustain-ability, I refer to as a problématique. The objective of this study is not one of finding an answer or a truth to an instrumentally posed question, but to explore the complexities of the problématique through a program of practice and intellectual investigation. The aim being to redirect my practice and to find a renewed raison d’être for practice through a process of opening up, encountering, and discovering otherwise unknown possibilities for practice. In the context of sustain-ability, this opening up of possibilities can be considered a form of futuring. A futuring I argue is only possible if the things we take for granted as integral aspects of our being, practices and life worlds, are revealed in ways that estrange them, rendering them visible in ways that allow questioning and change.

Creative industries in China : art, design and media

Creative industries in China provides a fresh account of China’s emerging commercial cultural sector. The author shows how developments in Chinese art, design and media industries are reflected in policy, in market activity, and grassroots participation. Never has the attraction of being a media producer, an artist, or a designer in China been so enticing. National and regional governments offer financial incentives; consumption of cultural goods and services have increased; creative workers from Europe, North America and Asia are moving to Chinese cities; culture is increasingly positioned as a pillar industry. But what does this mean for our understanding of Chinese society? Can culture be industrialised following the low-cost model of China’s manufacturing economy. Is the national government really committed to social liberalisation? This engaging book is a valuable resource for students and scholars interested in social change in China. It draws on leading Chinese scholarship together with insights from global media studies, economic geography and cultural studies.

Can Beijing become a global media capital?

The commercialization of Chinese media has taken place over the past two decades; it has become a significant force since 2001 when China joined the World Trade Organisation. With demand for original content increasing and China contemplating a cultural trade deficit in media content, there is much discussion of agglomeration and clustering. Beijing, as the national media centre of China, witnesses a process of media agglomeration while bearing the problem of cultural export during the media commercialization. Michael Curtin‟s idea of media capital, which absorbs media resources and personnel and exports media products transnationally, provides a dynamic perspective of understanding media agglomeration and dispersion under different political social and cultural circumstances. Hence the question whether Beijing is going to transform into a transnational media capital is worth studying, in order to observe and comprehend China‟s media industry in transition. Drawing on Michael Curtin‟s three media capital trajectories, the paper interprets tensions and challenges generated in the process of media industry agglomeration and growth in Beijing. Emphasis is placed on the third trajectory, socio-cultural variation.

Emergent innovation through the co-evolution of informal and formal media economies

Well-established distinctions between amateur and professional are blurring as the impact of social media, changes in cultural consumption, and crises in copyright industries’ business models are felt across society and economy. I call this the increasingly rapid co-evolution of the formal market and informal household sectors and analyse it through the concept of ‘social network markets’ – individual choices are made on the basis of other’s choices and such networked preferencing is enhanced by the growing ubiquity of social media platforms. This may allow us better to understand sources of disruption and innovation in audiovisual production and distribution in wealthy Western markets which are as significant as those posed by informal practices outside the West. I examine what is happening around the monetization and professionalization of online video (YouTube, for example) and the socialization of professional production strategies (transmedia, for example) as innovation from the margins.

Managing distraction in 21st century learning environments

First year students attend face-to-face classes armed with an arsenal of internet enabled digital devices. The conundrum is that while these devices offer scope for enhancing opportunities for engagement in face-to-face learning, they may simultaneously distract students away from learning and compound isolation issues. This paper considers how to best to use these devices for maximum engagement in first year face-to-face learning so as to assist students in connecting with other learners and instructors within the learning environment

Neural network-based detection of virtual environment anomalies

The increasingly widespread use of large-scale 3D virtual environments has translated into an increasing effort required from designers, developers and testers. While considerable research has been conducted into assisting the design of virtual world content and mechanics, to date, only limited contributions have been made regarding the automatic testing of the underpinning graphics software and hardware. In the work presented in this paper, two novel neural network-based approaches are presented to predict the correct visualization of 3D content. Multilayer perceptrons and self-organizing maps are trained to learn the normal geometric and color appearance of objects from validated frames and then used to detect novel or anomalous renderings in new images. Our approach is general, for the appearance of the object is learned rather than explicitly represented. Experiments were conducted on a game engine to determine the applicability and effectiveness of our algorithms. The results show that the neural network technology can be effectively used to address the problem of automatic and reliable visual testing of 3D virtual environments.

Serious playground : using Second Life to engage high school students in urban planning

Virtual world platforms such as Second Life have been successfully used in educational contexts to motivate and engage learners. This article reports on an exploratory workshop involving a group of high school students using Second Life for an urban planning project. Young people are traditionally an under-represented demographic when it comes to participating in urban planning and decision making processes. The research team developed activities that combined technology with a constructivist approach to learning. Real world experiences and purposes ensured that the workshop enabled students to see the relevance of their learning. Our design also ensured that play remained an important part of the learning. By conceiving of the workshop as a ‘serious playground’ we investigated the ludic potential of learning in a virtual world.

Kaleidoscopes and contradictions : the legitimacy of social media for public relations

If the current discourses of progress are to be believed, the new or social media promise a kaleidoscope of opportunity for connecting and informing citizens. This is by allegedly revitalizing the fading legitimacy and practice of institutions and providing an agent for social interaction. However, as social media adoption has increased, it has revealed a wealth of contradictions both of its own making and reproduction of past action. This has created a crisis for traditional media as well as for public relations. For example, social media such as WikiLeaks have bypassed official channels about government information. In other cases, social media such as Facebook and Twitter informed BBC coverage of the Rio Olympics. Although old media are unlikely to go away, social media have had an impact with several large familybased media companies collapsing or being reintegrated into the new paradigm. To use Walter Lippman’s analogy of the phantom public, the social media contradictorily serve to both disparate the phantom in part and reinforce it...

Gartner Surface Process Modelling movie

AR process modelling movie presented at Gartner BPM Summit in Sydney, August, 2011. Video showing us using the MS Surface at QUT to perform collaborative process modelling.

A simulated annealing algorithm for energy efficient virtual machine placement

Improving energy efficiency has become increasingly important in data centers in recent years to reduce the rapidly growing tremendous amounts of electricity consumption. The power dissipation of the physical servers is the root cause of power usage of other systems, such as cooling systems. Many efforts have been made to make data centers more energy efficient. One of them is to minimize the total power consumption of these servers in a data center through virtual machine consolidation, which is implemented by virtual machine placement. The placement problem is often modeled as a bin packing problem. Due to the NP-hard nature of the problem, heuristic solutions such as First Fit and Best Fit algorithms have been often used and have generally good results. However, their performance leaves room for further improvement. In this paper we propose a Simulated Annealing based algorithm, which aims at further improvement from any feasible placement. This is the first published attempt of using SA to solve the VM placement problem to optimize the power consumption. Experimental results show that this SA algorithm can generate better results, saving up to 25 percentage more energy than First Fit Decreasing in an acceptable time frame.

Energy-efficient virtual machine placement in data centers by genetic algorithm

Server consolidation using virtualization technology has become an important technology to improve the energy efficiency of data centers. Virtual machine placement is the key in the server consolidation. In the past few years, many approaches to the virtual machine placement have been proposed. However, existing virtual machine placement approaches to the virtual machine placement problem consider the energy consumption by physical machines in a data center only, but do not consider the energy consumption in communication network in the data center. However, the energy consumption in the communication network in a data center is not trivial, and therefore should be considered in the virtual machine placement in order to make the data center more energy-efficient. In this paper, we propose a genetic algorithm for a new virtual machine placement problem that considers the energy consumption in both the servers and the communication network in the data center. Experimental results show that the genetic algorithm performs well when tackling test problems of different kinds, and scales up well when the problem size increases.