Uptake of an OHS code of practice by Australian construction firms

The Australian construction industry is moving towards the implementation of a voluntary code of practice (VCP) for occupational health and safety (OHS). The evidence suggests that highly-visible clients and project management firms, in addition to their subcontractors, will embrace such a code, while smaller firms not operating in high-profile contracting regimes may prove reticent. This paper incorporates qualitative data from a research project commissioned by Engineers Australia and supported by the Australian Contractors’ Association, Property Council of Australia, Royal Australian Institute of Architects, Association of Consulting Engineers Australia, Australian Procurement and Construction Council, Master Builders Australia and the Australian CRC for Construction Innovation. The paper aims to understand the factors that facilitate or prevent the uptake of the proposed VCP by smaller firms, together with pathways to adoption.

Uptake of an OHS code of practice by construction firms : barriers and enablers in an Australian industry

The Australian construction industry, reflecting a global trend, is moving towards the implementation of a voluntary code of practice (hereafter VCP) for occupational health and safety. The evidence suggests that highlyvisible clients and project management firms, in addition to their subcontractors, look set to embrace such a code. However, smaller firms not operating in high-profile contracting regimes may prove reticent to adopt a VCP. This paper incorporates qualitative data from a high-profile research project commissioned by Engineers Australia and supported by the Australian Contractors’ Association, Property Council of Australia, Royal Australian Institute of Architects, Association of Consulting Engineers Australia, Australian Procurement and Construction Council, Master Builders Australia and the Australian CRC for Construction Innovation. The paper aims to understand the factors that facilitate or prevent the uptake of the VCP by smaller firms, together with pathways to the adoption of a VCP by industry.

Determinants of knowledge transfer and learning in hybrid public private alliances

This paper uses the case study of a hybrid public-private strategic alliance as data to complement and contrast with the traditional views on knowledge transfer and learning between alliance partners. In particular, the paper explores whether the concept of competitive collaboration conceptualized by Hamel (1991) in his seminal work holds true for all forms of strategic alliances. Conceptualizing the knowledge boundaries of organisations in alliances as a ‘collaborative membrane’, we focus attention on the permeability of these boundaries rather than the actual location of the boundaries. In this vein, we present a case study of a major public sector organization that illustrates how these principles have allowed it to start rebuilding its internal capabilities adopting a more collaborative stance and ensuring their knowledge boundaries are highly porous as they move more major projects into hybrid public private alliance contracts.

Getting creative in health care

Health care accounts for a substantial and growing share of national expenditures, and Australia’s health-care system faces some unprecedented pressures. This paper examines the contribution of creative expertise and services to Australian health care. They are found to be making a range of contributions to the development and delivery of health-care goods and services, the initial training and ongoing professionalism of doctors and nurses, and the effective functioning of health-care buildings. Creative activities within health-care services are also undertaken by medical professionals and patients. Key functions that creative activities address are innovation and service delivery in information management and analysis, and making complex information comprehensible or more useful, assisting communication and reducing psycho-social and distance-mediated barriers, and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of services.

Learning spatial concepts from RatSLAM representations

RatSLAM is a biologically-inspired visual SLAM and navigation system that has been shown to be effective indoors and outdoors on real robots. The spatial representation at the core of RatSLAM, the experience map, forms in a distributed fashion as the robot learns the environment. The activity in RatSLAM’s experience map possesses some geometric properties, but still does not represent the world in a human readable form. A new system, dubbed RatChat, has been introduced to enable meaningful communication with the robot. The intention is to use the “language games” paradigm to build spatial concepts that can be used as the basis for communication. This paper describes the first step in the language game experiments, showing the potential for meaningful categorization of the spatial representations in RatSLAM.

Automatic calibration of a spiking head-direction network for representing robot orientation

Calibration of movement tracking systems is a difficult problem faced by both animals and robots. The ability to continuously calibrate changing systems is essential for animals as they grow or are injured, and highly desirable for robot control or mapping systems due to the possibility of component wear, modification, damage and their deployment on varied robotic platforms. In this paper we use inspiration from the animal head direction tracking system to implement a self-calibrating, neurally-based robot orientation tracking system. Using real robot data we demonstrate how the system can remove tracking drift and learn to consistently track rotation over a large range of velocities. The neural tracking system provides the first steps towards a fully neural SLAM system with improved practical applicability through selftuning and adaptation.

The effect of dialect mismatch on likelihood-maximising speech enhancement for noise-robust speech recognition

Traditional speech enhancement methods optimise signal-level criteria such as signal-to-noise ratio, but these approaches are sub-optimal for noise-robust speech recognition. Likelihood-maximising (LIMA) frameworks are an alternative that optimise parameters of enhancement algorithms based on state sequences generated for utterances with known transcriptions. Previous reports of LIMA frameworks have shown significant promise for improving speech recognition accuracies under additive background noise for a range of speech enhancement techniques. In this paper we discuss the drawbacks of the LIMA approach when multiple layers of acoustic mismatch are present – namely background noise and speaker accent. Experimentation using LIMA-based Mel-filterbank noise subtraction on American and Australian English in-car speech databases supports this discussion, demonstrating that inferior speech recognition performance occurs when a second layer of mismatch is seen during evaluation.

The application of phonetic distribution normalisation to likelihood-maximising speech enhancement for robust ASR

Traditional speech enhancement methods optimise signal-level criteria such as signal-to-noise ratio, but such approaches are sub-optimal for noise-robust speech recognition. Likelihood-maximising (LIMA) frameworks on the other hand, optimise the parameters of speech enhancement algorithms based on state sequences generated by a speech recogniser for utterances of known transcriptions. Previous applications of LIMA frameworks have generated a set of global enhancement parameters for all model states without taking in account the distribution of model occurrence, making optimisation susceptible to favouring frequently occurring models, in particular silence. In this paper, we demonstrate the existence of highly disproportionate phonetic distributions on two corpora with distinct speech tasks, and propose to normalise the influence of each phone based on a priori occurrence probabilities. Likelihood analysis and speech recognition experiments verify this approach for improving ASR performance in noisy environments.