Detection of rain in acoustic recordings of the environment using machine learning techniques

This thesis is concerned with the detection and prediction of rain in environmental recordings using different machine learning algorithms. The results obtained in this research will help ecologists to efficiently analyse environmental data and monitor biodiversity.

Health care consumers’ perspectives on pharmacist integration into private general practitioner clinics in Malaysia: A qualitative study

Background Pharmacists are considered medication experts but are underutilized and exist mainly at the periphery of the Malaysian primary health care team. Private general practitioners (GPs) in Malaysia are granted rights under the Poison Act 1952 to prescribe and dispense medications at their primary care clinics. As most consumers obtain their medications from their GPs, community pharmacists’ involvement in ensuring safe use of medicines is limited. The integration of a pharmacist into private GP clinics has the potential to contribute to quality use of medicines. This study aims to explore health care consumers’ views on the integration of pharmacists within private GP clinics in Malaysia. Methods A purposive sample of health care consumers in Selangor and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, were invited to participate in focus groups and semi-structured interviews. Sessions were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim and thematically analyzed using NVivo 10. Results A total of 24 health care consumers participated in two focus groups and six semi-structured interviews. Four major themes were identified: 1) pharmacists’ role viewed mainly as supplying medications, 2) readiness to accept pharmacists in private GP clinics, 3) willingness to pay for pharmacy services, and 4) concerns about GPs’ resistance to pharmacist integration. Consumers felt that a pharmacist integrated into a private GP clinic could offer potential benefits such as to provide trustworthy information on the use and potential side effects of medications and screening for medication misadventure. The potential increase in costs passed on to consumers and GPs’ reluctance were perceived as barriers to integration. Conclusion This study provides insights into consumers’ perspectives on the roles of pharmacists within private GP clinics in Malaysia. Consumers generally supported pharmacist integration into private primary health care clinics. However, for pharmacists to expand their capacity in providing integrated and collaborative primary care services to consumers, barriers to pharmacist integration need to be addressed.

Driver’s behavioural changes with new Intelligent Transport System interventions at railway level crossings: A driving simulator study

Improving safety at railway level crossings is an important issue for the Australian transport system. Governments, the rail industry and road organisations have tried a variety of countermeasures for many years to improve railway level crossing safety. New types of Intelligent Transport System (ITS) interventions are now emerging due to the availability and the affordability of technology. These interventions target both actively and passively protected railway level crossings and attempt to address drivers’ errors at railway crossings, which are mainly a failure to detect the crossing or the train and misjudgement of the train approach speed and distance. This study aims to assess the effectiveness of three emerging ITS that the rail industry considers implementing in Australia: a visual in-vehicle ITS, an audio in-vehicle ITS, as well as an on-road flashing beacons intervention. The evaluation was conducted on an advanced driving simulator with 20 participants per trialled technology, each participant driving once without any technology and once with one of the ITS interventions. Every participant drove through a range of active and passive crossings with and without trains approaching. Their speed approach of the crossing, head movements and stopping compliance were measured. Results showed that driver behaviour was changed with the three ITS interventions at passive crossings, while limited effects were found at active crossings, even with reduced visibility. The on-road intervention trialled was unsuccessful in improving driver behaviour; the audio and visual ITS improved driver behaviour when a train was approaching. A trend toward worsening driver behaviour with the visual ITS was observed when no trains were approaching. This trend was not observed for the audio ITS intervention, which appears to be the ITS intervention with the highest potential for improving safety at passive crossings.

Temporal

An evolving meditation upon the complex, periodic processes that mark Australia’s seasonality, and our increasing ability to disturb them. By amplifying and shining light upon a myriad of mysterious lives lived in blackness, the work presents a sensuous, deep engagement with the rich, irregular spectras of seasonal forms: whilst hinting at a far less comforting background increasingly framed by anthropogenic climate change. ’Temporal’ uses custom interactive systems, illusionary techniques and real time spatial audio processes that draw upon a rich array of media, including seasonal, nocturnal field recordings sourced in the Bundaberg region and detailed observations of foliage & flowering phases from that region. By drawing inspiration from the subtle transitions between what Europeans once named ‘Summer’ and ‘Autumn’ and the multiple seasons recognised by other cultures, whilst also including bodily disturbances within the work, ’Temporal’ creates a compellingly immersive environment that wraps audiences in luscious yet ominous atmospheres beyond sight and hearing. This work completes a two year long project of dynamic mediated installations that have been presented in Sydney, Beijing, Cairns and Bundanon, that have each been somehow choreographed by environmental cycles; alluding to a new framework for making works that we named ‘Seasonal’. These powerful, responsive & experiential works each draw attention to that which will disappear when biodiverse worlds have descended into an era of permanent darkness – an ‘extinction of human experience’. By tapping into the deeply interlocking seasonal cycles of environments that are themselves intimately linked with social, geographical & political concerns, participating audiences are therefore challenged to see the night, their locality & ecologies in new ways through extending their personal limits of perception, imagery & comprehension.

Towards robust automatic affective classification of images using facial expressions for practical applications

Affect is an important feature of multimedia content and conveys valuable information for multimedia indexing and retrieval. Most existing studies for affective content analysis are limited to low-level features or mid-level representations, and are generally criticized for their incapacity to address the gap between low-level features and high-level human affective perception. The facial expressions of subjects in images carry important semantic information that can substantially influence human affective perception, but have been seldom investigated for affective classification of facial images towards practical applications. This paper presents an automatic image emotion detector (IED) for affective classification of practical (or non-laboratory) data using facial expressions, where a lot of “real-world” challenges are present, including pose, illumination, and size variations etc. The proposed method is novel, with its framework designed specifically to overcome these challenges using multi-view versions of face and fiducial point detectors, and a combination of point-based texture and geometry. Performance comparisons of several key parameters of relevant algorithms are conducted to explore the optimum parameters for high accuracy and fast computation speed. A comprehensive set of experiments with existing and new datasets, shows that the method is effective despite pose variations, fast, and appropriate for large-scale data, and as accurate as the method with state-of-the-art performance on laboratory-based data. The proposed method was also applied to affective classification of images from the British Broadcast Corporation (BBC) in a task typical for a practical application providing some valuable insights.

Taking the right road to somewhere

What do you with a teenager that no high school in Queensland wants sitting in its classrooms? A child that's disruptive, violent, who won't turn up? Who, it seems, the system has given up on? Any police officer, or child welfare worker will tell you what's likely to happen... a story with an unhappy ending, usually involving brushes with the law and then jail. But a unique project being run in Brisbane is trying to break that cycle.

Indigenous university champion angles for outcomes

The proportion of Australians to finish uni is about 25 per cent. This figure varies dramatically from the amount of Indigenous kids who attain the same result. Only five percent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders gain a degree. That's why Marnee Shay from Ilkey on the Sunshine Coast is bucking the trend... above and beyond expectations. She's believed to be the first Aboriginal recipient of the Chancellor's Medal at the University of the Sunshine Coast, and she's now starting a PHD at QUT in Brisbane. The ABC's Jon Coghill asked her about her studies and what the medal signifies.

Semi-automated annotation of environmental acoustic recordings

Environmental sensors collect massive amounts of audio data. This thesis investigates computational methods to support human analysts in identifying faunal vocalisations from that audio. A series of experiments was conducted to trial the effectiveness of novel user interfaces. This research examines the rapid scanning of spectrograms, decision support tools for users, and cleaning methods for folksonomies. Together, these investigations demonstrate that providing computational support to human analysts increases their efficiency and accuracy; this allows bioacoustics projects to efficiently utilise their valuable human analysts.

A simulator evaluation of effects of assistive technologies on driver cognitive load at railway level crossings

Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) have the potential to substantially reduce the number of crashes caused by human errors at railway levels crossings. However, such systems could overwhelm drivers, generate different types of driver errors and have negative effects on safety at level crossing. The literature shows an increasing interest for new ITS for increasing driver situational awareness at level crossings, as well as evaluations of such new systems on compliance. To our knowledge, the potential negative effects of such technologies have not been comprehensively evaluated yet. This study aimed at assessing the effect of different ITS interventions, designed to enhance driver behaviour at railway crossings, on driver’s cognitive loads. Fifty eight participants took part in a driving simulator study in which three ITS devices were tested: an in-vehicle visual ITS, an in-vehicle audio ITS, and an on-road valet system. Driver cognitive load was objectively and subjectively assessed for each ITS intervention. Objective data were collected from a heart rate monitor and an eye tracker, while subjective data was collected with the NASA-TLX questionnaire. Overall, results indicated that the three trialled technologies did not result in significant changes in cognitive load while approaching crossings.

“They are like family”: The emotional cost experienced by nurses when caring for haemodialysis patients

Background Haemodialysis (HD) nursing is characterised by frequent, intense interactions with patients over long periods of time resulting in a unique nurse-patient relationship. Due to the life-limiting nature of end-stage renal failure, nurses are likely to have repeated exposures to the death of patients with whom they have formed relationships. Repeated exposure to patient death translates into frequent grief experiences. There is scant literature on the psychological impact of patient death for nurses working in the HD setting. Aims To explore HD nurses experiences of patient death and coping mechanisms used. Methods A sequential mixed method study investigating job satisfaction, stress and burnout found that HD nurses had high levels of stress and burnout. These results were explored in more detail during 8 semi-structured interviews with HD nurses. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and subjected to thematic analysis. Results Three themes were identified that highlight the stress experienced by nurses when a haemodialysis patient dies. The first theme, “quazi-family” describes the close relationship which forms between nurses and patients. The “complicated grief” theme outlines the impact of death on HD nurses, and the final theme, “remembrance” explains some of the coping mechanisms used in the grieving process. Conclusion Nurses develop individual coping mechanisms to accommodate the grief and loss experienced when a “close” patient dies. The grieving process caused by the death of patient’s needs to be recognised by nurses and nurse managers as causing psychological stress and strain.

Robust principal component analysis in water quality index development

Some statistical procedures already available in literature are employed in developing the water quality index, WQI. The nature of complexity and interdependency that occur in physical and chemical processes of water could be easier explained if statistical approaches were applied to water quality indexing. The most popular statistical method used in developing WQI is the principal component analysis (PCA). In literature, the WQI development based on the classical PCA mostly used water quality data that have been transformed and normalized. Outliers may be considered in or eliminated from the analysis. However, the classical mean and sample covariance matrix used in classical PCA methodology is not reliable if the outliers exist in the data. Since the presence of outliers may affect the computation of the principal component, robust principal component analysis, RPCA should be used. Focusing in Langat River, the RPCA-WQI was introduced for the first time in this study to re-calculate the DOE-WQI. Results show that the RPCA-WQI is capable to capture similar distribution in the existing DOE-WQI.

Visual fingerprints of the acoustic environment: The use of acoustic indices to characterise natural habitats

Acoustic recordings play an increasingly important role in monitoring terrestrial environments. However, due to rapid advances in technology, ecologists are accumulating more audio than they can listen to. Our approach to this big-data challenge is to visualize the content of long-duration audio recordings by calculating acoustic indices. These are statistics which describe the temporal-spectral distribution of acoustic energy and reflect content of ecological interest. We combine spectral indices to produce false-color spectrogram images. These not only reveal acoustic content but also facilitate navigation. An additional analytic challenge is to find appropriate descriptors to summarize the content of 24-hour recordings, so that it becomes possible to monitor long-term changes in the acoustic environment at a single location and to compare the acoustic environments of different locations. We describe a 24-hour ‘acoustic-fingerprint’ which shows some preliminary promise.

Performance analysis of secure unified communications in the VMware-based cloud

Unified communications as a service (UCaaS) can be regarded as a cost-effective model for on-demand delivery of unified communications services in the cloud. However, addressing security concerns has been seen as the biggest challenge to the adoption of IT services in the cloud. This study set up a cloud system via VMware suite to emulate hosting unified communications (UC), the integration of two or more real time communication systems, services in the cloud in a laboratory environment. An Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) gateway was also set up to support network-level security for UCaaS against possible security exposures. This study was aimed at analysis of an implementation of UCaaS over IPSec and evaluation of the latency of encrypted UC traffic while protecting that traffic. Our test results show no latency while IPSec is implemented with a G.711 audio codec. However, the performance of the G.722 audio codec with an IPSec implementation affects the overall performance of the UC server. These results give technical advice and guidance to those involved in security controls in UC security on premises as well as in the cloud.

Implementing a context-based environmental science unit in the middle years: Teaching and learning at the creek

Engaging middle-school students in science continues to be a challenge in Australian schools. One initiative that has been tried in the senior years but is a more recent development in the middle years is the context-based approach. In this ethnographic study, we researched the teaching and learning transactions that occurred in one 9th grade science class studying a context-based Environmental Science unit that included visits to the local creek for 11 weeks. Data were derived from field notes, audio and video recorded conversations, interviews, student journals and classroom documents with a particular focus on two selected groups of students. This paper presents two assertions that highlight pedagogical approaches that contributed to learning. Firstly, spontaneous teaching episodes created opportunities for in-the-moment questioning by the teacher that led to students’ awareness of environmental issues and the scientific method; secondly, group work using flip cameras afforded opportunities for students to connect the science concepts with the context. Furthermore, students reported positively about the unit and expressed their appreciation for the opportunity to visit the creek frequently. This findings from this study should encourage teachers to take students into the real-world field for valuable teaching and learning experiences that are not available in the formal classroom.

European audiovisual production companies adapting to strategic challenges

These are turbulent times for audio- visual production companies. Radical changes, both inside and outside the organizations, reach across national markets and different genres. For instance, production methods are changing; the demand from audiences and advertisers is changing; power relations between the actors involved in the value chain are changing; and increasing concentration makes the market even more competitive for small independent players. From a perspective of the structure–conduct– performance paradigm (Ramstad, 1997) it is reasonable to expect that these changes on a structural level of the industry will cause the production companies to adapt their strategic behaviour. The current challenges for media companies are a combination of rising complexity and uncertainty in the market (Picard, 2004). The increasing complexity can for instance be observed in the growing number of market segments and in the continuing trend towards cross- media strategies where media companies operate in multiple markets and on multiple platforms...