GrabCutSFM : how 3D information improves unsupervised object segmentation

In this paper, we present an unsupervised graph cut based object segmentation method using 3D information provided by Structure from Motion (SFM), called Grab- CutSFM. Rather than focusing on the segmentation problem using a trained model or human intervention, our approach aims to achieve meaningful segmentation autonomously with direct application to vision based robotics. Generally, object (foreground) and background have certain discriminative geometric information in 3D space. By exploring the 3D information from multiple views, our proposed method can segment potential objects correctly and automatically compared to conventional unsupervised segmentation using only 2D visual cues. Experiments with real video data collected from indoor and outdoor environments verify the proposed approach.

Introducing Masculinity Studies to Information Systems research : the case of Gaydar

I believe that studies of men's gendered experiences of information systems are needed. In order to support this claim, I introduce the area of Masculinity Studies to Information Systems research and, using this, present an exploratory analysis of an internet dating website for gay men – Gaydar. The information system, which forms part of the Gaydar community, is shown to shape, and be shaped by the members as they accept and challenge aspects of it as related to their identities. In doing this, I show how the intertwined processes of information systems development and use contribute to the creation of diverse interpretations of masculinity within a group of men. In sum, my analysis highlights different kinds of men and different versions of masculinity that can sometimes be associated with different experiences of information systems. The implications of this work centre on the need to expand our knowledge of men's gendered experiences with information systems, to reflect upon processes of technology facilitated categorisation and to consider the influences that contribute to the roll out of particular software features along with the underlying rationales for market segmentation in the software and software-based services industries.

Locating packaged software in information systems research

The papers in this issue focus our attention to packaged software as an increasingly important, but still relatively poorly understood phenomena in the information systems research community. The topic is not new: Lucas et al. (1988) wrote a provocative piece focused on the issues with implementing packaged software. A decade later, Carmel (1997) argued that packaged software was both ideally suited for American entrepreneurial activity and rapidly growing. The information systems research community, however, has moved more slowly to engage this change (e.g., Sawyer, 2001). The papers in this special issue represent a significant step in better engaging the issues of packaged software relative to information systems research, and highlighting opportunities for additional relevant research.

Social Media Sites as Online Information Grounds : An exploratory study of the ways in which Information Technology (IT) professionals experience social media

Social media tools are often the result of innovations in Information Technology and developed by IT professionals and innovators. Nevertheless, IT professionals, many of whom are responsible for designing and building social media technologies, have not been investigated on how they themselves use or experience social media for professional purposes. This study will use Information Grounds Theory (Pettigrew, 1998) as a framework to study IT professionals’ experience in using social media for professional purposes. Information grounds facilitates the opportunistic discovery of information within social settings created temporarily at a place where people gather for a specific purpose (e.g., doctors’ waiting rooms, office tea rooms etc.), but the social atmosphere stimulates spontaneous sharing of information (Pettigrew, 1999). This study proposes that social media has the qualities that make it a rich information grounds; people participate from separate “places” in cyberspace in a synchronous manner in real-time, making it almost as dynamic and unplanned as physical information grounds. There is limited research on how social media platforms are perceived as a “place,” (a place to go to, a place to gather, or a place to be seen in) that is comparable to physical spaces. There is also no empirical study on how IT professionals use or “experience” social media. The data for this study is being collected through a study of IT professionals who currently use Twitter. A digital ethnography approach is being taken wherein the researcher uses online observations and “follows” the participants online and observes their behaviours and interactions on social media. Next, a sub-set of participants will be interviewed on their experiences with and within social media and how social media compares with traditional methods of information grounds, information communication, and collaborative environments. An Evolved Grounded Theory (Glaser, 1992) approach will be used to analyse tweets data and interviews and to map the findings against the Information Ground Theory. Findings from this study will provide foundational understanding of IT professionals’ experiences within social media, and can help both professionals and researchers understand this fast-evolving method of communications.

Impact of information on intentions to vaccinate in a potential epidemic : Swine-origin Influenza A (H1N1)

Vaccination campaigns to prevent the spread of epidemics are successful only if the targeted populations subscribe to the recommendations of health authorities. However, because compulsory vaccination is hardly conceivable in modern democracies, governments need to convince their populations through efficient and persuasive information campaigns. In the context of the swine-origin A (H1N1) 2009 pandemic, we use an interactive study among the general public in the South of France, with 175 participants, to explore what type of information can induce change in vaccination intentions at both aggregate and individual levels. We find that individual attitudes to vaccination are based on rational appraisal of the situation, and that it is information of a purely scientific nature that has the only significant positive effect on intention to vaccinate.

Diversifying Information Literacy Research : An Informed Learning Perspective

This article uses the idea of informed learning, an interpretation of information literacy that focuses on people’s information experiences rather than their skills or attributes, to analyse the character of using information to learn in diverse communities and settings, including digital, faith, indigenous and ethnic communities. While researchers of information behaviour or information seeking and use have investi- AU :2 gated people’s information worlds in diverse contexts, this work is still at its earliest stages in the information literacy domain. To date, information literacy research has largely occurred in what might be considered mainstream educational and workplace contexts, with some emerging work in community settings. These have been mostly in academic libraries, schools and government workplaces. What does information literacy look like beyond these environments? How might we understand the experience of effective information use in a range of community settings, from the perspective of empirical research and other sources? The article concludes by commenting on the significance of diversifying the range of information experience contexts,for information literacy research and professional practice.

User expertise in contemporary information systems : conceptualization, measurement and application

The development of user expertise is a strategic imperative for organizations in hyper-competitive markets. This paper conceptualizes opreationalises and validates user expertise in contemporary Information Systems (IS) as a formative, multidimensional index. Such a validated and widely accepted index would facilitate progression of past research on user competence and efficacy of IS to complex contemporary IS, while at the same time providing a benchmark for organizations to track their user expertise. The validation involved three separate studies, including exploratory and confirmatory phases, using data from 244 respondents.

Tax Deductible Giving in 2010 - 2011:ACPNS Current Issues Information Sheet 2013/1

Each year The Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies (ACPNS) at QUT analyses statistics on tax-deductible donations made by Australians in their individual income tax returns to Deductible Gift Recipients (DGRs). The information presented below is based on the amount and type of tax-deductible donations made by Australian taxpayers to DGRs for the period 1 July 2010 to 30 June 2011 extracted from the Australian Taxation Office's publication Taxation Statistics 2010-2011.1

Classifier selection using sequential error ratio criterion for multi-instance and multi-sample fusion

Classifier selection is a problem encountered by multi-biometric systems that aim to improve performance through fusion of decisions. A particular decision fusion architecture that combines multiple instances (n classifiers) and multiple samples (m attempts at each classifier) has been proposed in previous work to achieve controlled trade-off between false alarms and false rejects. Although analysis on text-dependent speaker verification has demonstrated better performance for fusion of decisions with favourable dependence compared to statistically independent decisions, the performance is not always optimal. Given a pool of instances, best performance with this architecture is obtained for certain combination of instances. Heuristic rules and diversity measures have been commonly used for classifier selection but it is shown that optimal performance is achieved for the `best combination performance' rule. As the search complexity for this rule increases exponentially with the addition of classifiers, a measure - the sequential error ratio (SER) - is proposed in this work that is specifically adapted to the characteristics of sequential fusion architecture. The proposed measure can be used to select a classifier that is most likely to produce a correct decision at each stage. Error rates for fusion of text-dependent HMM based speaker models using SER are compared with other classifier selection methodologies. SER is shown to achieve near optimal performance for sequential fusion of multiple instances with or without the use of multiple samples. The methodology applies to multiple speech utterances for telephone or internet based access control and to other systems such as multiple finger print and multiple handwriting sample based identity verification systems.

Information quality in social media : a conceptual model

Social Media (SM) is increasingly being integrated with business information in decision making. Unique characteristics of social media (e.g. wide accessibility, permanence, global audience, recentness, and ease of use) raise new issues with information quality (IQ); quite different from traditional considerations of IQ in information systems (IS) evaluation. This paper presents a preliminary conceptual model of information quality in social media (IQnSM) derived through directed content analysis and employing characteristics of analytic theory in the study protocol. Based in the notion of ‘fitness for use’, IQnSM is highly use and user centric and is defined as “the degree to which information is suitable for doing a specified task by a specific user, in a certain context”. IQnSM is operationalised as hierarchical, formed by the three dimensions (18 measures): intrinsic quality, contextual quality and representational quality. A research plan for empirically validating the model is proposed.

Analyzing and defining information requirements of knowledge intensive construction management tasks on BIM

With the increasing popularity and adoption of building information modeling (BIM), the amount of digital information available about a building is overwhelming. Enormous challenges remain however in identifying meaningful and required information from a complex BIM model to support a particular construction management (CM) task. Detailed specifications of information required by different construction domains and expressive and easy-to-use BIM reasoning mechanisms are seen as an important means in addressing these challenges. This paper analyzes some of the characteristics and requirements of component-specific construction knowledge in relation to the current work practice and BIM-based applications. It is argued that domain ontologies and information extraction approaches, such as queries could significantly bring much needed support for knowledge sharing and integration of information between design, construction and facility management.

Feature-domain super-resolution for iris recognition

Uncooperative iris identification systems at a distance suffer from poor resolution of the acquired iris images, which significantly degrades iris recognition performance. Super-resolution techniques have been employed to enhance the resolution of iris images and improve the recognition performance. However, most existing super-resolution approaches proposed for the iris biometric super-resolve pixel intensity values, rather than the actual features used for recognition. This paper thoroughly investigates transferring super-resolution of iris images from the intensity domain to the feature domain. By directly super-resolving only the features essential for recognition, and by incorporating domain specific information from iris models, improved recognition performance compared to pixel domain super-resolution can be achieved. A framework for applying super-resolution to nonlinear features in the feature-domain is proposed. Based on this framework, a novel feature-domain super-resolution approach for the iris biometric employing 2D Gabor phase-quadrant features is proposed. The approach is shown to outperform its pixel domain counterpart, as well as other feature domain super-resolution approaches and fusion techniques.

Management accounting adaptability in an integrated information system environment

In this study, we explore the relationship between the qualities of the information system environment and management accounting adaptability. The information system environment refers to three distinct elements: the degree of information system integration, system flexibility, and shared knowledge between business unit managers and the IT function. We draw on the literature on integrated information systems (IIS) and management accounting change and propose a model to test the hypothesized relationships. The sample for this study consists of Australian companies from all industries.

Modelling the information seeking user by the decision they make

The article focuses on how the information seeker makes decisions about relevance. It will employ a novel decision theory based on quantum probabilities. This direction derives from mounting research within the field of cognitive science showing that decision theory based on quantum probabilities is superior to modelling human judgements than standard probability models [2, 1]. By quantum probabilities, we mean decision event space is modelled as vector space rather than the usual Boolean algebra of sets. In this way,incompatible perspectives around a decision can be modelled leading to an interference term which modifies the law of total probability. The interference term is crucial in modifying the probability judgements made by current probabilistic systems so they align better with human judgement. The goal of this article is thus to model the information seeker user as a decision maker. For this purpose, signal detection models will be sketched which are in principle applicable in a wide variety of information seeking scenarios.

Designing a continuum of quality external cause of injury information in Queensland : from ambulance to hospital

This study is the first to employ an epidemiological framework to evaluate the ‘fit-for-purpose’ of ICD-10-AM external cause of injury codes, ambulance and hospital clinical documentation for injury surveillance. Importantly, this thesis develops an evidence-based platform to guide future improvements in routine data collections used to inform the design of effective injury prevention strategies. Quantification of the impact of ambulance clinical records on the overall information quality of Queensland hospital morbidity data collections for injury causal information is a unique and notable contribution of this study.