QuickTime multi-track theatricks

Digital media, corporate database applications and intranets provide efficient ways to create, store and deliver information and educational services. However some academics perceive new workload and other constraints eroding the potency of these technologies. Proposed corporate level information management systems for digital objects and their metadata are new complexities entering academicsÕ thoughts about using online multimedia.

Few staff understand digital multimedia concepts and fewer still, the systems designed to deal with IP management, copyright law compliance and the tracking of digital resource creation processes. Faltering staff enthusiasm warns of their need to experience working models and tangible benefits from these new directions. A project in Deakin's Faculty of Education provides a case study showing how QuickTime is helping academics understand, and increase their use of, multimedia in e-learning environments with an integrated library of digital resources with metadata.

We also report our experience of QuickTime in creating interactive learning objects using multi-tracks. We discuss our idea of theatricks as a performance drawcard - people will come! There is orchestration of multimedia and QuickTime conducts the events, its flexible functionalities providing a safer development environment for solving problems and grasping opportunities.

While difficult for some academics to comprehend, scripting automation and database connectivity through intelligent interfaces might facilitate QuickTime's use in building integrated learning environments with academics. These ideas are considered in relation to staff development, central to the case study project.

Mining more gold from web page hyperlinks

The development of the Internet has boosted prosperity of the World Wide Web, which is now a huge information source. Because of characteristics of the web, in most cases, traditional databasebased technologies are no longer suitable for web information retrieval and management. To effectively manage web information, it is necessary to reveal intrinsic relationships/structures among web information objects by eliminating noise factors. This paper proposes a mechanism that could be widely used in information processing, including web information processing and noise factor elimination for getting more intrinsic relationships. As an application case of this mechanism, one relevant web page finding algorithm is proposed to uncover intrinsic relationship among web pages from their hyperlink patterns, and find more semantic relevant web pages. The experimental evaluation shows the feasibility and effectiveness of the algorithm and demonstrates the potential of the proposed mechanism in web applications.

Parallel I/O scheduling in the presence of data duplication on multiprogrammed cluster computing systems

The widespread adoption of cluster computing as a high performance computing platform has seen the growth of data intensive scientific, engineering and commercial applications such as digital libraries, climate modeling, computational chemistry, computational fluid dynamics and image repositories. However, I/O subsystem performance has not been keeping pace with processor and memory performance, and is fast becoming the dominant factor in overall system performance.  Thus, parallel I/O has become a necessity in the face of performance improvements in other areas of computing systems. This paper addresses the problem of parallel I/O scheduling on cluster computing systems in the presence of data replication.  We propose two new I/O scheduling algorithms and evaluate the relative performance of the proposed policies against two existing approaches.  Simulation results show that the proposed policies perform substantially better than the baseline policies.

Neighborhood walkability and the walking behavior of Australian adults

Background
The physical attributes of residential neighborhoods, particularly the connectedness of streets and the proximity of destinations, can influence walking behaviors. To provide the evidence for public health advocacy on activity-friendly environments, large-scale studies in different countries are needed. Associations of neighborhood physical environments with adults’ walking for transport and walking for recreation must be better understood.

Method
Walking for transport and walking for recreation were assessed with a validated survey among 2650 adults recruited from neighborhoods in an Australian city between July 2003 and June 2004, with neighborhoods selected to have either high or low walkability, based on objective measures of connectedness and proximity derived from geographic information systems (GIS) databases. The study design was stratified by area-level socioeconomic status, while analyses controlled for participant age, gender, individual-level socioeconomic status, and reasons for neighborhood self-selection.

Results
A strong independent positive association was found between weekly frequency of walking for transport and the objectively derived neighborhood walkability index. Preference for walkable neighborhoods moderated the relationship of walkability with weekly minutes, but not the frequency of walking for transport—walkability was related to higher frequency of transport walking, irrespective of neighborhood self-selection. There were no significant associations between environmental factors and walking for recreation.

Conclusions
Associations of neighborhood walkability attributes with walking for transport were confirmed in Australia. They accounted for a modest but statistically significant proportion of the total variation of the relevant walking behavior. The physical environment attributes that make up the walkability index are potentially important candidate factors for future environmental and policy initiatives designed to increase physical activity.

Intelligent financial news digest system

We present an agent-based system Intelligent Financial News Digest System (IFNDS) for analyzing online financial news articles and associated material. The system can abstract, synthesize, digest, and classify the contents, and assesses whether the report is favorable to any company discussed in the reports. It integrates artificial intelligence technologies including traditional information retrieval and extraction techniques for the news analysis. It makes use of keyword statistics and backpropagation training data to identify companies named in reportage whether it is, evaluatively speaking, positive, negative or neutral. The system would be of use to media such as clipping services, media management, advertising, public relations, public interest, and e-commerce professionals and government non-governmental bodies interested in monitoring the media profiles of corporations, products, and issues.

Spectral kernels for classification

Spectral methods, as an unsupervised technique, have been used with success in data mining such as LSI in information retrieval, HITS and PageRank in Web search engines, and spectral clustering in machine learning. The essence of success in these applications is the spectral information that captures the semantics inherent in the large amount of data required during unsupervised learning. In this paper, we ask if spectral methods can also be used in supervised learning, e.g., classification. In an attempt to answer this question, our research reveals a novel kernel in which spectral clustering information can be easily exploited and extended to new incoming data during classification tasks. From our experimental results, the proposed Spectral Kernel has proved to speedup classification tasks without compromising accuracy.

Discovering Web Page Communities

The rapid development of Web technologies has made the World Wide Web a huge information source. However, due to the lack of a well-defined underlying data model for Web documents, effectively and efficiently finding required information and managing Web data are usually tedious and difficult tasks when using conventional information retrieval and data management techniques. The Web page community, defined as a set of Web-based documents with its own logical and/or semantic structures, provides a flexible and effective approach to support Wed data management, information retrieval and applications. This book addresses using hyperlink information to discover Web page communities. The work establishes a uniform framework for hyperlink analysis and community construction. Algorithms, supporting mechanisms and data models are proposed in the book. This book should help shed some light on this new and exciting research and application area. It is useful to researchers and students in Web mining, Web data management and information retrieval, as well as to professionals who may be considering utilizing Web communities to improve their applications.

Source-based filtering scheme against DDOS attacks

IP address spoofing is employed by a lot of DDoS attack tools. Most of the current research on DDoS attack packet filtering depends on cooperation among routers, which is hard to achieve in real campaigns. Therefore, in the paper, we propose a novel filtering scheme based on source information in this paper to defend against various source IP address spoofing. The proposed method works independently at the potential victim side, and accumulates the source information of its clients, for instance, source IP addresses, hops from the server during attacks free period. When a DDoS attack alarm is raised, we can filter out the attack packets based on the accumulated knowledge of the legitimate clients. We divide the source IP addresses into n(1 ≤ n ≤ 32) segments in our proposed algorithm; as a result, we can therefore release the challenge storage and speed up the procedure of information retrieval. The system which is proposed by us and the experiments indicated that the proposed method works effectively and efficiently.

Reducing cache lookup and publish overhead through locality awareness in P2P web caching

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Web caching has been a hot research topic in recent years as it can create scalable and robust designs for decentralized Internet-scale applications. However, many P2P Web caching systems suffer expensive overheads such as lookup and publish messages, and lack of locality awareness. In this paper we present the development of a locality aware P2P cache system to overcome these limitations by using routing table locality, aggregation and soft state. The experiments show that our P2P cache system improves the performance of index operations through the reduction of the amount of information processed by nodes, the reduction of the number of index messages sent by nodes, and the improvement of the locality of cache pointers.

Towards co-design with users who have autism spectrum disorders

People with cognitive disorders, such as autism or Asperger’s syndrome, face many barriers when being involved in the co-design of information and communications technologies (ICT). Cognitive disorders may require that co-design techniques be modified to fit with individual abilities. Up until recently, with technology design, purpose and use being in the hands of ‘experts’ there was little opportunity for customisation. However, ICT bring together various threads that make open many new possibilities. Not only are technologies cheaper, more powerful and more available than ever, but now parents, support agencies and people with autism spectrum disorders expect information technologies to be part of their worlds, and they have the capacity to participate in co-design for customisation. However, co-design techniques have not evolved to the extent that they capture this potential democratisation of the ICT. This paper reports on an investigation of the potential to develop a set of guidelines for co-design techniques to enable people with autism spectrum disorders to participate in ICT design.

Anycast services and its applications

Anycast in next generation Internet Protocol is a hot topic in the research of computer networks. It has promising potentials and also many challenges, such as architecture, routing, Quality-of-Service, anycast in ad hoc networks, application-layer anycast, etc. In this thesis, we tackle some important topics among them. The thesis at first presents an introduction about anycast, followed by the related work. Then, as our major contributions, a number of challenging issues are addressed in the following chapters. We tackled the anycast routing problem by proposing a requirement based probing algorithm at application layer for anycast routing. Compared with the existing periodical based probing routing algorithm, the proposed routing algorithm improves the performance in terms of delay. We addressed the reliable service problem by the design of a twin server model for the anycast servers, providing a transparent and reliable service for all anycast queries. We addressed the load balance problem of anycast servers by proposing new job deviation strategies, to provide a similar Quality-of-Service to all clients of anycast servers. We applied the mesh routing methodology in the anycast routing in ad hoc networking environment, which provides a reliable routing service and uses much less network resources. We combined the anycast protocol and the multicast protocol to provide a bidirectional service, and applied the service to Web-based database applications, achieving a better query efficiency and data synchronization. Finally, we proposed a new Internet based service, minicast, as the combination of the anycast and multicast protocols. Such a service has potential applications in information retrieval, parallel computing, cache queries, etc. We show that the minicast service consumes less network resources while providing the same services. The last chapter of the thesis presents the conclusions and discusses the future work.

Seeing the light : diet related variation in the vision of Platycercus elegans

 Poster Presentation

Supporting gen Y's engagement, enrichment and entertainment in interactive technologies

This research explored the potential for expansion of the current function, and usage of Interactive Television. The interviews and group discussions assisted in the determination of the theoretical framework for "Interactive Digital Vision", including its inspiration from current technologies to provide an engaging, enriching and intertaining user experience.

A locality aware cache diffusion system

Web caching is a widely deployed technique to reduce the load to web servers and to reduce the latency for web browsers. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) web caching has been a hot research topic in recent years as it can create scalable and robust designs for decentralized internet-scale applications. However, many P2P web caching systems suffer expensive overheads such as lookup and publish messages, and lack locality awareness. In this paper, we present the development of a locality aware cache diffusion system that makes use of routing table locality, aggregation, and soft state to overcome these limitations. The analysis and experiments show that our cache diffusion system reduces the amount of information processed by nodes, reduces the number of index messages sent by nodes, and improves the locality of cache pointers.