Eigenvoice modeling for cross likelihood ratio based speaker clustering : a Bayesian approach

This paper proposes the use of Bayesian approaches with the cross likelihood ratio (CLR) as a criterion for speaker clustering within a speaker diarization system, using eigenvoice modeling techniques. The CLR has previously been shown to be an effective decision criterion for speaker clustering using Gaussian mixture models. Recently, eigenvoice modeling has become an increasingly popular technique, due to its ability to adequately represent a speaker based on sparse training data, as well as to provide an improved capture of differences in speaker characteristics. The integration of eigenvoice modeling into the CLR framework to capitalize on the advantage of both techniques has also been shown to be beneficial for the speaker clustering task. Building on that success, this paper proposes the use of Bayesian methods to compute the conditional probabilities in computing the CLR, thus effectively combining the eigenvoice-CLR framework with the advantages of a Bayesian approach to the diarization problem. Results obtained on the 2002 Rich Transcription (RT-02) Evaluation dataset show an improved clustering performance, resulting in a 33.5% relative improvement in the overall Diarization Error Rate (DER) compared to the baseline system.

Balancing values and imperatives : a study of nursing service in an ICU

There has been significant attention from the managers and purchasers of health services regarding the economic advantages that result from changes to the patterns of health care delivery in the acute hospital setting. The impact of these changes, whilst often rendering advantage at the economic management level of health care, can have different consequences for the people who deliver and the people who receive health service. This paper reports on a study that was conducted with a group of nurses to investigate the practice milieu of a critical care unit in the context of changes to health service management. Interpretive methods were used to capture the perspective of the nurses and the way they interpret the multiple factors that influence their practice and their practice environment. The findings indicate that the nurses in the study setting interpret these factors according to the influences they have on the structure, the geography and the value of their work. Explication of these findings provides a research base to inform recommendations relating to improving the practice milieu of the critical care environment.

Intraurban rail access : Policy implications of five revealed perspectives from a Q-sorting exercise in three Australian cities

This project advances current understanding of intra-urban rail passengers and their travel experiences in order to help rail industry leaders tailor policy approaches to fit specific, relevant segments of their target population. Using a Q sorting technique and cluster analysis, our preliminary research identified five perspectives occurring in a small sample of rail passengers, who varied in their frequency and location of rail travel as well as certain socio-demographic characteristics. Revealed perspectives (named to capture the gist of their content) included: ‘Rail Travel is About the Destination, Not the Journey’; ‘Despite Challenges, Public Transport is Still the Best Option’; ‘Rail Travel is Fine’; ‘Rail Travel? So Far, So Good’; and ‘Bad Taste for Rail Travel’. This paper discusses each of the perspectives in detail, and considers them in terms of tailored policy implications. An overarching finding from this study is that improving railway travel ‘access’ requires attention to physical, psychological, financial, and social facets of accessibility. For example, designing waiting areas to be more socially functional and comfortable has the potential to increase ridership by addressing social forms of access, decreasing perceived wait times, and making time at the station feel like time well spent. Even at this preliminary stage, the Q sorting technique promises to provide a valuable, holistic albeit fine-grained analysis of passenger attitudes and experiences that will assist industry efforts to increase ridership.

Transforming mobile personal life log into autobiographical multimedia eChronicles

Mobile devices are becoming indispensable personal assistants in people's daily life as these devices support work, study, play and socializing activities. The multi-modal sensors and rich features of smartphones can capture abundant information about users' life experience, such as taking photos or videos on what they see and hear, and organizing their tasks and activities using calendar, to-do lists, and notes. Such vast information can become useful to help users recalling episodic memories and reminisce about meaningful experiences. In this paper, we propose to apply autobiographical memory framework to provide an effective mechanism to structure mobile life-log data. The proposed model is an attempt towards a more complete personal life-log indexing model, which will support long term capture, organization, and retrieval. To demonstrate the benefits of the proposed model, we propose some design solutions for enabling users-driven capture, annotation, and retrieval of autobiographical multimedia chronicles tools.

Clergy Sexual Abuse Litigation: Survivors Seeking Justice By Jennifer M. Balboni (Boulder: First Forum Press, 2011, 180pp. £43.77)

Balboni identifies her interest as being the processes of official disclosure and the path taken to civil litigation by survivors of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic Clergy. The empirical data, on which this work is based, come in the form of in-depth face-to-face interviews with 22 survivors of clergy sexual abuse who have pursued litigation and 13 of their advocates. Balboni provides a space for survivors’ accounts of the ‘why’ behind their decision making and the impact of civil litigation on their lives to be heard, discussed and contextualized with both clarity and sensitivity. She acknowledges the breadth and depth of survivor responses, and the perspectives of their legal advocates, employing defiance theory, symbolic interaction and other points of analysis, to capture the journey of survivors towards litigation and beyond. Balboni’s work is deeply poignant in its recognition of survivors’ voices, the complex transformative capacity of litigation, the effects of community forming amongst survivors and the complex nature of ‘empowerment’ obtained by survivors through civil litigation. Acknowledging that, for many survivors, litigation becomes a means of identity change and truth telling, Balboni admits that ‘these survivors helped me understand that litigation is more about voice than monetary settlement’ (p. 149). This work is not deeply analytical or theoretically rich but privileges the voices of survivors and their advocates with sufficient frameworks to contextualize and explain participants’ perspectives and experiences.

Ideal victims in human trafficking awareness campaigns

Amidst a proliferation of bestseller books, blockbuster films, television documentaries and sensational news reports, public awareness campaigns have claimed their place in a growing chorus of concern about the crime of human trafficking. These campaigns aim to capture the public’s support in efforts to eliminate a ‘modern slave trade’ in which individuals seeking a better life are transported across borders and forced into exploitative labour conditions. Constrained by the limitations of primary campaign materials (posters, print ads, billboards) typically allowing for only a single image and minimal text, it is unlikely that these awareness campaigns can accurately convey the complexity of the trafficking problem. This chapter explores how the depictions of trafficking victims in awareness campaigns can exclude those who do not fit a restrictive narrative mould. Nils Christie’s pivotal work on the construction of society’s ideal victim is the lens through which this paper examines the literal ‘poster child’ of the anti-trafficking movement.

Green crime and the role of environmental courts

Environmental issues continue to capture international headlines and remain the subject of intense intellectual, political and public debate. As a result, environmental law is widely recognised as the fastest growing area of international jurisprudence. This, combined with the rapid expansion of environmental agreements and policies, has created a burgeoning landscape of administrative, regulatory and judicial regimes. Emerging from these developments are increases in environmental offences, and more recently environmental crimes. The judicial processing of environmental or ‘green’ crimes is rapidly developing across many jurisdictions. Since 1979, Australia has played a lead role in criminal justice processing of environment offences through the New South Wales Land and Environment Court (NSW LEC). This article draws on case data, observations and interviews with court personnel, to examine the ways in which environmental justice is now administered through the existing court structures, and how it has changed since the Court’s inception.

On the commonly accepted assumptions regarding observed motor vehicle crash counts at transport system locations

Readily accepted knowledge regarding crash causation is consistently omitted from efforts to model and subsequently understand motor vehicle crash occurrence and their contributing factors. For instance, distracted and impaired driving accounts for a significant proportion of crash occurrence, yet is rarely modeled explicitly. In addition, spatially allocated influences such as local law enforcement efforts, proximity to bars and schools, and roadside chronic distractions (advertising, pedestrians, etc.) play a role in contributing to crash occurrence and yet are routinely absent from crash models. By and large, these well-established omitted effects are simply assumed to contribute to model error, with predominant focus on modeling the engineering and operational effects of transportation facilities (e.g. AADT, number of lanes, speed limits, width of lanes, etc.) The typical analytical approach—with a variety of statistical enhancements—has been to model crashes that occur at system locations as negative binomial (NB) distributed events that arise from a singular, underlying crash generating process. These models and their statistical kin dominate the literature; however, it is argued in this paper that these models fail to capture the underlying complexity of motor vehicle crash causes, and thus thwart deeper insights regarding crash causation and prevention. This paper first describes hypothetical scenarios that collectively illustrate why current models mislead highway safety researchers and engineers. It is argued that current model shortcomings are significant, and will lead to poor decision-making. Exploiting our current state of knowledge of crash causation, crash counts are postulated to arise from three processes: observed network features, unobserved spatial effects, and ‘apparent’ random influences that reflect largely behavioral influences of drivers. It is argued; furthermore, that these three processes in theory can be modeled separately to gain deeper insight into crash causes, and that the model represents a more realistic depiction of reality than the state of practice NB regression. An admittedly imperfect empirical model that mixes three independent crash occurrence processes is shown to outperform the classical NB model. The questioning of current modeling assumptions and implications of the latent mixture model to current practice are the most important contributions of this paper, with an initial but rather vulnerable attempt to model the latent mixtures as a secondary contribution.

Preparing high achieving English teachers to work in disadvantaged schools : 'I'll teach Shakespeare when I'm 60'

The recent release of the Gonski Review recognises the decline in Australia’s schooling performances over the last decade, noting in particular a distressing increase in the ‘achievement gap’ affecting students from low SES backgrounds (Gonski, 2012). The report details the need for more quality in teachers throughout the schooling system, particularly within the schools with the greatest academic needs. This paper specifically focuses on a group of high-achieving pre-service English teachers. In their last two years of university study, they participated in a program called Exceptional Teachers for Disadvantaged Schools (ETDS), designed to prepare them to work in disadvantaged or low SES schools. We wanted to capture their experiences of teaching in challenging settings during their practicum, and as they prepared to graduate, we wondered what they now felt about teaching English in low SES schools. Using narrative inquiry, we analysed a range of reflective data to gain insight into such things as their initial motivations for entering the teaching profession and how their preconceived expectations may or may not have shifted after practicum experiences in low SES schools. We encouraged open reflection about how they perceived themselves as English teachers.

Using photography in ‘The Restaurant of the Future’. A useful way to assess portion selection and plate cleaning?

Laboratory-based studies of human dietary behaviour benefit from highly controlled conditions; however, this approach can lack ecological validity. Identifying a reliable method to capture and quantify natural dietary behaviours represents an important challenge for researchers. In this study, we scrutinised cafeteria-style meals in the ‘Restaurant of the Future.’ Self-selected meals were weighed and photographed, both before and after consumption. Using standard portions of the same foods, these images were independently coded to produce accurate and reliable estimates of (i) initial self-served portions, and (ii) food remaining at the end of the meal. Plate cleaning was extremely common; in 86% of meals at least 90% of self-selected calories were consumed. Males ate a greater proportion of their self-selected meals than did females. Finally, when participants visited the restaurant more than once, the correspondence between selected portions was better predicted by the weight of the meal than by its energy content. These findings illustrate the potential benefits of meal photography in this context. However, they also highlight significant limitations, in particular, the need to exclude large amounts of data when one food obscures another.

Kernel analysis on Grassmann manifolds for action recognition

Modelling video sequences by subspaces has recently shown promise for recognising human actions. Subspaces are able to accommodate the effects of various image variations and can capture the dynamic properties of actions. Subspaces form a non-Euclidean and curved Riemannian manifold known as a Grassmann manifold. Inference on manifold spaces usually is achieved by embedding the manifolds in higher dimensional Euclidean spaces. In this paper, we instead propose to embed the Grassmann manifolds into reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces and then tackle the problem of discriminant analysis on such manifolds. To achieve efficient machinery, we propose graph-based local discriminant analysis that utilises within-class and between-class similarity graphs to characterise intra-class compactness and inter-class separability, respectively. Experiments on KTH, UCF Sports, and Ballet datasets show that the proposed approach obtains marked improvements in discrimination accuracy in comparison to several state-of-the-art methods, such as the kernel version of affine hull image-set distance, tensor canonical correlation analysis, spatial-temporal words and hierarchy of discriminative space-time neighbourhood features.

Building shared situational awareness in surgery through distributed dialogue

Background Failure to convey time-critical information to team members during surgery diminishes members’ perception of the dynamic information relevant to their task, and compromises shared situational awareness. This research reports the dialog around clinical decisions made by team members in the time-pressured and high-risk context of surgery, and the impact of these communications on shared situational awareness. Methods Fieldwork methods were used to capture the dynamic integration of individual and situational elements in surgery that provided the backdrop for clinical decisions. Nineteen semi structured interviews were performed with 24 participants from anaesthesia, surgery, and nursing in the operating rooms of a large metropolitan hospital in Queensland, Australia. Thematic analysis was used. Results: The domain “coordinating decisions in surgery” was generated from textual data. Within this domain, three themes illustrated the dialog of clinical decisions, i.e., synchronizing and strategizing actions, sharing local knowledge, and planning contingency decisions based on priority. Conclusion Strategies used to convey decisions that enhanced shared situational awareness included the use of “self-talk”, closed-loop communications, and “overhearing” conversations that occurred at the operating table. Behaviours’ that compromised a team’s shared situational awareness included tunnelling and fixating on one aspect of the situation.

The fishtown series

Fishtown is a series of mediated animated works which embody artistic conceptions of ambience and explore the interplay between foreground and background. The series draws upon a representation of natural patterns and rhythms in the ambient environment and is produced using a hybrid style of animation process that incorporates motion capture, dynamics and keyframe animation to construct a biomemtic peripheral rhythm. The display of the work is a crucial part of the project, and contributes a considerable amount to the reception of the work. Based on the ambient conceptions defined by Cage, Eno and Bizzocchi, ambient animation should incorporate some form of ambient display. As Eno (1978) states, it should be as ignorable as it is interesting. The ultimate intention is to place the work outside the gallery setting, to provide a more neutral ambient setting for the viewing of the work, and therefore the use of an ambient display is necessary if the work is to be situated in an ambient setting. Craig Walsh is a contemporary artist producing work for large scale projections in ambient settings. Completing Walsh's masterclass in 2011 (Tanawha Arts and Ecology Centre) has been an important factor in arriving at a strategy for the display of the Fishtown series. The most recent work in the Fishtown series was developed during a residency at the Crane Arts studios in Philadelphia USA in August 2012, and is comprised of a screen based animated work, utilizing large scale digital projection. Documentation of this work can be found at the Crane Arts Residency Website: http://cranearts.qcagriffith.com/crane-arts-residency-chris-denaro

Progress toward a cosmic dust collection facility on space station

Scientific and programmatic progress toward the development of a cosmic dust collection facility (CDCF) for the proposed space station is documented. Topics addressed include: trajectory sensor concepts; trajectory accuracy and orbital evolution; CDCF pointing direction; development of capture devices; analytical techniques; programmatic progress; flight opportunities; and facility development.

The Citizen’s Round Table process : canvassing public opinion on energy technologies to mitigate climate change

This study draws on communication accommodation theory, social identity theory and cognitive dissonance theory to drive a ‘Citizen’s Round Table’ process that engages community audiences on energy technologies and strategies that potentially mitigate climate change. The study examines the effectiveness of the process in determining the strategies that engage people in discussion. The process is designed to canvas participants’ perspectives and potential reactions to the array of renewable and non-renewable energy sources, in particular, underground storage of CO2. Ninety-five people (12 groups) participated in the process. Questionnaires were administered three times to identify changes in attitudes over time, and analysis of video, audio-transcripts and observer notes enabled an evaluation of level of engagement and communication among participants. The key findings of this study indicate that the public can be meaningfully engaged in discussion on the politically sensitive issue of CO2 capture and storage (CCS) and other low emission technologies. The round table process was critical to participants’ engagement and led to attitude change towards some methods of energy production. This study identifies a process that can be used successfully to explore community attitudes on politically-sensitive topics and encourages an examination of attitudes and potential attitude change.