Cascading appearance-based features for visual voice activity detection

The detection of voice activity is a challenging problem, especially when the level of acoustic noise is high. Most current approaches only utilise the audio signal, making them susceptible to acoustic noise. An obvious approach to overcome this is to use the visual modality. The current state-of-the-art visual feature extraction technique is one that uses a cascade of visual features (i.e. 2D-DCT, feature mean normalisation, interstep LDA). In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of this technique for the task of visual voice activity detection (VAD), and analyse each stage of the cascade and quantify the relative improvement in performance gained by each successive stage. The experiments were conducted on the CUAVE database and our results highlight that the dynamics of the visual modality can be used to good effect to improve visual voice activity detection performance.

An economic case for systematic student monitoring and intervention in the first year in higher education

Previous work has established the effectiveness of systematically monitoring first year higher education students and intervening with those identified as at-risk of attrition. This nuts-and-bolts paper establishes an economic case for a systematic monitoring and intervention program, identifying the visible costs and benefits of such a program at a major Australian university. The benefit of such a program is measured in savings to the institution which would otherwise be lost revenue, in the form of retained equivalent full-time student load (EFTSL). The session will present an economic model based on a number of assumptions. These assumptions are explored along with the applicability of the model to other institutions.

Cluster-based Intrusion Detection (CBID) architecture for mobile ad hoc networks

The ad hoc networks are vulnerable to attacks due to distributed nature and lack of infrastructure. Intrusion detection systems (IDS) provide audit and monitoring capabilities that offer the local security to a node and help to perceive the specific trust level of other nodes. The clustering protocols can be taken as an additional advantage in these processing constrained networks to collaboratively detect intrusions with less power usage and minimal overhead. Existing clustering protocols are not suitable for intrusion detection purposes, because they are linked with the routes. The route establishment and route renewal affects the clusters and as a consequence, the processing and traffic overhead increases due to instability of clusters. The ad hoc networks are battery and power constraint, and therefore a trusted monitoring node should be available to detect and respond against intrusions in time. This can be achieved only if the clusters are stable for a long period of time. If the clusters are regularly changed due to routes, the intrusion detection will not prove to be effective. Therefore, a generalized clustering algorithm has been proposed that can run on top of any routing protocol and can monitor the intrusions constantly irrespective of the routes. The proposed simplified clustering scheme has been used to detect intrusions, resulting in high detection rates and low processing and memory overhead irrespective of the routes, connections, traffic types and mobility of nodes in the network. Clustering is also useful to detect intrusions collaboratively since an individual node can neither detect the malicious node alone nor it can take action against that node on its own.

TCP-DR an effective protocol for infrastructure based wireless networks

TCP is a dominant protocol for consistent communication over the internet. It provides flow, congestion and error control mechanisms while using wired reliable networks. Its congestion control mechanism is not suitable for wireless links where data corruption and its lost rate are higher. The physical links are transparent from TCP that takes packet losses due to congestion only and initiates congestion handling mechanisms by reducing transmission speed. This results in wasting already limited available bandwidth on the wireless links. Therefore, there is no use to carry out research on increasing bandwidth of the wireless links until the available bandwidth is not optimally utilized. This paper proposed a hybrid scheme called TCP Detection and Recovery (TCP-DR) to distinguish congestion, corruption and mobility related losses and then instructs the data sending host to take appropriate action. Therefore, the link utilization is optimal while losses are either due to high bit error rate or mobility.

Dynamic analysis of on-board mass data to determine tampering in heavy vehicle on-board mass systems

Transport Certification Australia Limited, jointly with the National Transport Commission, has undertaken a project to investigate the feasibility of on-board mass monitoring (OBM) devices for regulatory purposes. OBM increases jurisdictional confidence in operational heavy vehicle compliance. This paper covers technical issues regarding potential use of dynamic data from OBM systems to indicate that tampering has occurred. Tamper-evidence and accuracy of current OBM systems needed to be determined before any regulatory schemes were put in place for its use. Tests performed to determine potential for, and ease of, tampering. An algorithm was developed to detect tamper events. Its results are detailed.

Static accuracy and precision of heavy vehicle on-board mass systems

Objective • Feasibility programme for on-board mass (OBM) monitoring of heavy vehicles (HVs) • Australian road authorities through Transport Certification Australia (TCA) • Accuracy of contemporary, commercially-available OBM units in Australia • Results need to be addressed/incorporated into specifications for Stage 2 of Intelligent Access Program (IAP) by Transport Certification Australia

Detection and prevention of distributed denial of services attacks by collaborative effort of software agents, first prototype implementation

Distributed Denial of Services DDoS, attacks has become one of the biggest threats for resources over Internet. Purpose of these attacks is to make servers deny from providing services to legitimate users. These attacks are also used for occupying media bandwidth. Currently intrusion detection systems can just detect the attacks but cannot prevent / track the location of intruders. Some schemes also prevent the attacks by simply discarding attack packets, which saves victim from attack, but still network bandwidth is wasted. In our opinion, DDoS requires a distributed solution to save wastage of resources. The paper, presents a system that helps us not only in detecting such attacks but also helps in tracing and blocking (to save the bandwidth as well) the multiple intruders using Intelligent Software Agents. The system gives dynamic response and can be integrated with the existing network defense systems without disturbing existing Internet model. We have implemented an agent based networking monitoring system in this regard.

Interaction and mediation in preadmission clinics : implications for the design of a telehealth stethoscope

A telehealth stethoscope would make it possible for doctors to perform physical examinations on patients at great distances. In order to develop a useful and usable telehealth stethoscope we have conducted fieldwork observations of existing anaesthetic preadmission clinics to understand how stethoscopes are currently used. Both face-to-face consultations and videoconference consultations have been studied. Our results indicate that the stethoscope plays a minor role in the consultation and that consultations are mediated by the administrative work that is the reason for the consultation. We suggest that a stethoscope plays an infrastructural role in the consultation. The implications of considering stethoscopes as infrastructure are explored and considered in the context of a future telehealth stethoscope.

Re-conceptualising IS function's support performance : a preliminary model

While IS function has gained widespread attention for over two decades, there is little consensus among information systems (IS) researchers and practitioners on how best to evaluate IS function's support performance. This paper reports on preliminary findings of a larger research effort proceeds from a central interest in the importance of evaluating IS function's support in organisations. This study is the first that attempts to re-conceptualise and conceive evaluate IS function's support as a multi- dimensional formative construct. We argue that a holistic measure for evaluating evaluate IS function's support should consist of dimensions that together assess the variety of the support functions and the quality of the support services provided to end-users. Thus, the proposed model consists of two halves, "Variety" and "Quality" within which resides seven dimensions. The Variety half includes five dimensions: Training; Documentation; Data- related Support, Software-related Support; and Hardware-related Support. The Quality half includes two dimensions: IS Support Staff and Support Services Performance. The proposed model is derived using a directed content analysis of 83 studies; from top IS outlets, employing the characteristics of the analytic theory and consistent with formative construct development procedures.

How relationships can be utilized for service bundling

The phenomenon of organizations offering service bundles can typically be observed in dynamic markets with heterogeneous customer demand. Available literature broaching the issue of service bundling covers strategic considerations for organizations related to their respective market position as well as their pricing options for different bundle configurations. However, little guidance can be found regarding the identification of potential bundle candidates and the actual process of bundling. In this paper, we present an approach to service bundling that can be utilized by organizations to identify services that are suitable for bundling. The contribution of the paper is twofold. Firstly, the proposed method represents a structured conceptualization approach for organizations to facilitate the creation of bundles in practice based on empirical findings. Secondly, from a Design Science research perspective, the proposed method represents an innovative artifact that extends the academic knowledge base related to service management.

Evaluation of distributed control signaling protocols in GMPLS

GMPLS is a generalized form of MPLS (MultiProtocol Label Switching). MPLS is IP packet based and it uses MPLS-TE for Packet Traffic Engineering. GMPLS is extension to MPLS capabilities. It provides separation between transmission, control and management plane and network management. Control plane allows various applications like traffic engineering, service provisioning, and differentiated services. GMPLS control plane architecture includes signaling (RSVP-TE, CR-LDP) and routing (OSPF-TE, ISIS-TE) protocols. This paper provides an overview of the signaling protocols, describes their main functionalities, and provides a general evaluation of both the protocols.

Securing medical research data with a rights management system

We propose a digital rights management approach for sharing electronic health records for research purposes and argue advantages of the approach. We give an outline of our implementation, discuss challenges that we faced and future directions.

secFleck: A Public Key Technology Platform for Wireless Sensor Networks

We describe the design and implementation of a public-key platform, secFleck, based on a commodity Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip that extends the capability of a standard node. Unlike previous software public-key implementations this approach provides E- Commerce grade security; is computationally fast, energy efficient; and has low financial cost — all essential attributes for secure large-scale sen- sor networks. We describe the secFleck message security services such as confidentiality, authenticity and integrity, and present performance re- sults including computation time, energy consumption and cost. This is followed by examples, built on secFleck, of symmetric key management, secure RPC and secure software update.

A Novel Approach to Haptic Tele-operation of Aerial Robot Vehicles

We present a novel, simple and effective approach for tele-operation of aerial robotic vehicles with haptic feedback. Such feedback provides the remote pilot with an intuitive feel of the robot’s state and perceived local environment that will ensure simple and safe operation in cluttered 3D environments common in inspection and surveillance tasks. Our approach is based on energetic considerations and uses the concepts of network theory and port-Hamiltonian systems. We provide a general framework for addressing problems such as mapping the limited stroke of a ‘master’ joystick to the infinite stroke of a ‘slave’ vehicle, while preserving passivity of the closed-loop system in the face of potential time delays in communications links and limited sensor data