Semi-supervised intelligent surveillance system for secure environments

This paper proposes a semi-supervised intelligent visual surveillance system to exploit the information from multi-camera networks for the monitoring of people and vehicles. Modules are proposed to perform critical surveillance tasks including: the management and calibration of cameras within a multi-camera network; tracking of objects across multiple views; recognition of people utilising biometrics and in particular soft-biometrics; the monitoring of crowds; and activity recognition. Recent advances in these computer vision modules and capability gaps in surveillance technology are also highlighted.

Mapping the building and construction product system : preliminary report

This Preliminary Report has been prepared by researchers at The Australian Expert Group in Industry Studies (AEGIS) for the Commonwealth Department of Industry, Science and Resources. It is intended to provide a preliminary 'product system map' of the building and construction industries which defines the system, identifies the major segments, describes key industry players and institutions and provides the basis for exploring relationships, innovation and information flows within the industries. This Preliminary Report is the first of a series of five which will explore the building and construction product system in some depth. This first report does not present original research, although it does include some new interview data and analysis of a variety of written sources. This report is rather a reformulation of existing statistical and analytical material from a product system-based perspective. It is intended to provide the basis for subsequent studies by putting what is already known into an alternative framework and allowing us to see it through a new lens.

Analysis of the build-up of semi and non volatile organic compounds on urban roads

Vehicular traffic in urban areas may adversely affect urban water quality through the build-up of traffic generated semi and non volatile organic compounds (SVOCs and NVOCs) on road surfaces. The characterisation of the build-up processes is the key to developing mitigation measures for the removal of such pollutants from urban stormwater. An in-depth analysis of the build-up of SVOCs and NVOCs was undertaken in the Gold Coast region in Australia. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Multicriteria Decision tools such as PROMETHEE and GAIA were employed to understand the SVOC and NVOC build-up under combined traffic scenarios of low, moderate, and high traffic in different land uses. It was found that congestion in the commercial areas and use of lubricants and motor oils in the industrial areas were the main sources of SVOCs and NVOCs on urban roads, respectively. The contribution from residential areas to the build-up of such pollutants was hardly noticeable. It was also revealed through this investigation that the target SVOCs and NVOCs were mainly attached to particulate fractions of 75 to 300 µm whilst the redistribution of coarse fractions due to vehicle activity mainly occurred in the >300 µm size range. Lastly, under combined traffic scenario, moderate traffic with average daily traffic ranging from 2300 to 5900 and average congestion of 0.47 was found to dominate SVOC and NVOC build-up on roads.

Modulation of depth-dependent properties in tissue-engineered cartilage with a semi-permeable membrane and perfusion : a continuum model of matrix metabolism and transport

The functional properties of cartilaginous tissues are determined predominantly by the content, distribution, and organization of proteoglycan and collagen in the extracellular matrix. Extracellular matrix accumulates in tissue-engineered cartilage constructs by metabolism and transport of matrix molecules, processes that are modulated by physical and chemical factors. Constructs incubated under free-swelling conditions with freely permeable or highly permeable membranes exhibit symmetric surface regions of soft tissue. The variation in tissue properties with depth from the surfaces suggests the hypothesis that the transport processes mediated by the boundary conditions govern the distribution of proteoglycan in such constructs. A continuum model (DiMicco and Sah in Transport Porus Med 50:57-73, 2003) was extended to test the effects of membrane permeability and perfusion on proteoglycan accumulation in tissue-engineered cartilage. The concentrations of soluble, bound, and degraded proteoglycan were analyzed as functions of time, space, and non-dimensional parameters for several experimental configurations. The results of the model suggest that the boundary condition at the membrane surface and the rate of perfusion, described by non-dimensional parameters, are important determinants of the pattern of proteoglycan accumulation. With perfusion, the proteoglycan profile is skewed, and decreases or increases in magnitude depending on the level of flow-based stimulation. Utilization of a semi-permeable membrane with or without unidirectional flow may lead to tissues with depth-increasing proteoglycan content, resembling native articular cartilage.

Performing the unutterable : mapping the experiential in contemporary dance

This research project looks to engage audiences in a variety of experiential ways by reexamining and manipulating the traditional presentation paradigm for viewing Western contemporary dance. It considers how the audience may be situated in the creation and presentation of contemporary dance generally, and specifically in the work The Voyeur, which researched these issues in action. By situating the body of the audience member as a site of understanding and meaning making, this practice-based research considers the audience within the artists’ creative process from the inception of a creative work, rather than after the work has been created. The research questions how a ‘lived experience’ of contemporary dance could be deepened for the audience. It presents a series of ‘tools’ to create alternative frameworks of presentation that challenge the dominant modes of creation, presentation and meaning making in contemporary dance. The five tools established and applied in this research are: site, liminality, agency, proximity and performer authenticity. These tools are framed as a series of calibrated scales that allow choreographers to map decisions made in the studio in relation to potential audience engagement. These scales have the ability to house multiple presentation formats from the traditional to the avant garde and open up possibilities for broad analysis of a wide range of artistic dance works.

Mapping the ethical journey of experienced nurses now practising in rural and remote hospitals in central and south-west Queensland and in domiciliary services in Brisbane : a grounded theory approach

The aim of this thesis has been to map the ethical journey of experienced nurses now practising in rural and remote hospitals in central and south-west Queensland and in domiciliary services in Brisbane. One group of the experienced nurses in the study were Directors of Nursing in rural and remote hospitals. These nurses were “hands on”, “multi-skilled “ nurses who also had the task of managing the hospital. Also there were two Directors of Nursing from domiciliary services in Brisbane. A grounded theory method was used. The nurses were interviewed and the data retrieved from the interviews was coded, categorised and from these categories a conceptual framework was generated. The literature which dealt with the subject of ethical decision making and nurses also became part of the data. The study revealed that all these nurses experienced moral distress as they made ethical decisions. The decision making categories revealed in the data were: the area of financial management; issues as end of life approaches; allowing to die with dignity; emergency decisions; experience of unexpected death; the dilemma of providing care in very difficult circumstances. These categories were divided into two chapters: the category related to administrative and financial constraints and categories dealing with ethical issues in clinical settings. A further chapter discussed the overarching category of coping with moral distress. These experienced nurses suffered moral distress as they made ethical decisions, confirming many instances of moral distress in ethical decision making documented in the literature to date. Significantly, the nurses in their interviews never mentioned the ethical principles used in bioethics as an influence in their decision making. Only one referred to lectures on ethics as being an influence in her thinking. As they described their ethical problems and how they worked through them, they drew on their own previous experience rather than any knowledge of ethics gained from nursing education. They were concerned for their patients, they spoke from a caring responsibility towards their patients, but they were also concerned for justice for their patients. This study demonstrates that these nurses operated from the ethic of care, tempered with the ethic of responsibility as well as a concern for justice for their patients. Reflection on professional experience, rather than formal ethics education and training, was the primary influence on their ethical decision making.

Must see TV : mapping an Australian mediasphere

Australian National Cinema and Australian Television Culture. These two books, magisterial accounts of Australian media cultures, are very different. The first analyses (according to its cover blurb) 'the distinct and diverse nature of Australian cinema'; the second offers 'a picture of Australian television'. The books share an author.2 Despite this, their objects of study are constituted very differently. The first is replete with examples of particular films, analyses of their representational strategies, and links to the social context of production. The second addresses almost no programs and those that are mentioned appear only in passing. There is no analysis of any particular television text. The difference between these books cannot be explained in terms of authorial fickleness: rather, it represents the different ways in which television and film have been constructed as objects of study. While film has a recognised canon and a tradition of close textual analysis, in the study of television the programs themselves have tended to vanish - as they do in Australian Television Culture. Most academic work on Australian television is not interested in its programs. Writers have tended to find other aspects more rewarding: industries, institutions, ownership, legislation, technology and production.3 Australian Television Culture is part of this tradition; and an example of how such work, done well, can be a useful contribution to understanding the medium.

Minimising wave drag for free surface flow past a two-dimensional stern

Free surface flow past a two-dimensional semi-infinite curved plate is considered, with emphasis given to solving for the shape of the resulting wave train that appears downstream on the surface of the fluid. This flow configuration can be interpreted as applying near the stern of a wide blunt ship. For steady flow in a fluid of finite depth, we apply the Wiener-Hopf technique to solve a linearised problem, valid for small perturbations of the uniform stream. Weakly nonlinear results found using a forced KdV equation are also presented, as are numerical solutions to the fully nonlinear problem, computed using a conformal mapping and a boundary integral technique. By considering different families of shapes for the semi-infinite plate, it is shown how the amplitude of the waves can be minimised. For plates that increase in height as a function of the direction of flow, reach a local maximum, and then point slightly downwards at the point at which the free surface detaches, it appears the downstream wavetrain can be eliminated entirely.

Maintenance strategy optimization using a continuous-state partially observable semi-Markov decision process

Due to the limitation of current condition monitoring technologies, the estimates of asset health states may contain some uncertainties. A maintenance strategy ignoring this uncertainty of asset health state can cause additional costs or downtime. The partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) is a commonly used approach to derive optimal maintenance strategies when asset health inspections are imperfect. However, existing applications of the POMDP to maintenance decision-making largely adopt the discrete time and state assumptions. The discrete-time assumption requires the health state transitions and maintenance activities only happen at discrete epochs, which cannot model the failure time accurately and is not cost-effective. The discrete health state assumption, on the other hand, may not be elaborate enough to improve the effectiveness of maintenance. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a continuous state partially observable semi-Markov decision process (POSMDP). An algorithm that combines the Monte Carlo-based density projection method and the policy iteration is developed to solve the POSMDP. Different types of maintenance activities (i.e., inspections, replacement, and imperfect maintenance) are considered in this paper. The next maintenance action and the corresponding waiting durations are optimized jointly to minimize the long-run expected cost per unit time and availability. The result of simulation studies shows that the proposed maintenance optimization approach is more cost-effective than maintenance strategies derived by another two approximate methods, when regular inspection intervals are adopted. The simulation study also shows that the maintenance cost can be further reduced by developing maintenance strategies with state-dependent maintenance intervals using the POSMDP. In addition, during the simulation studies the proposed POSMDP shows the ability to adopt a cost-effective strategy structure when multiple types of maintenance activities are involved.

Defining and mapping teacher practice in technology classrooms

The indecision surrounding the definition of Technology extends to the classroom as not knowing what a subject “is” affects how it is taught. Similarly, its relative newness – and consequent lack of habitus in school settings - means that it is still struggling to find its own place in the curriculum as well as resolve its relationship with more established subject domains, particularly Science and Mathematics. The guidance from syllabus documents points to open-ended student-directed projects where extant studies indicate a more common experience of teacher –directed activities and an emphasis on product over process. There are issues too for researchers in documenting classroom observations and in analysing teacher practice in new learning environments. This paper presents a framework for defining and mapping classroom practice and for attempting to describe the social practice in the Technology classroom. The framework is a bricolage which draws on contemporary research. More formally, the development of the framework is consonant with the aim of design-based research to develop a flexible, adaptive and generalisable theory to better understanding a teaching domain where promise is not seen to match current reality. The framework may also inform emergent approaches to STEM (Science, Technology, Education and Mathematics) in education.

Live my work : rural nurses and their multiple perspectives of self

Aim. This paper is a report of a study to explore rural nurses' experiences of mentoring. Background. Mentoring has recently been proposed by governments, advocates and academics as a solution to the problem for retaining rural nurses in the Australian workforce. Action in the form of mentor development workshops has changed the way that some rural nurses now construct supportive relationships as mentoring. Method. A grounded theory design was used with nine rural nurses. Eleven semi-structured interviews were conducted in various states of Australia during 2004-2005. Situational analysis mapping techniques and frame analysis were used in combination with concurrent data generation and analysis and theoretical sampling. Findings. Experienced rural nurses cultivate novices through supportive mentoring relationships. The impetus for such relationships comes from their own histories of living and working in the same community, and this was termed 'live my work'. Rural nurses use multiple perspectives of self in order to manage their interactions with others in their roles as community members, consumers of healthcare services and nurses. Personal strategies adapted to local context constitute the skills that experienced rural nurses pass-on to neophyte rural nurses through mentoring, while at the same time protecting them through troubleshooting and translating local cultural norms. Conclusion. Living and working in the same community creates a set of complex challenges for novice rural nurses that are better faced with a mentor in place. Thus, mentoring has become an integral part of experienced rural nurses' practice to promote staff retention. © 2007 The Authors.

From Greek temple to bird's nest : mapping, assessing and understanding national integrity systems

In this paper, I would like to outline the approach we have taken to mapping and assessing integrity systems and how this has led us to see integrity systems in a new light. Indeed, it has led us to a new visual metaphor for integrity systems – a bird’s nest rather than a Greek temple. This was the result of a pair of major research projects completed in partnership with Transparency International (TI). One worked on refining and extending the measurement of corruption. This, the second, looked at what was then the emerging institutional means for reducing corruption – ‘national integrity systems’

Learning the Kernel Matrix with Semi-Definite Programming

Kernel-based learning algorithms work by embedding the data into a Euclidean space, and then searching for linear relations among the embedded data points. The embedding is performed implicitly, by specifying the inner products between each pair of points in the embedding space. This information is contained in the so-called kernel matrix, a symmetric and positive definite matrix that encodes the relative positions of all points. Specifying this matrix amounts to specifying the geometry of the embedding space and inducing a notion of similarity in the input space -- classical model selection problems in machine learning. In this paper we show how the kernel matrix can be learned from data via semi-definite programming (SDP) techniques. When applied to a kernel matrix associated with both training and test data this gives a powerful transductive algorithm -- using the labelled part of the data one can learn an embedding also for the unlabelled part. The similarity between test points is inferred from training points and their labels. Importantly, these learning problems are convex, so we obtain a method for learning both the model class and the function without local minima. Furthermore, this approach leads directly to a convex method to learn the 2-norm soft margin parameter in support vector machines, solving another important open problem. Finally, the novel approach presented in the paper is supported by positive empirical results.