Creative Commons Olympics. How Big Media is Learning to License From Amateur Authors

NBC Universal’s decision to use Creative Commons-licensed photographs in an Olympic broadcast is an example of how media conglomerates are experimenting with collaboration with amateurs, but it also reveals potential problems of letting non-lawyers negotiate copyright licensing agreements. In the process, NBC’s producers nearly opened the door for a multimillion-dollar infringement law suit. To avoid such pitfalls, media companies need to adopt policies and best practices for using amateur licensed works. These guidelines should instruct how a production can attribute collaborating authors and how the Open Content licensing terms affect the licensing of the productions. The guidelines should also instruct how producers can seek alternative licensing arrangements with amateurs and contribute back to the Open Content community.

Unsupervised online learning of condition-invariant images for place recognition

This paper presents an online, unsupervised training algorithm enabling vision-based place recognition across a wide range of changing environmental conditions such as those caused by weather, seasons, and day-night cycles. The technique applies principal component analysis to distinguish between aspects of a location’s appearance that are condition-dependent and those that are condition-invariant. Removing the dimensions associated with environmental conditions produces condition-invariant images that can be used by appearance-based place recognition methods. This approach has a unique benefit – it requires training images from only one type of environmental condition, unlike existing data-driven methods that require training images with labelled frame correspondences from two or more environmental conditions. The method is applied to two benchmark variable condition datasets. Performance is equivalent or superior to the current state of the art despite the lesser training requirements, and is demonstrated to generalise to previously unseen locations.

Crowdsourcing malaria parasite quantification: an online game for analyzing images of infected thick blood smears

Background: There are 600,000 new malaria cases daily worldwide. The gold standard for estimating the parasite burden and the corresponding severity of the disease consists in manually counting the number of parasites in blood smears through a microscope, a process that can take more than 20 minutes of an expert microscopist’s time. Objective: This research tests the feasibility of a crowdsourced approach to malaria image analysis. In particular, we investigated whether anonymous volunteers with no prior experience would be able to count malaria parasites in digitized images of thick blood smears by playing a Web-based game. Methods: The experimental system consisted of a Web-based game where online volunteers were tasked with detecting parasites in digitized blood sample images coupled with a decision algorithm that combined the analyses from several players to produce an improved collective detection outcome. Data were collected through the MalariaSpot website. Random images of thick blood films containing Plasmodium falciparum at medium to low parasitemias, acquired by conventional optical microscopy, were presented to players. In the game, players had to find and tag as many parasites as possible in 1 minute. In the event that players found all the parasites present in the image, they were presented with a new image. In order to combine the choices of different players into a single crowd decision, we implemented an image processing pipeline and a quorum algorithm that judged a parasite tagged when a group of players agreed on its position. Results: Over 1 month, anonymous players from 95 countries played more than 12,000 games and generated a database of more than 270,000 clicks on the test images. Results revealed that combining 22 games from nonexpert players achieved a parasite counting accuracy higher than 99%. This performance could be obtained also by combining 13 games from players trained for 1 minute. Exhaustive computations measured the parasite counting accuracy for all players as a function of the number of games considered and the experience of the players. In addition, we propose a mathematical equation that accurately models the collective parasite counting performance. Conclusions: This research validates the online gaming approach for crowdsourced counting of malaria parasites in images of thick blood films. The findings support the conclusion that nonexperts are able to rapidly learn how to identify the typical features of malaria parasites in digitized thick blood samples and that combining the analyses of several users provides similar parasite counting accuracy rates as those of expert microscopists. This experiment illustrates the potential of the crowdsourced gaming approach for performing routine malaria parasite quantification, and more generally for solving biomedical image analysis problems, with future potential for telediagnosis related to global health challenges.

Towards an automatic system for road lane marking extraction in large-scale aerial images acquired over rural areas by hierarchical image analysis and Gabor filter

An automatic approach to road lane marking extraction from high-resolution aerial images is proposed, which can automatically detect the road surfaces in rural areas based on hierarchical image analysis. The procedure is facilitated by the road centrelines obtained from low-resolution images. The lane markings are further extracted on the generated road surfaces with 2D Gabor filters. The proposed method is applied on the aerial images of the Bruce Highway around Gympie, Queensland. Evaluation of the generated road surfaces and lane markings using four representative test fields has validated the proposed method.

Australian children's experiences of parents' online mediation

This paper draws on the work of the ‘EU Kids Online’ network funded by the EC (DG Information Society) Safer Internet plus Programme (project code SIP-KEP-321803); see www.eukidsonline.net, and addresses Australian children’s online activities in terms of risk, harm and opportunity. In particular, it draws upon data that indicates that Australian children are more likely to encounter online risks — especially around seeing sexual images, bullying, misuse of personal data and exposure to potentially harmful user-generated content — than is the case with their EU counterparts. Rather than only comparing Australian children with their European equivalents, this paper places the risks experienced by Australian children in the context of the mediation and online protection practices adopted by their parents, and asks about the possible ways in which we might understand data that seems to indicate that Australian children’s experiences of online risk and harm differ significantly from the experiences of their Europe-based peers. In particular, and as an example, this paper sets out to investigate the apparent conundrum through which Australian children appear twice as likely as most European children to have seen sexual images in the past 12 months, but parents are more likely to filter their access to the internet than is the case with most children in the wider EU Kids Online study. Even so, one in four Australian children (25%) believes that what their parents do helps ‘a lot’ to improve their internet experience, and Australian children and their parents are a little less likely to agree about the mediation practices taking place in the family home than is the case in the EU. The AU Kids Online study was carried out as a result of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation’s funding of a small scale randomised sample (N = 400) of Australian families with at least one child, aged 9–16, who goes online. The report on Risks and safety for Australian children on the internet follows the same format and uses much of the contextual statement around these issues as the ‘county level’ reports produced by the 25 EU nations involved in EU Kids Online, first drafted by Livingstone et al. (2010). The entirely new material is the data itself, along with the analysis of that data.

Alternative primary sources for studying Australian television history : an annotated list of online private collections

It is possible to write many different histories of Australian television, and these different histories draw on different primary sources. The ABC of Drama, for example, draws on the ABC Document Archives (Jacka 1991). Most of the information for Images and Industry: television drama production in Australia is taken from original interviews with television production staff (Moran 1985). Ending the Affair, as well as archival work, draws on ‘over ten years of watching … Australian television current affairs’ (Turner 2005, xiii). Moran’s Guide to Australian TV Series draws exhaustively on extant archives: the ABC Document Archives, material sourced through the ABC Drama department, the Australian Film Commission, the library of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, and the Australian Film Institute (Moran 1993, xi)...

A pilot study on affective classification of facial images for emerging news topics

The proliferation of news reports published in online websites and news information sharing among social media users necessitates effective techniques for analysing the image, text and video data related to news topics. This paper presents the first study to classify affective facial images on emerging news topics. The proposed system dynamically monitors and selects the current hot (of great interest) news topics with strong affective interestingness using textual keywords in news articles and social media discussions. Images from the selected hot topics are extracted and classified into three categorized emotions, positive, neutral and negative, based on facial expressions of subjects in the images. Performance evaluations on two facial image datasets collected from real-world resources demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed system in affective classification of facial images in news reports. Facial expression shows high consistency with the affective textual content in news reports for positive emotion, while only low correlation has been observed for neutral and negative. The system can be directly used for applications, such as assisting editors in choosing photos with a proper affective semantic for a certain topic during news report preparation.

1000 voices: reflective online multimodal narrative inquiry as a research methodology for disability research

This article outlines the research approach used in the international 1000 Voices Project. The 1000 Voices project is an interdisciplinary research and public awareness project that uses a customised online multimodal storytelling platform to explore the lives of people with disability internationally. Through the project, researchers and partners have encouraged diverse participants to select the modes of storytelling (e.g. images, text, videos and combinations thereof) that suit them best and to self-define what both ‘disability’ and ‘life story’ mean to them. The online reflective component of the approach encourages participants to organically and reflectively develop story events and revisions over time in ways that suit them and their emerging lives. This article provides a detailed summary of the project's theoretical and methodological development alongside suggestions for future development in social work and qualitative research.

Facebook and Google have a moral duty to stop online abuse

It’s the stuff of nightmares: your intimate images are leaked and posted online by somebody you thought you could trust. But in Australia, victims often have no real legal remedy for this kind of abuse. This is the key problem of regulating the internet. Often, speech we might consider abusive or offensive isn’t actually illegal. And even when the law technically prohibits something, enforcing it directly against offenders can be difficult. It is a slow and expensive process, and where the offender or the content is overseas, there is virtually nothing victims can do. Ultimately, punishing intermediaries for content posted by third parties isn’t helpful. But we do need to have a meaningful conversation about how we want our shared online spaces to feel. The providers of these spaces have a moral, if not legal, obligation to facilitate this conversation.

Online identification guides for Australian smut fungi (Ustilaginomycotina) and rust fungi (Pucciniales)

Interactive identification keys for Australian smut fungi (Ustilaginomycotina and Pucciniomycotina, Microbotryales) and rust fungi (Pucciniomycotina, Pucciniales) are available online at http://collections.daff.qld.gov.au. The keys were built using Lucid software, and facilitate the identification of all known Australian smut fungi (317 species in 37 genera) and 100 rust fungi (from approximately 360 species in 37 genera). The smut and rust keys are illustrated with over 1,600 and 570 images respectively. The keys are designed to assist a wide range of end-users including mycologists, plant health diagnosticians, biosecurity scientists, plant pathologists, and university students. The keys are dynamic and will be regularly updated to include taxonomic changes and incorporate new detections, taxa, distributions and images. Researchers working with Australian smut and rust fungi are encouraged to participate in the on-going development and improvement of these keys.

Learning Nonlinear Visual Processing from Natural Images

The paradigm of computational vision hypothesizes that any visual function -- such as the recognition of your grandparent -- can be replicated by computational processing of the visual input. What are these computations that the brain performs? What should or could they be? Working on the latter question, this dissertation takes the statistical approach, where the suitable computations are attempted to be learned from the natural visual data itself. In particular, we empirically study the computational processing that emerges from the statistical properties of the visual world and the constraints and objectives specified for the learning process. This thesis consists of an introduction and 7 peer-reviewed publications, where the purpose of the introduction is to illustrate the area of study to a reader who is not familiar with computational vision research. In the scope of the introduction, we will briefly overview the primary challenges to visual processing, as well as recall some of the current opinions on visual processing in the early visual systems of animals. Next, we describe the methodology we have used in our research, and discuss the presented results. We have included some additional remarks, speculations and conclusions to this discussion that were not featured in the original publications. We present the following results in the publications of this thesis. First, we empirically demonstrate that luminance and contrast are strongly dependent in natural images, contradicting previous theories suggesting that luminance and contrast were processed separately in natural systems due to their independence in the visual data. Second, we show that simple cell -like receptive fields of the primary visual cortex can be learned in the nonlinear contrast domain by maximization of independence. Further, we provide first-time reports of the emergence of conjunctive (corner-detecting) and subtractive (opponent orientation) processing due to nonlinear projection pursuit with simple objective functions related to sparseness and response energy optimization. Then, we show that attempting to extract independent components of nonlinear histogram statistics of a biologically plausible representation leads to projection directions that appear to differentiate between visual contexts. Such processing might be applicable for priming, \ie the selection and tuning of later visual processing. We continue by showing that a different kind of thresholded low-frequency priming can be learned and used to make object detection faster with little loss in accuracy. Finally, we show that in a computational object detection setting, nonlinearly gain-controlled visual features of medium complexity can be acquired sequentially as images are encountered and discarded. We present two online algorithms to perform this feature selection, and propose the idea that for artificial systems, some processing mechanisms could be selectable from the environment without optimizing the mechanisms themselves. In summary, this thesis explores learning visual processing on several levels. The learning can be understood as interplay of input data, model structures, learning objectives, and estimation algorithms. The presented work adds to the growing body of evidence showing that statistical methods can be used to acquire intuitively meaningful visual processing mechanisms. The work also presents some predictions and ideas regarding biological visual processing.

An online community designed to support future makers in educational reform

Australian education is undergoing national reform at many levels. The school sector, where preservice teachers will be employed, are adjusting to the demands of the National Curriculum and improving teacher quality through the National Professional Standards for Teachers. In addition, the university sector, where pre-service teachers are prepared, is undergoing its own education reform through the introduction of a demand-driven system and ensuring quality for tertiary education interns through the Higher Education Standards Framework. In moving to prepare preservice teachers for the school system; universities are grappling with the double-barreled approach to teacher quality; quality within the university course and quality within the student teachers being prepared. Through a collaborative partnership including university lecturers, Department of Education central administration staff, school principals, school coordinators, practicum supervisors, mentor teachers and pre-service teachers; the stakeholders have formed an online community of learners engaging in reflective practice who are committed to improving teacher quality. This online community not only links the key stakeholders within the project, it facilitates the nexus between theory and practice often missing in our pre-service teacher placements. This paper reports preliminary data about an initiative to ensure final year pre-service teachers are aspiring to meet the graduate professional standards through the use of an innovative online community.

Study of the images for the Visual Arts Education in Secondary Education textbooks: educational implications

In this paper we present the first data from the research conducted to determine the relationship between traditional visual arts and other forms of visual culture closer to the experiences of high school youth. The hypothesis of this research is that while students are nurtured and live primarily with the images provided by the media culture, their textbooks basically refer to the more traditional art images. The research has been limited to a review and analysis of the most common educational materials for teaching visual arts in high school. After the systematization and analysis of the images appeared in textbooks, we have detected three major types: the artistics, those who belong to media culture and others. The most relevant conclusions indicate that: there are hardly any connections between different types of images, they offer a very traditional view of art and they are far removed from the experiences of young book users.

Online Dispute Resolution: The Next Phase

Ce texte traite de l’évolution des modes alternatifs de résolution de conflit (MARC) en ligne. L’auteur dresse un historique des différents projets de médiation en ligne en passant par ses « débuts » en 1999 lorsque l’Online Ombuds Office (OOO) fut approché pour l’élaboration d’un système de médiation pour les clients d’eBay, par SquareTrade.com, par les règles de l’ICANN, par Cybersettle et Clicknsettle, etc. Il expose ensuite le courrant que prendra la cybermédiation et le cyberarbitrage dans les années à venir. Ainsi, le médium informatique devient lentement une « quatrième partie » aux discussions et peut venir en aide aux arbitres et aux médiateurs dans la gestion et la communication d’informations. De plus les fonctions d’affichages propres aux ordinateurs, c’est-à-dire la possibilité d’incorporer images, graphiques, plans, etc., devront être mis à l’œuvre par les systèmes de MARC en ligne si ceux-ci sont destinés à prendre de l’expansion dans d’autres domaines que ceux leur étant présentement réservés.