FOCUS ON ACCESS TO INSTITUTIONAL RESOURCES: A SYNTHESIS OF THE JISC FAIR PROGRAMME

The JISC-funded Focus of Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme ran from 2002-2005. The 14 projects within this programme investigated the cultural, organisational, legal and technical factors involved in providing places where institutional digital content, of which there is an increasing amount, could be stored and subsequently shared with others in the Higher and Further Education communities where appropriate. The primary technology to enable such sharing is the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), a lightweight protocol based on sharing metadata about the digital content available. The technical issues were at times overshadowed by the cultural, organisational and legal issues that had to be addressed. The experience of the Programme as a whole provides a valuable insight to the issues at hand in sharing content and a good starting point for other institutions wishing to investigate this capability. A Synthesis of the Programme was commissioned in late 2004 to capture this experience, and all tangible outputs where produced. A website was produced providing a comprehensive listing of all project outputs and a printed brochure was published in late 2005 as an introduction to the Programme and its findings. This article summarises the findings of the FAIR Synthesis and provides a range of pointers to further information for subsequent investigation.     

Geiringer theorems: from population genetics to computational intelligence, memory evolutive systems and Hebbian learning

The classical Geiringer theorem addresses the limiting frequency of occurrence of various alleles after repeated application of crossover. It has been adopted to the setting of evolutionary algorithms and, a lot more recently, reinforcement learning and Monte-Carlo tree search methodology to cope with a rather challenging question of action evaluation at the chance nodes. The theorem motivates novel dynamic parallel algorithms that are explicitly described in the current paper for the first time. The algorithms involve independent agents traversing a dynamically constructed directed graph that possibly has loops and multiple edges. A rather elegant and profound category-theoretic model of cognition in biological neural networks developed by a well-known French mathematician, professor Andree Ehresmann jointly with a neurosurgeon, Jan Paul Vanbremeersch over the last thirty years provides a hint at the connection between such algorithms and Hebbian learning.     

Mapping seagrass species, cover and biomass in shallow waters: An assessment of satellite multi-spectral and airborne hyper-spectral imaging systems in Moreton Bay (Australia)

Understanding, monitoring and modelling attributes of seagrass biodiversity, such as species composition, richness, abundance, spatial patterns, and disturbance dynamics, requires spatial information. This work assessed the accuracy of commonly available airborne hyper-spectral and satellite multi-spectral image data sets for mapping seagrass species composition, horizontal horizontal-projected foliage cover and above-ground dry-weight biomass. The work was carried out on the Eastern Banks in Moreton Bay, Australia, an area of shallow and clear coastal waters, containing a range of seagrass species, cover and biomass levels. Two types of satellite image data were used: Quickbird-2 multi-spectral and Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper multi-spectral. Airborne hyper-spectral image data were acquired from a CASI-2 sensor using a pixel size of 4.0 m. The mapping was constrained to depths shallower than 3.0 m, based on past modelling of the separability of seagrass reflectance signatures at increasing water depths. Our results demonstrated that mapping of seagrass cover, species and biomass to high accuracy levels (> 80%) was not possible across all image types. For each parameter mapped, airborne hyper-spectral data produced the highest overall accuracies (46%), followed by Quickbird-2 and then Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper. The low accuracy levels were attributed to the mapping methods and difficulties in matching locations on image and field data sets. Accurate mapping of seagrass cover, species composition and biomass, using simple approaches, requires further work using high-spatial resolution (< 5 m) and/or hyper-spectral image data. Further work is required to determine if and how the seagrass maps produced in this work are suitable for measuring attributes of seagrass biodiversity, and using these data for modelling floral and fauna biodiversity properties of seagrass environments, and for scaling-up seagrass ecosystem models.     

Nonrigid structure-from-motion: estimating shape and motion with hierarchical Priors

This paper describes methods for recovering time-varying shape and motion of non-rigid 3D objects from uncalibrated 2D point tracks. For example, given a video recording of a talking person, we would like to estimate the 3D shape of the face at each instant, and learn a model of facial deformation. Time-varying shape is modeled as a rigid transformation combined with a non-rigid deformation. Reconstruction is ill-posed if arbitrary deformations are allowed, and thus additional assumptions about deformations are required. We first suggest restricting shapes to lie within a low-dimensional subspace, and describe estimation algorithms. However, this restriction alone is insufficient to constrain reconstruction. To address these problems, we propose a reconstruction method using a Probabilistic Principal Components Analysis (PPCA) shape model, and an estimation algorithm that simultaneously estimates 3D shape and motion for each instant, learns the PPCA model parameters, and robustly fills-in missing data points. We then extend the model to model temporal dynamics in object shape, allowing the algorithm to robustly handle severe cases of missing data.     

Dynamic analysis of Java program concepts for visualization and profiling

Concept assignment identifies units of source code that are functionally related, even if this is not apparent from a syntactic point of view. Until now, the results of concept assignment have only been used for static analysis, mostly of program source code. This paper investigates the possibility of using concept information within a framework for dynamic analysis of programs. The paper presents two case studies involving a small Java program used in a previous research exercise, and a large Java virtual machine (the popular Jikes RVM system). These studies investigate two applications of dynamic concept information: visualization and profiling. The paper demonstrates two different styles of concept visualization, which show the proportion of overall time spent in each concept and the sequence of concept execution, respectively. The profiling study concerns the interaction between runtime compilation and garbage collection in Jikes RVM. For some benchmark cases, we are able to obtain a significant reduction in garbage collection time. We discuss how this phenomenon might be harnessed to optimize the scheduling of garbage collection in Jikes RVM.     

A framework for simulating real-time multi-agent systems

In this paper, we describe an implementation of use in demonstrating the effectiveness of architectures for real-time multi-agent systems. The implementation provides a simulation of a simplified RoboCup Search and Rescue environment, with unexpected events, and includes a simulator for both a real-time operating system and a CPU. We present experimental evidence to demonstrate the benefit of the implementation in the context of a particular hybrid architecture for multi-agent systems that allows certain agents to remain fully autonomous, while others are fully controlled by a coordinating agent. In addition, we discuss the value of the implementation for testing any models for the construction of real-time multi-agent systems and include a comparison to related work.

The case against a positivist philosophy of requirements engineering

Requirements engineering is a field with a heavy practical emphasis and for the most part is quite rightly unconcerned with philosophical reflection. However, there have been exceptions. Philosophical arguments are important because they can be used to powerful effect, facilitating explicit debate on views that may previously have been implicit, and shaping the direction of thought and research within the field. Several cases from both requirements engineering and software engineering have given prominence to the philosophy of positivism. This paper will outline arguments against such a view.

Minimal ordering constraints for some families of variable symmetries

Variable symmetries in a constraint satisfaction problem can be broken by adding lexicographic ordering constraints. Existing general methods of generating such sets of ordering constraints can require a huge number of constraints. This adds an unacceptable overhead to the solving process. Methods exist by which this large set of ordering constraints can be reduced to a much smaller set automatically, but their application is also prohibitively costly. In contrast, this paper takes a bottom-up approach. It examines some commonly-occurring families of groups and derives a minimal set of ordering constraints sufficient to break the symmetry each group describes. These minimal sets are then used as building blocks to generate minimal sets of ordering constraints for groups constructed via direct and imprimitive wreath products. Experimental results confirm the value of minimal sets of ordering constraints, which can now be generated much more cheaply than with previous methods.     

Face detection and recognition of natural human emotion using Markov random fields

This paper presents an integrated system for emotion detection. In this research effort, we have taken into account the fact that emotions are most widely represented with eye and mouth expressions. The proposed system uses color images and it is consisted of three modules. The first module implements skin detection, using Markov random fields models for image segmentation and skin detection. A set of several colored images with human faces have been considered as the training set. A second module is responsible for eye and mouth detection and extraction. The specific module uses the HLV color space of the specified eye and mouth region. The third module detects the emotions pictured in the eyes and mouth, using edge detection and measuring the gradient of eyes’ and mouth’s region figure. The paper provides results from the system application, along with proposals for further research.     

Social impacts of road traffic: perceptions and priorities of local residents

The assessment of the social impacts of road traffic is usually based on objective indicators or on expert judgement, without input from the affected communities. This paper considers the perceptions and priorities of local residents about traffic impacts and possible mitigation measures, using as a case study a rural area that will be affected by traffic associated with the construction of a nuclear power station. The study consisted of a qualitative phase followed by a stated preference survey. Econometric models were used to measure the relative priority of different impacts and mitigation measures. The most impactful aspects were noise, vibration and increased car or bus travel times. The most preferred measures were night-time restrictions to HGVs, parking restrictions and safety measures for pedestrians and cyclists. There were significant differences in preferences according to residence location, gender, employment status and household composition. The results provide information about aspects that tend to be aggregated in existing assessment frameworks, separating the reduction in the utility of some activities (like walking and driving) and the suppression of those activities.