Privacy Preserving Geo-Linkage in the Big Urban Data Era

Big data technologies and a range of Government open data initiatives provide the basis for discovering new insights into cities; how they are planned, how they managed and the day-to-day challenges they face in health, transport and changing population profiles. The Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN – www.aurin.org.au) project is one example of such a big data initiative that is currently running across Australia. AURIN provides a single gateway providing online (live) programmatic access to over 2000 data sets from over 70 major and typically definitive data-driven organizations across federal and State government, across industry and across academia. However whilst open (public) data is useful to bring data-driven intelligence to cities, more often than not, it is the data that is not-publicly accessible that is essential to understand city challenges and needs. Such sensitive (unit-level) data has unique requirements on access and usage to meet the privacy and confidentiality demands of the associated organizations. In this paper we highlight a novel geo-privacy supporting solution implemented as part of the AURIN project that provides seamless and secure access to individual (unit-level) data from the Department of Health in Victoria. We illustrate this solution across a range of typical city challenges in localized contexts around Melbourne. We show how unit level data can be combined with other data in a privacy-protecting manner. Unlike other secure data access and usage solutions that have been developed/deployed, the AURIN solution allows any researcher to access and use the data in a manner that meets all of the associated privacy and confidentiality concerns, without obliging them to obtain ethical approval or any other hurdles that are normally put in place on access to and use of sensitive data. This provides a paradigm shift in secure access to sensitive data with geospatial content.     

Computer Simulation of a Living Cell: Metabolic Control System Experiments

Abstract

This paper reports on some interesting experiments performed on a simulated model of a living cell. The basic model is that of Weinberg [35] and the underlying techniques employed are described by Zeigler and Weinberg [41]. The cell was subjected to step changes in its nutrient environment.     

EUROPEAN NEEDS AND ATTITUDES TOWARDS INFORMATION SECURITY

The needs for security of information (in computer systems, on telecommunications and on media) are rather uniform throughout Western Europe, and are seen as being significantly different from the needs in the United States. Recognition of these needs is, however, quite varied; attitudes towards the best methods for satisfying the needs are even more varied. The situation with respect to these needs and attitudes is described for the major countries of Western Europe. The official and unofficial attitudes towards policy and regulation of information security technology (particularly cryptology) is also described for these countries. In particular, it is clear that, with a very few exceptions, neither official nor unofficial policy level organizations are prepared to follow the position advocated by the U.S. Government in such matters.     

Arrival first queueing networks with applications in kanban production systems

In this paper, we introduce a new class of queueing networks called arrival first networks. We characterise its transition rates and derive the relationship between arrival rules, linear partial balance equations, and product form stationary distributions. This model is motivated by production systems operating under a kanban protocol. In contrast with the conventional departure first networks, where a transition is initiated by service completion of items at the originating nodes that are subsequently routed to the destination nodes (push system), in an arrival first network a transition is initiated by the destination nodes of the items and subsequently those items are processed at and removed from the originating nodes (pull system). These are similar to the push and pull systems in manufacturing systems.

Our characterisation provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the network to possess linear traffic equations, and sufficient conditions for the network to have a product form stationary distribution. We apply our results to networks operating under a kanban mechanism and characterise the rate at which items are pulled as well as the routing and blocking protocols that give rise to a product form stationary distribution.     

Bisimulation conversion and verification procedure for goal-based control systems

Fault tolerance and safety verification of control systems are essential for the success of autonomous robotic systems. A control architecture called Mission Data System (MDS), developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, addresses these needs with a goal-based control approach. In this paper, a software algorithm for converting goal network control systems into linear hybrid systems is described. The conversion process is a bisimulation; the resulting linear hybrid system can be verified for safety in the presence of failures using existing symbolic model checkers, and thus the original goal network is verified. A moderately complex example goal network control system is converted to a linear hybrid system using the automatic conversion software that is based on the bisimulation and then is verified.     

Multicamera people tracking with a probabilistic occupancy map

Given two to four synchronized video streams taken at eye level and from different angles, we show that we can effectively combine a generative model with dynamic programming to accurately follow up to six individuals across thousands of frames in spite of significant occlusions and lighting changes. In addition, we also derive metrically accurate trajectories for each one of them.Our contribution is twofold. First, we demonstrate that our generative model can effectively handle occlusions in each time frame independently, even when the only data available comes from the output of a simple background subtraction algorithm and when the number of individuals is unknown a priori. Second, we show that multi-person tracking can be reliably achieved by processing individual trajectories separately over long sequences, provided that a reasonable heuristic is used to rank these individuals and avoid confusing them with one another.     

Reconstruction of cellular biological structures from optical microscopy data

Developments in optical microscopy imaging have generated large high-resolution data sets that have spurred medical researchers to conduct investigations into mechanisms of disease, including cancer at cellular and subcellular levels. The work reported here demonstrates that a suitable methodology can be conceived that isolates modality-dependent effects from the larger segmentation task and that 3D reconstructions can be cognizant of shapes as evident in the available 2D planar images. In the current realization, a method based on active geodesic contours is first deployed to counter the ambiguity that exists in separating overlapping cells on the image plane. Later, another segmentation effort based on a variant of Voronoi tessellations improves the delineation of the cell boundaries using a Bayesian formulation. In the next stage, the cells are interpolated across the third dimension thereby mitigating the poor structural correlation that exists in that dimension. We deploy our methods on three separate data sets obtained from light, confocal, and phase-contrast microscopy and validate the results appropriately.