Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Determinants Of The Adoption Of Customer-Oriented Mobile Commerce Initiatives, Léger Pierre-Majorique, Luc Cassivi, S. F. Wamba

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

This paper investigates organizations implementing mobile commerce initiatives. Mobile commerce (m-commerce) is defined as the wireless B2B and B2C exchange of operational and financial data within a supply chain. Based on a survey conducted with 159 Canadian and Scandinavian executive managers, this paper tests several theoretical determinants of customer-oriented m-commerce initiatives. Results indicate that i) the adoption of electronic commerce is a strong determinant for the adoption of m-commerce initiatives, ii) software firms are more inclined to adopt m-commerce initiatives, iii) firm size does not influence the adoption of mobile commerce, and iv) contrary to expectations, firms focusing on B2C …

Comparison Of Solvent Regimes For The Extraction Of Photosynthetic Pigments From Leaves Of Higher Plants, J. L. Dunn, J. D. Turnbull, Sharon A. Robinson

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

The relative efficiency of methanol- and acetone-based solvents for the extraction of pigments from photosynthetic tissues of plant was compared, together with the advantages of multiple versus single extractions. The two commonly employed triple acetone extractions (100:80:80% and 85:100:100%) performed comparably for most pigments and for all plant species tested. Single extractions with either 96% methanol or 85% acetone failed to extract the more hydrophobic pigments, especially ?-carotene. We conclude that multiple extractions that combine pure and aqueous (80–85%) acetone are preferable for extraction of the full range of pigments. These results suggest that previous studies that have utilised aqueous …

Nativeness, Invasiveness And Nation In Australian Plants, Lesley M. Head, Pat Muir

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

The conceptualization of alien invasive species conflates two axes of variability that have become unhelpfully blurred. The nativeness/alienness axis refers to the presumed belonging of a species in ecological or social space. Invasiveness refers to the behavior of the species in question, particularly in relation to other species. The overlay of nation introduces further variability. Teasing these axes apart is important for more effective environmental management. We examine these concepts using two influential forms of ecological knowledge: the biogeographical and ecological literature and the vernacular experiences of suburban backyarders. Three case studes, the invasive native Pittosporum undulatum and two invasive …

Generalized Orthogonal Designs, S. Georgiou, C. Koukouvinos, Jennifer Seberry

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Orthogonal designs and their special cases such as weighing matrices and Hadamard matrices have many applications in combinatorics, statistics, and coding theory as well as in signal processing. In this paper we generalize the definition of orthogonal designs, we give many constructions for these designs and we prove some multiplication theorems that, most of them, can also be applied in the special case of orthogonal designs. Some necessary conditions for the existence of generalized orthogonal designs are also given.

National Inquiry On Bushfire Mitigation And Management, S. Ellis, P. Kanowski, R. J. Whelan

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

Bushfires are an inherent part of the Australian environment. We cannot prevent them, but we can minimise the risks they pose to life, property and infrastructure, production systems, and the environment. Australia has a large and very capable force of volunteer and career firefighters, advanced firefighting technologies, and significant firefighting resources. But the geographical scale of our country, the large and expanding rural–urban interface, and the potential for rapid bushfire development and spread under adverse weather conditions mean that individual Australians cannot rely solely on fire agencies to protect their lives and property from bushfires. Bushfires have a fundamental and …

On Some Antenna Selection Techniques For Wireless Channels Utilizing Differential Space-Time Modulation, Le Chung Tran, Tadeusz A. Wysocki

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

The paper deals with antenna selection techniques for wireless channels utilizing differential space-time modulation. We propose here the restricted N-out-of-M antenna selection technique providing relatively good bit error performance, while using only one feedback bit for transmit diversity purpose. In addition, we also present an improved N-out-of-(N+1) antenna selection technique, which shortens the time required for processing feedback information. These techniques remarkably improve performance of wireless channels using differential detection.

Trace Gas Emissions From Biomass Burning Inferred From Aerosol Optical Depth, Clare Paton-Walsh, N. B. Jones, Stephen R. Wilson, A. Meier, N. Deutscher, D. W. Griffith, R. Mitchell, S. Campbell

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

We have observed strong correlations between simultaneous and co-located measurements of aerosol optical depth and column amounts of carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde and ammonia in bushfire smoke plumes over SE Australia during the Austral summers of 2001/2002 and 2002/2003. We show how satellite-derived aerosol optical depth maps may be used in conjunction with these correlations to determine the total amounts of these gases present in a fire-affected region. This provides the basis of a method for estimating total emissions of trace gases from biomass burning episodes using visible radiances measured by satellite.

Sharp Results Concerning The Expression Of Functions As Sums Of Finite Differences, R. Nillsen, S. Okada

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

A square integrable function on the real line can be written as a finite sum of differences of order s if and only if the Fourier transform of the function vanishes at the origin at a rate comparable with |x|^{-s}. This enables us to see that the space of all such functions becomes a Hilbert space D^s(R) and that this space is the range of the derivative of order s on the Sobolev space of order s. It was proved by the author (Journal of Functional Analysis 110 (1992), 73-95) that each function in D^s(R) is a sum of 2s+1 …

Iterated Belief Change, Aditya K. Ghose, P. O. Hadjinian, A. Sattar, J. You, R. Goebel

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Most existing formalizations treat belief change as a single step process, and ignore several problems that become important when a theory, or belief state, is revised over several steps. This paper identifies these problems, and argues for the need to retain all of the multiple possible outcomes of a belief change step, and for a framework in which the effects of a belief change step persist as long as is consistently possible. To demonstrate that such a formalization is indeed possible, we develop a framework which uses the language of PJ-default logic to represent a belief state, and which enables …

Flexible Spatial Models For Kriging And Cokriging Using Moving Averages And The Fast Fourier Transform (Fft), Jay M. Ver Hoef, Noel A. Cressie, Ronald P. Barry

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Models for spatial autocorrelation and cross-correlation depend on the distance and direction separating two locations, and are constrained so that for all possible sets of locations, the covariance matrices implied from the models remain nonnegative-definite. Based on spatial correlation, optimal linear predictors can be constructed that yield complete maps of spatial fields from incomplete and noisy spatial data. This methodology is called kriging if the data are of only one variable type, and it is called cokriging if it is of two or more variable types. Historically, to satisfy the nonnegative-definite condition, cokriging has used coregionalization models for cross-variograms, even …

Designing Applications For Mobile Phones: The Mobile Subject Assistant, Sam Jebeile

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

The rapid adoption rate of mobile phones coupled with advancements in supporting technologies suggests mobile phones may now be a viable tool for classroom use. In this paper we introduce the Mobile Subject Assistant, a proposed mobile phone based course tool. The tool is intended to assist in the delivery of university level subjects with an emphasis on student participation, collaboration and group or project work. We discuss a number of issues related to the design of interfaces for mobile phone applications and briefly describe the design of the interface to the Mobile Subject Assistant.

Mirroring Does Not Equal Transparency: The Importance Of Culturally Aware Student Interfaces, Penelope Mcfarlane, A. Fuller

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

The University of Wollongong, along with most other Australian universities, now has considerable investment in delivering courses to Asian markets. While there is some concern regarding the relevance of a Western-based subject delivery to an Asian culture, most transnational teachers do localize course materials to varying degrees. However, the web-based interfaces to the subject materials are rarely, if ever, similarly adapted to better suit the culture of the intended target audience.

In this paper we argue that failure to take into consideration student perceptions of the interface provided to the materials may adversely affect the usability of such systems. Any …

A Longitudinal Study Of The Use Of The Web By Regional Tourism Organisations In The Asia Pacific Region, Lois Burgess, Joan Cooper, Carole Alcock, Preeti Uppala

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

The information-intensive nature of the tourism and travel industry suggests an important role for Web technology in the promotion and marketing of tourist destinations. With reports of travel purchases and reservations being one of the fastest growing segments of the Internet community (eMarketer, 2002), it is no surprise that the number of tourism operators on the Web has increased considerably over the past few years. This paper presents the results of a longitudinal study of the use of Web technologies by Regional Tourism Organisations (RTOs) in the Asia-Pacific tourism industry. The Websites of 195 RTOs in the Asia-Pacific Region were …

A Research Framework For The Adoption And Usage Of Executive Information Systems By Organisational Executives: An Exploratory Study, Emmanuel Matthew Ikart, George Ditsa

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

To improve the performance of executives’ work, a number of organisations have implemented executive information systems (EIS). Although the use of EIS is important in executives’ work, majority of executives are unwilling to use EIS applications. By using social factors, habits and facilitation conditions variables from Triandis’ framework, this paper extends TAM to derive variables to address the problem of the low usage of EIS by executives. This paper reports on research in progress in Australia on the adoption and usage of EIS by executives. The preliminary results suggest that executives’ experience in EIS positively relates to their experience in …

Issues Affecting Power Engineering Undergraduate Education In Australia, D A. Robinson, Victor J. Gosbell

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Recent changes to the electric power industry through deregulation and restructuring have had a considerable effect on power engineering education internationally. A number of Australian universities have also noticed a decline in the number of students interested in power engineering subjects, leading to the fewer graduates with power engineering knowledge. With a reduction in graduates and a perception of an aging workforce a shortage of suitably qualified power engineers for industry may be imminent. This paper provides discussion on the current status of university power engineering education within Australia and includes results from a recent Australia-wide survey of the university …

Power Quality Data Analysis Using Unsupervised Data Mining, Ali Asheibi, David A. Stirling, Sarath Perera, D A. Robinson

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

The rapid increase in the size of databases required to store power quality monitoring data has demanded new techniques for analysing and understanding the data. One suggested technique to assist in analysis is data mining. Data mining is a process that uses a variety of data analysis tools to identify hidden patterns and relationships within large samples of data. This paper presents several data mining tools and techniques that are applicable to power quality data analysis to enable efficient reporting of disturbance indices and identify network problems through pattern recognition. This paper also presents results of data mining techniques applied …

Flicker Transfer In Radial Power Systems, Sankika Tennakoon, Lakshal Perera, D A. Robinson, Sarath Perera

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Loads which exhibit continuous and rapid variations in their current can cause voltage fluctuations that are often referred to as flicker. One good example for such loads is arc furnaces which are usually fed by dedicated feeders from the high voltage busbars in transmission systems. The flicker generated from such loads will propagate to the upstream HV point of common coupling (PCC), and from there to the downstream through the transmission and sub transmission systems. This paper demonstrates how the generated flicker is propagated from the HV PCC to the downstream in radial networks exhibiting different levels of attenuation depending …

Assessing The Future Of Electrical Power Engineering: A Report On Electrical Power Engineering Manpower Requirements In Australia, Victor J. Gosbell, D A. Robinson

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

In 2001 the Electric Energy Society of Australia (EESA) developed concerns based on anecdotal evidence that there was a looming shortage of electrical power engineers in Australia. Information from the electrical power industry and academic communities was obtained through two separate survey questionnaires, a discussion workshop, and a number of submissions. This information was collated and compiled into 'Assessing the Future of Electrical Power Engineering: a Report on Electrical Power Engineering Manpower Requirements in Australia'.

Dynamic Multimedia Adaptation And Updating Of Media Streams With Mpeg-21, L. Rong, I. Burnett

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

The paper discusses media streaming using dynamic resource adaptation and update as a means of facilitating universal multimedia access (UMA): the concept of accessing multimedia content through a variety of possible schemes (Bormans, J. et al., IEEE Sig. Process. Magazine, 2003). As background, the paper summarizes the most common content negotiation approaches and addresses their facets and problems. MPEG-21, the multimedia framework and its relationship to UMA are then explained. Our primary focus is an end-to-end approach to content adaptation which takes advantage of MPEG-21 to facilitate the UMA concept in a media streaming environment. The concept is validated using …

Hierarchic Decomposition In Agent Oriented Conceptual Modelling, R. B. Brown, Aditya K. Ghose

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Software development processes requires a thorough understanding of stakeholder objectives and requirements. Product-centrism is an insufficient stance from which to achieve greater efficiencies and reduce reengineering. Stakeholder requirement elicitation is thus worthy of formalization. A suite of tools, notably the i* model, provides a framework for early-phase requirements capture. These tools currently are at best only semiautomated and essentially consist of a notational glossary and sets of mark-up symbols. Increasing formalization may lead to greater automation of the process in the future, but currently there is a degree of flexibility that presents pitfalls for the unwary practitioner. A notion of …

Co-Evolution Of Complementary Formal And Informal Requirements, Aneesh Krishna, Aditya K. Ghose, S. A. Vilkomir

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Agent-oriented Conceptual Modelling (AoCM, as exemplified by the i* notation by E. Yu (1995)), represents an interesting approach to modelling early phase requirements that is particularly effective in capturing organizational contexts, stake-holder intentions and rationale. There are significant benefits in using formal methods for the development of computer systems and improving their quality. We propose a methodology which permits the use of these two otherwise disparate approaches in a complementary and synergistic fashion for requirements engineering.

Combining Agent-Oriented Conceptual Modelling With Formal Methods, S. A. Vilkomir, Aditya K. Ghose, A. Krishna

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Agent-oriented conceptual modelling notations such as i* have received considerable recent attention as a useful approach to early-phase requirements engineering. Agent-oriented conceptual modelling notations are highly effective in representing requirements from an intentional stance and answering questions such as what goals exist, how key actors depend on each other and what alternatives must be considered. Formal methods such as those based on the Z notation offer a complementary set of representational facilities. We explore how these two otherwise disparate approaches might be used in a synergistic fashion.

Two Complex Orthogonal Space-Time Codes For Eight Transmit Antennas, Le Chung Tran, Jennifer Seberry, Yejing Wang, Beata J. Wysocki, Tadeusz A. Wysocki, Tianbing Xia, Ying Zhao

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Two new constructions of complex orthogonal space-time block codes of order 8 based on the theory of amicable orthogonal designs are presented and their performance compared with that of the standard code of order 8. These new codes are suitable for multi-modulation schemes where the performance can be sacrificed for a higher throughput.

Performance Evaluation Of A Proxy System For Providing Immersive Audio Communication To Massively Multi-Player Games, C. D. Nguyen, Farzad Safaei, P. Boustead

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

In this paper, a distributed proxy architecture is introduced for the provisioning of an immersive audio communication service to massively multi-player online games. The immersive audio communication service enables each avatar to hear a realistic audio mix of conversations in its hearing range. In our earlier work, peer-to-peer and central server architectures have been proposed for this service. In this paper, a distributed proxy architecture with either using network multicast or unicast between proxies is introduced to address the limitations of the previous architectures. The main focus of this paper is to evaluate the bandwidth cost saving of network multicast …

Visual Perceptual Process Model And Object Segmentation, Wanqing Li, P. Ogunbona, Lei Ye, Igor Kharitonenko

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Modeling human visual process is crucial for automatic object segmentation that is able to produce consistent results to human perception. Based on the latest understanding of how human performs the task of extracting objects from images, we proposed a graph-based computational framework to model the visual process. The model supports the hierarchical nature of human visual perception and consists of the key steps of human visual perception including pre-attentive (pre-constancy) grouping, figure-and-ground organization, and attentive (post-constancy) grouping. A divide-and-conquer implementation of the model based on the concept of shortest spanning tree (SST) has demonstrated the potential of the model for …

A Recursive Overlay Multicast Algorithm For Distribution Of Audio Streams In Networked Games, M. Dowlatshahi, Farzad Safaei

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

This paper aims to provide a fast multicast algorithm among a set of distributed proxies to enable the creation of realistic audio for networked games. We assume that each proxy is responsible for a group of clients. The proxy receives the audio packets from its clients and multicasts this audio to every other proxy that requires this audio for any of its attached clients. In crowded virtual environments, the number of multicast trees could be quite large and these undergoes continuous change as the avatars move in and out of each others hearing range. To reduce the effect of overhead …

Investigation And Modeling Of Traffic Issues In Immersive Audio Environments, J. Mcmahon, M. Rumsewicz, P. Boustead, Farzad Safaei

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

A growing area of technical importance is that of distributed virtual environments for work and play. For the audio component of such environments to be useful, great emphasis must be placed on the delivery of high quality audio scenes in which participants may change their relative positions. In this paper we describe and analyze an algorithm focused on maintaining relative synchronization between multiple users of such an environment and examine the subjective quality of service achieved.

Resilience-Differentiation In Programmable Virtual Networks, F. Rosenbaum, S. Jha, P. Boustead, Farzad Safaei

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Service and application requirements on network resilience have increased over the past few years. New on-line services such as e-commerce and connection-oriented interactive real-time services require higher network resilience than the more traditional off-line services. Programmable virtual networks promise fast and easy provisioning of new services but no consideration to meet the diverse resilience requirements has been made. This paper discusses issues related to resilience-differentiation in programmable virtual networks. A set of general guidelines is presented that apply to resilience-differentiation in programmable virtual network architectures. A case study is used to illustrate how the proposed guidelines can be met by …

Location-Based Services: A Vehicle For It&T Convergence , Katina Michael

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Location-based services (LBS), more than any other mobile commerce application area has served to bring together information technology and telecommunications (IT&T) industries. While much has been written on the potential of LBS, literature on how it is a catalyst for digital convergence is scant. This paper identifies and explores the various levels of converging technologies in mobile commerce by using three LBS case studies. Through literal replication the findings indicate that IT&T technologies are converging at the infrastructure, appliance and application level. It is predicted that mCommerce applications will increasingly rely on industry convergence to achieve their desired outcomes.

The Social, Cultural, Religious And Ethical Implications Of Automatic Identification, Katina Michael, M G. Michael

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

The number of automatic identification (auto-ID) technologies being utilized in eBusiness applications is growing rapidly. With an increasing trend toward miniaturization and wireless capabilities, auto-ID technologies are becoming more and more pervasive. The pace at which new product innovations are being introduced far outweighs the ability for citizens to absorb what these changes actually mean, and what their likely impact will be upon future generations. This paper attempts to cover a broad spectrum of issues ranging from the social, cultural, religious and ethical implications of auto-ID with an emphasis on human transponder implants. Previous work is brought together and presented …