Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Imagespirit: Verbal Guided Image Parsing, Ming-Ming Cheng, Shuai Zheng, Wen-Yan Lin, Vibhav Vineet, Paul Sturgess, Nigel Crook, Niloy J. Mitra, Philip Torr

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Humans describe images in terms of nouns and adjectives while algorithms operate on images represented as sets of pixels. Bridging this gap between how humans would like to access images versus their typical representation is the goal of image parsing, which involves assigning object and attribute labels to pixels. In this article we propose treating nouns as object labels and adjectives as visual attribute labels. This allows us to formulate the image parsing problem as one of jointly estimating per-pixel object and attribute labels from a set of training images. We propose an efficient (interactive time) solution. Using the extracted …

Timelessness In Sustainable Product Design, Alex Lobos

Presentations and other scholarship

Shorter product lifespan driven by reduced durability and planned obsolescence is causing severe environmental issues and diminishing user experience. Sustainable Design is addressing this problem with strategies that improve a product’s lifecycle and address important areas of impact in manufacturing, use, and end of life. This article explores how the concept of ‘timelessness’ can be used as an effective strategy for creating products that are cherished and enjoyed by their users, last longer, are easier to repair and have better options for end-of-life. A series of case studies found in commercial products as well as in student projects illustrate how …

Data Mining For Design Flood Prediction, James E. Ball

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Design flood estimation remains a problem for many professionals involved in the management of rural and urban catchments. Advice is required regarding design flood characteristics for many design problems including the design of culverts and bridges necessary for cross drainage of transport routes, the design of urban drainage systems, the design of flood mitigation levees and other flood mitigation structures, design of dam spillways, and many environmental flow problems. When a risk based approach is adopted as the design paradigm, there is a need to predict both the magnitude of the hazard and the exceedance probability of the hazard. In …

Comparison Of Various Phased Approaches For The Constrained Minimum-Cost Design Of Water Distribution Networks, Enrico Creaco, Marco Franchini, Tom Walski

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

This work is aimed at analyzing and comparing three different phased approaches for constrained minimum-cost design of water distribution networks: the single-step design with demand feedback, the multi-step design without demand feedback and the multi-step design with demand feedback. The difference between the single-step design and the multi-step design lies in the fact that whereas the former entails optimizing a single construction step at a time, i.e. the current construction phase, the latter is based on the phasing of construction and then is aimed at optimizing the current construction phase and all the subsequent phases, included inside a certain temporal …

A New Methodology For The Design Of Residential Water Distribution Networks And Its Population Range Of Application., Daniel Vallejo, Juan Guillermo Saldarriaga, Diego Alejandro Páez, Santiago Serrano

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

For the design of a Water Distribution Systems (WDS) or for Residential Water Networks (RWN) different assumptions have to be made. This implies that the design methodologies for each of the two kinds of networks differ between them and so it is important to define a population value that limits the applicability of each method. This paper will present a new methodology for the RWN’s design process as well as the calculation the population limit. For designing the RWN demands’ predictions have to be made. The new methodology uses the concept of Poisson Rectangular Pulses (PRP) for modeling the water …

Placing Videos On A Semantic Hierarchy For Search Result Navigation, Song Tan, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Organizing video search results in a list view is widely adopted by current commercial search engines, which cannot support efficient browsing for complex search topics that have multiple semantic facets. In this article, we propose to organize video search results in a highly structured way. Specifically, videos are placed on a semantic hierarchy that accurately organizes various facets of a given search topic. To pick the most suitable videos for each node of the hierarchy, we define and utilize three important criteria: relevance, uniqueness, and diversity. Extensive evaluations on a large YouTube video dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Constructive Visualization, Samuel Huron, Sheelagh Carpendale, Alice Thudt, Anthony Tang, Michael Mauerer

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

If visualization is to be democratized, we need to provide means for non-experts to create visualizations that allow them to engage directly with datasets. We present constructive visualization a new paradigm for the simple creation of flexible, dynamic visualizations. Constructive visualization is simple—in that the skills required to build and manipulate the visualizations are akin to kindergarten play; it is expressive— in that one can build within the constraints of the chosen environment, and it also supports dynamics — in that these constructed visualizations can be rebuilt and adjusted. We describe the conceptual components and processes underlying constructive visualization, and …

Physio@Home: Design Explorations To Support Movement Guidance, Richard Tang, Hesam Alizadeh, Anthony Tang, Scott Bateman, Joaquim A.P. Jorge

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Patients typically undergo physiotherapy with the help of a physiotherapist who teaches, guides, and corrects the patients as they perform exercises. It would be nice if people could repeat these exercises at home, potentially improving their recovery rate. However, without guidance and/or corrective feedback from a physiotherapist, the patient will not know whether they are doing their exercises correctly. To address this problem, we implemented a prototype that guides patients through pre-recorded exercise movements using visual guides overlaid atop a mirror-view of the patient on a wall-mounted display. We conducted informal evaluations and pilot studies to assess our prototype and …

Toward Visualization-Specific Heuristic Evaluation, Alvin E. Tarrell, Camilla Forsell, Ann L. Fruhling, Georges Grinstein, Rita Borgo, Jean Scholtz

Interdisciplinary Informatics Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

This position paper describes heuristic evaluation as it relates to visualization and visual analytics. We review heuristic evaluation in general, then comment on previous process-based, performance-based, and framework-based efforts to adapt the method to visualization-specific needs. We postulate that the framework-based approach holds the most promise for future progress in development of visualization-specific heuristics, and propose a specific framework as a starting point. We then recommend a method for community involvement and input into the further development of the heuristic framework and more detailed design and evaluation guidelines.

Indemics: An Interactive High-Performance Computing Framework For Data Intensive Epidemic Modeling, Keith R. Bisset, Jiangzhuo Chen, Suruchi Deodhar, Xizhou Feng, Yifei Ma, Madhav V. Marathe

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

We describe the design and prototype implementation of Indemics (_Interactive; Epi_demic; _Simulation;)—a modeling environment utilizing high-performance computing technologies for supporting complex epidemic simulations. Indemics can support policy analysts and epidemiologists interested in planning and control of pandemics. Indemics goes beyond traditional epidemic simulations by providing a simple and powerful way to represent and analyze policy-based as well as individual-based adaptive interventions. Users can also stop the simulation at any point, assess the state of the simulated system, and add additional interventions. Indemics is available to end-users via a web-based interface.

Detailed performance analysis shows that Indemics greatly enhances the …

Securing Identity Information With Image Watermarks, Brian Cusack, Reza Khaleghparas

Australian Information Security Management Conference

In this paper, we describe the requirements for embedding watermarks in images used for identity verification and demonstrate a proof of concept in security sciences. The watermarking application is designed for verifying the rightful ownership of a driving license or similar identity object. The tool we built and tested embeds and extracts watermarks that contain verification information of the rightful owner. We used the human finger print of the rightful owner as the watermark. Such information protection mechanisms add an extra layer of security to the information system and improve verification of identification attributes by providing strong security. The issues …