A new approach to structural design that incorporates the effect of non-structural components. The construction industry is a significant contributor to the Australian economy. Each year billions of dollars are spent erecting new high rise buildings. Further, Australian engineering firms bid on major construction projects throughout the world, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. The research described here promises to deliver economies to the Australian construction industry as well as e ....A new approach to structural design that incorporates the effect of non-structural components. The construction industry is a significant contributor to the Australian economy. Each year billions of dollars are spent erecting new high rise buildings. Further, Australian engineering firms bid on major construction projects throughout the world, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. The research described here promises to deliver economies to the Australian construction industry as well as equipping local firms involved in structural design to better compete for offshore work .
Community benefits will take the form of reduced construction costs and the capacity for a more complete and up to date knowledge of the structural performance and risk of aging assets, thereby increasing community confidence and safety.Read moreRead less
A study of the potential for the public to be involved in the design of large scale public works. Public acceptability of infrastructure such as desalination plants or new public spaces, is a concern for the Australian Commonwealth and State Governments. However, tensions exist between the need for expedient planning and development of critical public infrastructure and Australian principles of democratic social and economic participation. The instrument developed by this research will inform pu ....A study of the potential for the public to be involved in the design of large scale public works. Public acceptability of infrastructure such as desalination plants or new public spaces, is a concern for the Australian Commonwealth and State Governments. However, tensions exist between the need for expedient planning and development of critical public infrastructure and Australian principles of democratic social and economic participation. The instrument developed by this research will inform public policy to negotiate and understand arrangements that balance social participation with Government objectives.Read moreRead less
Vision Model Based Perceptual Digital Video Coding. Digital video coding and compression is an enabling technology and has diversified applications in audiovisual communications, multimedia computing, digital television broadcast and electronic entertainment industries. The project aims at spearheading research in theory, techniques and implementation of perceptual video coding in order to achieve constant and guaranteed quality in visual communications and services. It will explore a new appr ....Vision Model Based Perceptual Digital Video Coding. Digital video coding and compression is an enabling technology and has diversified applications in audiovisual communications, multimedia computing, digital television broadcast and electronic entertainment industries. The project aims at spearheading research in theory, techniques and implementation of perceptual video coding in order to achieve constant and guaranteed quality in visual communications and services. It will explore a new approach to digital video coding other than the constant bit rate coding techniques which have dominated digital video research for the past four decades. It will form a part of the theoretical foundation and principles for the next generation video coding and compression techniques, and may lead to new standards and practice.Read moreRead less
Ensembles of Collaborative Neural Networks. Artificial neural networks have been used successfully for data mining and control. A neural network ensemble(NNE) is a collection of networks that exhibits properties of self-organization, plasticity, and adaptive behaviour. The aim of this research is to develop an efficient and theoretically sound algorithm for NNE learning. The outcomes of the project will include insights into self-organization of complex NNE and automatic problem decomposition an ....Ensembles of Collaborative Neural Networks. Artificial neural networks have been used successfully for data mining and control. A neural network ensemble(NNE) is a collection of networks that exhibits properties of self-organization, plasticity, and adaptive behaviour. The aim of this research is to develop an efficient and theoretically sound algorithm for NNE learning. The outcomes of the project will include insights into self-organization of complex NNE and automatic problem decomposition and an efficient algorithm for constructing and training NNE. Practical outcomes will include research training for early career researchers and new modelling tools for data mining, robotics and multi-agent systems. The project contributes to the national priority area of smart information use.Read moreRead less
Kernel and Margin Based Machine Learning Algorithms. Certain machine learning algorithms, such as support vector machines, utilizing
the ideas of large margins and kernels have attracted much attention lately
because of their impressive performance on real world problems such as optical
character recognition. We plan to refine and extend such algorithms to a wide
range of different machine learning problems such as gene sequence analysis,
image processing and text classification. Expected ....Kernel and Margin Based Machine Learning Algorithms. Certain machine learning algorithms, such as support vector machines, utilizing
the ideas of large margins and kernels have attracted much attention lately
because of their impressive performance on real world problems such as optical
character recognition. We plan to refine and extend such algorithms to a wide
range of different machine learning problems such as gene sequence analysis,
image processing and text classification. Expected outcomes include the
development of software that allows the solution of hitherto unsolved machine
learning problems, and the ability to solve problems larger than those solvable
by the current generation of machine learning tools.Read moreRead less
Internet web page mining. This project aims to study the behaviour of internet search engines designed using a best first search strategy, and to improve on the existing designs. The outcome of the project will be a much better design of internet search engine which can be used to search for specific topics. The benefit to the Australian partner will be the gaining of skills in internet search engine design, originating from the Italian partner's group. The benefit to the Italian partner will be ....Internet web page mining. This project aims to study the behaviour of internet search engines designed using a best first search strategy, and to improve on the existing designs. The outcome of the project will be a much better design of internet search engine which can be used to search for specific topics. The benefit to the Australian partner will be the gaining of skills in internet search engine design, originating from the Italian partner's group. The benefit to the Italian partner will be the gaining of skills in research techniques, e.g., utilising a support vector machine as a classification tool, data mining techniques developed originally by the Australian partner's group, and in further developments of these techniques with specific applications to the internet web page mining problem.Read moreRead less
Extensions to the page scoring algorithm in internet search engine studies. This project proposes to study two extensions to the Page rank equation which is one of the theoretical underpinning of Google's web page scoring engine. In particular, we wish to explore ways to combine page connectivity and page characteristics in the scoring of web pages. This will be the first time a rational way is proposed for combining these two factors. The expected outcome will be a deeper understanding on how t ....Extensions to the page scoring algorithm in internet search engine studies. This project proposes to study two extensions to the Page rank equation which is one of the theoretical underpinning of Google's web page scoring engine. In particular, we wish to explore ways to combine page connectivity and page characteristics in the scoring of web pages. This will be the first time a rational way is proposed for combining these two factors. The expected outcome will be a deeper understanding on how these two factors affect the scores of a web page in a search engine, and hence how they affect the visibility of the page in response to a query.
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Data structures which change with time, a machine learning approach. Visibility of web pages, based on page importance, on the Internet controls their accessibility by users which is critical for e-Commerce applications. The page importance depends on its contents and its link structure to other web pages, both of which can be time varying. This project proposes a novel model in which time varying aspects of the changes to contents and their link structures are captured, thus allowing us a bette ....Data structures which change with time, a machine learning approach. Visibility of web pages, based on page importance, on the Internet controls their accessibility by users which is critical for e-Commerce applications. The page importance depends on its contents and its link structure to other web pages, both of which can be time varying. This project proposes a novel model in which time varying aspects of the changes to contents and their link structures are captured, thus allowing us a better understanding of how these influence the page importance over time. It will also allow us insight on how to improve the visibility of web pages.Read moreRead less
Investigations in Learning Algorithms for Web Page Scoring Systems. Modification of web page scores to satisfy requirements, e.g., one page should have a higher page score than another, a home page should have higher score than any other pages in the same site, using modifications of the forcing function, and the link connectivity matrix respectively of the PageRank equation will be studied. By clustering web pages either by ranks or by scores will help overcome issues of scale and complexity wh ....Investigations in Learning Algorithms for Web Page Scoring Systems. Modification of web page scores to satisfy requirements, e.g., one page should have a higher page score than another, a home page should have higher score than any other pages in the same site, using modifications of the forcing function, and the link connectivity matrix respectively of the PageRank equation will be studied. By clustering web pages either by ranks or by scores will help overcome issues of scale and complexity which are required for the live world wide web. Outcomes will provide a rational basis together with practical methods for modifying web page scores by a web site administrator.Read moreRead less
Uncertain Information Processing for Situation Awareness and Dynamic Decision-Making in Emergency Management. The Australian national counter-terrorism committee indicates that Australia should have a strong intelligence-led prevention and preparedness to support Australia on risk management, emergency services and maintaining capabilities to manage various types of terrorist attacks. The proposed situation awareness support technique can be used to develop situation analysis software systems or ....Uncertain Information Processing for Situation Awareness and Dynamic Decision-Making in Emergency Management. The Australian national counter-terrorism committee indicates that Australia should have a strong intelligence-led prevention and preparedness to support Australia on risk management, emergency services and maintaining capabilities to manage various types of terrorist attacks. The proposed situation awareness support technique can be used to develop situation analysis software systems or directly support Australia government agencies and industries to correctly assess a situation, increase awareness for crisis problems, and therefore improve emergency management and decision-making effectiveness, in particular, for avoiding disaster problems in the first place and preparing plans for those that undoubtedly will occur. Read moreRead less