Fire Service - Management and Command of Major Incidents

This study has concentrated upon the decision-making processes used at major incidents by the fire service in the United Kingdom rather than the more routine decisions made on the fireground. This partly because major incidents are safety critical events, involving complex technical or communication issues involving large volumes of information and many agencies, and also because the decisions made and judgements exercised have to demonstrate a robustness in application that will withstand considerable external scrutiny, since often major incidents involve losses that are subject to insurance or legal investigations. The research undertaken indicates that improvements are possible. The research places the current decision system in context. It does this by considering the cultural traditions of the fire service together with the managerial and organisational arrangements that set the parameters within which judgements and decisions will be made. This approach provides an insight as to how the fire service functions at operations and importantly the relationship between those decisions and time pressured environment in which they are often reached. Practical case studies that were attended by the author as the senior fire service commander are used to illustrate these features and help provide useful learning outcomes. This foundation is then used to consider in detail the whole decision support system employed and to offer objective improvements. Explanation of the operational practice employed is assisted by the provision of a number of tables and figures that illustrate the critical parts of the decision system, such as information trees and components and observed inter-agency issues, which are summarised in a systethatic decision process. Having collated and reviewed these findings it is postulated that command competency and situational awareness, the essential pre-requisites, can be improved through use of a new paradigm that emphasises the better use of data derived from a wider range of sources than are currently used. To assist in gaining this improvement greater integration of technology is suggested and options that exploit technology, such as electronic data communications, sensing devices, robotics and visualisátion, explored. Additional to the main study a number of allied supportive areas of research have been undertaken. These have included issues like fire service culture, public reaction to a serious fire, emergency action procedures, and toxic plume modelling and fireball impacts together with brief commentaries on September 11th and the future fire service in the United Kingdom. This research contributes to a relatively new area of study, the fire service decision process used to command and control resources, at major incidents

Distributed scene reconstruction from multiple mobile platforms

Recent research on mobile robotics has produced new designs that provide house-hold robots with omnidirectional motion. The image sensor embedded in these devices motivates the application of 3D vision techniques on them for navigation and mapping purposes. In addition to this, distributed cheapsensing systems acting as unitary entity have recently been discovered as an efficient alternative to expensive mobile equipment. In this work we present an implementation of a visual reconstruction method, structure from motion (SfM), on a low-budget, omnidirectional mobile platform, and extend this method to distributed 3D scene reconstruction with several instances of such a platform. Our approach overcomes the challenges yielded by the plaform. The unprecedented levels of noise produced by the image compression typical of the platform is processed by our feature filtering methods, which ensure suitable feature matching populations for epipolar geometry estimation by means of a strict quality-based feature selection. The robust pose estimation algorithms implemented, along with a novel feature tracking system, enable our incremental SfM approach to novelly deal with ill-conditioned inter-image configurations provoked by the omnidirectional motion. The feature tracking system developed efficiently manages the feature scarcity produced by noise and outputs quality feature tracks, which allow robust 3D mapping of a given scene even if - due to noise - their length is shorter than what it is usually assumed for performing stable 3D reconstructions. The distributed reconstruction from multiple instances of SfM is attained by applying loop-closing techniques. Our multiple reconstruction system merges individual 3D structures and resolves the global scale problem with minimal overlaps, whereas in the literature 3D mapping is obtained by overlapping stretches of sequences. The performance of this system is demonstrated in the 2-session case. The management of noise, the stability against ill-configurations and the robustness of our SfM system is validated on a number of experiments and compared with state-of-the-art approaches. Possible future research areas are also discussed

Graduate Catalogue 2005-2007

https://digitalscholarship.tnstate.edu/graduatecatalogues/1008/thumbnail.jp

Graduate Catalogue 2007-2009

https://digitalscholarship.tnstate.edu/graduatecatalogues/1000/thumbnail.jp

Dance performance in cyberspace - transfer and transformation

The aim of this research undertaking is to understand the potential development of dance performance in the context of cyberculture, by examining the way practitioners use new media to create artworks that include audience participation, and by endeavouring in their theorization. With specific reference to cyberspace as a concept of electronic, networked and navigable space, the enquiry traces the connections such practices have with conventions of the medium of dance, which operate in its widely known condition as a live performing art. But acknowledgement that new media and new contexts of production and reception inform the characteristics of these artworks and their discursive articulation, in terms of the way people and digital technologies interact in contemporary culture, is a major principle to their analysis and evaluation. This qualitative research is based on case-study design as a means of finding pragmatic evidence in particulars, to illustrate abstract concepts, technological processes and aesthetic values that are underway in a new area of knowledge. The field where this research operates within is located by a mapping of published literature that informs a theoretical interdisciplinary framework, which contextualizes the interpretation of artworks. The selected case studies have been subject to a process of systematic and detailed analysis, entailed with a model devised for the purpose of this enquiry. From this undertaking it can be claimed that while an extensive array of technologies, media and interactive models is available in this field, the artists pursue a commitment to demonstrate their worth for specifically developing (new media) dance performance, and for dance performance to articulate technological and critical issues for cyberculture studies. The results of this enquiry also contribute to conceptual understanding of what dance can be, today, in the light of technological changes