International networking: education, training and change

The decision to inaugurate the International Networking Conference to focus on education, training and change was a direct result of the Higher Education/UNESCO Conference which was held in Cyprus in 1992. I was given the opportunity of delivering a paper on some of the problems associated with managing an internationally respected performing arts institution in the most remote capital city in the world-Perth, Western Australia. Upon my return to Perth I broached the notion of conducting an international conference in Western Australia which would highlight issues and problems relative to higher education programs in Australia, Asia and the Indian Ocean rim. With the support of UNESCO, the University\u27s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Roy Lourens, and the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Professor Brian Lawrence, agreed that the project was one that would be a significant one for Edith Cowan University. They provided substantial financial and moral support...

Context Awareness for Navigation Applications

This thesis examines the topic of context awareness for navigation applications and asks the question, “What are the benefits and constraints of introducing context awareness in navigation?” Context awareness can be defined as a computer’s ability to understand the situation or context in which it is operating. In particular, we are interested in how context awareness can be used to understand the navigation needs of people using mobile computers, such as smartphones, but context awareness can also benefit other types of navigation users, such as maritime navigators. There are countless other potential applications of context awareness, but this thesis focuses on applications related to navigation. For example, if a smartphone-based navigation system can understand when a user is walking, driving a car, or riding a train, then it can adapt its navigation algorithms to improve positioning performance. We argue that the primary set of tools available for generating context awareness is machine learning. Machine learning is, in fact, a collection of many different algorithms and techniques for developing “computer systems that automatically improve their performance through experience” [1]. This thesis examines systematically the ability of existing algorithms from machine learning to endow computing systems with context awareness. Specifically, we apply machine learning techniques to tackle three different tasks related to context awareness and having applications in the field of navigation: (1) to recognize the activity of a smartphone user in an indoor office environment, (2) to recognize the mode of motion that a smartphone user is undergoing outdoors, and (3) to determine the optimal path of a ship traveling through ice-covered waters. The diversity of these tasks was chosen intentionally to demonstrate the breadth of problems encompassed by the topic of context awareness. During the course of studying context awareness, we adopted two conceptual “frameworks,” which we find useful for the purpose of solidifying the abstract concepts of context and context awareness. The first such framework is based strongly on the writings of a rhetorician from Hellenistic Greece, Hermagoras of Temnos, who defined seven elements of “circumstance”. We adopt these seven elements to describe contextual information. The second framework, which we dub the “context pyramid” describes the processing of raw sensor data into contextual information in terms of six different levels. At the top of the pyramid is “rich context”, where the information is expressed in prose, and the goal for the computer is to mimic the way that a human would describe a situation. We are still a long way off from computers being able to match a human’s ability to understand and describe context, but this thesis improves the state-of-the-art in context awareness for navigation applications. For some particular tasks, machine learning has succeeded in outperforming humans, and in the future there are likely to be tasks in navigation where computers outperform humans. One example might be the route optimization task described above. This is an example of a task where many different types of information must be fused in non-obvious ways, and it may be that computer algorithms can find better routes through ice-covered waters than even well-trained human navigators. This thesis provides only preliminary evidence of this possibility, and future work is needed to further develop the techniques outlined here. The same can be said of the other two navigation-related tasks examined in this thesis

Phototrophic Bacteria

Microorganisms is pleased to publish this book, which reprints papers that appeared in a Special Issue on “Phototrophic Bacteria”, with Guest Editors Robert Blankenship and Matthew Sattley. This Special Issue included research on all types of phototrophic bacteria, including both anoxygenic and oxygenic forms. Research on these bacterial organisms has greatly advanced our understanding of the basic principles that underlie the energy storage that takes place in all types of photosynthetic organisms, including both bacterial and eukaryotic forms. Topics of interest include: microbial physiology, microbial ecology, microbial genetics, evolutionary microbiology, systems microbiology, agricultural microbiology, microbial biotechnology, and environmental microbiology, as all are related to phototrophic bacteria