Report of the Planning Group on Commercial Catches, Discards and Biological Sampling (PGCCDBS) [1-5 March 2010 Lisbon, Portugal]

Contributors: Kjell Harald Nedreaas (co-chair) and Jon Helge Vølsta

Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2022

This open access book presents the proceedings of the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism (IFITT)’s 29th Annual International eTourism Conference, which assembles the latest research presented at the ENTER2022 conference, which will be held on January 11–14, 2022. The book provides an extensive overview of how information and communication technologies can be used to develop tourism and hospitality. It covers the latest research on various topics within the field, including augmented and virtual reality, website development, social media use, e-learning, big data, analytics, and recommendation systems. The readers will gain insights and ideas on how information and communication technologies can be used in tourism and hospitality. Academics working in the eTourism field, as well as students and practitioners, will find up-to-date information on the status of research

Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2022

This open access book presents the proceedings of the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism (IFITT)’s 29th Annual International eTourism Conference, which assembles the latest research presented at the ENTER2022 conference, which will be held on January 11–14, 2022. The book provides an extensive overview of how information and communication technologies can be used to develop tourism and hospitality. It covers the latest research on various topics within the field, including augmented and virtual reality, website development, social media use, e-learning, big data, analytics, and recommendation systems. The readers will gain insights and ideas on how information and communication technologies can be used in tourism and hospitality. Academics working in the eTourism field, as well as students and practitioners, will find up-to-date information on the status of research

Effective design, configuration, and use of digital CCTV

It is estimated that there are five million CCTV cameras in use today. CCTV is used by a wide range of organisations and for an increasing number of purposes. Despite this, there has been little research to establish whether these systems are fit for purpose. This thesis takes a socio-technical approach to determine whether CCTV is effective, and if not, how it could be made more effective. Humancomputer interaction (HCI) knowledge and methods have been applied to improve this understanding and what is needed to make CCTV effective; this was achieved in an extensive field study and two experiments. In Study 1, contextual inquiry was used to identify the security goals, tasks, technology and factors which affected operator performance and the causes at 14 security control rooms. The findings revealed a number of factors which interfered with task performance, such as: poor camera positioning, ineffective workstation setups, difficulty in locating scenes, and the use of low-quality CCTV recordings. The impact of different levels of video quality on identification and detection performance was assessed in two experiments using a task-focused methodology. In Study 2, 80 participants identified 64 face images taken from four spatially compressed video conditions (32, 52, 72, and 92 Kbps). At a bit rate quality of 52 Kbps (MPEG-4), the number of faces correctly identified reached significance. In Study 3, 80 participants each detected 32 events from four frame rate CCTV video conditions (1, 5, 8, and 12 fps). Below 8 frames per second, correct detections and task confidence ratings decreased significantly. These field and empirical research findings are presented in a framework using a typical CCTV deployment scenario, which has been validated through an expert review. The contributions and limitations of this thesis are reviewed, and suggestions for how the framework should be further developed are provided

Geoinformatics in Citizen Science

The book features contributions that report original research in the theoretical, technological, and social aspects of geoinformation methods, as applied to supporting citizen science. Specifically, the book focuses on the technological aspects of the field and their application toward the recruitment of volunteers and the collection, management, and analysis of geotagged information to support volunteer involvement in scientific projects. Internationally renowned research groups share research in three areas: First, the key methods of geoinformatics within citizen science initiatives to support scientists in discovering new knowledge in specific application domains or in performing relevant activities, such as reliable geodata filtering, management, analysis, synthesis, sharing, and visualization; second, the critical aspects of citizen science initiatives that call for emerging or novel approaches of geoinformatics to acquire and handle geoinformation; and third, novel geoinformatics research that could serve in support of citizen science

A framework for understanding and predicting the take up and use of social networking tools in a collaborative envionment

Online collaborative environments, such as social networking environments, enable users to work together to create, modify, and share media collaboratively. However, as users can be autonomous in their actions the ability to create and form a shared understanding of the people, purpose, and process of the collaborative effort can be complex. This complexity is compounded by the natural implicit social and collaborative structure of these environments, a structure that can be modified by users dynamically and asynchronously. Some have tried to make this implicitness explicit through data mining, and allocation of user roles. However such methods can fail to adapt to the changing nature of an environment's structure relating to habits of users and their social connectedness. As a result, existing methods generally provide only a snapshot of the environment at a point in time. In addition, existing methods focus on whole user bases and the underlying social context of the environment. This makes them unsuitable for situations where the context of collaboration can change rapidly, for example the tools and widgets available for collaborative action and the users available for collaborative interactions. There is a pre-existing model for understanding the dynamic structure of these environments called the “Group Socialisation Model". This model has been used to understand how social group roles form and change over time as they go through a life cycle. This model also contains a concept of characteristic behaviours or descriptors of behaviour that an individual can use to make judgement about another individual and to create an understanding of a role or social norm that may or may not be explicit. Although studies have used components of this model to provide a means of role identification or role composition within online collaborative environments, they have not managed to provide a higher level method or framework that can replicate the entire life cycle continuously over time within these environments. Using the constructive research methodology this thesis presents a research construct in the form of a framework for replicating the social group role life cycle within online collaborative environments. The framework uses an artificial neural network with a unique capability of taking snapshots of its network structure. In conjunction with fuzzy logic inference, collaborative role signatures composed of characteristic behaviours can then be determined. In this work, three characteristic behaviours were identified from the literature for characterisation of stereotypical online behaviour to be used within a role signature: these were publisher, annotator, and lurker. The use of the framework was demonstrated on three case studies. Two of the case studies were custom built mobile applications specifically for this study, and one was the Walk 2.0 website from a National Health and Medical Research Council project. All three case studies allowed for collaborative actions where users could interact with each other to create an dynamic and diverse environment. For the use of these case studies, ethics was approved by the Western Sydney University Human Research Ethic Committee and consistent strategies for recruitment were carried out. The framework was thereby demonstrated to be capable of successfully determining role signatures composed of the above characteristic behaviours, for a range of contexts and individual users. Also, comparison of participant usage of case studies was carried out and it was established that the role signatures determined by the framework matched usage. In addition, the top contributors within the case studies were analysed to demonstrate the framework's capability of handling the dynamic and continual changing structure of an online collaborative environment. The major contribution of this thesis is a framework construct developed to propose and demonstrate a new framework approach to successfully automate and carry out the social group role model life cycle within online collaborative environments. This is a significant component of foundational work towards providing designers of online collaborative environments with the capacity of understanding the various implicit roles and their characteristic behaviours for individual users. Such a capability could enable more specific individual personalisation or resource allocation, which could in turn improve the suitability of environments developed for collaboration online

Discovering communities of social e-learning practice

Teaching and Professional Development Fellowship Report 201