6,345 research outputs found

    Nanotechnology, Industry Competitiveness and University Strategies: the Case of the UWS Nanotechnology Network in South-West Sydney

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    University-industry alliances have long been pursued by public funded programs hoping to boost innovation spillovers in a geographical or cognitive area of research-strength by universities. However, there is still a lack of industry-university cooperation in many fields while at the same time the benefits of universities to their regions’ knowledge intensity is firmly advocated (Acs 2004, Martinez-Fernandez & Leevers 2004, Martinez-Fernandez 2004)). The issue is not limited to the dissemination of knowledge, a traditional role of universities, but to introducing change into the region’s innovation system through activities that increase industry competitive advantage. Results from a project conducted in South-West Sydney from 2003 to 2005 shows that active industry engagement by Universities offering specific expertise in frontier technologies has a positive effect in university-industry cooperation if compared with other technologies well established in the private sector. The project results also show that the role of Universities as active facilitators of industry engagement in frontier technologies is a critical element in the regional/local innovation system where the university operates. The paper discusses first the context of the emergence of the UWS Nanotechnology Network as a sophisticated knowledge intensive service activity led by the University. Secondly the paper discusses the particular case of nanotechnology as a science in an early path and the role of universities at this particular stage. Thirdly, the paper discusses the use and barriers of firms to nanotechnology applications and the role played by UWS during the duration of the project. Finally policy issues arise in relation to the role of the public education sector in the early promotion of frontier technologies. References Acs, Z. (2002) Innovation and the Growth of Cities. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. Martinez-Fernandez, M.C. (2004) ‘Regional Collaboration Infrastructure: Effects in the Hunter Valley of NSW’, Australian Planner Vol 41(4); Planning Institute of Australia: Queensland. Martinez-Fernandez, M.C. and K. Leevers (2004) ‘Knowledge Creation, Sharing and Transfer as an Innovation Strategy: The Discovery of Nano-technology by South-West Sydney’. International Journal of Technology Management (IJTM), Volume 28 (3/4/5/6): 560-581.

    Framework to Enhance Teaching and Learning in System Analysis and Unified Modelling Language

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    Cowling, MA ORCiD: 0000-0003-1444-1563; Munoz Carpio, JC ORCiD: 0000-0003-0251-5510Systems Analysis modelling is considered foundational for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) students, with introductory and advanced units included in nearly all ICT and computer science degrees. Yet despite this, novice systems analysts (learners) find modelling and systems thinking quite difficult to learn and master. This makes the process of teaching the fundamentals frustrating and time intensive. This paper will discuss the foundational problems that learners face when learning Systems Analysis modelling. Through a systematic literature review, a framework will be proposed based on the key problems that novice learners experience. In this proposed framework, a sequence of activities has been developed to facilitate understanding of the requirements, solutions and incremental modelling. An example is provided illustrating how the framework could be used to incorporate visualization and gaming elements into a Systems Analysis classroom; therefore, improving motivation and learning. Through this work, a greater understanding of the approach to teaching modelling within the computer science classroom will be provided, as well as a framework to guide future teaching activities

    The development and implementation of a hierarchal assessment scheme for the management of estuaries in NSW

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    The coastal fringe of Australia is characterised by a number of estuarine environments and are one of the richest and diverse coastal environments. As coastal populations increase, pressures are exerted on estuarine environments. Despite improvements to estuarine management, the absence of a clear and consistent management approach has limited the value of estuarine management. Consequently, there is a need for a clear approach, involving the development of an effective and consistent assessment of estuarine environments to guide the formation of management decisions and distribution of limited management resources. Review of existing state and national estuarine assessment schemes revealed that the value and functionality of these assessments are limited by the inappropriate use of environmental indicators and complex management of data. Several improvements have been made in the current scheme, allowing greater reliability in the reporting of estuarine condition. These improvements include the development of a simple assessment framework, use of high-value indicators that limit confounding by natural spatial and temporal variation, reduction in the complexity of data analysis and the use of fuzzy logic in indicator evaluation. These improvements were incorporated into the development of a hierarchal assessment scheme that involved a two-tiered assessment of estuaries within New South Wales. The regional assessment scheme formed the preliminary component of estuarine evaluation, providing an initial quantitative assessment of 38 estuaries in NSW. Five classes of estuarine condition were identified: near pristine, slightly modified, modified, highly modified and severely modified. Under this scheme, estuarine systems classified as ‘severely modified’ were selected for a detailed evaluation under a local assessment scheme. The local assessment formed the secondary component of the hierarchal scheme, providing a detailed intra-estuary assessment of catchment pressures and estuarine condition. A report card format, involving the use of letter grades, was used to present the results of the assessment. This scheme provides an effective decision support tool to maximise the efficient distribution of limited management resources by identifying priority estuarine systems

    The 45th Australasian Universities Building Education Association Conference: Global Challenges in a Disrupted World: Smart, Sustainable and Resilient Approaches in the Built Environment, Book of Abstracts, 23 - 25 November 2022

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    This is the book of abstract of the 45th Australasian Universities Building Education Association (AUBEA) conference, which will be hosted by Western Sydney University in November 2022. The conference is organised by the School of Engineering, Design, and Built Environment in collaboration with the Centre for Smart Modern Construction, Western Sydney University. This year’s conference theme is “Global Challenges in a Disrupted World: Smart, Sustainable and Resilient Approaches in the Built Environment”, and expects to publish over a hundred double-blind peer review papers under the proceedings

    Converting Your Thoughts to Texts: Enabling Brain Typing via Deep Feature Learning of EEG Signals

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    An electroencephalography (EEG) based Brain Computer Interface (BCI) enables people to communicate with the outside world by interpreting the EEG signals of their brains to interact with devices such as wheelchairs and intelligent robots. More specifically, motor imagery EEG (MI-EEG), which reflects a subjects active intent, is attracting increasing attention for a variety of BCI applications. Accurate classification of MI-EEG signals while essential for effective operation of BCI systems, is challenging due to the significant noise inherent in the signals and the lack of informative correlation between the signals and brain activities. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network based learning framework that affords perceptive insights into the relationship between the MI-EEG data and brain activities. We design a joint convolutional recurrent neural network that simultaneously learns robust high-level feature presentations through low-dimensional dense embeddings from raw MI-EEG signals. We also employ an Autoencoder layer to eliminate various artifacts such as background activities. The proposed approach has been evaluated extensively on a large- scale public MI-EEG dataset and a limited but easy-to-deploy dataset collected in our lab. The results show that our approach outperforms a series of baselines and the competitive state-of-the- art methods, yielding a classification accuracy of 95.53%. The applicability of our proposed approach is further demonstrated with a practical BCI system for typing.Comment: 10 page

    Integrating research- and relationship-based approaches in Australian health promotion practice

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    We examine the perspectives of health promotion practitioners on their approaches to determining health promotion practice, in particular on the role of research and relationships in this process. Using Grounded Theory methods, we analysed 58 semi-structured interviews with 54 health promotion practitioners in New South Wales, Australia. Practitioners differentiated between relationship-based and research-based approaches as two sources of knowledge to guide health promotion practice. We identify several tensions in seeking to combine these approaches in practice and describe the strategies that participants adopted to manage these tensions. The strategies included working in an evidence-informed rather than evidence-based way, creating new evidence about relationship-based processes and outcomes, adopting ‘relationship-based’ research and evaluation methods, making research and evaluation useful for communities, building research and evaluation skills and improving collaboration between research & evaluation and program implementation staff. We conclude by highlighting three systemic factors which could further support the integration of researchbased and relationship-based health promotion practices: (1) expanding conceptions of health promotion evidence, (2) developing 'relationship-based' research methods that enable practitioners to measure complex social processes and outcomes and to facilitate community participation and benefit, and (3) developing organisational capacity. KEYWORDS: qualitative research, health promotion practice, community participation, research & evaluationNHMR

    New South Wales Vegetation classification and Assessment: Part 3, plant communities of the NSW Brigalow Belt South, Nandewar and west New England Bioregions and update of NSW Western Plains and South-western Slopes plant communities, Version 3 of the NSWVCA database

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    This fourth paper in the NSW Vegetation Classification and Assessment series covers the Brigalow Belt South-/1(BBS) and Nandewar (NAN) Bioregions and the western half of the New England Bioregion (NET), an area of 9.3 million hectares being 11.6% of NSW. It completes the NSWVCA coverage for the Border Rivers-Gwydir and Namoi CMA areas and records plant communities in the Central West and Hunter–Central Rivers CMA areas. In total, 585 plant communities are now classified in the NSWVCA covering 11.5 of the 18 Bioregions in NSW (78% of the State). Of these 226 communities are in the NSW Western Plains and 416 are in the NSW Western Slopes. 315 plant communities are classified in the BBS, NAN and west-NET Bioregions including 267 new descriptions since Version 2 was published in 2008. Descriptions of the 315 communities are provided in a 919 page report on the DVD accompanying this paper along with updated reports on other inland NSW bioregions and nine Catchment Management Authority areas fully or partly classified in the NSWVCA to date. A read-only version of Version 3 of the NSWVCA database is on the DVD for use on personal computers. A feature of the BBS and NAN Bioregions is the array of ironbark and bloodwood Eucalyptusdominated shrubby woodlands on sandstone and acid volcanic substrates extending from Dubbo to Queensland. This includes iconic natural areas such as Warrumbungle and Mount Kaputar National Parks and the 500,000 ha Pilliga Scrub forests. Large expanses of basalt-derived soils support grassy box woodland and native grasslands including those on the Liverpool Plains; near Moree; and around Inverell, most of which are cleared and threatened. Wetlands occur on sodic soils near Yetman and in large clay gilgais in the Pilliga region. Sedgelands are rare but occupy impeded creeks. Aeolian lunettes occur at Narran Lake and near Gilgandra. Areas of deep sand contain Allocasuarina, eucalypt mallee and Melaleuca uncinata heath. Tall grassy or ferny open forests occur on mountain ranges above 1000m elevation in the New England Bioregion and on the Liverpool Range while grassy box woodlands occupy lower elevations with lower rainfall and higher temperatures. The vegetation classification and assessment is based on over 100 published and unpublished vegetation surveys and map unit descriptions, expert advice, extra plot sampling and data analysis and over 25 000 km of road traverse with field checking at 805 sites. Key sources of data included floristic analyses produced in western regional forest assessments in the BBS and NAN Bioregions, floristic analyses in over 60 surveys of conservation reserves and analysis of plot data in the western NET Bioregion and covering parts of the Namoi and Border Rivers- Gwydir CMA areas. Approximately 60% of the woody native vegetation in the study area has been cleared resulting in large areas of “derived” native grasslands. As of June 2010, 7% of the area was in 136 protected areas and 127 of the 315 plant communities were assessed to be adequately protected in reserves. Using the NSWVCA database threat criteria, 15 plant communities were assessed as being Critically Endangered, 59 Endangered, 60 Vulnerable, 99 Near Threatened and 82 Least Concern. 61 of these communities are assessed as part of NSW or Commonwealth-listed Threatened Ecological Communities. Current threats include expanding dryland and irrigated cropping on alluvial plains, floodplains and gently undulating topography at lower elevations; over-grazing of steep hills; altered water tables and flooding regimes; localized mining; and the spread of exotic species, notably Coolatai Grass (Hyparrhenia hirta)

    UOW Research Report 1994

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