Colouring Australia: a participatory open data platform

Colouring Australia is a digital platform for collecting and visualising building level information across several Australian cities. It provides a valuable resource for bringing together data on building age, material, sustainability ratings, walkability and other key metrics as we plan for net zero cities. Colouring Australia comprises part of the international Colouring Cities Research Programme, which supports the development of open-source platforms that provide open data on national building stocks. In this paper we outline the technical architecture of the platform, and the development and visualisation of a building level walkability metric based on pedestrian access to destinations. This platform provides a useful digital tool for planners to understand which parts of the city are walkable and in turn this can support future active transport programs and policies. Future research will be to validate this novel walkability index through a series of stakeholder and public workshops using the Colouring Australia platform in an interactive tabletop environment where usability testing can be undertaken

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Urban Growth in Brunei: the Interplay between Policy, Land-use, and Accessibility

Urban growth is a process that, evermore, involves an increasing proportion of the global population. Its numerous drivers and implications are relatively well-documented within the academic body of literature — and, so too are the many models of urban expansion used to describe it. Today, urban investigations have been integral in providing a sound foundation to the current understanding of the various dimensions of urban growth. However, despite this, there remains a large number of cities — both established, or at the frontiers of rapid expansion — that have persisted without monitoring and detailed investigation. Efforts in global monitoring have shown a large proportion of these cities exist in developing regions of the world, like Southeast Asia. Cities in these regions might not conform to many of the well-established accounts of urban growth seen in academic literature. More in-depth studies are still needed. This thesis details a trajectory of urban growth exhibited by the small nation of Brunei. It focuses principally on how development policies set out by Brunei’s centralised government have driven urban growth. With further appreciation of data limitations that exist in Brunei, this thesis has approached this investigation through the use of remote-sensing and modelling of urban spatial interactions. Essential land-cover data was derived from the United States Geological Survey’s Landsat Programme. From this, Brunei’s urban land-consumption and land-use were quantified; and, its historical road network and residential land-uses were extracted. The integration of these novel datasets with census data forms the basis for this thesis’ subsequent accessibility analysis — which is proxied by a cumulative-opportunities measure and a gravity-based potential model. In particular, these models were used to interrogate Brunei’s national development policies for improving urban accessibility throughout the country. The results of this thesis provide the essential baseline information necessary to substantiate policy-making on the current development practices. These results can also be used to inform policy-makers on essential aspects of equity and equality in line with land-consumption and population trends. This thesis, however, also has broader implications, not only, in positing Brunei as a relatively understudied case of urban growth; but, as a possible exemplar of top-down, policy-driven growth for numerous countries that fall under similar administrations

Characterising Land Cover Change in Brunei Darussalam’s Capital District

In fast-developing regions like Southeast Asia monitoring urban areas presents a challenge given the lack of publicly available data. This is an issue that precludes the nuances of a city’s growth and undermines the way land use is considered with respect to planning. The issue of data availability is very much present in the small nation of Brunei. Little is still known about the spatiotemporal evolution of its urban realm in particular, with regard to its national development planning. The country presents an interesting case-study given the pursuit of two highly opposing master-plans within the last 40 years. Its first master plan advocated polycentric growth away from the capital city, Bandar Seri Begawan. Its latest plan, however, currently promotes compact growth within a predefined urban footprint as a development control mechanism. This paper looks at remotely-sensed satellite data to examine the way in which the two implemented master-plan strategies have translated into actual land-use thus far. It employs a supervised classification procedure and characterises urban land into three typologies: urban infill, edge growth, and leapfrog growth. The paper’s findings suggest that residential developments play a stronger role in driving urban growth in Brunei. This is particularly true for public housing, which has typically persisted in isolated pockets of low density at the city fringe. This study has produced a novel dataset of urban land use and land cover in Brunei; and, its quantification may prove useful in understanding the impacts of master planning and the formulation of development policies both within Brunei, and the wider Southeast Asian region

Spatial Variability of the ‘Airbnb Effect’: A Spatially Explicit Analysis of Airbnb’s Impact on Housing Prices in Sydney

Over the last decade, the emergence and significant growth of home-sharing platforms, such as Airbnb, has coincided with rising housing unaffordability in many global cities. It is in this context that we look to empirically assess the impact of Airbnb on housing prices in Sydney—one of the least affordable cities in the world. Employing a hedonic property valuation model, our results indicate that Airbnb’s overall effect is positive. A 1% increase in Airbnb density is associated with approximately a 2% increase in property sales price. However, recognizing that Airbnb’s effect is geographically uneven and given the fragmented nature of Sydney’s housing market, we also employ a GWR to account for the spatial variation in Airbnb activity. The findings confirm that Airbnb’s influence on housing prices is varied across the city. Sydney’s northern beaches and parts of western Sydney experience a statistically significant value uplift attributable to Airbnb activity. However, traditional tourist locations focused around Sydney’s CBD and the eastern suburbs experience insignificant or negative property price impacts. The results highlight the need for policymakers to consider local Airbnb and housing market contexts when deciding the appropriate level and design of Airbnb regulation

Spatial Variability of the ‘Airbnb Effect’: A Spatially Explicit Analysis of Airbnb’s Impact on Housing Prices in Sydney

Over the last decade, the emergence and significant growth of home-sharing platforms, such as Airbnb, has coincided with rising housing unaffordability in many global cities. It is in this context that we look to empirically assess the impact of Airbnb on housing prices in Sydney—one of the least affordable cities in the world. Employing a hedonic property valuation model, our results indicate that Airbnb’s overall effect is positive. A 1% increase in Airbnb density is associated with approximately a 2% increase in property sales price. However, recognizing that Airbnb’s effect is geographically uneven and given the fragmented nature of Sydney’s housing market, we also employ a GWR to account for the spatial variation in Airbnb activity. The findings confirm that Airbnb’s influence on housing prices is varied across the city. Sydney’s northern beaches and parts of western Sydney experience a statistically significant value uplift attributable to Airbnb activity. However, traditional tourist locations focused around Sydney’s CBD and the eastern suburbs experience insignificant or negative property price impacts. The results highlight the need for policymakers to consider local Airbnb and housing market contexts when deciding the appropriate level and design of Airbnb regulation

ANALYSIS OF RARE EARTH ELEMENT SUPPLY CHAIN RESILIENCE DURING A MAJOR CONFLICT

This report explores the extension of the conventional “kill chain” in a counterintuitive manner. Utilizing lessons learned from the SEA29 work in “Logistics in a Contested Environment,” the “kill chain” is re-defined backward from warhead detonation to “metal bending and metal delivery.” This process provides a more well-rounded examination of Department of Defense (DOD) efforts to maintain supply lines in a major conflict, specifically, those supply lines that provide key rare earth elements (REE) to DOD weapons contractors. Using linear programming and optimization, this report documents a design of three alternatives for the mining, refinement, and production of REEs. By defining a production equation around our Measures of Effectiveness and Performance (MOE/MOP), we maximized the weighted MOPs while minimizing damage to convoys. From the analysis of results, we found REE components produced remotely (OCONUS) and near CONUS had the best results while using medium and large convoys. Finally, the diverse background of the team, professionally and academically, allowed for a combination of perspectives during the research and modeling process, which ultimately led to the creation of this final report.Director, Warfare Integration (OPNAV N9I)Captain, United States Marine CorpsSeren, Israel Defence ForcesCivilian, Singapore Technologies Electronics, SingaporeMilitary Expert 5, Republic of Singapore Air ForceLieutenant, United States NavyLieutenant, United States NavyLieutenant, United States NavyMilitary Expert 5, Republic of Singapore Air ForceMilitary Expert 5, Singapore ArmyMilitary Expert 5, Republic of Singapore Air ForceMajor, United States ArmyCaptain, United States Marine CorpsCaptain, Singapore ArmyMilitary Expert 5, Republic of Singapore Air ForceCivilian, Singapore Technologies - Engineering Land Systems, SingaporeMilitary Expert 5, Republic of Singapore Air ForceCaptain, Singapore ArmyCivilian, Singapore Technologies Engineering Land Systems, SingaporeMajor, Singapore ArmyCivilian, DSO National Labs, SingaporeApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Epidemiology and outcomes of hospital-acquired bloodstream infections in intensive care unit patients: the EUROBACT-2 international cohort study

Purpose: In the critically ill, hospital-acquired bloodstream infections (HA-BSI) are associated with significant mortality. Granular data are required for optimizing management, and developing guidelines and clinical trials. Methods: We carried out a prospective international cohort study of adult patients (≥ 18 years of age) with HA-BSI treated in intensive care units (ICUs) between June 2019 and February 2021. Results: 2600 patients from 333 ICUs in 52 countries were included. 78% HA-BSI were ICU-acquired. Median Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score was 8 [IQR 5; 11] at HA-BSI diagnosis. Most frequent sources of infection included pneumonia (26.7%) and intravascular catheters (26.4%). Most frequent pathogens were Gram-negative bacteria (59.0%), predominantly Klebsiella spp. (27.9%), Acinetobacter spp. (20.3%), Escherichia coli (15.8%), and Pseudomonas spp. (14.3%). Carbapenem resistance was present in 37.8%, 84.6%, 7.4%, and 33.2%, respectively. Difficult-to-treat resistance (DTR) was present in 23.5% and pan-drug resistance in 1.5%. Antimicrobial therapy was deemed adequate within 24 h for 51.5%. Antimicrobial resistance was associated with longer delays to adequate antimicrobial therapy. Source control was needed in 52.5% but not achieved in 18.2%. Mortality was 37.1%, and only 16.1% had been discharged alive from hospital by day-28. Conclusions: HA-BSI was frequently caused by Gram-negative, carbapenem-resistant and DTR pathogens. Antimicrobial resistance led to delays in adequate antimicrobial therapy. Mortality was high, and at day-28 only a minority of the patients were discharged alive from the hospital. Prevention of antimicrobial resistance and focusing on adequate antimicrobial therapy and source control are important to optimize patient management and outcomes.</p