Monitoring Frog Communities: An Application of Machine Learning

Automatic recognition of animal vocalisations would be a valuable tool for a variety of biological research and environmental monitoring applications . We report the development of a software system which can recognise the vocalisations of 22 species of frogs which occur in an area of Northern Australia. This software system will be used in unattended operation to monitor the effect on frog populations of the introduced Cane Toad. The system is based around classification of local peaks in the spectrogram of the audio signal using Quinlan's machine learning system, C4.5 (Quinlan 1993). Unreliable identifications of peaks are aggregated together using a hierarchical structure of segments based on the typical temporal vocalisation species' patterns. This produces robust system performance

Deadline-Driven Auctions for NPC Host Allocation on P2P MMOGs.

We present the design, implementation and evaluation of Deadline-Driven Auctions (DDAs), a novel task-mapping infrastructure for heterogeneous distributed environments. DDA is primarily designed for hosting Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in P2P Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). Experimental and analytical results demonstrate that DDA provides four significant advantages. It is self-organising: the infrastructure is automatically managed. It efficiently allocates computing resources for large numbers (1000s) of real-time NPC tasks. It supports gaming interactivity by minimising communication latency between NPC hosts. Finally, it supports flexible matchmaking policies, and a friendly incentive policy establishes a cooperative economic model to motivate participants to contribute resources

Design Issues for Peer-to-Peer Massively Multiplayer Online Games.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are increasing in both popularity and scale, and while classical Client/Server (C/S) architectures convey some benefits, they suffer from significant technical and commercial drawbacks. This realisation has sparked intensive research interest in adapting MMOGs to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architectures. This paper articulates a comprehensive set of six design issues to be addressed by P2P MMOGs, namely Interest Management (IM), game event dissemination, Non-Player Character (NPC) host allocation, game state persistency, cheating mitigation and incentive mechanisms. Design alternatives for each issue are systematically compared, and their interrelationships discussed. We further evaluate how well representative P2P MMOG architectures fulfil the design criteria