Machine learning stochastic design models.

Due to the fluid nature of the early stages of the design process, it is difficult to obtain deterministic product design evaluations. This is primarily due to the flexibility of the design at this stage, namely that there can be multiple interpretations of a single design concept. However, it is important for designers to understand how these design concepts are likely to fulfil the original specification, thus enabling the designer to select or bias towards solutions with favourable outcomes. One approach is to create a stochastic model of the design domain. This paper tackles the issues of using a product database to induce a Bayesian model that represents the relationships between the design parameters and characteristics. A greedy learning algorithm is presented and illustrated using a simple case study

Modelling tools to support the management of crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster cf. solaris) on Australia's Great Barrier Reef

Samuel Matthews studied outbreaks of the crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) on the Great Barrier Reef. He developed a number of modelling and simulation tools to help predict when and where COTS outbreaks occur. Government agencies are using his results and tools to improve how outbreaks of COTS are managed and controlled on the GBR

Highly Non-Linear Optical (NLO) organic crystals and films. Electrooptical organic materials

Devices employing nonlinear optics (NLO) hold great promise for important applications in integrated optics, optical information processing and telecommunications. Properly designed organics possess outstanding optical and electrooptical properties which will substantially advance many technologies including electrooptical switching, optical amplification for communications, and parallel processing for hybrid optical computers. A brief comparison of organic and inorganic materials is given

Development of a simple information pump.

The Information Pump (IP) is a methodology that aims to counter the problems arising from traditional subjective product data collection. The IP is a game theory based process that aims to maximise information extracted from a panel of subjects, while maintaining their interest in the process through a continuous panelist scoring method. The challenge with implementing this arises from the difficulty in executing the 'game'. In its original format, there is an assumption that the game is played with each player using their own PC to interact with the process. While this in theory allows information and scores to flow in a controlled manner between the players, it actually provides a major barrier to the wider adoption of the IP method. This barrier is two-fold: it is costly and complex, and it is not a natural manner for exchanging information. The core objective is to develop a low cost version of the IP method. This will use the game theory approach to maintain interest among participants and maximise information extraction, but remove the need for each participant to have their own PC interface to the game. This will require replacing both the inter-player communication method and the score keeping/reporting

Automatic Electrical Appliances Control Panel Based on Infrared and Wi-Fi: A Framework for Electrical Energy Conservation

-Today, proprietary home automation targets very specific applications which operate mostly on a cable based infrastructure. In contrast to that, our implementation builds on a wireless platform for the automatic control of house hold electrical appliances. The nodes gather sensor readings in a home and transmit them to a central automation server. There, the readings are matched against a list of script statements. When there is a match, a specific action is performed. An important property of the system is that the control of all home appliances is done by means of the ubiquitous Infrared and Wi-Fi wireless technologies. This way, the co-operation between manufacturers is not a necessity in order to connect devices to the home automation network

Comment on “Bayesian additional evidence for decision making under small sample uncertainty”

We examine the concept of Bayesian Additional Evidence (BAE) recently proposed by Sondhi et al. We derive simple closed-form expressions for BAE and compare its properties with other methods for assessing findings in the light of new evidence. We find that while BAE is easy to apply, it lacks both a compelling rationale and clarity of use needed for reliable decision-making. Keywords: Advocacy prior; Analysis of credibility; Bayesian additional evidence; Reverse-Baye

Remember the Followers: A Look at How Follower Traits Influence the Outcomes of Humble Leadership Behaviors

Leadership styles and leader behaviors are some of the most studied topics in the management literature. Recently, the study of humble leadership has been gaining interest and popularity. Humble leadership has been shown to increase follower retention, job satisfaction, and performance. Although there has been prior research using leader and situational variables as moderators, there is little research on how follower traits might moderate the relationship between humble leadership and follower and organizational outcomes. It is important to understand how followers might react differently to humble leaders. This dissertation primarily looks at how follower traits influence the effectiveness of humble leadership. I designed a 2x2 lab experiment in which a confederate, acting as the session leader, manipulated his behavior to display a humble leadership style in half of the conditions. I found that proactive employees respond better to humble leadership and that this conditional effect between humble leadership and leader satisfaction is mediated by empowerment. I also found that followers have lower task performance when their leader is both inexperienced and displays humble leadership behaviors. Finally, I discovered three-way interactions between humble leadership, leader experience level, and follower characteristics. In the first chapter, I begin with a review of the humble leadership literature. In the second chapter of my dissertation, I develop a model and my hypotheses. The third chapter includes the analyses of my lab study. The fourth and final chapter of my dissertation will be a discussion of what I have learned. Here, I will describe how my research has contributed to the leadership literature generally and the humble leadership literature specifically. Finally, I will discuss how my study has opened up avenues for future research and suggest specific future studies that future scholars can do in order to continue to move this important research stream forward

Nomadic Base Station (NBS): a Software Defined Radio (SDR) based Architecture for Capacity Enhancement in Mobile Communications Networks

In this research work, the problem of congestion that leads to dropped calls at GSM cell sites and drastic reduction in network capacity is addressed. We designed a novel GSM base station architecture named Nomadic Base Station (NBS) which is based on Software Defined Radio (SDR) architecture and simulated the LNA for its receiver front-end. The NBS receiver LNA selects and amplifies GSM signal bursts operating at 900MHz and 1800MHz Radio Frequency Band. The later stages translate the Radio Frequency (RF) signal to Intermediate Frequency (IF) signal. This implements the SDR technology by digitizing the IF signal into bit streams that can be processed on generic Central Processing Unit (CPU) using custom written signal processing software

An Efficient Scheme for a Distributed Video Retrieval System for Remote Users

The new era of digital video and multimedia technologies has created the potential for large libraries of digital video. With this new technology come the challenges of creating usable means by which such large and diverse depositories of digital information (digital libraries) can be efficiently queried and accessed so that (a) the response is fast, (b) the communication over the Internet is minimal and (c) the retrieval is characterized by high precision and recall. In this paper we discuss how existing digital video editing tools, together with data compression techniques, can be combined to create a fast, accurate and cost effective video retrieval system for remote users. The traditional approaches employed in text databases, such as keyword searching and volume browsing, are inadequate mechanisms for a video retrieval system for remote users because, (a) they don\u27t apply to video at all, or (b) they are not practical due to the amounts of data involved, or (c) they have insufficient resolution to be useful in a video archive. New techniques must be developed that facilitate the query and selection of digital video. This paper presents one such scheme