Electrical and Electronic Engineering - Research Publications
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ItemImplementation of marker training exercises to improve marking reliability and consistency(Australasian Association for Engineering Education, 2018)CONTEXT: One of the challenges present in teaching a large engineering subject is that of achieving marking consistency of assessments across multiple markers. Several measures of standardising markers exist, such as calibrated review, and are commonly used in the humanities, particularly for assessments that could be prone to a wide variation in marks such as essays. The application of such methods, in an engineering context, is somewhat less documented but of particular importance in the case of reflective writing. This study contrasts the implementation of several different methods of using marker training exercises prior to the actual assessment marking and provides an analysis of the results in order to minimise the effect of multiple marker irregularities and to provide effective high-quality formative feedback on a piece of reflective writing. PURPOSE: This paper presents several different methods of marker training exercises, run prior to the actual assessment marking, and provides analyses to determine the effect of each in terms of minimising marking inconsistency among multiple markers on a piece of reflective writing. APPROACH: In all three marker training exercises, markers are given samples of a piece of reflective writing, of differing quality, along with a rubric outlining the marking criteria for the piece of writing and exemplars for indicative marking standards. Each of the methods employed differ in how the reference standard was set and how feedback was delivered to the markers. Statistics comparing the marking results across markers from before the introduction of the training exercises and between each of the three training methods were analysed to investigate marking reliability and consistency. RESULTS: A significant reduction in the spread of the marker means has been achieved through the introduction of the marker training, indicating an improvement in consistency. Some differences in results between the alternative methods employed has also been observed. CONCLUSIONS: Marking consistency can be improved with the introduction of a marker training exercise prior to the actual assessment marking. Different methods of implementing the marking training exercise, and how the feedback is provided, can have an effect of the amount of improvement in terms of consistency and reliability.
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ItemImplementing a suite of skills modules in a first-year engineering project-based subject(SEFI, 2022)Students commencing engineering at university often have no prior experience of engineering, what the profession entails and the distinctions between disciplines. Consequently, tertiary institutions often offer common first-year engineering subjects that aim to give students an experience of the engineering profession and method, while providing exposure to different disciplines through applied project-based learning. The difficulty with this approach is that there is a wide variance in terms of students’ knowledge, skills, past experiences, and expectations. In a team context, these discrepancies could lead to conflict and poor educational outcomes. Furthermore, if the project is of reasonable length, students might be locked into a discipline-focused project that they realise does not suit them as a potential major. To this end, a suite of self-enrolled skills modules was developed to support student skills development in a first-year, project-based engineering subject under two categories – technical, focusing on skills that had direct applicability to the project-work and general, focusing on skills related to assessment. The modules aimed to (1) improve individuals’ skills in a team context; (2) give students an opportunity to learn skills unrelated to their chosen project in a low-stakes context; and (3) promote interaction and peer-learning outside of their project team and class, building a wider sense of cohort. This paper discusses the creation of the modules and evaluates their outcomes in achieving their goals based on numerous data gathered throughout the semester and student feedback. Initial results have been positive and suggest future directions for development.
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ItemFast Rate Generalization Error Bounds: Variations on a Theme(IEEE, 2022)A recent line of works, initiated by [1] and [2], has shown that the generalization error of a learning algorithm can be upper bounded by information measures. In most of the relevant works, the convergence rate of the expected generalization error is in the form of O(\sqrt λ I/n ) where λ is an assumption-dependent coefficient and I is some information-Theoretic quantities such as the mutual information between the data sample and the learned hypothesis. However, such a learning rate is typically considered to be "slow", compared to a "fast rate"of O(1 /n) in many learning scenarios. In this work, we first show that the square root does not necessarily imply a slow rate, and a fast rate result can still be obtained using this bound by evaluating λ under an appropriate assumption. Furthermore, we identify the key conditions needed for the fast rate generalization error, which we call the ( η, c)-central condition. Under this condition, we give information-Theoretic bounds on the generalization error and excess risk, with a convergence rate of O (1 /n) for specific learning algorithms such as empirical risk minimization. Finally, analytical examples are given to show the effectiveness of the bounds.
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ItemEnergy Efficient Time Synchronization in WSN for Critical Infrastructure Monitoring(SPRINGER-VERLAG BERLIN, 2011-01-01)Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) based Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is becoming popular in analyzing the life of critical infrastructure such as bridges on a continuous basis. For most of the applications, data aggregation requires high sampling rate. A need for accurate time synchronization in the order of 0.6 − 9 μs every few minutes is necessary for data collection and analysis. Two-stage energy-efficient time synchronization is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the network is divided into clusters and a head node is elected using Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy based algorithm. Later, multiple packets of different lengths are used to estimate the delay between the elected head and the entire network hierarchically at different levels. Algorithmic scheme limits error to 3-hop worst case synchronization error. Unlike earlier energy-efficient time synchronization schemes, the achieved results increase the lifetime of the network.
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ItemA robust algorithm for foreground extraction in crowded scenes(IEEE, 2012-12-01)The widespread availability of surveillance cameras and digital technology has improved video based security measures in public places. Surveillance systems have been assisting officials both in civil and military applications. It is helping to identify unlawful activities by means of uninterrupted transmission of surveillance videos. By this, the system is adding extraneous onus on to the already existing workload of security officers. Instead, if the surveillance system is intelligent and efficient enough to identify the events of interest and alert the officers, it alleviates the burden of continuous monitoring. In other words, our existing surveillance systems are lacking to identify the objects that are dissimilar in shape, size, and color especially in identifying human beings (nonrigid motions). Global illumination changes, frequent occurrences of shadows, insufficient lighting conditions, unique properties of slow and fast moving objects, unforeseen appearance of objects and its behavior, availability of system memory, etc., may be ascribed to the limitations of existing systems. In this paper, we present a filtering technique to extract foreground information, which uses RGB component and chrominance channels to neutralize the effects of nonuniform illumination, remove shadows, and detect both slow-moving and distant objects.
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ItemA Pilot Study of Urban Noise Monitoring Architecture Using Wireless Sensor Networks(IEEE, 2013-01-01)Internet of Things (IoT) is denned as interconnection of sensing and actuating devices providing the ability to share information across platforms through a unified framework, developing a common operating picture for enabling innovative applications. As the world urban population is set to cross unprecedented levels, adequate provision of services and infrastructure poses huge challenges. The emerging IoT that offers ubiquitous sensing and actuation can be utilized effectively for managing urban environments. In this paper, a new architecture for noise monitoring in urban environments is proposed. The architecture is scalable and applicable to other sensors required for city management. In addition to the architecture, a new noise monitoring hardware platform is reported and visualization of the data is presented. An emerging citizen centric participatory sensing is discussed in the context of noise monitoring.
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ItemA Pilot Study on the use of Accelerometer Sensors for Monitoring Post Acute Stroke Patients(IEEE, 2013-01-01)The high incidence of stroke has raised a major concern among health professionals in recent years. Concerted efforts from medical and engineering communities are being exercised to tackle the problem at its early stage. In this direction, a pilot study to analyze and detect the affected arm of the stroke patient based on hand movements is presented. The premise is that the correlation of magnitude of the activities of the two arms vary significantly for stroke patients from controls. Further, the cross-correlation of right and left arms for three axes are differentiable for patients and controls. A total of 22 subjects (15 patients and 7 controls) were included in this study. An overall accuracy of 95.45% was obtained with sensitivity of 1 and specificity of 0.86 using correlation based method.
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ItemCrowd Density Estimation Based on Optical Flow and Hierarchical Clustering(IEEE, 2013-01-01)Crowd density estimation has gained much attention from researchers recently due to availability of low cost cameras and communication bandwidth. In video surveillance applications, counting people and creating a temporal profile is of high interest. Surveillance systems face difficulties in detecting motion from the scene due to varying environmental conditions and occlusion. Instead of detecting and tracking individual person, density estimation is an approximate method to count people. The approximation is often more accurate than individual tracking in occluded scenarios. In this work, a new technique to estimate crowd density is proposed. A block-based dense optical flow with spatial and temporal filtering is used to obtain velocities in order to infer the locations of objects in crowded scenarios. Furthermore, a hierarchical clustering is employed to cluster the objects based on Euclidean distance metric. The Cophenetic correlation coefficient for the clusters highlighted the fact that our preprocessing and localizing of object movements form hierarchical clusters that are structured well with reasonable accuracy without temporal post-processing.
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ItemDetermination of Object Directions Using Optical Flow for Crowd Monitoring(SPRINGER-VERLAG BERLIN, 2013-01-01)Determination of object direction in a multi-camera tracking system is critical. The absence of object direction from other cameras pose challenges if the object is along the optical axis. The problem of determining object direction worsens further if the cameras in the existing infrastructure are improperly placed and are uncontrollable. To determine the direction of an object in such situations, three methods based on optical flow (OF) are presented. The first method uses centroids of optical flow vector magnitudes and Kalman filter for tracking and is suitable for less crowded scenarios. The second method uses geometric moments to evaluate the flow vector distribution and to ascertain the direction in case of crowded scenarios by partitioning the scene and then applying moments to individual partitions independently. The third method is appropriate for small-sized objects near vanishing points where global object motion is less. During surveillance, whether multi-object, single-object or crowded scenarios, the aforementioned methods are applicable accordingly. The results show that the object directions can be accurately inferred from three methods for different scenarios.
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ItemProbabilistic detection of crowd events on riemannian manifolds(IEEE, 2015-01-12)Event detection in crowded scenarios becomes complex due to articulated human movements, occlusions and complexities involved in tracking individual humans. In this work, we focus on crowd event (activity) detection and classification. We focus on active crowd (continuously moving crowd) events. First, event primitives such as motion, action, activity and behaviour are defined. Furthermore, a distinction is made among event detection, action recognition and abnormal event detection. Further, event detection and classification are defined on Riemannian Manifolds that yields six different probabilities of the event occurring. Using a new probabilistic approach, an automated event detection algorithm is proposed that temporally segments the event using a novel framework. The results indicate that the proposed approach delivers superior performance in selected cases and similar results in other cases, whilst the detection model delay allows operation in near real-time. The Performance Evaluation of Tracking and Surveillance (PETS) 2009 dataset was used for evaluation. Existing crowd event detection approaches used supervised approach, whereas we eschew semi-supervised approach.