Infrastructure Engineering - Research Publications
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ItemSpatial Concepts in the Conversation With a Computer(ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY, 2021-07)Conversing about places with a computer poses a range of challenges to current AI.
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ItemTowards credibility of micro-blogs: characterising witness accounts(Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2015)Information about events can be opportunistically harvested from social media, however, a major challenge is assessing the credibility of the information derived, and the credibility of the micro-bloggers who are the source of the information. Witnesses to events are intrinsically linked with credibility for many disciplines including journalism and the criminal justice system. This research seeks to determine whether likely witness accounts of an event can be differentiated from social media feeds. A conceptual model of a witness account, and related impact accounts and relayed accounts is developed. Additionally, influence regions defining a relationship between witnesses and events are inferred, from different categories of witness accounts. This model is explored and tested using a bushfire event as a case study. In depth manual analysis of Twitter data related to this event and its effects, confirms the expected revelations of characteristics of direct observations of a bushfire that witnesses report, and the impacts and actions potential witnesses report. A visualisation of influence regions for smoke and traffic congestion observations is provided. Additionally, for the case study event, it is observed that witness accounts contain fewer place name references, but more personal place descriptions such as ‘my home’. These findings suggest implications for automatic data mining from place descriptions that will enable an assessment of the credibility of extracted event information.
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ItemTarget Word Masking for Location Metonymy Resolution(International Committee on Computational Linguistics, 2020)
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ItemTesting the event witnessing status of micro-bloggers from evidence in their micro-blogs(PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE, 2017-12-12)This paper demonstrates a framework of processes for identifying potential witnesses of events from evidence they post to social media. The research defines original evidence models for micro-blog content sources, the relative uncertainty of different evidence types, and models for testing evidence by combination. Methods to filter and extract evidence using automated and semi-automated means are demonstrated using a Twitter case study event. Further, an implementation to test extracted evidence using Dempster Shafer Theory of Evidence are presented. The results indicate that the inclusion of evidence from micro-blog text and linked image content can increase the number of micro-bloggers identified at events, in comparison to the number of micro-bloggers identified from geotags alone. Additionally, the number of micro-bloggers that can be tested for evidence corroboration or conflict, is increased by incorporating evidence identified in their posting history.
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ItemPlace questions and human-generated answers: A data analysis approach(Springer, Cham, 2020-01-01)This paper investigates place-related questions submitted to search systems and their human-generated answers. Place-based search is motivated by the need to identify places matching some criteria, to identify them in space or relative to other places, or to characterize the qualities of such places. Human place-related questions have thus far been insufficiently studied and differ strongly from typical keyword queries. They thus challenge today’s search engines providing only rudimentary geographic information retrieval support. We undertake an analysis of the patterns in place-based questions using a large-scale dataset of questions/answers, MS MARCO V2.1. The results of this study reveal patterns that can inform the design of conversational search systems and in-situ assistance systems, such as autonomous vehicles.
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ItemSmartphone usability for emergency evacuation applications(LIPIcs, 2019-09-01)Mobile phone ubiquity has allowed the implementation of a number of emergency-related evacuation aids. Yet, these applications still face a number of challenges in human-mobile interaction, namely: (1) lack of widely accepted mobile usability guidelines, (2) people's limited cognitive capacity when using mobile phones under stress, and (3) difficulty recreating emergency scenarios as experiments for usability testing. This study is intended as an initial view into smartphone usability under emergency evacuations by compiling a list of experimental observations and setting the ground for future research in cognitively-informed spatial algorithms and app design.
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ItemThe grass is greener on the other side: understanding the effects of green spaces on Twitter user sentiments(ACM Press, 2018)Green spaces are believed to improve the well-being of users in urban areas. While there are urban research exploring the emotional benefits of green spaces, these works are based on user surveys and case studies, which are typically small in scale, intrusive, time-intensive and costly. In contrast to earlier works, we utilize a non-intrusive methodology to understand green space effects at large-scale and in greater detail, via digital traces left by Twitter users. Using this methodology, we perform an empirical study on the effects of green spaces on user sentiments and emotions in Melbourne, Australia and our main findings are: (i) tweets in green spaces evoke more positive and less negative emotions, compared to those in urban areas; (ii) each season affects various emotion types differently; (iii) there are interesting changes in sentiments based on the hour, day and month that a tweet was posted; and (iv) negative sentiments are typically associated with large transport infrastructures such as train interchanges, major road junctions and railway tracks. The novelty of our study is the combination of psychological theory, alongside data collection and analysis techniques on a large-scale Twitter dataset, which overcomes the limitations of traditional methods in urban research.
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ItemEmerging Technological Trends likely to Affect GIScience in the Next Twenty Years(GSDI Association Press, 2016)
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ItemPlace Properties(GSDI Association Press, 2016)