Computing and Information Systems - Research Publications

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    Modeling of microalgal shear-induced flocculation and sedimentation using a coupled CFD-population balance approach.
    Golzarijalal, M ; Zokaee Ashtiani, F ; Dabir, B (Wiley, 2018)
    In this study, shear-induced flocculation modeling of Chlorella sp. microalgae was conducted by combination of population balance modeling and CFD. The inhomogeneous Multiple Size Group (MUSIG) and the Euler-Euler two fluid models were coupled via Ansys-CFX-15 software package to achieve both fluid and particle dynamics during the flocculation. For the first time, a detailed model was proposed to calculate the collision frequency and breakage rate during the microalgae flocculation by means of the response surface methodology as a tool for optimization. The particle size distribution resulted from the model was in good agreement with that of the jar test experiment. Furthermore, the subsequent sedimentation step was also examined by removing the shear rate in both simulations and experiments. Consequently, variation in the shear rate and its effects on the flocculation behavior, sedimentation rate and recovery efficiency were evaluated. Results indicate that flocculation of Chlorella sp. microalgae under shear rates of 37, 182, and 387 s-1 is a promising method of pre-concentration which guarantees the cost efficiency of the subsequent harvesting process by recovering more than 90% of the biomass.
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    An automated matrix profile for mining consecutive repeats in time series
    Mirmomeni, M ; Kowsar, Y ; Kulik, L ; Bailey, J ; Geng, X ; Kang, BH (Springer Nature, 2018-01-01)
    A key application of wearable sensors is remote patient monitoring, which facilitates clinicians to observe patients non-invasively, by examining the time series of sensor readings. For analysis of such time series, a recently proposed technique is Matrix Profile (MP). While being effective for certain time series mining tasks, MP depends on a key input parameter, the length of subsequences for which to search. We demonstrate that MP’s dependency on this input parameter impacts its effectiveness for finding patterns of interest. We focus on finding consecutive repeating patterns (CRPs), which represent human activities and exercises whilst tracked using wearable sensors. We demonstrate that MP cannot detect CRPs effectively and extend it by adding a locality preserving index. Our method automates the use of MP, and reduces the need for data labeling by experts. We demonstrate our algorithm’s effectiveness in detecting regions of CRPs through a number of real and synthetic datasets.
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    Navigating Online Down Under: International Students’ Digital Journeys in Australia
    Chang, S ; Gomes, C ; Martin, F ; Gomes, C ; Yeoh, B (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018)
    Research focusing on the experiences of international students tends to centre directly on their educational experiences rather than their everyday lives outside study. Moreover, much of this research has concentrated almost exclusively on the various impacts of the physical, geographic mobility of international students as they move from one country to another, with very little exploration of their digital experiences. There also exists extensive research on the social media and information seeking experiences of young people in different regions of the world. Some of this research provides a comparison between different sources of information and uses of social media. However, there has been little research on what happens when young people move between regions or countries. Borrowing Chang and Gomes’ (2017a) concept of the digital journey, where in crossing transnational borders, migrants might also cross digital borders, this chapter provides some concrete examples of the digital experiences of international students as they transition––wholly or partly––to the Australian digital environment. How do international students transition from certain online environments into others that may be completely different, even alien, to what they have previously experienced? Referring to qualitative and quantitative data collected from three separate projects conducted between 2012 and 2017, this chapter shows that in making the digital journey, international students in Australia do not so much quit their original digital comfort zones as widen their digital horizons. Understanding international students’ digital journeys is particularly significant since it has implications for future research in international student well-being and the provision of support services for students.
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    Designing an App for Pregnancy Care for a Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Community
    Smith, W ; Wadley, G ; Daly, JO ; Webb, M ; Hughson, J ; Hajek, J ; Parker, A ; Woodward-Kron, R ; Story, DA (The Association for Computing Machinery, 2017)
    We report a study to design and evaluate an app to support pregnancy information provided to women through an Australian health service. As part of a larger project to provide prenatal resources for culturally and linguistically diverse groups, this study focused on the design and reception of an app with the local Vietnamese community and health professionals of a particular hospital. Our study had three stages: an initial design workshop with the hospital; prototype design and development; prototype-based interviews with health professionals and focus groups with Vietnamese women. We explore how an app of this sort must be designed for a range of different use scenarios, considering its use by consumers with a multiplicity of differing viewpoints about its nature and purpose in relation to pregnancy care.
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    Cooperating to compete: The mutuality of cooperation and competition in boardgame play
    Rogerson, MJ ; Gibbs, MR ; Smith, W (Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2018-04-20)
    This paper examines the complex relationship between competition and cooperation in boardgame play. We understand boardgaming as distributed cognition, where people work together in a shared activity to accomplish the game. Although players typically compete against each other, this competition is only possible through ongoing cooperation to negotiate, enact and maintain the rules of play. In this paper, we report on a study of people playing modern boardgames. We analyse how knowledge of the game's state is distributed amongst the players and the game components, and examine the different forms of cooperation and collaboration that occur during play. Further, we show how players use the material elements of the game to support articulation work and to improve their awareness and understanding of the game's state. Our goal is to examine the coordinative practices that the players use during play and explicate the ways in which these enable competition.
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    Finding Time for Tabletop: Board Game Play and Parenting
    Rogerson, MJ ; Gibbs, M (SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2018)
    Hobby board gaming is a serious leisure pastime that entails large commitments of time and energy. When serious hobby board gamers become parents, their opportunities for engaging in the pastime are constrained by their new family responsibilities. Based on an ethnographic study of serious hobby board gamers, we investigate how play is constrained by parenting and how serious board gamers with these responsibilities create opportunities to continue to play board games by negotiating the context, time, location, and medium of play. We also examine how these changes influence the enjoyment players derive from board games across the key dimensions of sociality, intellectual challenge, variety, and materiality.
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    "I love all the bits": The Materiality of Boardgames
    Rogerson, MJ ; Gibbs, M ; Smith, W (ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY, 2016-01-01)
    This paper presents findings from a study of boardgamers which stress the importance of the materiality of modern boardgames. It demonstrates that materiality is one of four significant factors in the player experience of tabletop gaming and describes four domains of materiality in boardgaming settings. Further, building on understanding of non-use in HCI, it presents boardgames as a unique situation of parallel use, in which users simultaneously engage with a single game in both digital and material, non-digital environments.
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    Summarizing Significant Changes in Network Traffic Using Contrast Pattern Mining
    Chavary, EA ; Erfani, SM ; Leckie, C (Association for Computing Machinery, 2017)
    Extracting knowledge from the massive volumes of network traffic is an important challenge in network and security management. In particular, network managers require concise reports about significant changes in their network traffic. While most existing techniques focus on summarizing a single traffic dataset, the problem of finding significant differences between multiple datasets is an open challenge. In this paper, we focus on finding important differences between network traffic datasets, and preparing a summarized and interpretable report for security managers. We propose the use of contrast pattern mining, which finds patterns whose support differs significantly from one dataset to another. We show that contrast patterns are highly effective at extracting meaningful changes in traffic data. We also propose several evaluation metrics that reflect the interpretability of patterns for security managers. Our experimental results show that with the proposed unsupervised approach, the vast majority of extracted patterns are pure, i.e., most changes are either attack traffic or normal traffic, but not a mixture of both.
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    TREE-BASED STATISTICAL MACHINE TRANSLATION: EXPERIMENTS WITH THE ENGLISH AND BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE PAIR
    Beck, D ; Caseli, H (SBIC, 2013)
    Machine Learning paradigms have dominated recent research in Machine Translation. Current state-of-the-art approaches rely only on statistical methods that gather all necessary knowledge from parallel corpora. However, this lack on explicit linguistic knowledge makes them unable to model some linguistic phenomena. In this work, we focus on models that take into account the syntactic information from the languages involved on the translation process. We follow a novel approach that preprocess parallel corpora using syntactic parsers and uses translation models composed by Tree Transducers. We perform experiments with English and Brazilian Portuguese, providing the first known results in syntax-based Statistical Machine Translation for this language pair. These results show that this approach is able to better model phenomena like long-distance reordering and give directions to future improvements in building syntax-based translation models for this pair.
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    Job Insecurity in Academic Research Employment: An Agent-Based Model
    Silverman, E ; Geard, N ; Wood, I ; Gershenson, C ; Froese, T ; Siqueiros, JM ; Aguilar, W ; Izquierdo, E ; Sayama, H (MIT Press, 2016-01-01)
    This paper presents an agent-based model of fixed-term academic employment in a competitive research funding environment based on UK academia. The goal of the model is to investigate the effects of job insecurity on research productivity. Agents may be either established academics who may apply for grants, or postdoctoral researchers who are unable to apply for grants and experience hardship when reaching the end of their fixed-term contracts. Model results show that in general adding fixed-term postdocs to the system produces less total research output than adding half as many permanent academics. An in-depth sensitivity analysis is performed across postdoc scenarios, and indicates that promoting more postdocs into permanent positions produces significant increases in research output.