Seminar Series 2008
Date |
Venue |
Speaker |
Title |
| Thursday 11 December | Theatre C1, Geomatics | Falko Schmid Cognitive Systems, University of Bremen, Germany |
On
Personalizing Wayfinding Assistance Mobile devices are gaining importance for wayfinding assistance. But their constrained displays are too small to visualize geographic route information in a satisfying scale. The small available display area hardens to balance out the concerns of route visualization: either decisive details or its spatial context (or both) cannot be visualized according to known cognitive requirements. It has been shown that the resulting fragmentation of spatial information affects the cognitive processing and decreases the effectiveness of assistance as well as the formation of the cognitive map. One possible solution to tackle this problem is to tailor maps to the individual spatial knowledge of a user. We can generate user profiles based on the everyday GPS trajectories of users and use them as an input for wayfinding assistance. The detected familiar places and paths serve as an individual reference frame and allow for successful visual compression of geographic data by at the same time preserving contextual information – key requirements for maps on mobile devices. This talk will give an overview on the requirements for personalized mapping ranging from data acquisition, human behavioral trip planning, to algorithms for the automatic generation of personalized maps. Joint seminar with SSI Victoria (1 CPD) |
| Thursday 4 December | Theatre C1, Geomatics | Inga Kulik Department of Geomatics |
Spatio-Temporal Data
Modelling in Ecological Monitoring (PhD completion) Surveying the properties of a phenomenon regularly over an extended time frame is called monitoring. The aim of monitoring surveys is usually to identify changes of the surveyed phenomena and regulate or control the observed changes. This research provides an event-based model supporting the analysis of spatio-temporal changes. A general model of qualitative change and underlying events is developed and illustrated with vegetation monitoring data. The main idea is to abstract relevant information from complex data by classifying changes into qualitative impact and transition types allowing us to reason about changes and events from a more cognitive perspective. Knowledge discovery techniques are used to implement a prototype supporting users in analysing change behaviour and discovering underlying events. |
| Thursday 27 November | Theatre C1, Geomatics | Philip Paar Lenne3D - Digital Botany / Virtual Landscapes, Germany |
Biosphere3D:
An Open-source, GIS databased
Landscape Scenery Visualisation System Interactive landscape visualisations on Digital Earth have the potential to be developed into a perceptually efficacious, somehow 'natural' user interface in landscape and environmental planning processes. Planners and landscape architects will publish their projects 'on earth' addressing stakeholders and the general public. Currently, mainstream tools and media like Google Earth already offer an easy and wide access to Internet users. Still, the 'digital tool box' lacks support for professional landscape management processes, and state-of-the-art representation of vegetation. Biosphere3D is an open-source system, which supports multiple scales on a virtual globe, loads GIS data at runtime, and focuses on real-time rendering of vegetation and foreground detail (http://www.biosphere3d.org). It is result of two German joint research projects and currently in beta stage. Main target scale of Bioshere3D is visualising landscape from an eye-level perspective enabling to wander through the planned or predicted landscape. Joint seminar with SSI Victoria (1 CPD) |
| Thursday 13 November | Theatre C1, Geomatics | Hossein Mohammadi | The
Integration of Multi-source Spatial Data Integration
in the Context of SDI Initiatives (PhD completion) Integration of multi-source spatial data is an important process in many spatial applications including sustainable development and spatially-enabled governments, which aim to provide multi-disciplinary knowledge to the citizens. The diversity of approaches taken by custodians to coordinate spatial data causes many technical and non-technical inconsistencies among data sets. These issues need to be identified and addressed in a holistic approach. Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) promise to facilitate the interaction of spatial data stakeholders with spatial data. Within the context of an SDI, the provision of technical tools together with policy frameworks, institutional arrangements, standards and guidelines can assist users to integrate spatial data sets more effectively. This also decreases the cost and time associated with data integration. This research aimed to propose data integration toolbox in the context of SDIs with the focus on facilitating multi-source spatial data integration. The toolbox consists of an integration guideline, an integration data model and an integration validation tool. The identification of toolbox components has been accomplished through a number of case studies within Asia and the Pacific region. This led to the identification of potential obstacles together with best practices. Based on the analysis of the obstacles and challenges, the toolbox components have been identified and developed to overcome the obstacles. The integration toolbox can assist practitioners and decision-makers to utilize multi-source/multi-disciplinary datasets (including built and natural datasets) effectively. |
| Thursday 30 October | Theatre A1, Old Engineering | Eldar Rubinov Department of Geomatics |
Real Time Quality Assessment for
Network RTK GNSS Positioning (half session) |
| Thursday 16 October | Theatre A1, Old Engineering | Kai-Florian Richter University of Bremen |
Simplest instructions Current applications for wayfinding and navigation assistance usually calculate the route to a destination based on the shortest or fastest path from the origin. However, numerous findings in cognitive science show that the ease of use and communication of route instructions depends on factors other than just the length of a route, such as the number and complexity of decision points. Building on previous work to improve the automatic generation of route instructions, this paper presents an algorithm for finding routes associated with the simplest instructions, taking into account fundamental principles of human direction giving, namely decision point complexity, references to landmarks, and spatial chunking. The algorithm presented can be computed in the same order of time complexity as Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm, O(n2). Joint seminar with SSI Victoria (1 CPD) |
| Thursday 18 September | Theatre A1, Old Engineering | Jafar
Sadeq Department of Geomatics |
Effect
of Neighborhood on In-Network Processing in Sensor Networks Wireless sensor networks are growing from a few hand-placed devices to more large-scale networks in terms of coverage and node density. For various concerns, such as scalability, larger network sizes require some management of the large volume of data that a sensor network delivers. One way to manage this data is processing information in the network. This presentation investigates how a sensor network’s network architecture (specifically, the neighborhood structure) can influence the conclusions that a sensor network makes from its measurements. The results demonstrate that non-planar structures are infeasible for routing and some in-network processing applications. Structures with low average edge lengths give better quantitative results, while those with high edge densities give better qualitative results. |
| Tuesday 16 September | Brown Theatre, Electrical Engineering | Lothar Gründig University of Technology Berlin |
Computation of Lightweight
Structures Tewksbury Lecture |
| Thursday 11 September | Theatre A1, Old Engineering | Yunhui Wu Jonathan Arundel Department of Geomatics |
Communicating with Navigation
Systems about Places Occurrence of epidemics by events attracting mass movement |
| Thursday 4 September | Theatre A1, Old Engineering | Patrick Laube Department of Geomatics |
Decentralized Movement Pattern Detection amongst Mobile
Geosensor Nodes Movement patterns, like flocking and converging, leading and following, are examples of high-level process knowledge derived from low-level trajectory data. Conventional techniques for the detection of movement patterns rely on centralized "omniscient" computing systems that have global access to the trajectories of mobile entities. However, in decentralized spatial information processing systems, exemplified by wireless sensor networks, individual processing units may only have access to local information about other individuals in their immediate spatial vicinity. Where the individuals in such decentralized systems are mobile, there is a need to be able to detect movement patterns using collaboration between individuals, each of which possess only partial knowledge of the global system state. This talk presents an algorithm for decentralized detection of the movement pattern flock, with applications to mobile wireless sensor networks. |
| Thursday 14 August | Theatre A1, Old Engineering | Alvaro Ramirez Universidad Politécnica de Madrid |
Evaluation of the landscape
around rural roads The environmental sustainability of the actions carried out by the human beings into the environment is a worry for a society aware of the wealthy heritage that they own. The study of environmental measures and the proposal of technical solutions for achieving the integration of those actions show the interest to maintain and preserve this heritage. Rural roads are linear infrastructures that environmentally influence into an important extension of territory, and which main characteristic is the landscape fragmentation derived. The integration process of the road into the environment has to be mainly achieved in the earliest stage of the project. A fair identification of the most important attributes of the landscape and an objective assessment of them could provide important decision criteria for selecting the most appropriate routes. Landscapes of 38 rural roads in Spain has been evaluated and statistically analyzed in a study concerning the identification of the significant attributes as well as the relations among them to determine the weight that they should receive. This aimed to establish the basis for the development of a specific method for landscape assessment around rural roads. Joint seminar with SSI Victoria (1 CPD) |
| Thursday 7 August | Theatre A1, Old Engineering | Stephan Winter | The "Spatial Turing Test" How far are current route services from imitating humans in giving route directions? And what can we learn, in terms of gaps of knowledge and need for further research, from this question? This presentation aims to sketch a research agenda for giving (better) route advice. It is based on a systematic approach of studying the gaps and failures in the communication process with current route services. The presentation starts from the premise that people can give better route advice than current route services due to their richer language, their more compatible spatial concepts and conceptualizations, and their superior capability to capture and adapt to context. With that, services still have to aim for a communication behavior like a person. |
| Thursday 24 July | Theatre C1, Geomatics | Jane Brennan University of Technology Sydney |
Modelling Spatial Proximity The concept of proximity is an important aspect of human reasoning. Despite the diversity of applications that require proximity measures, the most intuitive notion is that of spatial nearness. In this talk, we will investigate the underpinnings of the notion of nearness, explore suitable formalisations and their implications to the processing of geographic data. I propose that nearness should be defined from impact areas which take both the nature of an object and the surrounding environment into account. Context is introduced to incorporate the wealth of knowledge that is brought into the processing of geographic data by end users. Joint seminar with SSI Victoria (1 CPD) |
| Thursday, 17 July | Theatre C1, Geomatics | Christian Stock Department of Geomatics |
Visualise your message and make
it stick Competition between bits of information is high and from the sea of information generated every moment only a few messages survive and become important in our lives. Visualising your message can help making it stick. This presentation will show some key ingredients to making your message stand out by showing some concrete examples in the hot topic of climate change. Come along and learn how you can apply visualisation to create impact! |
| Thursday 3 July | Theatre C1, Geomatics | Eric Legge Smith Department of Geomatics |
Eliciting public preference for
decision making in complex environments (PhD confirmation) |
| Thursday 19 June | Theatre C1, Geomatics | Dorota Brzezinska Geodetic Science, Ohio State University |
Multisensor personal navigator
supported by machine learning The prototype of a personal navigator, which integrates the Global Positioning System (GPS), micro-electro-mechanical inertial measurement unit (MEMS IMU), digital barometer, magnetometer, and human pedometry to support navigation and tracking of military and rescue ground personnel has been developed at The Ohio State University Satellite Positioning and Inertial Navigation (SPIN) Laboratory. This presentation will provide a review of the navigation techniques suitable for personal navigation followed by the design, implementation and performance assessment of the system prototype, with a special emphasis on dead-reckoning (DR) navigation supported by the human locomotion model. A summary of the performance analysis in the mixed indoor-outdoor environments, with the special emphasis on the DR performance is provided. The system’s navigation limitation in DR mode is tested in terms of time and trajectory length to determine the upper limit of indoor operation before the need for system re-calibration. Joint seminar with SSI Victoria (1 CPD) |
| Thursday 8 May | Denis Driscoll Theatrette, Doug McDonell Building | Matt Duckham Department of Geomatics |
"Non-convex" hulls: Efficient generation of simple polygons for characterizing the shape of a set of points in the plane |
| Thursday 1 May | Denis Driscoll Theatrette, Doug McDonell Building | Nathan Quadros Department of Geomatics | Delineating the Littoral Zone:
Issues and Solutions (PhD completion) The vast majority of boundaries within the littoral zone are based on one of the many possible tidal lines. These tidal lines are defined by the line of intersection between a particular tidal datum and the land mass. This research presents the results of case studies involved in the development of the land and water input datasets and the consequent delineation of tidal lines. |
| Thursday 24 April | Denis Driscoll Theatrette, Doug McDonell Building | Graeme Kernich CRCSI Stephan Winter Department of Geomatics |
The current impact of spatial
information on Australia's GDP Report on a study by ACIL Tasman for the CRCSI The potential impact of spatial information on the GDP Critical review of the ACIL Tasman Study in the light of other work |
| Thursday 17 April | Denis Driscoll Theatrette, Doug McDonell Building | Joe Leach Department of Geomatics |
The nature of space, and other philosophical ramblings |
| Thursday 10 April | Denis Driscoll Theatrette, Doug McDonell Building | Sue
Hope Department of Geomatics |
Integrating
vector datasets of varying quality (PhD completion) As the spatial information industry moves from an era of data collection to one of data maintenance, new integration methods to consolidate or to update datasets are required. These must reduce the discrepancies that are becoming increasingly apparent when spatial datasets are overlaid. It is essential that any such methods consider the quality characteristics of, firstly, the data being integrated and, secondly, the resultant data. This research develops techniques that give due consideration to data quality during the integration process. Applicable to any overlaid vector datasets, they enable preservation of spatial integrity constraints and generate updated quality parameters. |
| Thursday 3 April | Denis Driscoll Theatrette, Doug McDonell Building | Lucy Ann Spottiswood Department of Geomatics |
An agent-driven virtual
environment for the simulationofland-use decision making
(PhD completion) This research investigates the use of a virtual decision-making environment as a tool for better understanding individual land-use choice behaviour. A series of quantitative and qualitative experiments were conducted to determine the extent to which subjects’ land-use decisions were affected by varying the visual and social context (as represented by a 3D visualisation and agent-based model) provided in the virtual environment. The extent to which people's values were correlated with their land-use choices was also investigated. |
| Thursday 20 March | Denis Driscoll Theatrette, Doug McDonell Building | Anna Boin Department of Geomatics |
Exposing Uncertainty:
Communicating fitness for use for spatial data over
the Internet (PhD completion) After decades of research into spatial data quality, there has been very little empirical research conducted into how consumers really determine whether data is suitable for them. Theories were drafted in workshops on quality in the early 1980s but since then spatial data has moved from the specialist domain to the everyday Internet user. This research has investigated consumer perceptions and reasoning, and consequently suggests some concise strategies for communicating quality to consumers that would obtain data through the Internet. |
| Thursday 13 March | Denis Driscoll Theatrette, Doug McDonell Building | Mohsen
Kalantari Department of Geomatics |
Cadastral Data
Modeling - A Tool for E-Land Administration (PhD completion) Electronic administration of land is challenged by increasing needs of clients for land information and by creation of new land related commodities and interests. Existing administration systems, including the latest ICT enabled systems, are not sufficiently flexible to accommodate these new interests and commodities. Nor do they respond to the needs of end users. This research will develop a new cadastral data model that incorporates a broader range of interests and commodities and satisfies the emerging demands of users. |
| Thursday 6 March | Theatre C1, Geomatics | Faisal Masood
Qureshi Department of Geomatics |
Facilitating Urban Planning & Management Through Local SDI Design & Development |
| Thursday 28 February | Theatre C1, Geomatics | Mingzheng Shi Department of Geomatics |
Automated Information Fusion of Centralized and Decentralized Spatial Datasets (PhD confirmation) |
| Thursday 21 February | Theatre C1, Geomatics | Anna Donets Department of Geomatics |
Solving multipath problems in GPS structural monitoring |
| Thursday 14 February | Theatre C1, Geomatics | Ida Jazayeri Department of Geomatics |
Image-Based Modelling for Object Reconstruction |
| Thursday 7 February | Theatre C1, Geomatics | Paul Grgich Department of Geomatics |
Improved
Processing Models for Network Kinematic GPS Positioning in Sparse
Networks (PhD completion) Network Kinematic GPS can realise centimetre level positioning accuracies using regional networks of reference stations (CORS), with typical separations of up to 70km. This spacing is not practically feasible across large regions such as Australia. To overcome this limitation and expand the utility of GPS, this research developed algorithms to accurately determine GPS biases at CORS sites using undifferenced processing techniques. Results indicate that accurate position solutions can be computed at rover sites that are over 100km from CORS sites. |
| Thursday 24 January | Theatre C1, Geomatics | Zaffar Sadiq Department of Geomatics |
Modeling spatial variation of data quality in databases (PhD completion) |