Ross A. Brown

The Second Life of urban planning? Using NeoGeography tools for community engagement

The majority of the worlds citizens now live in cities. Although urban planning can thus be thought of as a field with significant ramifications on the human condition, many practitioners feel that it has reached the crossroads in thought leadership between traditional practice and a new, more participatory and open approach. Conventional ways to engage people in participatory planning exercises are limited in reach and scope. At the same time, socio-cultural trends and technology innovation offer opportunities to re-think the status quo in urban planning. NeoGeography introduces tools and services that allow non-geographers to use advanced geographical information systems. Similarly, is there a potential for the emergence of a neo-planning paradigm in which urban planning is carried out through active civic engagement aided by Web 2.0 and new media technologies thus redefining the role of practicing planners? This paper traces a number of evolving links between urban planning, NeoGeography and information and communication technology. Two significant trends – participation and visualisation – with direct implications for urban planning are discussed. Combining advanced participation and visualisation features, the popular virtual reality environment Second Life is then introduced as a test bed to explore a planning workshop and an integrated software event framework to assist narrative generation. We discuss an approach to harness and analyse narratives using virtual reality logging to make transparent how users understand and interpret proposed urban designs.

Using virtual worlds for collaborative business process modeling

Purpose – Process modeling is a complex organizational task that requires many iterations and communication between the business analysts and the domain specialists. The challenge of process modeling is exacerbated, when the process of modeling has to be performed in a cross‐organizational, distributed environment. This paper aims to suggest a three‐dimensional (3D) environment for collaborative process modeling, using virtual world technology.Design/methodology/approach – The paper suggests a new collaborative process modeling approach based on virtual world technology. It describes the design of an innovative prototype collaborative process modeling approach, implemented as a 3D Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) modeling environment in Second Life. We use a case study to evaluate the suggested approach.Findings – Based on a case study application, the paper shows that our approach increases user empowerment and adds significantly to the collaboration and consensual development of process models ...

Visualization support for managing large business process specifications

This paper proposes a visualization technique to support the modelling and management of large business process specifications. The technique uses a set of criteria to produce views of the specification that exclude less relevant features. The proposed approach consists of three steps: assessing the relevance of nodes, reducing the specification, and presenting the results. Algorithms and methods are presented for these steps along with examples.

Animated visual vibrations as an uncertainty visualisation technique

Research into the visualisation of imprecise data is a relatively new field in visualisation. Work is beginning to appear detailing the process of visualising uncertainty in data. Continuing previous work by the author, this paper seeks to extend techniques used to visualise uncertainty from the spatial to the temporal domain, by using visual vibrations to indicate the level of imprecision at a visualised data point. The paper contains an analysis of the present visual features used to indicate imprecision, and then details a methodology for using visual vibrations to display the uncertainty contained in visualised data. Novel additions include addressing chart junk issues outlined by Tufte, additions of perceptual factors and extension to stereo vision applications.

A Spreadsheet Approach to Facilitate Visualization of Uncertainty in Information

Information uncertainty is inherent in many problems and is often subtle and complicated to understand. Although visualization is a powerful means for exploring and understanding information, information uncertainty visualization is ad hoc and not widespread. This paper identifies two main barriers to the uptake of information uncertainty visualization: first, the difficulty of modeling and propagating the uncertainty information and, second, the difficulty of mapping uncertainty to visual elements. To overcome these barriers, we extend the spreadsheet paradigm to encapsulate uncertainty details within cells. This creates an inherent awareness of the uncertainty associated with each variable. The spreadsheet can hide the uncertainty details, enabling the user to think simply in terms of variables. Furthermore, the system can aid with automated propagation of uncertainty information, since it is intrinsically aware of the uncertainty. The system also enables mapping the encapsulated uncertainty to visual elements via the formula language and a visualization sheet. Support for such low-level visual mapping provides flexibility to explore new techniques for information uncertainty visualization.

Visual attention-based polygon level of detail management

Modern real-time graphics systems are required to render millions of polygons to the screen per second. However, even with this high polygon rendering bandwidth, there are still applications which tax this rendering capability. We introduce in this paper a technique which adaptively allocates polygons to objects in a scene according to their visual importance. It is expected that using this technique, an improvement in the perceptual quality of a rendered image should result, for the same overall number of polygons being rendered.We present both a theoretical basis and a complete design for a visual attention-based level of detail management technique. We also present some preliminary assessment of output from the system. Applications for this technique are expected to be found in the areas of entertainment, visualisation and simulation.

Implementation of Kernel Methods on the GPU

Kernel methods such as kernel principal component analysis and support vector machines have become powerful tools for pattern recognition and computer vision. Unfortunately the high computational cost of kernel methods is a limiting factor for real-time classification tasks when running on the CPU of a standard PC. Over the last few years, commodity Graphics Processing Units (GPU) have evolved from fixed graphics pipeline processors into more flexible and powerful data-parallel processors. These stream processors are capable of sustaining computation rates of greater than ten times that of a single CPU. GPUs are inexpensive and are becoming ubiquitous (desktops, laptops, PDAs, cell phones). In this paper, we present a face recognition system based on kernel methods running on the GPU. This GPU implementation is twenty eight times faster than the same optimized application running on the CPU.

Design and implementation of a virtual world training simulation of ICU first hour handover processes.

Nursing training for an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is a resource intensive process. High demands are made on staff, students and physical resources. Interactive, 3D computer simulations, known as virtual worlds, are increasingly being used to supplement training regimes in the health sciences; especially in areas such as complex hospital ward processes. Such worlds have been found to be very useful in maximising the utilisation of training resources. Our aim is to design and develop a novel virtual world application for teaching and training Intensive Care nurses in the approach and method for shift handover, to provide an independent, but rigorous approach to teaching these important skills. In this paper we present a virtual world simulator for students to practice key steps in handing over the 24/7 care requirements of intensive care patients during the commencing first hour of a shift. We describe the modelling process to provide a convincing interactive simulation of the handover steps involved. The virtual world provides a practice tool for students to test their analytical skills with scenarios previously provided by simple physical simulations, and live on the job training. Additional educational benefits include facilitation of remote learning, high flexibility in study hours and the automatic recording of a reviewable log from the session. To the best of our knowledge, we believe this is a novel and original application of virtual worlds to an ICU handover process. The major outcome of the work was a virtual world environment for training nurses in the shift handover process, designed and developed for use by postgraduate nurses in training.

Image Mining and Retrieval Using Hierarchical Support Vector Machines

For some time now, image retrieval approaches have been developed that use low-level features, such as colour histograms, edge distributions and texture measures. What has been lacking in image retrieval approaches is the development of general methods for more structured object recognition. This paper describes in detail a general hierarchical image classifier approach, and illustrates the ease with which it can be trained to find objects in a scene. To further illustrate the wide capabilities of this approach, results from its application to particle picking in biology and Vietnamese art image retrieval are listed.

Visualisation of fuzzy systems: requirements, techniques and framework

Complex fuzzy systems exist in many applications and effective visualisation is required to gain insights into the nature and working of these systems, especially in the implication of imprecision, its propagation and impacts on the quality and reliability of the outcomes. This paper presents a holistic approach towards the design of a visualisation system for fuzzy systems. We firstly analyse the requirements for such a visualisation system by articulating fundamental ontologies that underpin the structure and operations of fuzzy systems. A software framework using a multi-agent approach is then presented with the aim to facilitate the organisation and flow of complex tasks, their inter-relationships and their interactions with users. Finally, we discuss visualisation techniques for fuzzy data and fuzzy rules, and introduce methods to extend and improve some existing techniques.