Jixue Liu

Friday, 2 October 2009, 1.00-2.00pm

D1-05, Mawson Lakes Campus, University of South Australia

Video conferencing will be available at the City West Campus, University of South Australia in SM1-15, 27-29 North Terrace.

Abstract

Abstract: XML has been recognized as a data exchange and publication model and is widely used. To support XML data storage, management and processing, both industry and research have put a great lot of effort to develop necessary technologies. This seminar reviews the current progress of the technologies with regard to the query of and the update of data in XML databases. The seminar will show two XML databases. One is Oracle XML DB which stores XML documents either as big objects or shreds XML documents and stores them in relational tables. The other is a native XML database prototype called XTC which uses a complete different implementation from the relational database. The seminar will focus on how query is processed and how updates are catered in these two types of databases.

Sylvain Hallé

Monday, 21 September 2009, 12.00-1.00pm

D1-05, Mawson Lakes Campus, University of South Australia

Video conferencing will be available at the City West Campus, University of South Australia in SM1-15, 27-29 North Terrace.

Abstract

Companies like Amazon, Google and Yahoo make available part of their functionalities in the shape of web services; a third-party application can communicate with these services via the Internet by exchanging messages whose structure and content are public and formally defined.
However, the documentation also stipulates many other details regarding the way in which these services should be consumed, expressed in natural language and escaping any formalization. This context led us to develop LTL-FO+, an extension of Linear Temporal Logic including 1) a particular form of first-order quantification; 2) a semantics with 2, 3 or 4 truth values, depending on the context. We shall see that this logic is appropriate to express constraints on messages sequences specific to web applications. We then concentrate on its runtime monitoring; to this end, we present BeepBeep, a tool allowing the verification and enforcement of LTL-FO+ formulas on real-world web applications.

Biography

Sylvain Hallé is a postdoctoral fellow at University of California in Santa Barbara, USA. His research interests focus on the specification, verification and monitoring of interface requirements in web applications. Sylvain’s research is funded by the Fonds québécois de recherche sur la nature et les technologies (FQRNT); prior to that, he was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and has published around 20 papers since the beginning of his graduate studies. Sylvain was the general co-chair of the International Workshop on Dynamic and Declarative Business Processes (held jointly with EDOC in 2008 and 2009), and the local organization co-chair of the 15th International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning (TIME 2008), held in Montreal.
Sylvain’s home page is available at http://www.leduotang.com/sylvain/.

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Bing Liu

Friday, 21 August 2009, 12.00-1.00pm

D1-05, Mawson Lakes Campus, University of South Australia

Video conferencing will be available at the City West Campus, University of South Australia in SM1-15, 27-29 North Terrace.

Abstract

For a half a century, human understanding about the genetic programming of mammals and other complex organisms has been dominated by the central dogma which regards non-protein-coding RNAs as debris arising from the evaluation. However, increasing evidence shows that non-protein-coding RNAs have a wide repertoire of biological functions, mostly as a means of gene regulation, especially in the higher eukaryotes. microRNAs (miRNAs) are a group of newly found non-protein-coding RNAs which have critical roles in post-transcriptional gene regulations as repressors or promoters through targeting mRNAs and proteins in all known animal and plant genomes. Consequently, dysregulation of miRNA functions may lead to human diseases.
In this talk, he will introduce the background of this research, and briefly discuss two papers produced to discover the functions of miRNAs and their roles in human diseases with computational methods.

Biography

Bing Liu is currently a PhD candidate in the field of data mining and bioinformatics in CIS, UniSA. He received the BS. in Electronics & Information System, and MS. in Communication & Information System from Yunnan University, China, in 1997 and 2000, respectively. He was a lecturer in school of software, Yunnan University from 2000 to 2006. He also conducted research on information processing, especially the Robust Watermarking of Digital Image under the support of Natural Science Foundation (NSF) of Yunnan Province, NSF of Education of Yunnan Province. He went to University of Pittsburgh, USA between April, 2004 and May, 2005 as a research scholar and joined the research team of Telemedicine and Telehealth which was supported by NIH. During his research there, he developed a multimedia system for remote neurosurgical monitoring and a novel algorithm to detect region of interest (ROI) in Neurosurgical video used for telemedicine. His current research interest focuses on identifying functional gene regulatory modules with data mining and bioinformatics methods.

Xavier Pucel

Friday, 21 August 2009, 1.00-1.30pm

D1-05, Mawson Lakes Campus, University of South Australia

Video conferencing will be available at the City West Campus, University of South Australia in SM1-15, 27-29 North Terrace.

Abstract

This talk adresses the problem of diagnosability analysis, which allows a system designer to anticipate the performance of a model based diagnosis (MBD) algorithm for a given system. Such analysis require a formal description of the system behavior, called model, which can be very difficult to establish, especially when faults occur in the system. In disregard to this fact, all known diagnosability frameworks rely on some specification of the system behavior under the absence and presence of faults.
In this talk, he presents a diagnosability analysis algorithm related to a diagnosis approach in which the model of faulty system components is unspecified. Diagnosis is based on the description of the normal behavior as well as a decomposition of the system into components, and assesses which components cannot be behaving normally. Diagnosability is defined in a way that copes with the capabilities of such diagnosis approaches.

Biography

Xavier Pucel is a Research Fellow in the Knowledge and Software Engineering Lab at School of Computer and Information Science, UniSA. He works in the domain of Model-Based Reasoning, and values its applications in software analysis and systems safety. He completed his doctoral thesis in December 2008 in LAAS-CNRS (Laboratoire d’Analyse et d’Architecture des Systèmes du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in Toulouse, France, focusing on enriching Model-Based Diagnosis and applying it to software systems, especially Service Oriented Architectures. He is currently contributing to Model-Based Debugging techniques and their applications to concurrent programs.
Xavier’s home page is available at http://people.unisa.edu.au/Xavier.Pucel.

Helen Ashman

Friday, 31 July 2009, 1:00-1:30pm

D1-05, Mawson Lakes Campus, University of South Australia

Video conferencing will be available at the City West Campus, University of South Australia in SM1-15, 27-29 North Terrace.

Abstract:

Personalisation has been seen as the answer to the vast quantity of information now available digitally. Information is tailored to meet each user’s apparent needs, whether making use of Web-based learning materials, purchasing from online sites, accessing entertainment products or any other potentially-personalisable facility. Yet before rushing headlong into personalising everything, including online learning systems, we need to consider the threats posed by the capture of so much data about individuals, the implications of personalised information delivery, and whether the benefits of personalisation justify the costs. In this paper, we look at both the issues and benefits of personalisation, and consider how to steer our way to a safe and valuable use of personalisation.

Biography:

Helen Ashman has worked in hypertext and Web research since 1992, starting with the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation, then spending a year in Southampton with Wendy Hall’s group before doing a PhD with RMIT on dynamic hypertext. She then moved to the University of Nottingham, where she set up the Web Technologies Group and became Editor-in-Chief of the new ACM Transactions on the Web. She recently moved back to Australia and now leads the WebTech and Security Lab at the University of South Australia. She has recently guest-edited special issues on Distance Learning and Emerging Internet Technologies and Applications for e-Learning for IEEE Internet Computing.

Personalisation has always been one of her interests, whether in the military context or educational, and at the same time so has security and privacy. While she believes in the promise of personalisation, she feels it needs to be experimentally validated, especially in the e-learning context, so that it can be proved to live up to its promise.

Georg Grossmann

Friday, 31 July 2009, 12:00-1:00pm

D1-05, Mawson Lakes Campus, University of South Australia

Video conferencing will be available at the City West Campus, University of South Australia in SM1-15, 27-29 North Terrace.

Abstract:

Business process languages have been successfully applied in research and industry for the development of information systems. They are used for the analysis, design, construction, and verification of software applications and fit well into the model driven paradigm. Although many business process languages have emerged in the last couple of years, they are in general not used for supporting the integration of existing information systems. In many cases, they are applied for designing an integrated system from scratch but less emphasis has been placed on integrating existing business process models which would be a natural consequence from a model driven point of view.

In the presented work, inter-process dependencies for the integration of existing business processes have been identified and currently available business process modelling languages have been investigated for their support.

One result was that none of the languages support all identified dependencies directly and therefore a set of language extensions is proposed. A possible implementation of the dependency by an event driven architecture is discussed at the end.

Biography:

Georg Grossmann is a Research Fellow in the Knowledge and Software Engineering Lab at School of Computer and Information Science, UniSA. He works in the area of business process integration and obtained his PhD in 2008 from UniSA that was awarded with the Ian Davey Research Thesis Prize for the most-outstanding PhD thesis at UniSA in 2008. His doctoral thesis focused on the behaviour-based integration of object oriented information systems. Before coming to Australia, he obtained a M.Sc. in Economcis and Computer Science (Magister in Wirtschaftsinformatik) jointly from the University of Vienna and the Vienna University of Technology. Current research interests include behaviour-based integration of Web services, ontology-driven integration and distributed event-based systems. Georg’s home page is available at http://people.unisa.edu.au/Georg.Grossmann.

Rajesh Thiagarajan

Friday, 3 July 2009, 12:00-12:30pm

D1-05, Mawson Lakes Campus, University of South Australia

Video conferencing will be available at the City West Campus, University of South Australia in SM1-15, 27-29 North Terrace.

Abstract:

Automated discovery of web services with desired functionality is an active research area because of its role in realising the envisioned advantages of the semantic web, such as functional reuse and automated composition. Existing approaches generally determine matches by inferring subsumption relationships between a request and a service specification, but may return poor results if service profiles are overspecified or provide only partial information. We present a two-staged consistency-based matchmaking approach where services that potentially match the request are identified in the first stage, these services are queried for concrete information, and finally this information is used to determine the matches. We evaluate our matchmaking scheme in the context of the ‘Discovery II and Simple Composition’ scenario proposed by the SWS Challenge group. Preliminary evaluation shows that our approach is robust while handling overspecified profiles, does not return false positives, and is able to handle partial information in service and requirements specification.

Biography:

Rajesh is a PhD candidate in the Knowledge and Software Engineering Lab of the Advanced Computing Research Centre, School of Computer and Information Science in the University of South Australia.

Rajesh Thiagarajan

Friday, 3 July 2009, 12:30-1:00pm

D1-05, Mawson Lakes Campus, University of South Australia

Video conferencing will be available at the City West Campus, University of South Australia in SM1-15, 27-29 North Terrace.

Abstract:

The ability to build new (complex) services by composing existing services is one of the key benefits of the Service Oriented Architecture paradigm. Existing approaches to automate composition requires pre-planning or prediction of the number of required services, making them unsuitable in dynamic composition scenarios. To address this gap, we present a consistency-based service composition approach, where composition problems are modeled in a generative constraint-based formalism. We illustrate how the configuration of service processes differs from established constraint-based configuration techniques and develop an algorithm to synthesis valid service process compositions. We also show that our technique scales well to non-trivial problems.

Biography:

Rajesh is a PhD candidate in the Knowledge and Software Engineering Lab of the Advanced Computing Research Centre, School of Computer and Information Science in the University of South Australia.

Dr. Christian Sandor

Friday, 26 June 2009, 1:00-2:00pm

D1-05, Mawson Lakes Campus, University of South Australia

Video conferencing will be available at the City West Campus, University of South Australia in SM1-15, 27-29 North Terrace.

Abstract:

During the last decade, mobile information browsing on mobile phones has become a widely-adopted practice. This was made possible by the increase of wireless networking infrastructure and computing power of mobile phones.

However, there are several challenges in human-computer interaction related to mobile information browsing. One fundamental limitation is the small screen of current mobile internet devices.

Therefore, many researchers are investigating ways to display information efficiently; a research area also known as Information Visualization.

A second challenge is based on the huge increase of available online data that refers to objects in the real world. How can users understand these references easily?

A promising approach to this challenge is to employ Augmented Reality (AR), a user interface technology that can overlay computer graphics over a video image of the real world.

So far, most AR systems have mainly been used and tested in synthetic laboratory environments. A related problem is that many AR systems have targeted toy applications that are of mere academic interest, but fail to address the real needs of lay people.

Due to these problems, until now, no AR system has been developed that would influence development of consumer devices on a large scale.

In the Wearable Computer Lab, we are taking these challenges seriously and are recently focusing on building systems that are evaluated with lay people from the street.

In early June, we have conducted experiments in Adelaide’s Central Business District with random people from the street. This presentation will report about our experiences of the first steps for creating next-generation, AR-enabled consumer devices.

Biography:

Dr. Christian Sandor is the current Deputy Director of the Wearable Computer Lab at the University of South Australia. He believes that augmented Reality has the potential to become the dominating user interface paradigm for mobile information access. To help realizing this potential, his key research question is: what are the fundamental user interface primitives for augmented reality? While such primitives have been established for desktop computers and virtual reality, augmented reality is still in short supply.

From 12/2005 to 7/2007, he has been working at Canon’s Leading-Edge Technology Research Headquarters in Tokyo, Japan. There, he has created a design environment that enables users to see and touch virtual objects and invented a 3D cursor for mobile augmented reality.

Before joining Canon, he has obtained a doctorate in computer science from the Munich University of Technology, Germany. Under the supervision of Prof. Gudrun Klinker and Prof. Steven Feiner, he has developed a software framework and authoring tools for distributed augmented reality user interfaces. Using these tools, he has created a variety of applications, ranging from art installations to industrial applications. In a collaboration with BMW, he has worked in an interdisciplinary team to investigate augmented reality guidance systems for car drivers.

Jian Zhang

Tuesday, 16 June 2009, 1:00pm

D1-05, Mawson Lakes Campus, University of South Australia

Video conferencing will be available at the City West Campus, University of South Australia in SM1-15, 27-29 North Terrace. Afternoon tea will be provided after the seminar in D2-23.

Abstract:

Efficiently and accurately detecting pedestrians plays a crucial role in many vision applications such as video surveillance, multimedia retrieval, smart vehicles, etc. In order to find the right feature for this task, we first present a comprehensive experimental study on pedestrian detection using state-of-the-art locally extracted features. Building upon our findings, we propose a new, simpler pedestrian detecting framework based on the covariance features. We conduct feature selection and weak classifier training in the Euclidean space for faster computation. To this end, two machine learning algorithms have been designed:- AdaBoost with weighted Fisher linear discriminant analysis (WLDA) based weak classifiers and Greedy Sparse Linear Discriminant Analysis (GSLDA). To further accelerate the detection, we adopt a faster strategy-multiple cascade layers with heterogeneous features-to exploit the efficiency of the Haar-like wavelet features and the discriminative power of the covariance features. Experimental results shown on different datasets prove that the new pedestrian detection is not only comparable to the state-of-the-art pedestrian detectors but it also performs at a faster speed.

Biography:

Dr. Zhang is currently working with National ICT Australia (NICTA) as a principal researcher, project leader and a conjoint associate professor with School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales. Dr Zhang is a research leader in the area of Multimedia and Video Communications at NICTA Neville Roach Lab in Sydney, Australia.

Dr. Zhang leads two of NICTA research projects in the areas of image and video processing, video surveillance and multimedia content management. He is a senior member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. His research interests include image/video processing; video understanding; and video coding and communication. Apart from more than 70 paper publications and authored book chapters as his research output, he also holds more than ten patents filed in US, UK, Japan and Australia including five issued US patents. He served as associate editors of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (T-CSVT), International Journal of Image and Video Processing (Journal of IVP) and the Co-Guest Editor of the T-CSVT for Special Issue (March 2007) of the Convergence of Knowledge Engineering Semantics and Signal Processing in Audiovisual Information Retrieval

In 1997, Dr. Zhang joined the Visual Information Processing Lab, Motorola Labs in Sydney as a senior research engineer and later became a principal research engineer, and a team leader of Visual Communications Research Team. While at Motorola labs, he had been working on diverse research projects including image processing, video coding and communication, image segmentation and multimedia content adaptation etc.

Dr Zhang was awarded a Bachelor of Science in Electronic Engineering from East Normal University, China in 1982; a Masters of Science in Computer Science from Flinders University, South Australia in 1994; and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of New South Wales, Australia in 1997.