1.
Picturing China 1870-1950: photographs from British collections - Foo, Yee-Wah
This book accompanies the exhibition 'Picturing China 1870-1950’, Brunei Gallery, SOAS, 16 October- 15 December 2007. The exhibition showcases artifacts, documents and photographs from the Fu Bingchang collection. These, and all the documentary and historical references concerning Fu Bingchang were provided by Foo. The project is a collaboration with SOAS, Bristol University, and the Institut d’Asie Orientale, Lyon. The exhibition is co-sponsored by the AHRC (‘China Now’ project). A reduced version of the exhibition moves to the Museum of East Asian Art, Bath, December 2007, the Oriental Museum, Durham, April 2008 and Queen’s University, Belfast, thereafter.
2.
A Self-Organising Awareness System for Distributed Software Engineering - Nutter, David
Software engineers and other collaborative disciplines rely on informal "out-of-band" communication for ef-
fective coordination of their activities, especially in agile methods. This type of communication is lost when devel-
opment is distributed, with consequent deleterious effects on engineer effectiveness. In order to effectively support
distributed software engineering, a replacement for this informal communication must be found.
Much previous research focussed on either synchronous awareness such as radar views and shared editors,
where participants were distributed in space not time, or asynchronous awareness such as change notification, which
did not explicitly support concurrent activities. A unified approach is necessary to support software engineering.
Furthermore, requiring co-location...
3.
Using Inactivity to Detect Unusual behavi - Dickinson, Patrick; Hunter, Andrew
We present a novel method for detecting unusual modes
of behavior in video surveillance data, suitable for supporting home-based care of elderly patients. Our approach is based on detecting unusual patterns of inactivity.
We first learn a spatial map of normal inactivity for an observedscene, expressed as a two-dimensional mixture of Gaus-sians. The map components are used to construct a HiddenMarkov Model representing normal patterns of behavior. Athreshold model is also inferred, and unusual behavior de-tected by comparing the model likelihoods. Our learning procedures are unsupervised, and yield a highly transparent model of scene activity. We present an evaluation of our...
4.
Web-based support for managing large collections of software artefacts - Boldyreff, Cornelia; Brittle, James; Korhonen, Chris; Kyaw, Phyo; Lavery, Janet; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen
There has been a long history of CASE tool development, with an underlying software repository at the heart of most systems. Usually such tools, even the more recently web-based systems, are focused on supporting individual projects within an enterprise or across a number of distributed sites. Little support for maintaining large heterogeneous collections of software artefacts across a number of projects has been developed. Within the GENESIS project, this has been a key consideration in the development of the Open Source Component Artefact Repository
(OSCAR). Its most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross project global views of large...
5.
Towards collaborative learning via shared artefacts over the Grid - Boldyreff, Cornelia; Kyaw, Phyo; Lavery, Janet; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen
The Web is the most pervasive collaborative technology in widespread use today; and its use to support
eLearning has been highly successful. There are many web-based Virtual Learning Environments such as
WebCT, FirstClass, and BlackBoard as well as associated web-based Managed Learning Environments. In
the future, the Grid promises to provide an extremely powerful infrastructure allowing both learners and
teachers to collaborate in various learning contexts and to share learning materials, learning processes,
learning systems, and experiences. This position paper addresses the role of support for sharing artefacts
in distributed systems such as the Grid. An analogy is made between collaborative software development
and collaborative learning with...
7.
Construyendo títulos basados en competencias: problemas y progreso desde una perspectiva Europea - Karran, Terence
Presentation (in Spanish) showing how to create Competence Based Degrees, focussing on the following eight steps:
•Review Mission and Goals
•Develop Collaboration between the University and Employers
•Build an Accreditation Framework
•Identify Potential for Articulation Between Different Frameworks
•Design the Curriculum, Based on Learning Outcomes
•Facilitate Learning Wherever It Occurs
•Design Ways of Assessing Evidence to Award Credit
•Monitor and Evaluate the Program
9.
Measuring success of open source projects using web search engines - Dawid, Weiss
What makes an open source project successful?
In this paper we show that the traditional factors of success of open source projects, such as number of downloads, deployments or commits are sometimes inconvenient or even insufficient. We then correlate success of an open source project with its popularity on the Web. We show several ideas of how such popularity could be measured using Web search engines and provide experimental results from quantitative analysis of the proposed measures on representative large samples of open source projects from SourceForge.
10.
Using audio visuals to illustrate concepts - Hodgson, Tom
This short pedagogic paper investigates the use of audio visual presentation techniques to enhance teaching and learning in the classroom. It looks at the current 'MTV' generation of students who find it difficult to concentrate for long periods of time.
11.
Darkness terrible in its own nature; Turner's Sublime in the common heathlands of South East London c.1796-7 - Waites, Ian
When Viscount Torrington in 1791 described an expanse of common waste land in Lincolnshire as a ‘staring, black moor … a wild, dreary prospect’, it is understandable that this type of landscape could genuinely provoke a sense of threat and danger. This paper will examine some contemporary visual equivalents to Torrington’s description, JMW Turner’s dark and dense watercolour sketches of the common heathlands of Blackheath and Lewisham. On the face of it, these sketches appear to be typical products of a traditional view of Turner and his work: as an artist of the Sublime, and of a Romantic temperament. This...
12.
MegaTrends in university teaching: global perspectives on ODL - Karran, Terence
TERMS AND TYPOLOGIES: What is Open, Distance & E-Learning?
TENDENCIES: What changes have taken place in e- and learning?
TRENDS: What have been the global developments in technology enabled learning?
THEMES and TACTICS: What lessons can be learnt from the global development of e-learning?
14.
Lumping and splitting: rolling out a new VLE at the University of Lincoln - Beckton, Julian
This paper describes how the University of Lincoln adapted the Blackboard virtual learning environment by modifying the snapshot extracts to create Blackboard sites that met the needs of teaching departments, rather than attempting to impose a single model on the University. Lumping refers to the process of creating a site out of multiple modules thus facilitating delivery of content to students across multiple awards. Splitting in contrast refers to the creation of special interest groups within modules based on data from the University's MIS systems.
15.
From ECTS to EGS: pains, strains, brains and gains - Karran, Terence
This keynote presentation examines the ECTS, EU national systems and the fasibility of a European Grading Scale under the following headings:
PARENTAGE: How did the ECTS come about?
PROGRESS: How well has the implementation of the Bologna Process and ECTS gone?
PROBLEMS: What are the problems with ECTS?
PECULIARITIES: EU Variations in h.e. grading systems
PROTOTYPES: The European Grading System (EGS) Working Group and the Tuning suggestions.
PLAYERS: Who are the EGS Stakeholders?
PRINCIPLES: What could/should the EGS do?
PRAGMATICS: What is the best way to proceed?
16.
Narrative as a research method - Joyce, Maria
The purpose of this core paper is to explore narrative research methods. In particular it considers them as a tool for research in the area of nurse education and researching the experiences of nurse educationalists. Narrative derives from a long history of litererary tradition and is increasingly used as a research method. Narrative in essence is the stories of our lives and the stories of the lives of others. Narrative is open to interpretation. This interpretation develops through collaboration of researcher and respondent or story teller and listener. Narrative, explored through interpretive research allows access to the respondent reality via...
17.
Cyclification of human motion for animation synthesis - Ahmed, Amr; Mokhtarian, Farzin; Hilton, Adrian
In this paper, a cyclification approach is presented for gait motions. It modifies short clips (ideally a gait cycle, but similar movements have been also presented) so that it can seamlessly and repeatedly concatenated to construct longer sequences. This work is motivated by the aim for synthesis of long animation sequences from short clips, which has received little attention in previous research (at that time).
18.
Quality factors and coding standards - a comparison between open source forges - Capiluppi, Andrea; Boldyreff, Cornelia; Beecher, Karl; Adams, Paul
Enforcing adherence to standards in software development in order to produce high quality software artefacts has long been recognised as best practice in traditional software engineering. In a distributed heterogeneous development environment such those found within the Open Source paradigm, coding standards are informally shared and adhered to by communities of loosely coupled developers. Following these standards could potentially lead to higher quality software.
This paper reports on the empirical analysis of two major forges where OSS projects are hosted. The first one, the KDE forge, provides a set of guidelines and coding standards in the form of a coding style...
19.
Lesion boundary segmentation using level set methods - Massey, Elizabeth; Lowell, James; Hunter, Andrew; Steele, David
This paper addresses the issue of accurate lesion segmentation in retinal imagery, using level set methods and
a novel stopping mechanism - an elementary features scheme. Specifically, the curve propagation is guided
by a gradient map built using a combination of histogram equalization and robust statistics. The stopping
mechanism uses elementary features gathered as the curve deforms over time, and then using a lesionness
measure, defined herein, ’looks back in time’ to find the point at which the curve best fits the real object.
We implement the level set using a fast upwind scheme and compare the proposed method against five other
segmentation algorithms performed on...
20.
Calligraphic type design in the digital age - Donaldson, Timothy
The designer was invited to exhibit several pieces of calligraphy and type design in this international exhibition. The exhibition was intended to be a celebration of the work of Hermann Zapf and Gudrun Zapf von Hesse, a husband & wife partnership exemplifying the disciplines of calligraphy, book design, typography, bookbinding and type design. Designers all over the world have been influenced by the Zapf's design practice and therefore, several designers were also invited to show work that was felt to demonstrate the influence of their work on a younger generation of designers but also display the pioneering spirit evident in...
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