We create factor constructs for the physical characteristics of 864 passive railway crossings in South Australia. Crossings are then classified as dangerous or otherwise by means of self-organizing maps, K-means, mixture models and combinations of the latter. Results are compared using historical accident data. The self-organizing map with mixtures approach is found to be optimal in prediction ...

Humans innately perceive infantile features as cute. The ethologist Konrad Lorenz proposed that the infantile features of mammals and birds, known as the baby schema (kindchenschema), motivate caretaking behaviour. As biologically relevant stimuli, newborns are likely to be processed specially in terms of visual attention, perception, and cognition. Recent demonstrations on human participants h...

In this paper we present a framework for conversational awareness and conflict resolution in spoken dialogue systems for home care assistance. Conversational awareness is supported through OWL ontologies for capturing conversational modalities, while interpretation and incremental context enrichment is facilitated through Description Logics reasoning. Conflict resolution further assists the int...

The quality of a product can be defined by its ability to satisfy the needs and expectations of its customers. Achieving quality is especially difficult in market-driven situations since the product is released on an open market with numerous potential customers and users with various wishes. The quality of the software product is to a large extent determined by the quality of the requirements ...

Sensitivity of short read DNA-sequencing for gene fusion detection is improving, but is hampered by the significant amount of noise composed of uninteresting or false positive hits in the data. In this paper we describe a tiered prioritisation approach to extract high impact gene fusion events from existing structural variant calls. Using cell line and patient DNA sequence data we improve the a...

Telecom service providers are faced with an overwhelming flow of alarms, which makes good alarm classification and prioritisation very important. This paper first provides statistical analysis of data collected from a real-world alarm flow and then presents a quantitative characterisation of the alarm situation. Using data from the trouble ticketing system as a reference, we examine the relatio...

The General Medical Council (GMC) states, "A well managed, thorough and organized handover is crucial for ensuring the quality and safety for patient care," and in their guidance on safe handover the British Medical Association (BMA) advised that "clinically unstable patients are known to the senior and covering clinicians; tasks should be prioritised; plans for further care are put in place; u...

Due to the unique nature among the service industries, the overriding objective of the healthcare sector is to provide error free, impeccable services to their patients and clientele. It is not an option rather a norm for the healthcare sector to uphold and maintain the level of service that is quintessential and benchmark in the service industries. However, service quality has different meanin...

Background and aimsPriority setting is a challenging task for public health professionals. To support health professionals with this and in following a recommendation from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO), 35 European parasitologists attended a workshop from 8-12 February 2016 to rank food-borne parasites (FBP) in terms of the...

Areas of high conservation value were identified in the Western Ghats using a systematic conservation planning approach. Surrogates were chosen and assessed for effectiveness on the basis of spatial congruence using Pearson’s correlations and Mantel’s tests. The surrogates were, threatened and endemic plant and vertebrate species, unfragmented forest areas, dry forests, sub-regionally rare vege...