<div class="sectionTitle">Information Science Discussion Papers Series: 2006 Abstracts</div>

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<a name="dp2006-01"></a><h3>2006/01: Consumers, security and electronic health records</h3>
<h4>P. Chhanabhai, A. Holt and I. Hunter</h4>

<p>Health care has entered the electronic domain. This domain has improved data collection and storage abilities while allowing almost instantaneous access and results to data queries. Furthermore it allows direct communication between healthcare providers and health consumers. The development of privacy, confidentiality and security principles are necessary to protect consumers&rsquo; interests against inappropriate access. The electronic health systems vendors have dominated the transition of media, claiming it will improve the quality and coherence of the care process. However, numerous studies show that the health consumer is the important stakeholder in this process, and their views are suggesting that the electronic medium is the way forward, but not just yet. With the international push towards Electronic Health Records (EHRs) by the Health and Human Services (United States of America), National Health Service (United Kingdom), Health Canada (Canada) and more recently the Ministry of Health (New Zealand), this paper presents the consumers&rsquo; role with a focus on their perceptions on the security of EHRs. A description of a study, looking at the New Zealand health consumer, is given.</p>

<p><strong>Keywords: </strong>electronic health records,
New Zealand health system,
consumer,
security</p>

<p><a href="papers/dp2006-01.pdf">Download</a> (PDF, 291 KB)</p>


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<a name="dp2006-02"></a><h3>2006/02: Ubiquitous interactive art displays: Are they wanted, are they intuitive?</h3>
<h4>G. Burrows</h4>

<p>The purpose of this study was to create a ubiquitous proximity activated interactive digital display system providing adjusted artworks as content for evaluating viewer reactions and opinions to determine if similar interactive ubiquitous systems are a beneficial, enjoyable and even an appropriate way to display art. Multimedia used in galleries predominately provides content following set patterns and disregards the viewer. Interactive displays using viewer location usually require the viewer&rsquo;s conscious participation through carrying some form of hardware or using expensive sensing equipment. We created an inexpensive, simple system that reacts to the user in a ubiquitous manner, allowing the evaluation of the usability and suitability of such systems in the context of viewing art. Results from testing show that interactive displays are generally enjoyed and wanted for displaying art, however even simple ubiquitous displays can cause user difficulty due to the transparency of their interaction.</p>

<p><strong>Keywords: </strong>interactive,
digital displays,
art,
proximity,
ubiquitous,
gallery,
intuitive interfaces</p>

<p><a href="papers/dp2006-02.pdf">Download</a> (PDF, 496 KB)</p>


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<a name="dp2006-03"></a><h3>2006/03: Positive and negative selection in a multilayer artificial immune system</h3>
<h4>M. Middlemiss</h4>

<p>The immune system is a complex and distributed system. It provides a multilayered form of defence, capable of identifying and responding to harmful pathogens that it does not recognise as &ldquo;self&rdquo;. The framework proposed in this paper incorporates a number of immunological concepts and principles, including the multilayered defence and the cooperation between cells in the adaptive immune system. An alternative model of positive selection is also presented. It is suggested that the framework discussed here could lead to reduced false positive responses in anomaly detection tasks, such as intrusion detection, as well being extended to a population of computational immune systems that are able to maintain population diversity of recognition and response.</p>

<p><a href="papers/dp2006-03.pdf">Download</a> (PDF, 444 KB)</p>

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<a name="dp2006-04"></a><h3>2006/04: Agent based web service composition in the context of a supply-chain based workflow</h3>
<h4>B.T.R. Savarimuthu, M. Purvis and M. Purvis</h4>

<p>With the advent of Web Services, more and more business organizations make their services available on the Internet through Web Services and also use other services that are available on the corporate Intranet. From the viewpoint of workflow systems, these freely available Web Services and the proprietary intranet-based services should be integrated into individual businesses for their day-to-day workflows. Businesses that use Web Services not only provide the services to their customers but can also use Web Services to customize their internal processing, such as online order placement for raw materials.  In this paper we describe the architecture of our agent-based workflow system that can be used for Web Service composition. In the context of an example from the apparel manufacturing industry, we demonstrate how Web Services can be composed and used.</p>

<p><strong>Keywords: </strong>web services,
multi-agent systems,
workflow systems</p>

<p><a href="papers/dp2006-04.pdf">Download</a> (PDF, 565 KB)</p>

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<a name="dp2006-05"></a><h3>2006/05: Facilitating collaboration in a distributed software development environment using P2P architecture</h3>
<h4>M. Purvis, M. Purvis and B.T.R. Savarimuthu</h4>

<p>This paper describes efforts to facilitate collaborative work in a distributed environment by providing infrastructure that facilitates the understanding of inter-connected processes involved and how they interact. In this work we describe how our agent-based framework supports these. This distributed work environment makes use of both P2P and client-server architectures. Using an example of developing an open source software system, we explain how a collaborative work environment can be achieved. In particular we address how the support for coordination, collaboration and communication are provided using our framework.</p>

<p><a href="papers/dp2006-05.pdf">Download</a> (PDF, 361 KB)</p>

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<a name="dp2006-06"></a><h3>2006/06: Establishing dynamic trust in virtual organization by means of MAS</h3>
<h4>N. Foukia and P.-E. Mallet</h4>

<p>This paper presents an implementation of the first stage of a Virtual Organization (VO) life cycle, which is the VO&rsquo;s creation. This implementation is based on previous work by one of the authors describing a framework which facilitates the establishment of VO agreements. In accordance with the framework, the implementation makes the VO&rsquo;s creation fully automated, thereby reducing its duration considerably. This is beneficial for the VO, which should only exist for the limited period needed to satisfy its goal. The VO is implemented as a Multi-Agent System (MAS), where autonomous agents negotiate the agreement leading the the VO&rsquo;s establishment. The Opal FIPA-compliant MAS platform was used to implement the VO agents. Different scenarios and evaluations provide a clear demonstration of the implementation, showing how agents dynamically negotiate the establishment of the agreement and how opportunistic agents&rsquo; behavior affect the trust level during the negotiation process.</p>

<p><strong>Keywords: </strong>virtual organization,
trust,
autonomy,
agent</p>

<p><a href="papers/dp2006-06.pdf">Download</a> (PDF, 336 KB)</p>

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<a name="dp2006-07"></a><h3>2006/07: Hitting the ground running: Building New Zealand&rsquo;s first publicly available institutional repository</h3>
<h4>N. Stanger and G. McGregor</h4>

<p>A fully functional and publicly available, digital institutional repository (IR) in the space of just ten days? The technology was available, the time was right, the team was right and technical assistance from colleagues in Australia was on hand a mere cyber call away. This paper reports on how we were able to &ldquo;hit the ground running&rdquo; in building an open access IR in such a short space of time. What has taken our breath away is not so much the speed of the process, but the scale of responsiveness from the Internet community. Consequently, we also consider the research impact of more than 18,000 downloads from eighty countries, less than three months into the project!</p>

<p><a href="papers/dp2006-07.pdf">Download</a> (PDF, 327 KB)</p>

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<a name="dp2006-08"></a><h3>2006/08: The EVM&rsquo;s universe and the Universe</h3>
<h4>M. Nowostawski</h4>

<p>The notion that all (or in weaker sense, some) natural phenomena can be modelled as a computable process, some kind of algorithm is recently gaining scientific recognition, and more research is dedicated to the rigorous explorations of the mapping between natural phenomena and the formalised computational systems. There is some debate and controversy as to how much of the natural can be expressed in the models of the artificial, although due to formalised nature of mathematics and physics itself, it is generally accepted that computation is viable way to model physical reality. Contemporary developments in computer science and in physics not only do no refute computationalism &ndash; they provide more data and evidence in support of the basic theses. In this article we discuss some of the aspects of contemporary computationalist efforts based on the traditional notions of Turning Machine computation. Then we present an extended notion of computation, that goes beyond the traditional Turing limit. We propose a new interactive computation model called Evolvable Virtual Machines (EVMs). The EVM model uses the notion of many independently asynchronously executing processes, that communicate between each other and with the outside environment. We present some of the pitfalls of traditional computationalism, and compare it to our new, extended computationalist model, based on the notion of massively concurrent interactive computation (hypercomputation). We argue, that hypercomputationalism based on the collection of asynchronously concurrently communicating computational machines is a more compact and more appropriate way of representing natural phenomena (or the Universe in general). It is theoretically sound, and does not violate any of the current state-of-the-art physical theories. We discuss the details of our computational architecture, and present some of the implications of the hypercomputationalism on contemporary physical, life sciences, and computer science.</p>

<p><a href="papers/dp2006-08.pdf">Download</a> (PDF, 477 KB)</p>

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<h3><a name="dp2006-09">2006/09: Combining multiple precision-boosted classifiers for 
indoor-outdoor scene classification</a></h3>
<h4>D. Deng and J. Zhang</h4>

<p>Along with the progress of the content-based image retrieval research and the development of the MPEG-7 XM feature descriptors, there has been an increasing research interest on object recognition and semantics extraction from images and videos. In this paper, we revisit an old problem of indoor versus outdoor scene classification. By introducing a precision-boosted combination scheme of multiple classifiers trained on several global and regional feature descriptors, our experiment has led to better results compared with conventional approaches.</p>

<p><strong>Keywords: </strong>scene classification,
classifier combination</p>

<p><a href="papers/dp2006-09.pdf">Download</a> (PDF, 843 KB)</p>

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<a name="dp2006-10"></a><h3>2006/10: Feature analysis and classification of classical musical instruments: An empirical study</h3>
<h4>C. Simmermacher, D. Deng and S. Cranefield</h4>

<p>We present an empirical study on classical music instrument classification. A methodology with feature extraction and evaluation is proposed and assessed with a number of experiments, whose final stage is to detect instruments in solo passages. In feature selection it is found that similar but different rankings for individual tone classification and solo passage instrument recognition are reported. Based on the feature selection results, excerpts from concerto and sonata files are processed, so as to detect and distinguish four ma jor instruments in solo passages: trumpet, flute, violin, and piano. Nineteen features selected from the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) and the MPEG-7 audio descriptors achieve a recognition rate of around 94% by the best classifier assessed by cross validation.</p>

<p><a href="papers/dp2006-10.pdf">Download</a> (PDF, 206 KB)</p>