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Home-based, tailored intervention to reduce rate of falls after stroke (FAST): a randomised trial. Data Set
No full textDATA SET for FAST trial. FAST was a two-armed, randomised trial which recruited ambulatory stroke survivors from three states in Australia who were within 5 years of stroke and had been discharged from formal rehabilitation to the community. Between August 2019 and December 2023, 370 people with stroke were enrolled. Primary outcome was rate of falls over 12 months. Secondary outcomes were: proportion of participants experiencing a fall, community participation, self-efficacy, balance, mobility, physical activity, ADL, depression and health-related quality of life.A prospective, multistate, Phase III randomised trial with concealed allocation, blinded measurement and intention-to-treat analysis. Primary outcome was rate of falls over 12 months. Secondary outcomes were: proportion of participants experiencing a fall
Fabled by the Daughters of Industry: Temporality, Reification, and Labour in Ulysses
No full textTime is central to Joyce’s Ulysses: its occurring in a single day is one of the most famous facts about it. It is also concerned with the social and psychic effects of capitalism. How do these fit together – how does the novel depict the mediation of characters’ experiences and understandings of time by capitalism? And how does the novel’s own mediation by capitalist formations impact reader experience? I answer these questions through Georg Lukács’ concept of “reification,” the spread of the commodity form to all parts of life under capitalism, leading to a divorce of ideas and experiences from the material life that undergirds them. I use Walter Benjamin’s distinction between “isolated experience” and “long experience” to examine how reification is experienced temporally. I focus especially on the temporal effects of the “shock” formations of capitalism, technologies and social forms which cram too much energy into a short space.
I begin by studying how Joyce isolates characters’ and readers’ experiences through shock formations which give the present an excessive energy (advertising, urban anonymity, and periodical forms). This cannot be overcome by retreating to the past, however, because Joyce also depicts how the over-persistence of the past in capitalist modernity means Stephen Dedalus cannot connect his experiences. By formally approximating mass-produced literary anthologies, the episode “Oxen of the Sun” isolates readers’ experience of the past. The novel also shows how these formations’ shock energies can lengthen characters’ and readers’ experiences. This is achieved through Joyce’s representations of the material life that undergirds what elsewhere in the novel appears reified; through what Benjamin calls the “dialectical image” where shock forces us to recognise the past’s unredeemed dreams; and by pushing readers to use external scholarship, a form of shock technology which nonetheless embeds readers in a historical, social process of interpretation
A multi-task Transformer with mixture-of-experts for personalized periodic predictions of individual travel behavior in multimodal public transport
No full textMobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) platforms are reshaping urban mobility by integrating multiple travel modes into seamless, user-centric systems. However, designing dynamic MaaS bundles that adapt to user-specific preferences, evolving over time in response to changing travel behaviors and shifting needs, remains a significant challenge. The rise of big data and artificial intelligence (AI) has unlocked new opportunities for data-driven personalized MaaS bundle solutions. In this study, we introduce an innovative MaaSformer-MMoE framework to customize user-specific monthly MaaS bundles by predicting each user’s mode-specific usage frequency class (classification tasks) and travel fare (regression task) for the upcoming month based on the user’s previous travel records. Within the multi-gate mixture-of-expert (MMoE) framework, each expert network is a MaaSformer, and each gate determines the weighted contributions of expert outputs relevant to a specific task tower. MaaSformer integrates two key modules: 1) Multi-mode Transformer processes continuous time-series features (e.g., monthly travel time, distance, and fare) employing a multi-feature self-attention mechanism; 2) OD Transformer processes origin-destination (OD)-specific travel features (i.e., journey frequency) using a multi-OD self-attention mechanism. Evaluated on a multimodal (i.e., bus, rail, ferry, and tram) dataset of over 1.5822 million users in Queensland, Australia, from 01/2021 to 01/2023, the proposed MaaSformer-MMoE demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in predicting mode usage frequency class and travel fare compared with 9 baseline models, significantly improving user satisfaction, adoption and retention for MaaS platforms
A study into the liability in the tort of negligence of the governing bodies of Australian contact sport for failing to warn their athletes of the risk of the brain disorder chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) prior to CTE being declared an ‘obvious risk’ of contact sport
No full textThis thesis considers the question of the liability in negligence of the governing bodies of major contact sport in Australia in failing to take reasonable steps to inform themselves of the risk of the debilitating brain disorder chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), to warn their premier-level athletes of that risk. The thesis concentrates on the years and decades prior to 2010, a year when it is roughly estimated that CTE will have become an ‘obvious risk’ of contact sport at premier level for purposes of state civil liability legislation and common law. As argued, from 2010 forward those who play contact sport will be deemed in law to have volunteered to accept the risk of CTE. Athletes who played premier-level contact sport in the decades prior to 2010, ex-players now in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, are those who almost exclusively, at the time of writing this thesis, claim to be suffering the symptoms of CTE.
CTE is caused by repetitive concussive and sub-concussive head trauma experienced over a period of years playing contact sport. As trauma to the head accumulates, a point is reached where a protein, tau, is released from neurones of the brain to form phosphorated tau, that clumps around small blood vessels and cells disrupting normal cognitive function. Over time, the condition spreads throughout the brain causing a sufferer to experience increasingly severe symptoms such as poor concentration, headaches, short-term memory loss, suicidality, aggression, explosivity, dementia and parkinsonism. There is no known cure, and sufferers ultimately die of, or with, the disease.
The fundamental question explored by the thesis is: At a time when a premier-level athlete was exposed to the risk of CTE, did his or her sport governing body (SGB) know, or should it have known, of the link between RHT in playing contact sport and CTE and taken reasonable steps to ameliorate the risk of harm by warning its premier players of that risk
Exploring Self-Supervised Learning for Speech Emotion Recognition: Feature Analysis, Dimensional Enhancement and Emotion Classification
No full textSpeech Emotion Recognition (SER) aims to identify emotional states from speech signals by analyzing acoustic properties that reflect affective expression. Traditional SER approaches often rely on handcrafted acoustic features such as Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) and prosodic descriptors, which may lack the capacity to capture context-sensitive or subtle emotional variations. Recent advancements in self-supervised learning (SSL) have enabled the development of models trained on large-scale unlabeled speech data, producing general-purpose speech embeddings that enhance emotion recognition without task-specific fine-tuning.
This thesis investigates the effectiveness of SSL-derived acoustic embeddings in both dimensional and categorical SER tasks, with a particular focus on dimensional SER (DSER). The study addresses three key objectives: (1) systematically compare traditional handcrafted features with SSL embeddings across three benchmark datasets for DSER; (2) enhance temporal modeling of emotional dynamics using transformer-based encoders with a two-step sequence reduction strategy; and (3) explore strategies to improve categorical SER (CSER) by leveraging DSER outputs through integration, regression-informed mapping, and multi-task learning (MTL).
Empirical results demonstrate that pre-trained SSL models such as WavLM and UniSpeech-SAT outperform traditional baselines in DSER, with the greatest improvements observed for valence, followed by dominance and arousal. Transformer-based architectures with sequence reduction further enhance valence prediction. Integrating DSER into CSER frameworks yields consistent performance gains, particularly via MTL and SSL-enhanced mappings.
This work contributes to building more generalizable, flexible, and context-aware SER systems
Saudi Families-Teachers Partnerships and Attitudes Towards Families' Involvement in Early Childhood Inclusive Education
No full textThis study describes the families' involvement in their child's learning in inclusive early childhood settings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It aims to examine the family-school partnerships level, and attitudes of those surrounding a child regarding family involvement, including the role of both parents in their child's learning within these environments, as well as the attitudes of teachers and providers. Bronfenbrenner’s bio-ecological systems theory (1979, 2009) has been employed to support the current study conceptualisation as it provides an analytical lens considering multiple environments and relations (e.g., preschool and family), which have direct influence on children. Subsequently, certain factors that could underpin participants’ perspectives on family involvement were examined. These included age, education level, teaching experience, and number in family. The study analysed surveys from 265 participants to initially explore attitudes towards family involvement. Following this, semi-structured interviews were developed and conducted with 17 participants, to gain a deeper understanding and explanation of the enablers and barriers participants face regarding family involvement in their child's learning. In the quantitative phase of this study, parents had the most positive attitudes towards family involvement. At the same time, the number of children per family emerged as a key element affecting parental involvement. Conversely, interviews suggested that a lower educational level among parents may adversely impact their involvement in their children's education. Furthermore, participants overwhelmingly focused on the difficulty of involving fathers in Saudi early childhood education, citing traditional and preschool structural reasons. The study provides an original notion of the barriers to fathers' involvement, and suggestions to facilitate this issue in the Saudi context
Sydney School of Veterinary Science Annual Research Report 2025
No full textOur 2025 annual research report highlights the achievements of our school's researchers over the past year
Predictors of SDG Disclosures in Chinese Public Companies: A Machine Learning Approach
No full textThe United Nations’ call for companies to adopt SDGs presents a challenge to report on SDG
performance to external stakeholders. Despite emerging discussion by standard setters and within
the literature, there remains ambiguity as to the nature and extent of SDG disclosures; hence, a core
challenge for future corporate SDG disclosures is identifying quantifiable and consistent measures for
performance. This is particularly prevalent in China, where the government embraced the UN 2030
Agenda for Sustainable Development within the 13th National Five-Year Plan, through which they
have encouraged companies to become more proactive in SDG. Therefore, this thesis focuses on
the growing use of SDG disclosures in Chinese companies and the factors that may predict their
SDG disclosure levels.
To address this challenge, this thesis, drawing upon existing reporting standards, academic literature
and Chinese government publications, has developed a content analysis tool of 27 indicators to
capture Chinese corporate SDG disclosures. A sample of 60 public companies were examined
during the period of the 13th National FYP (2016-2020) to provide analysis of Chinese corporate
SDG disclosures, particularly on SDG 1, 7 and 13.
A review of existing literature suggests that a wide range of factors can affect the level of SDG
disclosures; however, these studies rely on traditional statistical methods and overlook the complex
non-linear associations among predictors. To address these challenges, this thesis employs the
gradient boosting machine to 1. identify the predictive power of 159 predictors from government
control, financial performance, corporate governance, and ESG performance aspects; 2. offer a more
reliable out-of-sample analysis. This thesis observed that the gradient boosting machine outperforms
traditional methods to interpret the prediction results. However, the predictive power and direction of
the results widely vary due to variable selection and variable measurements
Identifying the Molecular Mechanisms of Radiation-Induced Epithelial-Mesenchymal Plasticity in Human Oral Squamous Carcinoma Cells under Glucose Stress
No full textRemodelling along the epithelial-mesenchymal (E-M) axis is crucial in carcinomas and is strongly linked to tumour invasion, metastasis, and radiation resistance. Research indicates hyperglycaemia, which refers to chronic exposure to high glucose levels, significantly increases cancer risk and impacts key features of tumour development, including the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT). This research seeks to explore the effects of hyperglycaemia on the phenotypic remodelling of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) in the context of metabolic stress and ionising radiation, while investigating the potential molecular mechanisms involved.
In this study, we utilised the 3D tumour spheroid models generated from the OSCC cells subjected to a 7-day hyperglycaemic stress and performed different cellular, molecular, and high-level transcriptome analyses to investigate the cellular and molecular dynamics of hyperglycaemia and its effects on the tumour remodelling as part of the response to ionising radiation.
The immunohistochemical analysis of epithelial and mesenchymal markers, E-cadherin and Vimentin, revealed a notably higher abundance of both hybrid EMT and mesenchymal-like subpopulations in OSCC spheroids subjected to hyperglycaemic stress. This phenotypic remodelling, triggered by metabolic stress and ionising radiation, is shown to be influenced by the regulation and transition among different EMT transcription factors. Transcriptional profiling and pathway analyses have pinpointed several molecular components that may link hyperglycaemia, EMT, and radioresistance in OSCC spheroids, including integrins, MMPs, and laminins.
This study provides a better understanding of the intricate dynamics involved in OSCC progression and treatment responses, offering essential knowledge for future therapeutic approaches. It may also enlighten new therapeutic possibilities for radioresistant carcinomas, thus enriching the ongoing advancements in cancer research
Regulatory safety advisories on medicines: an international comparison of content and delivery
No full textWhen a medicine is first approved, data on safety is often limited. It is only after the medicine enters general use that less common or longer-term adverse drug reactions may be detected, better understood and quantified. If new evidence emerges of harm, regulators can issue safety advisories to inform clinicians and the public about these risks. Safety advisories are designed to communicate crucial information on these emergent harms and support informed prescribing decisions.This thesis uses a database of regulatory safety advisories from four jurisdictions over a 10-year period to examine how different regulators are using safety advisories to communicate, how the delivery and content of communications on the risks of medicines can affect prescribers’ awareness, knowledge and behaviours, and the links between the content of advisories and effects on prescribing