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The potential of peacebuilding education interventions in societies facing the risk of extreme ideological shifts
No full textWhile education is a key tool in peacebuilding, traditional education systems may push those who feel marginalized into extreme ideological shifts in response. Community-based peacebuilding education initiatives (PEIs) are an alternative to conventional educational institutions to promote peace and combat radicalization. This paper's conceptual framework utilizes experiential and transformative learning theories with educational displacement and replacement model to support the idea that PEIs could serve as a platform for transformation. Results were derived from data collected over a thirteen-month period from six PEIs located in Southeast Europe, primarily in Bosnia and Herzegovina, using multi-sited ethnography, interviews, and a thrice-reiterated survey to identify changes in participants. This indicates that adopting targeted approaches in PEIs, alongside the opportunity for the participants to learn about each other and about the violent history, may trigger alterations in intergroup contact quality, and a general decline in unfavorable outgroup perception.</p
Fairness in Opinion Summarisation in the Era of Large Language Models
No full textOpinion summarisation is the computational task of automatically generating concise summaries from collections of subjective texts, such as product reviews, and social media posts. This process involves extracting and synthesising key opinions, sentiments, and perspectives from large volumes of user-generated content to provide readers with concise overviews of users' opinions.Fairness in opinion summarisation entails the equitable inclusion of diverse viewpoints and that the distribution of represented viewpoints reflects the underlying diversity of the source material rather than amplifying dominant voices at the expense of marginalised ones. While large language models have been increasingly used for text summarisation, bias can be introduced at various stages from pretraining to model adaptation and finetuning for downstream tasks such as summarisation. This thesis makes several key contributions to the field of fair opinion summarisation. Firstly, it provides a comprehensive examination of general fairness issues in opinion summarisation systems, establishing a theoretical framework for understanding bias manifestation in automated summarisation processes. Secondly, it introduces novel evaluation metrics specifically designed to measure fairness in opinion summarisation, offering quantitative tools for assessing bias. Thirdly, the work investigates various model editing techniques and their differential effects on fairness outcomes, providing empirical insights into how different approaches to model modification impact equitable representation. Finally, the thesis presents an innovative cognitive-inspired prompting method tailored specifically for debiasing opinion summarisation. This contributes a practical solution for mitigating unfairness in real-world applications whilst maintaining summarisation quality and coherence.</p
Decayability: Care-Based Material Affordances for Ecological Reintegration
No full textThe growing use of 3D printing in industrial design has created new design possibilities but also generated large amounts of plastic waste that resist ecological reintegration. Materials like PLA are marketed as biodegradable yet rarely decompose in natural environments, exposing a gap between industry claims and ecological realities.This research addresses this problem by introducing decayability - a material affordance that reframes decomposition as an intentional design property. Using a transdisciplinary approach, the project combined industrial design techniques, soil science methods, and material-led experimentation. Four stages of practice-based experiments explored the availability, filamentability, printability, and compostability of bio-based materials, engaging microbial and ecological processes alongside industrial biodesign practice.Results show that while many bio-based filaments resist microbial engagement, blends containing microbial biopolymers and bioactive fillers achieved ecological reintegration by sustaining microbial activity. Composting organisms acted as collaborators, shaping material evaluation and revealing how design extends beyond human perception. This work establishes decayability as a design methodology that positions decomposition as active collaboration between materials, microorganisms, technological, and ecological systems. The approach reframes design as multispecies practice where microbial collaborators become partners in material development and evaluation. The research provides practical frameworks for integrating biological processes into industrial workflows, demonstrating how 3D printing can shift from producing persistent objects to creating materials that actively participate in ecological cycles. By bridging industrial biodesign with soil ecology, this methodology expands design temporality beyond human-centered lifecycles, offering practitioners methods for designing with decay as a generative material property.</p
“Horror in Defence of the Planet!”: Sustainability and Fan Cultures at the European Genre Film Festival
No full textIn a 2022 roundtable discussion about “greening” film festivals, scholar Marikje de Valck noted that “there is a certain logic at work at film festivals that uses a model of abundance. It is always about too many films that you can’t actually watch and it is also about inviting many, many guests.” de Valck sees this tendency towards abundance as a result of the pressures applied by neoliberal government systems on cultural organisations to articulate their success via metrics of growth, whereby in order to secure essential funding festivals must continually deliver on program expansion and attracting larger audiences. Concurrently, film festivals around the world are also striving to reduce their carbon footprint and make meaningful contributions sustainable futures. Many contemporary film festivals operate in a space of tension between a values-driven commitment to social and environmental sustainability and a dependency on growth. Within this context, initiatives developed by the largest film festivals constitute the most visible sustainability interventions in the industry. The 2022 announcement of the “Locarno International Film Festival” Green Project (incorporating a new prize for best ecological film and the Green Film Fund) received media coverage around world and reiterated Locarno’s status as a global leader in this space. Lurking in the shadows of these glamourous and highly publicised events, however, are hundreds of lesser-known genre film festivals which serve diverse taste cultures and are held annually across the globe. What role might such these festivals, which often operate with minimal resourcing for impact assessment and strategy development, have to play in environmental sustainability?</p
Deep learning-based framework for Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacterial growth detection for antimicrobial susceptibility testing
No full textTuberculosis (TB) kills more people annually than any other pathogen. Resistance is an ever-increasing global problem, not least because diagnostics remain challenging and access limited. 96-well broth microdilution plates offer one approach to high-throughput phenotypic testing, but they can be challenging to read. Automated Mycobacterial Growth Detection Algorithm (AMyGDA) is a software package that uses image processing techniques to read plates, but struggles with plates that exhibit low growth or images of low quality. We developed a new framework, TMAS (TB Microbial Analysis System), which leverages state-of-the-art deep learning models to detect M. tuberculosis growth in images of 96-well microtiter plates. TMAS is designed to measure Minimum Inhibitory Concentrations (MICs) rapidly and accurately while differentiating between true bacterial growth and artefacts. Using 4,018 plate images from the CRyPTIC (Comprehensive Resistance Prediction for Tuberculosis: An International Consortium) dataset to train models and refine the framework, TMAS achieved an essential agreement of 98.8%, significantly outperformed the 90% threshold established by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). TMAS offers a reliable, automated and complementary evaluation to support expert interpretation, potentially improving accuracy and efficiency in tuberculosis drug susceptibility testing (DST).</p
Open Dress-ing: Design Explorations Through Making and Wearing
No full textThis creative practice research explored how open design principles could be adapted to question fashion’s underutilisation and overconsumption paradigm. The research centred around the dress, the least-worn item in Australian wardrobes, making it a dynamic, sustainable consumption problem. Change is an integral aspect of the Western fashion system, which has inherent hierarchies that ‘close down’ alternate voices and knowledge systems, restricting and separating design and wearing practices and creating ‘closed’ garments that do not invite change by the wearer.
This project challenged the dominant fashion model by proposing an alternate strategy of ‘open’ garments, systems, and practices, encouraging wearer engagement for maximum wear. This innovative approach to fashion design adopted a research-through-design methodology that situates knowledge creation and activism within speculative prototypes, with reflective practice methods informing the iterative design cycles. Wardrobe study methods enriched the design process revealing empirical insights into little-understood wearing practices.
The study makes a significant and original contribution to knowledge by establishing and evaluating an open fashion design model. This model strips away the hierarchies of knowledge that often exclude diverse wearer experiences and reveals previously undocumented wearing practices.</p
Recent developments in textile-based pH sensors for non-invasive medical applications<b></b><b></b>
No full textThe pH levels in biofluids, including sweat, wound exudates, tears, and saliva, indicate hydration status, dermatological conditions, and underlying health issues such as kidney disease. The rapid development of wearable technology in health monitoring has led to considerable interest in textile-based wearable sensors, owing to their flexibility, comfort, breathability, biodegradability and diverse fabrication methodologies. Although there are numerous reviews on textile-based wearable sensors, a thorough review specifically addressing wearable textile-based pH sensors is lacking. The objective of this review is to present a comprehensive analysis of the current status of research on textile-based colorimetric pH sensors, highlighting their prospective applications in non-invasive health monitoring. Key textile substrates, pH-sensitive dyes, surface functionalization techniques, dye immobilization strategies, and innovative fabrication methods are discussed. Possible limitations of colorimetric sensors, including dye leaching, stability challenges, accuracy issues, and inadequate reversibility are summarized, and research initiatives aimed at improving sensor performance, durability, and wearability, such as encapsulation, multi-layer coatings, sol-gel methods, hydrogels, printing, chemical and physical bonding, and printing, are included. Besides, novel techniques such as nanofiber-based dye encapsulation and sensor miniaturization, and enhancement of sensor sensitivity, dye retention, and response time, are highlighted. This work will shed light on future development of textile-based pH sensors for wearable, non-invasive and reliable medical applications.</p
Analytical Design of Wide Tuning Range and Low Noise Voltage Control Oscillators for 5G Technology
No full textThis paper presents the analytical design of a new wide tuning range and low-noise millimeter-wave voltage control oscillators (VCO) for 5G technology. The small signal model analysis and phase noise of the VCOs will be presented to evaluate the start-up oscillation condition, oscillation frequency, and phase noise affecting factors. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show the outperformance of the proposed cascode cross-couple LC VCO topology compared to the conventional cross-coupled LC VCO in terms of frequency tuning range, VCO gain and phase noise level.</p
Measuring experiences and outcomes of mental distress-related presentations to Australian emergency departments: lived experience perspectives
No full textEmergency departments (EDs) represent a key contact point for people experiencing mental health-related distress. Lived experience accounts of presenting to the ED with mental health-related concerns report the ED experience as being highly stigmatizing and negative, with significantly deleterious impacts on people's wellbeing and future help-seeking behaviours being documented. However, little by way of empirical data on these experiences and outcomes are available to help inform evidence-based policy and practice change. This scoping study considered the potential utility of using patient-rated outcome measures (PROMs) and patient-rated experience measures (PREMs) in the Australian ED setting for people who present to an ED with mental health-related concerns. We interviewed eight people, all of whom had reported having presented to an ED for mental health-related reasons. Interviewees considered there being potential merit to measuring patient experiences and outcomes in this setting. Areas of focus for PROMs focussed on whether the presentation led to improvements in the person's health and whether they would return to the ED for future help. Focus areas for PREMs centred around respect for dignity, human rights being upheld, and having health needs met in a timely way. A number of concerns, challenges and opportunities are outlined. These should be used to inform larger-scale qualitative research that aims to develop patient-rated experience and outcome measures specifically for mental health-related ED presentations that are centred on, and are meaningful to, lived experience views and preferences.</p
Advances in machine learning-based active vibration control for automotive seat suspensions: A comprehensive review
No full textWith the rise of intelligent vehicles, the driving and riding experience has undergone significant changes. However, research on intelligent active vibration control of seat suspension systems, which is closely related to ride comfort and safety, remains in its early stages. This paper explores novel machine learning-based control algorithms and their potential applications in active vibration control of seat suspension systems, particularly how the algorithms such as supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning (RL) can overcome the limitations of traditional control methods. Given the lack of comprehensive reviews in this field, this paper aims to provide researchers with a systematic analysis by reviewing machine learning algorithms and their successful applications in other domains and discussing their application potential in active vibration control of seat suspension systems. In doing so, it seeks to offer new insights for the intelligent development of this field.</p