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Call number: LD2668 .T4 1950 S655 / Master of Science

To this point in time humanity has successfully responded to the challenges to its existence. A viewpoint becoming widespread is that humanity will have to respond to even greater challenges to its existence in the future. If adequate responses are not formulated to these emerging challenges then a dystopian future for humanity is a strong possibility. While experience can teach us how to act in the future it is the express intent of this research that we should not have to experience dystopia in order to learn how to prevent it. The innate human capacity for foresight has played a pivotal role in responding to past challenges, however, a more extensive form of foresight will need to be developed to respond to these future challenges. That form of foresight will need to be both individual and social in nature. Part I of this thesis generates an original theory of how foresight could develop in individuals beyond our innate capacities. The theory argues that foresight ca- pacities develop through the expansion of individual consciousness, particularly the individual's sense of `self'. The theory is synthesised from the work of a num- ber of psychological researchers including Jean Piaget, Jane Loevinger, Lawrence Kohlberg, Clare Graves, Susan Cook-Greuter and Ken Wilber. Part II is a two year study of students undertaking a postgraduate course in strategic foresight. The study is utilised to add preliminary empirical support to the theory proposed in Part I. Part III integrates the previous two parts to further elaborate the attributes and dynamics of individual foresight development before describing how social foresight capacity can emerge from individual development. Expanded individual and so- cial foresight capacities are achievable, but cannot be assumed. The contribution of this thesis is to give a theoretical base to such development and to outline fur- ther research. The development of individual foresight and the emergence of social expressions of foresight can offer preferable, and not dystopian, futures for both current and future generations.

In this thesis an incident prediction model is formulated and calibrated. The primary idea of the model developed is to correlate the expected number of crashes on any section of a freeway to a set of traffic stream characteristics, so that a reliable estimation of likelihood of crashes can be provided on a real-time basis. Traffic stream variables used as explanatory variables in this model are termed as “incident precursors”. The most promising incident precursors for the model formulation for this research were determined by reviewing past research. The statistical model employed is the categorical log-linear model with coefficient of speed variation and occupancy as the precursors. Peak-hour indicators and roadway-type indicators were additional categorical variables used in the model. The model was calibrated using historical loop detector data and crash reports, both of which were available from test beds in Austin, Texas. An examination of the calibrated model indicated that the model distinguished different levels of crash rate for different precursor values and hence could be a useful tool in estimating the likelihood of incidents for real-time freeway incident management systems.

In this thesis an incident prediction model is formulated and calibrated. The primary idea of the model developed is to correlate the expected number of crashes on any section of a freeway to a set of traffic stream characteristics, so that a reliable estimation of likelihood of crashes can be provided on a real-time basis. Traffic stream variables used as explanatory variables in this model are termed as “incident precursors”. The most promising incident precursors for the model formulation for this research were determined by reviewing past research. The statistical model employed is the categorical log-linear model with coefficient of speed variation and occupancy as the precursors. Peak-hour indicators and roadway-type indicators were additional categorical variables used in the model. The model was calibrated using historical loop detector data and crash reports, both of which were available from test beds in Austin, Texas. An examination of the calibrated model indicated that the model distinguished different levels of crash rate for different precursor values and hence could be a useful tool in estimating the likelihood of incidents for real-time freeway incident management systems.

In this thesis, a high-efficient integrated pixel compensator architecture for the H.264/AVC standard has been proposed which can provide both inter and intra prediction functions for luma and chroma components of pixels. By decomposing the algorithms used for both prediction methods into small micro-operation steps, the fundamental arithmetic processing unit architecture capable for performing these operations can be first determined. Next, by considering the possible reference sample transfer issue, the overall compensator architecture will be built by using parallel processing units with some input and intermediate buffers which can be dynamically configured to perform proper computation schedules of different modes suitable for the nature input order of reference samples. The proposed design not only can avoid the additional data transposition buffer, but most importantly the data transfer time spent to fetch the reference samples can be overlapped with the data computation time. Since both arithmetic units and the intermediate data buffer for both inter and intra prediction processes have been shared, our integrated design can achieve more than 30% reduction of gate count compared with the sum of the separate designs. Our design can also lead to more than 38% saving of gate count compared with the previous designs. In addition to the data-path design, this thesis also addresses the memory bandwidth optimization issue which is especially important for the luma interpolation process. A new data-reuse buffer design based on a two-dimensional cache architecture to explore the possible data reuse among the inter and intra partitions will be proposed. The proposed design can be easily integrated with the H.264 interpolator to reduce the enormous demand of memory access. Our experimental results shows that our saving of memory bandwidth can be 20% more than what the best design can achieve by exploring the intra-partition data reuse only. Besides, our compensator can decode the videos up to HDTV resolution, and be applied for the dedicated H.264 hardware codec for various consumer devices.

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Typescript (photocopy) / Bibliography: leaves 98-111. / Microfiche. / vii, 126 leaves, bound 29 cm

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Tulsa, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-115).

Thesis (PhD) -- Swinburne University of Technology, Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship, 2005. / Submitted to the fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy - Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship, Faculty of Business and Enterprise, Swinburne University of Technology, 2005. Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (p. 294-308).