EGH404 Research In Engineering Practice

Question:

Subject: Distribution

You work for a consulting engineering firm who has been contracted by the Australian Border Force to evaluate two commercial solutions which are being considered for the next generation border control system. This system utilises iris recognition to verify individuals as they enter the country through international airports.

The system employs verification only: a person presents their passport; the system then checks to see if the identity of the person matches the identity of the person named on the passport. This match is conducted by comparing an iris image of the person taken at the border, with the iris image stored on their e-passport.

In the border control system, the verification test has two outcomes:

1. V+: the person is verified (i.e., their iris image taken at the border matches that stored on their e-passport); or
2. V-: the person is not verified.

In reality, the person could be:

1. P+: a genuinetraveller, who has their own unique and valid passport; or
2. P-: an imposter, who is not genuine and has a fake or stolen passport (for example).

Each commercial solution has strengths and weaknesses. The specifications released by the commercial providers are given in the table below. It is also known from historical data that the probability of a person being an imposter is 0.12%.

1a Calculate conditional probabilities

Your firm is to compute the conditional probability (for both solutions) that there is an imposter, given the verification is positive; ie. p(P-|V+). Show your calculations using Bayes’ rule.

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1b Provide a recommendation

Provide your recommendations to the Australian Border Force on the best choice of the solution if they want to minimise this conditional probability.

You should draw on the unit content relating to dealing with uncertainty to answer this question.

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• Automotive Excellence produces a range of components needed to produce automobile engines.
• Production of different component categories varies from month to month.
• The intent of this graph is to summarise the variation in numbers of component categories from month to month in 2017.

List and briefly explain each of the problems that you detect in the design of this graphic drawing on the principles presented on visualisation and from your wider reading.

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2A.2 How would you redesign this graphic?

Develop an alternative graphic that addresses the problems you detected

Copy and paste your alternative graphic here

2A.3 What do you now observe in your redesigned graphic?

What are the salient problems or features of the data that you now observe?

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• Automotive Excellence has gaskets which come in a range of sizes for different engine blocks and for different components.
• Through a sophisticated product tracking system, Automotive Excellence monitors the working life of these gaskets and have collected time-to-failure data on hundreds of gaskets.
• The Automotive Excellence product quality team have summarised this data by calculating the mean failure times of a sample of each size. The sizes are reported by their overall length in mm.
• The intent of this graph is to help understand whether there is a relationship between gasket size and failure times.