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Space analysis technologies

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Under the TEQSA Threshold Standards, UQ is obliged to provide facilities that:

  • are fit for educational and research purposes
  • accommodate the numbers, and educational and research activities, of students and staff who use those facilities
  • support students to achieve expected learning outcomes.

Our Property and Facilities Division plans and manages UQ sites and spaces and you can learn more about this on the UQ Space Planning and Management page.

Technology we use

To support effective space management, we use a number of technologies to analyse space usage at different levels (site/building/floor/room):

  • counting people via cameras in teaching and learning spaces (room level)
  • analysing WiFi connectivity data (site/building/floor level).

People-counting

UQ uses cameras installed in teaching and learning spaces to generate head-counts.

How it works

  1. cameras take images of the room at 5-minute intervals between 6am and 10pm.
  2. images are processed by a machine learning model within the UQ Data Lake to generate head-counts for a particular teaching and/or learning activity (such as a lecture or tutorial).
  3. head counts are combined with other data (such as room bookings, computer usage and AV system usage) to provide us with a better understanding of how the space is used. 

Personal information

Images used for people-counting need to be of a sufficient quality for the system to recognise occupants as people and make an accurate head-count.

As a result, the images will allow for some individuals to be identified and will therefore qualify as personal information.

Images are securely stored in the UQ Data Lake.

How we use images and final data

Images are only used for people-counting and space management purposes.

Images are not used to monitor students' attendance.

As shown in the screenshot below, the final data captured for head counts doesn't contain any personal information and is limited to data points such as: 

  • Site, building and room
  • Date and time
  • Weekday
  • People count (the number of people in the room)
  • Enrolment (the number of people expected)
  • Activity name (eg. tutorial code) 
  • Device count

data chart

Other recording technologies 

CCTV on campus: Keeping safe on campus

Learn about lecture recordings at UQ: