Corpus-driven investigation of corporate governance reports

Department of English2016-2017 > Academic research: refereed > Chapter in an edited book (author)bcw

Critical barriers to green building technologies adoption in developing countries : the case of Ghana

Although green building technologies (GBTs) have been advocated in the construction industry to address sustainability issues, their adoption is still plagued with barriers. The barriers that hinder GBTs adoption need detailed investigation. However, few studies have been conducted on the barriers to GBTs adoption in developing countries such as Ghana. This study aims to investigate the critical barriers to GBTs adoption with reference to the Ghanaian construction market. To achieve the objective, 26 barriers were identified from a comprehensive literature review, and a questionnaire survey was performed with 43 professionals with green building experience. The ranking analysis results indicated that 20 barriers were critical. The top three most critical barriers were higher costs of GBTs, lack of government incentives, and lack of financing schemes (e.g., bank loans). A comparative analysis showed that while the most critical barriers to GBTs adoption in the developing country of Ghana mostly vary from those in the developed countries of the US, Canada, and Australia, higher costs of GBTs remains a top barrier in all the countries. Furthermore, factor analysis revealed that the underlying grouped barriers for the 20 critical barriers were government-related, human-related, knowledge and information-related, market-related, and cost and risk-related barriers. This study also showed that the most dominant of the five underlying groups was government-related barriers, which highlights the government's role in promoting GBTs adoption in Ghana. This study adds to the green building literature by analyzing GBTs adoption barriers within the context of a developing country, which could help policy makers and practitioners take suitable measures to mitigate the barriers and thereby promote the GBTs adoption. Future research will investigate the interrelationships between the critical barriers and their impacts on the GBTs adoption activity.Department of Building and Real Estat

A bibliometric analysis of occupational therapy publications

Background: Bibliometrics involves the statistical analysis of the publications in a specific discipline or subject area. A bibliometric analysis of the occupational therapy refereed literature is needed. Aim: A bibliometric analysis was completed of the occupational therapy literature from 1991-2014, indexed in the Science Citation Index-Expanded or the Social Sciences Citation Index. Method: Publications were searched by title, abstract, keywords, and KeyWords Plus. Total number of article citations, citations per journal, and contributions per country, individual authors, and institution were calculated. Results: 5,315 occupational therapy articles were published in 821 journals. It appears that there is a citation window of an approximate 10-year period between the time of publication and the peak number of citations an article receives. The top three most highly cited articles were published in Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, JAMA, and Lancet. AJOT, BJOT and AOTJ published the largest number of occupational therapy articles with the United States, Australia, and Canada producing the highest number of publications. McMaster University, the University of Queensland, and the University of Toronto were the institutions that published the largest number of occupational therapy journal articles. Conclusion: The occupational therapy literature is growing and the frequency of article citation is increasing.Department of Rehabilitation Sciences2016-2017 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalbcr

High-performance fibers for textiles

Fibers are now very specialized to offer extremely high-performance properties for specific applications, such as fibers offering high strength, modulus and elasticity, flame-retardancy, electrical conductivity, moisture absorbency, cooling and heating effects, softness to touch. In this chapter, we review progresses in the commercialization and research of these specialty fibers.Institute of Textiles and Clothing2016-2017 > Academic research: refereed > Chapter in an edited book (author)bcw

Lightning surge propagation on a grounded vertical conductor

This letter addresses lightning surge propagation on a vertical conductor connected to the earth via a ground electrode. As the vertical conductor does not support the TEM mode of wave propagation, surge propagation is characterized with time- and position-variant surge impedance and attenuation coefficient of current. The reflection of a lightning surge at the ground then is addressed with the approach similar to the travelling wave theory. Expressions of the reflected surge excited by the current with a ramp or an arbitrary waveform are derived. Note that the reflected surge consists of two components with different attenuation rates. The traditional reflection coefficient is not applicable to the grounded vertical conductor. The results are numerically validated with the finite-difference time domain and partial element equivalent circuit methods.Department of Building Services Engineering2016-2017 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalbcr

An exploration of designer-to-user relationship from a care-orientated perspective

AHFE 2017 International Conference on Design for Inclusion, 2017, USA, 17-21 July 2017This paper explores the relationship between designers and users from the perspective of care. Methods included a critical investigation of literature about the ideal care relationship, interviews with Hong Kong residential designers about their opinion on “designers as care professions” and analyses of these designers’ strategies for interacting with users. The research reveals that designers tend to view themselves as collaborative partners in satisfying users’ needs from the user-centered design perspective. This design approach leads designers to focus on each individual’s desire. But largely ignored their role as active influencers in changing user’s behavior and improving people’s relationships. This study suggests that designers consider residential design from a care-orientated perspective to build a more harmonious relationship with users.School of Design2016-2017 > Academic research: refereed > Refereed conference paperbcw

A path marginal cost approximation algorithm for system optimal quasi-dynamic traffic assignment

This study introduces an efficient path-based System-Optimal Quasi-Dynamic Traffic Assignment (SOQDTA) framework that benefits from the computational efficiency of static traffic assignment models, yet captures the realism of traffic flow, with less complexity and a lower computational burden, compared to dynamic traffic assignment models.To solve the proposed SOQDTA problem, we have developed a novel Path Marginal Cost (PMC) approximation algorithm, based on a Quasi-Dynamic Network Loading (QDNL) procedure (Bliemer et al., 2014), that incorporates a first order node model, and thus produces realistic path travel times consistent with queuing theory, and similar to those of dynamic network loading models, but at a lower computational cost. The model considers capacity constrained static flows, residual vertical/point queues and no spillback.The proposed SOQDTA model is applied to the test network of Sioux Falls and is demonstrated to result in system optimal traffic flow patterns that improve total system travel times compared to the user equilibrium solution. In the case study experiment, the convergence of the algorithm is demonstrated using a relative gap function. A sensitivity analysis is performed to realize the impact of perturbation size on the solution quality, and a discussion is presented on the selection of perturbation size for general network applications.Department of Electrical Engineering201801 bcr

A macroscopic physical model for self-initiated upward leaders from tall grounded objects and its application

Annual Assembly of Chinese Meteorological Society, Xian, China, 2-4 November 2016This paper presents a macroscopic physical model that can simulate an upward leader initiated from a tall grounded object under thunderclouds. Based on a tri-layer leader channel structure and the energy conservation law, a new equation for estimating the upward leader propagation speed is proposed. Equations for modeling other physical parameters, such as the leader line charge density, leader core radius, leader corona sheath radius, leader current, leader electric field and leader conductance, are also proposed. Besides, a set of initiation and survival criteria for a steady self-initiated upward leader from a tall grounded object is suggested. Based on the suggested criteria and the proposed model, the critical corona and charge amount as well as the minimum height for successful initiation of an upward positive leader (UPL) from a tall grounded object are evaluated and discussed. The model is then used to investigate the general properties of UPLs self-initiated from tall grounded objects with and without the effect of corona space charge layer near the ground under different thunderstorm conditions. The modelling results can well explain the leader properties observed in literature. The model is further tested with two set of experiment data and very promising results are obtained.Department of Building Services Engineering2016-2017 > Academic research: not refereed > Invited conference paperbcw

Towards leakage-resilient fine-grained access control in fog computing

Fog Computing, a technology that takes advantage of both the paradigms of Cloud Computing and the Internet of Things, has a great advantage in reducing the communication cost. Since its introduction, fog computing has found a lot of applications, including, for instance, connected vehicles, wireless sensors, smart cities and etc. One prominent problem in fog computing is how fine-grained access control can be imposed. Functional encryption, a new cryptographic primitive, is known to support fine-grained access control. However, when it comes to some new threats in the fog computing scenario, such as side channel attacks, functional encryption cannot maintain its security. Therefore, we need new cryptographic primitives that not only provide a way to securely share data with a fine-grained access control but also are able to resist those new threats. In this paper, we consider how to construct functional encryption schemes (FEs) adaptively secure in continual memory leakage model (CML), which is one of the strongest models that allows continuous leakage on both user and master secret keys. Besides providing privacy and fine-grained access control in fog computing, our scheme can also guarantee security against side channel attacks. More concretely, we propose a generic framework for constructing fully secure leakage-resilient FEs (LR-FEs) in the CML model results from leakage-resilient pair encoding, which is an extension of pair encoding presented in the recent work of Attrapadung. In this way, our framework simplifies the design and analysis of LR-FEs into the design and analysis of predicate encodings. Moreover, we discover new adaptively secure LR-FEs, including FE for regular languages, attribute-based encryption (ABE) for large universe and ABE with short ciphertext. Above all, leakage-resilient adaptively secure functional encryption schemes can equip fog computing with higher security and fine-grained access control.Department of Computing2016-2017 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalbcr

Improving property valuation accuracy : a comparison of hedonic pricing model and artificial neural network

Inaccuracies in property valuation is a global problem. This could be attributed to the adoption of valuation approaches, with the hedonic pricing model (HPM) being an example, that are inaccurate and unreliable. As evidenced in the literature, the HPM approach has gained wide acceptance among real estate researchers, despite its shortcomings. Therefore, the present study set out to evaluate the predictive accuracy of HPM in comparison with the artificial neural network (ANN) technique in property valuation. Residential property transaction data were collected from registered real estate firms domiciled in the Lagos metropolis, Nigeria, and were fitted into the ANN model and HPM. The results showed that the ANN technique outperformed the HPM approach, in terms of accuracy in predicting property values with mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) values of 15.94 and 38.23%, respectively. The findings demonstrate the efficacy of the ANN technique in property valuation, and if all the preconditions of property value modeling are met, the ANN technique is a reliable valuation approach that could be used by both real estate researchers and professionals.Department of Building and Real Estate201802 bcr