Using historic cases to formulate appropriate sustainable building refurbishment strategy

Existing buildings are indispensable in a society and they will continue to exist until they reach the end of their service or economic life. While it is crucial to upkeep existing buildings, enhancing their sustainability is equally important as the energy performance of some older properties is usually less than satisfactory. Despite that, it is never easy for citizens to establish which is the most suitable sustainable refurbishment strategy for their properties. If historic cases can be captured and represented systematically, owners and occupants living in properties of similar types can review the outcomes of these cases to decide whether some sustainable building refurbishment solutions adopted by the others before are applicable to their property. In the paper, a prototype case-based reasoning model for sustainable building refurbishment is proposed. This paper demonstrates how to make use of the proposed model to retrieve and reuse previous cases to derive suitable sustainable building refurbishment strategies for existing buildings

Local Reputation Management in Cloud Computing

In the Cloud computing community, the calculation of the reputation using the feedback of cloud customers is widely adopted to address the issue of trustworthiness of cloud services. Currently, most methods pursue a global reputation score essentially assuming that the value of a cloud service’s reputation is the same for every consumer. However depending on the expectations and needs of a consumer, there can be significant deviation of perceived reputation for the same cloud service. In this paper we propose a trust management framework that differentiates reputation for various user groups thus providing what we term local reputation. To achieve this we compute the similarity of consumers based a decision-tree model which is used to cluster feedback into localised scores. To refine the result, a time decay factor applicable to feedback is also to be considered. The simulation results illustrate that our approach is feasible and also effective for consumers to choose reputable cloud service

X-ray Diffraction and X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy Studies of Sol−Gel-Processed Zirconium Titanates

ZrTiO4 samples were prepared by using a conventional hydrolytic alkoxide sol−gel route, a nonhydrolytic method, an acetic acid modified route, and by the direct reaction of the binary oxides. The local structure in the gels and its evolution upon heating was followed using EXAFS and XANES, and the crystallization of the products was examined using powder X-ray diffraction. All the solution-processed materials crystallized in the range 600−700 °C. The crystalline materials formed at 700 °C showed no evidence of any long-range cation ordering. The EXAFS data indicated that all the amorphous ZrTiO4 samples produced using the solution routes contained zirconium with a coordination number >6 and that the disordered crystalline ZrTiO4 contained six-coordinate zirconium. Both the XANES and EXAFS data showed that nearly all the amorphous ZrTiO4 samples contained titanium with a coordination number of <6. The EXAFS data clearly indicated the presence of Zr−O−Ti links in the ZrTiO4 gel produced using the nonhydrolytic route. There was also some evidence that the gel prepared using hydrolytic sol−gel chemistry contained Zr−O−Ti links

Interferometric speckle visibility spectroscopy (ISVS) for human cerebral blood flow monitoring

Infrared light scattering methods have been developed and employed to non-invasively monitor human cerebral blood flow (CBF). However, the number of reflected photons that interact with the brain is low when detecting blood flow in deep tissue. To tackle this photon-starved problem, we present and demonstrate the idea of interferometric speckle visibility spectroscopy (ISVS). In ISVS, an interferometric detection scheme is used to boost the weak signal light. The blood flow dynamics are inferred from the speckle statistics of a single frame speckle pattern. We experimentally demonstrated the improvement of measurement fidelity by introducing interferometric detection when the signal photon number is insufficient. We apply the ISVS system to monitor the human CBF in situations where the light intensity is $\sim$100-fold less than that in common diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) implementations. Due to the large number of pixels ($\sim 2\times 10^5$) used to capture light in the ISVS system, we are able to collect a similar number of photons within one exposure time as in normal DCS implementations. Our system operates at a sampling rate of 100 Hz. At the exposure time of 2 ms, the average signal photon electron number is $\sim$0.95 count/pixel, yielding a single pixel interferometric measurement signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of $\sim$0.97. The total $\sim 2\times 10^5$ pixels provide an expected overall SNR of 436. We successfully demonstrate that the ISVS system is able to monitor the human brain pulsatile blood flow, as well as the blood flow change when a human subject is doing a breath holding task

DS_10.1177_0022034520904018 – Supplemental material for Genome-wide Identification of Foxf2 Target Genes in Palate Development

Supplemental material, DS_10.1177_0022034520904018 for Genome-wide Identification of Foxf2 Target Genes in Palate Development by J. Xu, H. Liu, Y. Lan, J.S. Park and R. Jiang in Journal of Dental Research</p

Run-Time Resolution of Service Property Conflicts in Web Service Composition

Service composition has become a common approach to realising complex business processes. The large number of services developed and deployed independently by various providers can lead to undesirable interactions between properties of different services which are a serious obstacle for service composition to meet users' requirements. While some property conflicts can be prevented during design, many occur during execution based on runtime data. In this paper, we propose a solution for the problem of run-time resolution of service property conflicts. We formulate the conflict resolution problem as bi-objective optimisation model based on user's revenue. Solving the optimisation model provides a set of Pareto solutions which are ranked to identify the optimal one for resolving a service property conflict. The proposed scheme is implemented in a prototype for experimental performance evaluation. The experimental results indicate that our scheme is effective and efficient in resolving service property conflicts at runtime

Run-Time Resolution of Service Property Conflicts in Web Service Composition

Service composition has become a common approach to realising complex business processes. The large number of services developed and deployed independently by various providers can lead to undesirable interactions between properties of different services which are a serious obstacle for service composition to meet users' requirements. While some property conflicts can be prevented during design, many occur during execution based on runtime data. In this paper, we propose a solution for the problem of run-time resolution of service property conflicts. We formulate the conflict resolution problem as bi-objective optimisation model based on user's revenue. Solving the optimisation model provides a set of Pareto solutions which are ranked to identify the optimal one for resolving a service property conflict. The proposed scheme is implemented in a prototype for experimental performance evaluation. The experimental results indicate that our scheme is effective and efficient in resolving service property conflicts at runtime