The Internet and the Project of Communications Law

The internet offers the potential for economic growth stemming from online human communications, but recent industry and government actions have disfavored these possibilities by treating the internet like a content-delivery supply chain. This article recommends that the internet be at the center of communications policy and that laws affecting internet access be evaluated in terms of whether they further U.S. economic growth by facilitating increased emergent online diversity. It criticizes the nearly exclusive focus of communications policy on the private economic success of infrastructure and “application” providers, and suggests that communications policy be focused on facilitating communications themselves

Collected Papers in Structural Mechanics Honoring Dr. James H. Starnes, Jr.

This special publication contains a collection of structural mechanics papers honoring Dr. James H. Starnes, Jr. presented at the 46th AIAA/ASME/ASCE/AHS/ASC Structures, Structural Dynamics, and Materials Conference held in Austin, Texas, April 18-21, 2005. Contributors to this publication represent a small number of those influenced by Dr. Starnes' technical leadership, his technical prowess and diversity, and his technical breath and depth in engineering mechanics. These papers cover some of the research areas Dr. Starnes investigated, which included buckling, postbuckling, and collapse of structures; composite structural mechanics, residual strength and damage tolerance of metallic and composite structures; and aircraft structural design, certification and verification. He actively pursued technical understanding and clarity, championed technical excellence, and modeled humility and perseverance

Proceedings of FORM 2022. Construction The Formation of Living Environment

This study examines the integration of building information modelling (BIM) technologies in operation & maintenance stage in the system of managing real estate that helps to reduce transaction costs. The approach and method are based on Digital Twin technology and Model Based System Engineering (MBSE) approach. The results of the development of a service for digital facility management and digital expertise are presented. The connection between physical and digital objects is conceptualized

Recognition Situations Using Extended Dempster-Shafer Theory

Weiser’s [111] vision of pervasive computing describes a world where technology seamlessly integrates into the environment, automatically responding to peoples’ needs. Underpinning this vision is the ability of systems to automatically track the situation of a person. The task of situation recognition is critical and complex: noisy and unreliable sensor data, dynamic situations, unpredictable human behaviour and changes in the environment all contribute to the complexity. No single recognition technique is suitable in all environments. Factors such as availability of training data, ability to deal with uncertain information and transparency to the user will determine which technique to use in any particular environment. In this thesis, we propose the use of Dempster-Shafer theory as a theoretically sound basis for situation recognition - an approach that can reason with uncertainty, but which does not rely on training data. We use existing operations from Dempster-Shafer theory and create new operations to establish an evidence decision network. The network is used to generate and assess situation beliefs based on processed sensor data for an environment. We also define two specific extensions to Dempster-Shafer theory to enhance the knowledge that can be used for reasoning: 1) temporal knowledge about situation time patterns 2) quality of evidence sources (sensors) into the reasoning process. To validate the feasibility of our approach, this thesis creates evidence decision networks for two real-world data sets: a smart home data set and an officebased data set. We analyse situation recognition accuracy for each of the data sets, using the evidence decision networks with temporal/quality extensions. We also compare the evidence decision networks against two learning techniques: Naïve Bayes and J48 Decision Tree

Exergy-based Planning and Thermography-based Monitoring for energy efficient buildings - Progress Report (KIT Scientific Reports ; 7632)

Designing and monitoring energy efficiency of buildings is vital since they account for up to 40% of end-use energy. In this study, exergy analysis is investigated as a life cycle design tool to strike a balance between thermodynamic efficiency of energy conversion and economic and environmental costs of construction. Quantitative geo-referenced thermography is proposed for monitoring and quantitative assessment via continued simulation and parameter estimation during the operating phase