CONSTRUCTION EDUCATION REQUIREMENTS FOR ACHIEVING LEVEL 2 AND 3 BIM

The Architecture Engineering Construction (AEC) Industry is well noted for its fragmented nature, leading to several flaws in communication and information processing, which have led to a proliferation of adversarial relationships amongst project participants, thereby affecting the integrity of design information throughout the project life cycle. Likewise, Construction Education is bedevilled by multitudinous issues due to its practice-based, interdisciplinary nature of the industry, its professional and institutional history, and its evolving context and composition. These challenges have influenced the purpose of construction as well as the requirements or strategies needed to achieve it. The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of Construction Education and learning requirements for successful training and implementation of Level 2 (with the aid of a process map) and also of Level 3, to meeting the ever-changing nature of the AEC industry. This process map seeks to identify the educational requirements for existing industry practitioners and for fresh graduates entering into the industry. In order to achieve this aim, a case study methodology was adopted using semi-structured interviews with BIM experts in purposively selected organisations in the UK, which were further analysed using single case narrative and cross-case synthesis techniques. The BIM sub-processes at each project phase of the construction process were extracted from the interviews conducted. Then the process map linking all the BIM activities in the project was developed. In conclusion, the process map formalises the knowledge and skills set required to successfully implement Level 2 and 3 BIM, facilitating project collaboration, communication flow and agreement amongst project participants on construction processes throughout the project lifecycle. The finding of this research are highly aligned with the seminal literature which argued that new skills required for the creation and management of a BIM model fall into the three categories of technological tools, organisational processes, and project team roles and responsibilities, and that these three skill sets contribute to the success of the entire BIM project and adoption in any organisation

A Web application for creating and sharing visual bibliographies

The amount of information provided by peer-reviewed scientific literature citation indexes such as Scopus, Web of Science (WOS), CrossRef and OpenCitations is huge: it offers to the users a lot of metadata about publications, such as the list of papers written by a specific author, the editorial and content details of a paper, the list of references and citations. But, for a researcher could be interesting also to: extract in real-time these data in order to create bibliographies, for example, starting with a small set of significant papers or a restricted number of authors, and progressively enriching them by exploring cited/citing references; dispose of a graphical and aggregate representation for them; be able to easily share them with other interested researchers. With these main intents, we modelled and realized VisualBib, a Web application prototype, which enables the user to select sets of papers and/or authors in order to create customized bibliographies, and in real-time visualize them, aggregating data from different sources, in a comprehensive, holistic graphical view. The bibliographies are displayed using time-based visualizations, called narrative views, which contain explicit representations of the authorship and citing relations. These views may help users to: describe a research area; disseminate the research on a specific topic through the sharing of personal points of view; show in a fresh look the entire production of a researcher, or research groups, in order present or evaluate it

Seeing industrial services through experience lens - Revealing a customer experience map to design for an experiential service in B2B context

Nowadays, more and more companies become aware of the importance on experience investment, which not only brings customers pleasant and meaningful interactions during the business but also supports the company to formulate key brand differentiator compared to other competitors. Through the theoretical background research, it has been found that there is still a lack of academic studies and design cases about investigating industrial services with experiential thinking in business-to-business context. As a branch of UXUS research program, the thesis work relies on the case study in cooperation with Rolls-Royce Marine that deals with B2B transactions with customers. It depicts the exploration on how the customer experience map could be constructed under the product context ‘UUC azimuth thruster’ to support refining its industrial service through utilizing experience lens for the near future. Starting with project background introduction and study context definition, the objectives of this thesis have been framed as three research questions, which comprise of discovering the way to promote internal understanding on UUC customer journey as well as bringing the big picture of UUC customer service experience to in-house staff, and enhancing the focused service from the experiential aspect within a short-term outlook. After representing the literature review from both academic and practical domain, the in-house research is described about applying semi- structured interviews to map the industrial service process with touch points. It documents the identification regarding key service interactions and the internal standpoints about the customer service experience. The customer study process is explained then as collecting first-hand customer experience within the targeted UUC service scope, the information of customer journey context has been enriched at the same time. T o Integrate the internal and external study results, the first outcome of this thesis - UUC customer experience map has been uncovered to Rolls-Royce Marine. By identifying the key opportunity from the customer experience map, the thesis continues to illustrate the process of utilizing the experience goals for ideating the experience-driven actions that Rolls-Royce Marine could take on future service development. The developed concept is presented in detail as an experiential service story which has been further built up through information architecture, the flow of interaction and wireframes establishment, and Hi-Fi prototype creation. Lastly, the two outcomes of the thesis have been evaluated by internal experts to determine the directions for the following implementation. Through the in-house assessment, the customer experience map has been regarded as a valuable and meaningful tool that could help mapping the UUC customer journey and the related customer service experience. The re ned UUC service concept has also achieved quite positive feedback from the evaluators, which aims to boost the user experience both inside and outside the organization

Facing the Hard Truth: Showing Users what Mobile Apps can Learn about them from the Location Data they Collect

We live in a world where data is food to companies. Users install more applications each day in their smartphones without taking into account all the data gathering it is done to offer new or improved “services” or to show personalized content based on that data. One kind of data companies gather is the location data. With this data, companies are capable of personalize Advertisement (ads) shown to the user with fine-grained precision, and also making possible to follow the user knowing what places the user visited. Users need to know how much location data has been queried from their smartphone and be able to look at it in any instant. From that necessity of awareness The PAPAYA tool (Privacy leackages from app trajectory data (PAPAYA)) has been born. It is a tool that records any location update in the smartphone and allows to look at the data within the application. It is been also implemented a KDD algorithm to know the most stationary places the user has been to. Moreover a research on the legal and socio-economic implications of this project is included.Vivimos en un mundo donde los datos son el alimento de las empresas. Cada vez los usuarios instalan más aplicaciones en sus terminales móviles sin tener en cuenta los datos que son recolectados para ofrecer y mejorar “servicios” y mostrar contenido personalizado en base a esos datos. Uno de los datos más importante para las empresas es la localización de los usuarios. Con esos datos, las empresas son capaces de personalizar la publicidad que muestra a los usuarios con una granularidad muy baja, y además, realizar un seguimiento de los lugares donde el usuario ha estado. Los usuarios deben conocer cuántos datos de localización se han recolectado en su terminal, así como poder visualizar dichos datos en el momento. De esta necesidad de concienciación ha nacido The PAPAYA tool, una herramienta que recoge todas las peticiones de localización realizadas en un terminal móvil y permite visualizar dichos datos dentro de la aplicación. Además, se realiza la implementación de un algoritmo KDD, usado para conocer las zonas donde el usuario ha pasado más tiempo. Asímismo, se provee de un estudio del marco legislativo bajo el que los datos son recogidos, así como un estudio socio-económico de este proyecto.Ingeniería Informátic

Reflections on developing a tool for creating visual representations of learning designs: towards a visual language for learning designs

Over the past four years we have been developing CompendiumLD, a software tool for designing learning activities using a flexible visual interface. It has been developed as a tool to support lecturers, teachers and others involved in education to help them articulate their ideas and map out a design or learning sequence. CompendiumLD is a specialised version of Compendium, a tool for managing connections between information and ideas, which has been applied in many domains including the mapping of discussions and arguments. As most of the core knowledge mapping facilities provided by Compendium are included within CompendiumLD, it can be used for learning design, and applied it to other information mapping and modelling problems. Evidence gathered since CompendiumLD’s first release has shown the many conditions in which it is likely to be applied and appreciated by users, and that the need for visualising learning designs as a solution to understanding how all components of planned learning and teaching fit together may continue to grow. Furthermore, the use of technology is making the process of creating courses more complex. We explore these challenges and conclude with some reflections on the developments in visual representation needed to further facilitate the modelling of today and tomorrow’s complex learning situations

Integrating GRASS GIS and Jupyter Notebooks to facilitate advanced geospatial modeling education

Open education materials are critical for the advancement of open science and the development of open-source soft-ware. These accessible and transparent materials provide an important pathway for sharing both standard geospa-tial analysis workflows and advanced research methods. Computational notebooks allow users to share live code with in-line visualizations and narrative text, making them a powerful interactive teaching tool for geospatial analyt-ics. Specifically, Jupyter Notebooks are quickly becoming a standard format in open education. In this article, we intro-duce a new GRASS GIS package, grass.jupyter, that enhances the existing GRASS Python API to allow Jupyter Notebook users to easily manage and visualize GRASS data including spatiotemporal datasets. While there are many Python-based geospatial libraries available for use in Jupyter Notebooks, GRASS GIS has extensive geospatial functionality including support for multi-temporal analysis and dynamic simulations, making it a powerful teaching tool for advanced geospatial analytics. We discuss the devel-opment of grass.jupyter and demonstrate how the package facilitates teaching open-source geospatial mode-ling with a collection of Jupyter Notebooks designed for a graduate-level geospatial modeling course. The open educa-tion notebooks feature spatiotemporal data visualizations, hydrologic modeling, and spread simulations such as the spread of invasive species and urban growthpublishedVersio