Conference report: planning in, and for, a digital world: UK-Ireland planning research conference, 5th-7th September 2022

From 5–7 September 2022, the UK-Ireland Planning Research Conference was held at the University of Manchester, marking a return to an in-person event for the first time since 2019. The theme of the conference – ‘Planning in, and for, a Digital World’ – covered topics from the potential implications of the metaverse through to the impact of planners’ values on shaping practice. Hosted by the Department of Planning and Environmental Management in the year of its seventieth anniversary, the conference brought together 76 conference papers across 13 conference tracks, five round table sessions, and keynotes from Professor Michael Batty (UCL, UK), Professor Andrew Hudson-Smith (UCL, UK), Professor Marketta Kyttä (Aalto University, Finland) and Ms Joanna Averley (Chief Planner for England, Dept of Levelling Up, Housing & Communities). Hosted alongside the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), the conference also saw the announcement of the RTPI Awards for Research Excellence

Irrigation and drainage in the new millennium

Presented at the 2000 USCID international conference, Challenges facing irrigation and drainage in the new millennium on June 20-24 in Fort Collins, Colorado.Includes bibliographical references.Current global population growth rates require an increase in agricultural food production of about 40-50% over the next thirty to forty years, in order to maintain present levels of food intake. To meet the target, irrigated agriculture must play a vital role, in fact the FAO estimates that 60% of future gains will have to come from irrigation. The practice of controlling drainage involves the extension of on-farm water management to include drainage management. With the integration of irrigation and drainage management, the water balance can be managed to reduce excess water losses and increase irrigation efficiencies. Controlled drainage is relatively new and there are many theoretical and practical issues to be addressed. The technique involves maintaining high water table in the soil profile for extended periods of time, requiring careful management to ensure that crop growth is not affected by anaerobic conditions. A fieldwork programme has been investigated to test controlled drainage in the Nile Delta, where water resources are stretched to the limit. Water saving is essential in the next 20 years. Pressures from the fixed Nile water allocation, population growth, industry and other sectors and the horizontal expansion programme mean that this need is urgent. One crop season has been completed at a site in the Western Nile Delta using simple control devices in the subsurface drainage system. This paper discusses the potential benefits of controlled drainage to save water in agricultural areas such as the Nile Delta, and presents findings from the first crop season

FATA-Trans: Field And Time-Aware Transformer for Sequential Tabular Data

Sequential tabular data is one of the most commonly used data types in real-world applications. Different from conventional tabular data, where rows in a table are independent, sequential tabular data contains rich contextual and sequential information, where some fields are dynamically changing over time and others are static. Existing transformer-based approaches analyzing sequential tabular data overlook the differences between dynamic and static fields by replicating and filling static fields into each transformer, and ignore temporal information between rows, which leads to three major disadvantages: (1) computational overhead, (2) artificially simplified data for masked language modeling pre-training task that may yield less meaningful representations, and (3) disregarding the temporal behavioral patterns implied by time intervals. In this work, we propose FATA-Trans, a model with two field transformers for modeling sequential tabular data, where each processes static and dynamic field information separately. FATA-Trans is field- and time-aware for sequential tabular data. The field-type embedding in the method enables FATA-Trans to capture differences between static and dynamic fields. The time-aware position embedding exploits both order and time interval information between rows, which helps the model detect underlying temporal behavior in a sequence. Our experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the learned representations from FATA-Trans consistently outperform state-of-the-art solutions in the downstream tasks. We also present visualization studies to highlight the insights captured by the learned representations, enhancing our understanding of the underlying data. Our codes are available at https://github.com/zdy93/FATA-Trans.Comment: This work is accepted by ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 202

A Framework for and Design of a Smart Academic Building Using Sensors, Citizen Participation, and Volunteered Geographic Information

Population growth and migration patterns have shown an influx of residents from rural to urban environments. To deal with the problems caused by unprecedented urban influx, cities should plan to use technology in a smart and distinctive way. Tackling at the city scale is hard. But a set of smart buildings that are interconnected by technology will lead to smarter communities which are then interconnected to create a smart city. Smart lobby, building, community, or city is distinguished by its application of integrated software, hardware, and network technologies, along with access to real-time data enabling decision-making, facilitating tracing, tracking and real-time monitoring. For this research project, the unit of study is an academic building that we want to change into a smart building. The goal is to deliver two artifacts. The first artifact is a framework designed to guide developers, while considering stakeholders and technology elements to make a smart lobby engaging for the users. The second artifact is a mobile based application allowing users to access services on smart devices. To identity the services, multiple brainstorming and discussion sessions (Service ideation) were conducted between the researcher and colleagues at Claremont Graduate University. Potential new smart ideas to be deployed were discussed as well as opportunities to transform traditional services to smart services using emerging technologies (Service re-engineering). A preliminary list of 47 ideas were identified. The final three services chosen were based on the scoring by the pre-focus group survey participants (Table 2). Services include: restroom availability—making the occupancy in a restroom COVID-19 safe by limiting the number of occupants; conference room availability—displaying available conference room/public space in real time to allow users to reserve a room using their smart device and, allow management to set and verify occupancy limits; incident reporting—enabling people to report and upload pictures of issues in the facility that require attention. The project’s design aims to make a lobby smart and interactive. The key is to start small and start by making buildings, communities, and cities smarter by using ICTs. We learn and grow from there for larger implementations to be successful

Women in Management A Strategy for Sustainable Development in Nigeria

Career interruptions are plateauing and turnover is expensive. The money corporations invest in recruitment, training and development is less likely to produce top executives among women that among men. The invaluable company experience that developing executives acquire at every level as they move up through management ranks are more often lost. Demographic realities are going to force corporations across the country to analyze the cost of employing women in managerial positions and what they will discover is that women cost more (Schwartz, 2005). Women in management and bringing women into management have been subjects of increasing significance and concerns for all. The areas where a properly structured program would help companies achieve their goal of increasing number of women executives and maximizing their effectiveness are becoming more significant. With this in mind the Stanford Business School sponsored a conference in April, 1974 on women in management. Business leaders from across United States of America attended. The success of the conference and the presentations were developed into a Book for permanent availability and a wider distribution (Miller, 1975) It has been observed that women are better bosses than men (Sappenfield and Day, 2001). In an architectural firm of Dimilla Shaffer in Boston, all the members of the team were women and when they met everyone took part. They organized, parceled out responsibilities, and devised ways to check off tasks as the job progressed. While in a firm led by a male, things were different. Sitting at a granite table in a meeting room overlooking Boston, Harbor, the project was a study in frustration. Every one would just sit around the table and watch with their little calendars. There was no receptivity to group planning. It is a telling comparison, and it came at a time when more and more evidence suggested that women made better managers than men (Sappenfield and Day, 2001). For years companies wanted leaders who took control, people who rumbled through boardrooms like panter tanks, achieving their goal no matter the odds or obstacles. Business was a war game and men were seen as the best commanders. Today two decades after the great wave of layoffs in the United State of America turned many workers into free agents with little corporate loyalty, businesses want team builders and communicators, people who create relationship with employees and instill in them a commitment to the organization. Studies have repeatedly shown that these mean women (Sappenfield and Day, 2001) Economic growth entails an increase in the national output for a period of one year from a particular year using a previous year as the base year (Iyoha, 2006). It entails also an increase in the national income measured in terms of Gross National Product, Gross Domestic Product, Gross National Income and Gross Personal Income. If economic growth is backed by the distribution of the proceeds of growth in such a way that there is a structural change that leads to an improvement in the economic well being of the masses of the people, economic development sets in. Economic Development is one of the four pillars of sustainable development, the others being social development, environmental development and cultural diversity. The specific objectives of this study is to a theoretical review of the institutional barriers of what keeps women out of the executive suite to do a theoretical review of Sustainable Development, and o do a theoretical analysis to show how the process of women in management could be a strategy for Sustainable development in Nigeria and to design a system cybernetic model of 8 inputs, transform of the process of women in management and output of the increase in sustainable development in Nigeria. All the objectives were achieved in this study

Built environment education and research in West Africa

Built environment programmes in West African universities; and research contributions from West Africa in six leading international journals and proceedings of the WABER conference are explored. At least 20 universities in the region offer degree programmes in Architecture (86% out of 23 universities); Building (57%); Civil Engineering (67%); Estate Management (52%); Quantity Surveying (52%); Surveying and Geoinformatics (55%); Urban and Regional Planning (67%). The lecturer-student ratio on programmes is around 1:25 compared to the 1:10 benchmark for excellence. Academics who teach on the programmes are clearly research active with some having published papers in leading international journals. There is, however, plenty of scope for improvement particularly at the highest international level. Out of more than 5000 papers published in six leading international peer-reviewed journals since each of them was established, only 23 of the papers have come from West Africa. The 23 papers are published by 28 academics based in 13 universities. Although some academics may publish their work in the plethora of journals that have proliferated in recent years, new generation researchers are encouraged to publish in more established journals. The analyses of 187 publications in the WABER conference proceedings revealed 18 research-active universities. Factors like quality of teaching, research and lecturer-student ratio, etc count in the ranking of universities. The findings lay bare some of the areas that should be addressed to improve the landscape of higher education in West Africa