29,721 research outputs found
Vibration serviceability of footbridges under human-induced excitation : a literature review
Increasing strength of new structural materials and longer spans of new footbridges, accompanied with aesthetic requirements for greater slenderness, are resulting in more lively footbridge structures. In the past few years this issue attracted great public attention. The excessive lateral sway motion caused by crowd walking across the infamous Millennium Bridge in London is the prime example of the vibration serviceability problem of footbridges. In principle, consideration of footbridge vibration serviceability requires a characterisation of the vibration source, path and receiver. This paper is the most comprehensive review published to date of about 200 references which deal with these three key issues.
The literature survey identified humans as the most important source of vibration for footbridges. However, modelling of the crowd-induced dynamic force is not clearly defined yet, despite some serious attempts to tackle this issue in the last few years.
The vibration path is the mass, damping and stiffness of the footbridge. Of these, damping is the most uncertain but extremely important parameter as the resonant behaviour tends to govern vibration serviceability of footbridges.
A typical receiver of footbridge vibrations is a pedestrian who is quite often the source of vibrations as well. Many scales for rating the human perception of vibrations have been found in the published literature. However, few are applicable to footbridges because a receiver is not stationary but is actually moving across the vibrating structure.
During footbridge vibration, especially under crowd load, it seems that some form of human–structure interaction occurs. The problem of influence of walking people on footbridge vibration properties, such as the natural frequency and damping is not well understood, let alone quantified.
Finally, there is not a single national or international design guidance which covers all aspects of the problem comprehensively and some form of their combination with other published information is prudent when designing major footbridge structures. The overdue update of the current codes to reflect the recent research achievements is a great challenge for the next 5–10 years
An Integrated Framework for AI Assisted Level Design in 2D Platformers
The design of video game levels is a complex and critical task. Levels need
to elicit fun and challenge while avoiding frustration at all costs. In this
paper, we present a framework to assist designers in the creation of levels for
2D platformers. Our framework provides designers with a toolbox (i) to create
2D platformer levels, (ii) to estimate the difficulty and probability of
success of single jump actions (the main mechanics of platformer games), and
(iii) a set of metrics to evaluate the difficulty and probability of completion
of entire levels. At the end, we present the results of a set of experiments we
carried out with human players to validate the metrics included in our
framework.Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Game Entertainment and Media Conference 201
Learning to Skim Text
Recurrent Neural Networks are showing much promise in many sub-areas of
natural language processing, ranging from document classification to machine
translation to automatic question answering. Despite their promise, many
recurrent models have to read the whole text word by word, making it slow to
handle long documents. For example, it is difficult to use a recurrent network
to read a book and answer questions about it. In this paper, we present an
approach of reading text while skipping irrelevant information if needed. The
underlying model is a recurrent network that learns how far to jump after
reading a few words of the input text. We employ a standard policy gradient
method to train the model to make discrete jumping decisions. In our benchmarks
on four different tasks, including number prediction, sentiment analysis, news
article classification and automatic Q\&A, our proposed model, a modified LSTM
with jumping, is up to 6 times faster than the standard sequential LSTM, while
maintaining the same or even better accuracy
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