CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Covid19/IT the digital side of Covid19: A picture from Italy with clustering and taxonomy

The Covid19 pandemic has significantly impacted on our lives, triggering a strong reaction resulting in vaccines, more effective diagnoses and therapies, policies to contain the pandemic outbreak, to name but a few. A significant contribution to their success comes from the computer science and information technology communities, both in support to other disciplines and as the primary driver of solutions for, e.g., diagnostics, social distancing, and contact tracing. In this work, we surveyed the Italian computer science and engineering community initiatives against the Covid19 pandemic. The 128 responses thus collected document the response of such a community during the first pandemic wave in Italy (February-May 2020), through several initiatives carried out by both single researchers and research groups able to promptly react to Covid19, even remotely. The data obtained by the survey are here reported, discussed and further investigated by Natural Language Processing techniques, to generate semantic clusters based on embedding representations of the surveyed activity descriptions. The resulting clusters have been then used to extend an existing Covid19 taxonomy with the classification of related research activities in computer science and information technology areas, summarizing this work contribution through a reproducible survey-to-taxonomy methodology

Multi-task deep learning for large-scale building detail extraction from high-resolution satellite imagery

Understanding urban dynamics and promoting sustainable development requires comprehensive insights about buildings. While geospatial artificial intelligence has advanced the extraction of such details from Earth observational data, existing methods often suffer from computational inefficiencies and inconsistencies when compiling unified building-related datasets for practical applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Multi-task Building Refiner (MT-BR), an adaptable neural network tailored for simultaneous extraction of spatial and attributional building details from high-resolution satellite imagery, exemplified by building rooftops, urban functional types, and roof architectural types. Notably, MT-BR can be fine-tuned to incorporate additional building details, extending its applicability. For large-scale applications, we devise a novel spatial sampling scheme that strategically selects limited but representative image samples. This process optimizes both the spatial distribution of samples and the urban environmental characteristics they contain, thus enhancing extraction effectiveness while curtailing data preparation expenditures. We further enhance MT-BR's predictive performance and generalization capabilities through the integration of advanced augmentation techniques. Our quantitative results highlight the efficacy of the proposed methods. Specifically, networks trained with datasets curated via our sampling method demonstrate improved predictive accuracy relative to those using alternative sampling approaches, with no alterations to network architecture. Moreover, MT-BR consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in extracting building details across various metrics. The real-world practicality is also demonstrated in an application across Shanghai, generating a unified dataset that encompasses both the spatial and attributional details of buildings

Benefits of Implementing Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems for the Sustainable Construction Industry: A Systematic Literature Review

Accidents are more prevalent in the construction industry compared to other economic sectors. Therefore, understanding the benefits of occupational health and safety management systems (OHSMSs) in terms of their sustainable implementation, management and performance, as well as the awareness of OHMSs and barriers to their implementation, are important for improving OHSMSs in the sustainability of the construction industry. Although there is considerable research on OHSMSs, further assessments are needed concerning other aspects of OHSMSs, particularly the benefits of OHSMSs. Thus, this review paper summarises the empirical state of the art of OHSMS activities. Scopus, Web of Science and other databases were searched using predefined standards. The query was limited to articles published from 1999 to 2023. Consequently, one hundred and four articles were selected and analysed. These articles present analyses of OHSMSs and their potential benefits concerning the implementation of OHSMSs and management, performance, awareness, and barriers in relation to OHSMSs. The results reveal that 12.50% of the reviewed studies assessed the implementation of OHSMSs in the construction industry, and 25.96% studied the management of OHSMSs. Analyses of the performance of OHSMSs in the construction industry accounted for 8.65%, analyses of the awareness of OHSMSs accounted for 4.81%, model-related analyses accounted for 13.46%, studies on the significance/benefits of OHSMSs accounted for 3.85%, studies on the barriers/challenges associated with OHSMSs accounted for 5.77%, analyses on the safety indicators of OHSMSs accounted for 2.88% and other types of studies accounted for 20.19%. This study further reveals that the implementation of OHSMSs is characterised by a dearth of proper communication, the non-utilisation of personal protective equipment (PPE), wrong postures and work activities, a dearth of training, physiological factors including burnout and stress, and a dearth of safety culture and orientation; in addition, matters relating to compliance with effective laws are significant safety challenges in the construction industry. However, the rationality for evaluating the benefits of OHSMSs, comprising their implementation, management and performance, as well as awareness of and barriers to OHSMSs, is challenging to authenticate because appropriate field, survey, organisational and clinical data concerning incident occurrences in the construction industry are lacking for comprehensive evaluations. Thus, this novel study presents our effort to narrow this gap by establishing a framework for increasing our understanding of the benefits of implementing OHSMSs and accident reduction

Acquiring and Harnessing Verb Knowledge for Multilingual Natural Language Processing

Advances in representation learning have enabled natural language processing models to derive non-negligible linguistic information directly from text corpora in an unsupervised fashion. However, this signal is underused in downstream tasks, where they tend to fall back on superficial cues and heuristics to solve the problem at hand. Further progress relies on identifying and filling the gaps in linguistic knowledge captured in their parameters. The objective of this thesis is to address these challenges focusing on the issues of resource scarcity, interpretability, and lexical knowledge injection, with an emphasis on the category of verbs. To this end, I propose a novel paradigm for efficient acquisition of lexical knowledge leveraging native speakers’ intuitions about verb meaning to support development and downstream performance of NLP models across languages. First, I investigate the potential of acquiring semantic verb classes from non-experts through manual clustering. This subsequently informs the development of a two-phase semantic dataset creation methodology, which combines semantic clustering with fine-grained semantic similarity judgments collected through spatial arrangements of lexical stimuli. The method is tested on English and then applied to a typologically diverse sample of languages to produce the first large-scale multilingual verb dataset of this kind. I demonstrate its utility as a diagnostic tool by carrying out a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art NLP models, probing representation quality across languages and domains of verb meaning, and shedding light on their deficiencies. Subsequently, I directly address these shortcomings by injecting lexical knowledge into large pretrained language models. I demonstrate that external manually curated information about verbs’ lexical properties can support data-driven models in tasks where accurate verb processing is key. Moreover, I examine the potential of extending these benefits from resource-rich to resource-poor languages through translation-based transfer. The results emphasise the usefulness of human-generated lexical knowledge in supporting NLP models and suggest that time-efficient construction of lexicons similar to those developed in this work, especially in under-resourced languages, can play an important role in boosting their linguistic capacity.ESRC Doctoral Fellowship [ES/J500033/1], ERC Consolidator Grant LEXICAL [648909

Explorando ferramentas de modelação digital, aumentada e orientada por dados em engenharia e design de produto

Tools are indispensable for all diligent professional practice. New concepts and possibilities for paradigm shifting are emerging with recent computational technological developments in digital tools. However, new tools from key concepts such as “Big-Data”, “Accessibility” and “Algorithmic Design” are fundamentally changing the input and position of the Product Engineer and Designer. After the context introduction, this dissertation document starts by extracting three pivotal criteria from the Product Design Engineering's State of the Art analysis. In each one of those criteria the new emergent, more relevant and paradigmatic concepts are explored and later on are positioned and compared within the Product Lifecycle Management wheel scheme, where the potential risks and gaps are pointed to be explored in the experience part. There are two types of empirical experiences: the first being of case studies from Architecture and Urban Planning — from the student's professional experience —, that served as a pretext and inspiration for the experiments directly made for Product Design Engineering. First with a set of isolated explorations and analysis, second with a hypothetical experience derived from the latter and, finally, a deliberative section that culminate in a listing of risks and changes concluded from all the previous work. The urgency to reflect on what will change in that role and position, what kind of ethical and/or conceptual reformulations should exist for the profession to maintain its intellectual integrity and, ultimately, to survive, are of the utmost evidence.As ferramentas são indispensáveis para toda a prática diligente profissional. Novos conceitos e possibilidades de mudança de paradigma estão a surgir com os recentes progressos tecnológicos a nível computacional nas ferramentas digitais. Contudo, novas ferramentas originadas sobre conceitos-chave como “Big Data”, “Acessibilidade” e “Design Algorítmico” estão a mudar de forma fundamental o contributo e posição do Engenheiro e Designer de Produto. Esta dissertação, após uma primeira introdução contextual, começa por extrair três conceitos-eixo duma análise ao Estado da Arte actual em Engenharia e Design de Produto. Em cada um desses conceitos explora-se os novos conceitos emergentes mais relevantes e paradigmáticos, que então são comparados e posicionados no círculo de Gestão de Ciclo de Vida de Produto, apontando aí potenciais riscos e falhas que possam ser explorados em experiências. As experiências empíricas têm duas índoles: a primeira de projetos e casos de estudo de arquitetura e planeamento urbanístico — experiência em contexto de trabalho do aluno —, que serviu de pretexto e inspiração para as experiências relacionadas com Engenharia e Design de Produto. Primeiro com uma série de análises e experiências isoladas, segundo com uma formulação hipotética com o compêndio dessas experiências e, finalmente, com uma secção de reflexão que culmina numa série de riscos e mudanças induzidas do trabalho anterior. A urgência em refletir sobre o que irá alterar nesse papel e posição, que género de reformulações éticas e/ou conceptuais deverão existir para que a profissão mantenha a sua integridade intelectual e, em última instância, sobreviva, são bastante evidentes.Mestrado em Engenharia e Design de Produt

BIM-Based Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment for Buildings

In recent years, the progress of digitization in the architecture and construction sectors has produced enormous advances in the automation of analysis and evaluation processes. This is the case with environmental analysis systems, such as the life cycle analysis. Methodology practitioners have found a fundamental ally in the building information modeling platforms, which allow tasks that conventionally consume large amounts of energy and time to be carried out more automatically and efficiently. In this publication, the reader will find some of the latest advances in this area

Facilitating and Enhancing the Performance of Model Selection for Energy Time Series Forecasting in Cluster Computing Environments

Applying Machine Learning (ML) manually to a given problem setting is a tedious and time-consuming process which brings many challenges with it, especially in the context of Big Data. In such a context, gaining insightful information, finding patterns, and extracting knowledge from large datasets are quite complex tasks. Additionally, the configurations of the underlying Big Data infrastructure introduce more complexity for configuring and running ML tasks. With the growing interest in ML the last few years, particularly people without extensive ML expertise have a high demand for frameworks assisting people in applying the right ML algorithm to their problem setting. This is especially true in the field of smart energy system applications where more and more ML algorithms are used e.g. for time series forecasting. Generally, two groups of non-expert users are distinguished to perform energy time series forecasting. The first one includes the users who are familiar with statistics and ML but are not able to write the necessary programming code for training and evaluating ML models using the well-known trial-and-error approach. Such an approach is time consuming and wastes resources for constructing multiple models. The second group is even more inexperienced in programming and not knowledgeable in statistics and ML but wants to apply given ML solutions to their problem settings. The goal of this thesis is to scientifically explore, in the context of more concrete use cases in the energy domain, how such non-expert users can be optimally supported in creating and performing ML tasks in practice on cluster computing environments. To support the first group of non-expert users, an easy-to-use modular extendable microservice-based ML solution for instrumenting and evaluating ML algorithms on top of a Big Data technology stack is conceptualized and evaluated. Our proposed solution facilitates applying trial-and-error approach by hiding the low level complexities from the users and introduces the best conditions to efficiently perform ML tasks in cluster computing environments. To support the second group of non-expert users, the first solution is extended to realize meta learning approaches for automated model selection. We evaluate how meta learning technology can be efficiently applied to the problem space of data analytics for smart energy systems to assist energy system experts which are not data analytics experts in applying the right ML algorithms to their data analytics problems. To enhance the predictive performance of meta learning, an efficient characterization of energy time series datasets is required. To this end, Descriptive Statistics Time based Meta Features (DSTMF), a new kind of meta features, is designed to accurately capture the deep characteristics of energy time series datasets. We find that DSTMF outperforms the other state-of-the-art meta feature sets introduced in the literature to characterize energy time series datasets in terms of the accuracy of meta learning models and the time needed to extract them. Further enhancement in the predictive performance of the meta learning classification model is achieved by training the meta learner on new efficient meta examples. To this end, we proposed two new approaches to generate new energy time series datasets to be used as training meta examples by the meta learner depending on the type of time series dataset (i.e. generation or energy consumption time series). We find that extending the original training sets with new meta examples generated by our approaches outperformed the case in which the original is extended by new simulated energy time series datasets

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2013

This report summarizes the research activities of the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management. It describes research interests and faculty expertise; lists student theses/dissertations; identifies research sponsors and contributions; and outlines the procedures for contacting the school. Included in the report are: faculty publications, conference presentations, consultations, and funded research projects. Research was conducted in the areas of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electro-Optics, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Systems Engineering and Management, Operational Sciences, Mathematics, Statistics and Engineering Physics