CO2 Emissions Forecast in Precast Concrete Production

With increasing demands regarding a detailed estimation of environmental impacts of materials in new construction projects, this research was intended to produce a forecasting model of CO2 emissions in precast concrete production using Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Due to its capability to correlate non-linear and non-unique problem, ANN has received increasing attention for forecasting applications in recent years. Prior to the model development, a set of questionnaire was distributed to several precast concrete plants all around Japan to obtain data regarding indicators which are generally influential to CO2 emissions in the production. From 107 plants, the result of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) showed that ordinary Portland cement, coarse aggregate, fine aggregate, heavy oil, kerosene, and electricity were considered to be significant indicators and further used as inputs in developing the CO2 emissions model. A three-layer perceptron with backpropagation neural network approach was proposed to train the network. The different number of hidden neurons, distribution of data sets, learning rate, and momentum were tested to minimize the error between actual and forecasted outputs. The model with 51 hidden neurons using a set of 0.1, 0.9 and 0.3 for learning rate, momentum and initial weight, respectively produced the best result. Indicated by the MAPE value which is less than 10%, this newly developed model shows an excellent accuracy for forecasting the CO2 emissions in the future. It was also validated by the result of sensitivity analysis that the developed model generated a negligible impact on the CO2 emissions due to variations of the six significant indicators

Privacy Preserving Distributed Data Mining

Privacy preserving distributed data mining aims to design secure protocols which allow multiple parties to conduct collaborative data mining while protecting the data privacy. My research focuses on the design and implementation of privacy preserving two-party protocols based on homomorphic encryption. I present new results in this area, including new secure protocols for basic operations and two fundamental privacy preserving data mining protocols. I propose a number of secure protocols for basic operations in the additive secret-sharing scheme based on homomorphic encryption. I derive a basic relationship between a secret number and its shares, with which we develop efficient secure comparison and secure division with public divisor protocols. I also design a secure inverse square root protocol based on Newton\u27s iterative method and hence propose a solution for the secure square root problem. In addition, we propose a secure exponential protocol based on Taylor series expansions. All these protocols are implemented using secure multiplication and can be used to develop privacy preserving distributed data mining protocols. In particular, I develop efficient privacy preserving protocols for two fundamental data mining tasks: multiple linear regression and EM clustering. Both protocols work for arbitrarily partitioned datasets. The two-party privacy preserving linear regression protocol is provably secure in the semi-honest model, and the EM clustering protocol discloses only the number of iterations. I provide a proof-of-concept implementation of these protocols in C++, based on the Paillier cryptosystem

Sviluppo di una Metodologia per la Selezione e il Controllo Qualità di Ventilatori per Cappe Aspiranti in Linea di Produzione Mediante Analisi Vibrazionale

Fin dai primi anni del secolo scorso i ricercatori hanno condotto ricerche e sviluppato soluzioni per diagnosticare l’insorgere di difettosità nei motori ad induzione per aumentarne l’affidabilità e la qualità. La letteratura è ricca di esempi nei quali vengono utilizzate le più conosciute tecniche di elaborazione del segnale e negli ultimi anni l’utilizzo di algoritmi di intelligenza artificiale ha portato ad ulteriori miglioramenti nella prevenzione dei guasti e delle loro conseguenze. In questo lavoro viene presentato un approccio differente per diagnosticare la presenza di difettosità nei motori ad induzione, una metodologia originale per il tipo di applicazione basata sul calcolo delle divergenze statistiche tra distribuzioni di probabilità e sul calcolo delle entropie e della cross-entropia. Vengono proposti e confrontati cinque diversi metodi per ottenere le distribuzioni di probabilità dai segnali misurati, due differenti formulazioni per il calcolo delle divergenze e quattro per il calcolo dell’entropia. L’efficacia e la maggiore robustezza degli indicatori calcolati con il metodo proposto rispetto ai tradizionali indicatori statistici sono dimostrate tramite le analisi condotte sulle misure accelerometriche acquisite durante lo sviluppo della procedura per il controllo qualità dei ventilatori per cappe aspiranti uscenti dalla linea di produzione di SIT S.p.A. Ne viene presentata inoltre una versione modificata utilizzando la trasmissibilità del banco di collaudo come filtro inverso, soluzione che la rende efficace anche quando applicata alle misure acquisite dal sensore accelerometrico di linea. La procedura proposta ha dimostrato capacità di classificazione con un accuratezza superiore al 95%. Infine, sfruttando le potenzialità del machine learning, viene proposta una soluzione che, utilizzando un Autoencoder, è in grado di migliorare i risultati ottenuti in precedenza, raggiungendo valori analoghi come accuratezza ma migliori in termini di falsi negativi.Since the early years of the last century, researchers have conducted research and developed solutions to diagnose the onset of defects in induction motors to increase their reliability and quality. The literature is full of examples in which the well-known signal processing techniques are used and in recent years the use of artificial intelligence algorithms has led to further improvements in the prevention of faults and their consequences. In this work a different approach is presented to diagnose the presence of defects in induction motors, an original methodology for the type of application based on the calculation of statistical divergences between probability distributions and on the calculation of entropies and cross-entropy. Five different methods for obtaining probability distributions from measured signals are proposed and compared, two different formulations for calculating divergences and four for calculating entropy. The effectiveness and greater robustness of the indicators calculated with the proposed method compared to traditional statistical indicators are demonstrated through the analyses conducted on the accelerometric measurements acquired during the development of the procedure for the quality control of the fans for extractor hoods leaving the production line of SIT S.p.A. A modified version is also presented using the transmissibility of the production bench as an inverse filter, a solution that makes it effective even when applied to the measurements acquired by the accelerometric sensor positioned on the production station. The proposed procedure has demonstrated classification capabilities with an accuracy greater than 95%. Finally, exploiting the potential of machine learning, a solution is proposed which, using an Autoencoder, is able to improve the results previously obtained, reaching similar values in terms of accuracy but better in terms of false negatives