2,236 research outputs found

    Graduate Catalog of Studies, 2023-2024

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    Innovation in Energy Security and Long-Term Energy Efficiency â…ˇ

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    The sustainable development of our planet depends on the use of energy. The increasing world population inevitably causes an increase in the demand for energy, which, on the one hand, threatens us with the potential to encounter a shortage of energy supply, and, on the other hand, causes the deterioration of the environment. Therefore, our task is to reduce this demand through different innovative solutions (i.e., both technological and social). Social marketing and economic policies can also play their role by affecting the behavior of households and companies and by causing behavioral change oriented to energy stewardship, with an overall switch to renewable energy resources. This reprint provides a platform for the exchange of a wide range of ideas, which, ultimately, would facilitate driving societies toward long-term energy efficiency

    Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management

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    This book is a reprint of the Special Issue 'Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management' that was published in the journal Buildings

    Towards a holistic understanding of the role of green infrastructure in improving urban air quality

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    Air pollution has been identified as a major problem in modern societies, threatening urban population health. Pedestrians, in particular, are directly exposed to one of the main sources of air pollutants: road transport, which is concentrated in proximity to the road, worsening the air. Green infrastructure (GI) has been promoted as a natural method for reducing exposure to local street air pollutants and providing additional Ecosystem Services with a range of environmental, social and economic benefits for citizens. The effectiveness of GI for improving air quality depends on the spatio-temporal context and the species-specific characteristics of the GI. Urban planting could maximise this benefit by a holistic understanding of the effects of GI in cities, balancing its benefits and constraints. However, little is currently known about the application of GI design and planning with regard to air pollution mitigation. Moreover, there is little agreement on the quantifiable effectiveness of GI in improving street air quality as its effectiveness is highly context dependent. Holistic guidance is therefore needed to inform practitioners of site- and species- specifics, trade-offs, and GI maintenance considerations for successful urban planting. This research reviews the academic literature addressing GI-related characteristics in streets, creating a holistic framework to help guide decision-makers on using GI solutions to improve air quality. Additionally, this research aims to understand how and which GI, along with other local characteristics, influence pedestrian air quality and how these characteristics are considered in real-world practice within the United Kingdom. This research progresses through three stages: First, the mechanisms by which GI is considered to influence air quality were identified through literature reviews. A specific literature review was then conducted for each mechanism to extract the associated GI and spatial characteristics that affect the potential for GI to mitigate urban air pollution. In the second stage, this list of characteristics, together with other Ecosystem Services, was discussed in consultation with practitioners in the UK. A survey was conducted to explore and evaluate the recommendations and resources available for planning plantings, as well as the practitioners’ knowledge about the characteristics associated with mitigating air pollution. Supported by results from the survey and the literature reviews, the third stage evaluated (validated) an easy-to-use computational model for its potential use in improving planting decisions for air pollution mitigation. Green infrastructure influences air quality by providing surfaces for pollutant deposition and absorption, effects on airflow and dispersion, and biogenic emissions. The relationship between the specific GI and the spatio-temporal context also influences air quality. Street structure, weather variables, and the type, shape and size of GI influence the dispersion of pollutants, with micro-and macro-morphological traits additionally influencing particulate deposition and gas absorption. In addition, maintaining GI lessens air quality deterioration by controlling biogenic emissions. According to participants in the survey, aesthetics were the principal drivers of urban planting, followed by improving well-being and increasing biodiversity and air pollution mitigation as a lesser priority. Characteristics such as airflow manipulation, leaf surface traits, and biogenic emissions were the less important influences in planting decisions in the UK, despite the fact that these characteristics influence air quality. Perhaps, a lack of communication of current information and low confidence about which specific characteristics have a tangible effect on air quality reduces the incorporation of GI for air pollution mitigation purposes. Uncertainties exist about the quantification of pollutants removed by GI. Field campaigns and computational models still need improvement to address the effectiveness of GI in real-world environments adequately and also to understand whether GI can exert a significant effect on pollutant levels under real-world conditions. This research showed that a promising and easy-to-use model used to evaluate the effectiveness of trees in removing particles was not an acceptable model to study the effect of GI on streets. The validation results showed a poor agreement between wind tunnel data and the model results. More effort is needed to develop better modelling tools that can quantify the actual effect of GI on improving street air quality. This research contributes to the air pollution mitigation field, explicitly helping to inform decision-making for more health-promoting urban settings by optimising the expected benefits of GI through a holistic understanding of their impacts. Facilitating the communication of current evidence through a holistic guide that considers both the benefits and trade-offs of planting decisions for air quality improvement. Improving information on air pollution mitigation to feed the decision-making process might maximise the benefits of GI planting for air pollution mitigation in streets.Open Acces

    Honors Colleges in the 21st Century

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    Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction | Richard Badenhausen Part I: Honors College Contexts: Past and Present CHAPTER ONE Oxbridge and Core Curricula: Continuing Conversations with the Past in Honors Colleges | Christopher A. Snyder CHAPTER TWO Characteristics of the 21st-Century Honors College | Andrew J. Cognard-Black and Patricia J. Smith Part II: Transitioning to an Honors College CHAPTER THREE Should We Start an Honors College? An Administrative Playbook for Working Through the Decision | Richard Badenhausen CHAPTER FOUR Beyond the Letterhead: A Tactical Toolbox for Transitioning from Program to College | Sara Hottinger, Megan McIlreavy, Clay Motley, and Louis Keiner Part III: Administrative Leadership CHAPTER FIVE “It Is What You Make It’’: Opportunities Arising from the Unique Roles of Honors College Deans | Jeff Chamberlain, Thomas M. Spencer, and Jefford Vahlbusch CHAPTER SIX The Role of the Honors College Dean in the Future of Honors Education | Peter Parolin, Timothy J. Nichols, Donal C. Skinner, and Rebecca C. Bott-Knutson CHAPTER SEVEN From the Top Down: Implications of Honors College Deans’ Race and Gender | Malin Pereira, Jacqueline Smith-Mason, Karoline Summerville, and Scott Linneman Part IV: Honors College Operations CHAPTER EIGHT Something Borrowed, Something New: Honors College Faculty and the Staffing of Honors Courses | Erin E. Edgington and Linda Frost CHAPTER NINE Telling Your Story: Stewardship and the Honors College | Andrew Martino Part V: Honors Colleges as Leaders in the Work of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Access CHAPTER TEN Cultivating Institutional Change: Infusing Principles of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion into Everyday Honors College Practices | Tara M. Tuttle, Julie Stewart, and Kayla Powell CHAPTER ELEVEN Positioning Honors Colleges to Lead Diversity and Inclusion Efforts at Predominantly White Institutions | Susan Dinan, Jason T. Hilton, and Jennifer Willford CHAPTER TWELVE Honors Colleges as Levers of Educational Equity | Teagan Decker, Joshua Kalin Busman, and Michele Fazio CHAPTER THIRTEEN Promoting the Inclusion of LGBTQ+ Students: The Role of the Honors College in Faith-Based Colleges and Universities | Paul E. Prill Part VI: Supporting Students CHAPTER FOURTEEN Who Belongs in Honors? Culturally Responsive Advising and Transformative Diversity | Elizabeth Raisanen CHAPTER FIFTEEN Fostering Student Leadership in Honors Colleges | Jill Nelson Granger Part VII: Honors College Curricular Innovation CHAPTER SIXTEEN Honors Liberal Arts for the 21st Century | John Carrell, Aliza S. Wong, Chad Cain, Carrie J. Preston, and Muhammad H. Zaman CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Honors Colleges, Transdisciplinary Education, and Global Challenges | 423 Paul Knox and Paul Heilker Part VIII: Community Engagement CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Teaching and Learning in the Fourth Space: Preparing Scholars to Engage in Solving Community Problems | Heidi Appel, Rebecca C. Bott-Knutson, Joy Hart, Paul Knox, Andrea Radasanu, Leigh E. Fine, Timothy J. Nichols, Daniel Roberts, Keith Garbutt, William Ziegler, Jonathan Kotinek, Kathy Cooke, Ralph Keen, Mark Andersen, and Jyotsna Kapur CHAPTER NINETEEN Serving Our Communities: Leveraging the Honors College Model at Two-Year Institutions | Eric Hoffman, Victoria M. Bryan, and Dan Flores About the Authors About the NCHC Monograph Serie

    Software Startups -- A Research Agenda

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    Software startup companies develop innovative, software-intensive products within limited time frames and with few resources, searching for sustainable and scalable business models. Software startups are quite distinct from traditional mature software companies, but also from micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises, introducing new challenges relevant for software engineering research. This paper's research agenda focuses on software engineering in startups, identifying, in particular, 70+ research questions in the areas of supporting startup engineering activities, startup evolution models and patterns, ecosystems and innovation hubs, human aspects in software startups, applying startup concepts in non-startup environments, and methodologies and theories for startup research. We connect and motivate this research agenda with past studies in software startup research, while pointing out possible future directions. While all authors of this research agenda have their main background in Software Engineering or Computer Science, their interest in software startups broadens the perspective to the challenges, but also to the opportunities that emerge from multi-disciplinary research. Our audience is therefore primarily software engineering researchers, even though we aim at stimulating collaborations and research that crosses disciplinary boundaries. We believe that with this research agenda we cover a wide spectrum of the software startup industry current needs

    Representation Learning for Texts and Graphs: A Unified Perspective on Efficiency, Multimodality, and Adaptability

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    [...] This thesis is situated between natural language processing and graph representation learning and investigates selected connections. First, we introduce matrix embeddings as an efficient text representation sensitive to word order. [...] Experiments with ten linguistic probing tasks, 11 supervised, and five unsupervised downstream tasks reveal that vector and matrix embeddings have complementary strengths and that a jointly trained hybrid model outperforms both. Second, a popular pretrained language model, BERT, is distilled into matrix embeddings. [...] The results on the GLUE benchmark show that these models are competitive with other recent contextualized language models while being more efficient in time and space. Third, we compare three model types for text classification: bag-of-words, sequence-, and graph-based models. Experiments on five datasets show that, surprisingly, a wide multilayer perceptron on top of a bag-of-words representation is competitive with recent graph-based approaches, questioning the necessity of graphs synthesized from the text. [...] Fourth, we investigate the connection between text and graph data in document-based recommender systems for citations and subject labels. Experiments on six datasets show that the title as side information improves the performance of autoencoder models. [...] We find that the meaning of item co-occurrence is crucial for the choice of input modalities and an appropriate model. Fifth, we introduce a generic framework for lifelong learning on evolving graphs in which new nodes, edges, and classes appear over time. [...] The results show that by reusing previous parameters in incremental training, it is possible to employ smaller history sizes with only a slight decrease in accuracy compared to training with complete history. Moreover, weighting the binary cross-entropy loss function is crucial to mitigate the problem of class imbalance when detecting newly emerging classes. [...

    Impact of Social Media Marketing on Consumer Purchase Action: A Case Study of SME consumers in Bangladesh

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    This study examines the influence of Impact of Social Media Marketing on Consumer Purchase Action. A Case Study of SME consumers in Bangladesh. A survey questionnaire was used to conduct the study on Bangladeshi SME customers who utilise online social media sites. The purpose of the research was to examine the significance of social media marketing in Bangladesh and how it influences customer purchase action. In the study's first phase, relevant literature research was conducted to thoroughly comprehend social media marketing techniques. After analysing previous research in the subject matter, the conceptual framework of the study was developed. This framework studied both the causes and consequences of social media marketing on consumer engagement. In the second phase, a cross-sectional quantitative data survey was constructed to evaluate the research framework and hypotheses. In a pilot test, 16 valid survey questionnaires were distributed to determine how social media is embedded in various situations and locations. The assumptions of the extended model were then verified with 329 valid surveys. The data were analysed through structural equation modelling (SEM). The research found a positive correlation between customer engagement and the social media marketing efforts of SMEs. Moreover, the statistically significant mediating influences of trust, perceived value, and social media antecedents on this connection were discovered. Furthermore, there was a substantial correlation between customer engagement and client acquisition, indicating that SMEs in Bangladesh might strengthen their customer interactions by using a social media marketing approach. This study also examines how social media marketing influences consumer behaviour, customer engagement, and consumer purchase action in Bangladesh's small and medium-sized enterprises. This study could help Bangladesh's SMEs interact with consumers on social media platforms and establish the framework for future research on the moderating influence of online consumer behaviour

    Managing healthcare transformation towards P5 medicine (Published in Frontiers in Medicine)

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    Health and social care systems around the world are facing radical organizational, methodological and technological paradigm changes to meet the requirements for improving quality and safety of care as well as efficiency and efficacy of care processes. In this they’re trying to manage the challenges of ongoing demographic changes towards aging, multi-diseased societies, development of human resources, a health and social services consumerism, medical and biomedical progress, and exploding costs for health-related R&D as well as health services delivery. Furthermore, they intend to achieve sustainability of global health systems by transforming them towards intelligent, adaptive and proactive systems focusing on health and wellness with optimized quality and safety outcomes. The outcome is a transformed health and wellness ecosystem combining the approaches of translational medicine, 5P medicine (personalized, preventive, predictive, participative precision medicine) and digital health towards ubiquitous personalized health services realized independent of time and location. It considers individual health status, conditions, genetic and genomic dispositions in personal social, occupational, environmental and behavioural context, thus turning health and social care from reactive to proactive. This requires the advancement communication and cooperation among the business actors from different domains (disciplines) with different methodologies, terminologies/ontologies, education, skills and experiences from data level (data sharing) to concept/knowledge level (knowledge sharing). The challenge here is the understanding and the formal as well as consistent representation of the world of sciences and practices, i.e. of multidisciplinary and dynamic systems in variable context, for enabling mapping between the different disciplines, methodologies, perspectives, intentions, languages, etc. Based on a framework for dynamically, use-case-specifically and context aware representing multi-domain ecosystems including their development process, systems, models and artefacts can be consistently represented, harmonized and integrated. The response to that problem is the formal representation of health and social care ecosystems through an system-oriented, architecture-centric, ontology-based and policy-driven model and framework, addressing all domains and development process views contributing to the system and context in question. Accordingly, this Research Topic would like to address this change towards 5P medicine. Specifically, areas of interest include, but are not limited: • A multidisciplinary approach to the transformation of health and social systems • Success factors for sustainable P5 ecosystems • AI and robotics in transformed health ecosystems • Transformed health ecosystems challenges for security, privacy and trust • Modelling digital health systems • Ethical challenges of personalized digital health • Knowledge representation and management of transformed health ecosystems Table of Contents: 04 Editorial: Managing healthcare transformation towards P5 medicine Bernd Blobel and Dipak Kalra 06 Transformation of Health and Social Care Systems—An Interdisciplinary Approach Toward a Foundational Architecture Bernd Blobel, Frank Oemig, Pekka Ruotsalainen and Diego M. Lopez 26 Transformed Health Ecosystems—Challenges for Security, Privacy, and Trust Pekka Ruotsalainen and Bernd Blobel 36 Success Factors for Scaling Up the Adoption of Digital Therapeutics Towards the Realization of P5 Medicine Alexandra Prodan, Lucas Deimel, Johannes Ahlqvist, Strahil Birov, Rainer Thiel, Meeri Toivanen, Zoi Kolitsi and Dipak Kalra 49 EU-Funded Telemedicine Projects – Assessment of, and Lessons Learned From, in the Light of the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic Laura Paleari, Virginia Malini, Gabriella Paoli, Stefano Scillieri, Claudia Bighin, Bernd Blobel and Mauro Giacomini 60 A Review of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in Transformed Health Ecosystems Kerstin Denecke and Claude R. Baudoin 73 Modeling digital health systems to foster interoperability Frank Oemig and Bernd Blobel 89 Challenges and solutions for transforming health ecosystems in low- and middle-income countries through artificial intelligence Diego M. López, Carolina Rico-Olarte, Bernd Blobel and Carol Hullin 111 Linguistic and ontological challenges of multiple domains contributing to transformed health ecosystems Markus Kreuzthaler, Mathias Brochhausen, Cilia Zayas, Bernd Blobel and Stefan Schulz 126 The ethical challenges of personalized digital health Els Maeckelberghe, Kinga Zdunek, Sara Marceglia, Bobbie Farsides and Michael Rigb
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