966 research outputs found
Enhancing personalised thermal comfort models with Active Learning for improved HVAC controls
Developing personalised thermal comfort models to inform occupant-centric
controls (OCC) in buildings requires collecting large amounts of real-time
occupant preference data. This process can be highly intrusive and
labour-intensive for large-scale implementations, limiting the practicality of
real-world OCC implementations. To address this issue, this study proposes a
thermal preference-based HVAC control framework enhanced with Active Learning
(AL) to address the data challenges related to real-world implementations of
such OCC systems. The proposed AL approach proactively identifies the most
informative thermal conditions for human annotation and iteratively updates a
supervised thermal comfort model. The resulting model is subsequently used to
predict the occupants' thermal preferences under different thermal conditions,
which are integrated into the building's HVAC controls. The feasibility of our
proposed AL-enabled OCC was demonstrated in an EnergyPlus simulation of a
real-world testbed supplemented with the thermal preference data of 58 study
occupants. The preliminary results indicated a significant reduction in overall
labelling effort (i.e., 31.0%) between our AL-enabled OCC and conventional OCC
while still achieving a slight increase in energy savings (i.e., 1.3%) and
thermal satisfaction levels above 98%. This result demonstrates the potential
for deploying such systems in future real-world implementations, enabling
personalised comfort and energy-efficient building operations.Comment: CISBAT202
Evaluating the Envelope Performance of Commercial Office Buildings in Cities
Master'sMASTER OF SCIENCE (BUILDING
Development of vaccines against dengue virus: Use of Lactococcus lactis as a mucosal vaccine delivery vehicle
Master'sJOINT M.SC. IN INFECTIOUS DISEASES, VACCINOLOGY AND DRUG DISCOVER
'She is like a Yakshini' : character construction via aggressive humour in Chinese sitcom discourse
This paper looks at the importance of aggressive humour in the discursive construction of a ‘Yakshini’ character in a popular Chinese sitcom, Ipartment. The exaggerated, aggressive nature of such a stereotypical character undermines traditional cultural norms of Chinese femininity. Such characterisation of a heroine through aggressive humour in a popular sitcom reflects the fact that empowering women has become (or is becoming) more acceptable in contemporary China
Shallow quantum circuits for efficient preparation of Slater determinants and correlated states on a quantum computer
Preparing quantum ansatzes is a necessary prerequisite in many quantum
algorithms for quantum chemistry such as the variational quantum eigensolver.
Widely-used ansatzes including the Slater determinants and Unitary Coupled
Cluster, employ parameterized fermionic excitation gates, with the latter
resulting in deep quantum circuits that scale at least polynomially with the
system size . Here we propose an alternate paradigm for fermionic ansatz
state preparation inspired by data-loading circuits methods developed for
quantum machine learning. Our approach provides a shallower, yet scalable
two-qubit gate depth preparation of -fermion Slater
determinants and correlated states, a subexponential improvement in gate depth
over existing approaches. This is particularly important as it can be
implemented on planar architectures without qubit swapping overheads, thereby
enabling the use of larger basis sets needed for high-precision quantum
chemistry studies on near-term quantum devices.Comment: 7+4 pages, 4 figure
Longitudinal thermal imaging for scalable non-residential HVAC and occupant behaviour characterization
This work presents a study on the characterization of the air-conditioning
(AC) usage pattern of non-residential buildings from thermal images collected
from an urban-scale infrared (IR) observatory. To achieve this first, an image
processing scheme, for cleaning and extraction of the temperature time series
from the thermal images is implemented. To test the accuracy of the thermal
measurements using IR camera, the extracted temperature is compared against the
ground truth surface temperature measurements. It is observed that the
detrended thermal measurements match well with the ground truth surface
temperature measurements. Subsequently, the operational pattern of the
water-cooled systems and window AC units are extracted from the analysis of the
thermal signature. It is observed that for the water-cooled system, the
difference between the rate of change of the window and wall can be used to
extract the operational pattern. While, in the case of the window AC units,
wavelet transform of the AC unit temperature is used to extract the frequency
and time domain information of the AC unit operation. The results of the
analysis are compared against the indoor temperature sensors installed in the
office spaces of the building. It is realized that the accuracy in the
prediction of the operational pattern is highest between 8 pm to 10 am, and it
reduces during the day because of solar radiation and high daytime temperature.
Subsequently, a characterization study is conducted for eight window/split AC
units from the thermal image collected during the nighttime. This forms one of
the first studies on the operational behavior of HVAC systems for
non-residential buildings using the longitudinal thermal imaging technique. The
output from this study can be used to better understand the operational and
occupant behavior, without requiring to deploy a large array of sensors in the
building space
BIM-to-BRICK: Using graph modeling for IoT/BMS and spatial semantic data interoperability within digital data models of buildings
The holistic management of a building requires data from heterogeneous
sources such as building management systems (BMS), Internet-of-Things (IoT)
sensor networks, and building information models. Data interoperability is a
key component to eliminate silos of information, and using semantic web
technologies like the BRICK schema, an effort to standardize semantic
descriptions of the physical, logical, and virtual assets in buildings and the
relationships between them, is a suitable approach. However, current data
integration processes can involve significant manual interventions. This paper
presents a methodology to automatically collect, assemble, and integrate
information from a building information model to a knowledge graph. The
resulting application, called BIM-to-BRICK, is run on the SDE4 building located
in Singapore. BIM-to-BRICK generated a bidirectional link between a BIM model
of 932 instances and experimental data collected for 17 subjects into 458 BRICK
objects and 1219 relationships in 17 seconds. The automation of this approach
can be compared to traditional manual mapping of data types. This scientific
innovation incentivizes the convergence of disparate data types and structures
in built-environment applications
Nucleotide Excision Repair Genes are Upregulated by Low-Dose Artificial Ultraviolet B: Evidence of a Photoprotective SOS Response?
Nucleotide excision repair is a major mechanism of defense against the carcinogenic effects of ultraviolet light. Ultraviolet B causes sunburn and DNA damage in human skin. Nucleotide excision repair has been studied extensively and described in detail at the molecular level, including identification of many nucleotide excision repair-specific proteins and the genes encoding nucleotide excision repair proteins. In this study, normal human keratinocytes were exposed to increasing doses of ultraviolet B from fluorescent sunlamps, and the effect of this exposure on expression of nucleotide excision repair genes was examined. An RNase protection assay was performed to quantify transcripts from nucleotide excision repair genes, and a slot blot DNA repair activity assay was used to assess induction of the nucleotide excision repair pathway. The activity assay demonstrated that cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers were removed efficiently after exposure to low doses of ultraviolet B, but this activity was delayed significantly at higher doses. All nucleotide excision repair genes examined demonstrated a similar trend: ultraviolet B induces expression of nucleotide excision repair genes at low doses, but downregulates expression at higher doses. In addition, we show that pre-exposure of cells to low-dose ultraviolet protected keratinocytes from apoptosis following high-dose exposure. These data support the notion that nucleotide excision repair is induced in cells exposed to low doses of ultraviolet B, which may protect damaged keratinocytes from cell death; however, exposure to high doses of ultraviolet B downregulates nucleotide excision repair genes and is associated with cell death
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