Interconnection between Scales for Friendly and Affordable Sustainable Urban Districts Retrofitting

The EU FP7 project FASUDIR (Friendly and Affordable Sustainable Urban Districts Retrofitting) supports the mobilization of the building retrofitting market towards 2020-2050 EU-targets through an Integrated Decision Support Tool (IDST), a software based on a new methodology that will help decision makers identify the best energy retrofitting strategy to increase the sustainability of the whole district. Improving the sustainability of urban environments is a interscalar problem, addressed through a multiscalar and multidirectional approach. A comprehensive urban scale strategy considers the working scale, but the measures at building scale have to be coherent with the global objectives at district and city scale. The FASUDIR IDST and methodology interconnect and visualize information across scales, ensuring comprehensive diagnoses and proper implementation of strategies. Due to the complexity of urban sustainability, interscalarity and multiscalarity, first it has been necessary to identify the possible scales of analysis, to capture various themes and to highlight the horizontal and vertical interconnections between different components. Multiscalarity and Interscalarity affect the three phases of the sustainable retrofitting cycle: diagnosis, decision making and management. The identification of the impact of district solutions on buildings (and vice versa) and their compatibility across scales has been addressed through interconnected building and district Key Performance Iindicators (KPIs). The intervention phases at building level generate new information about specific buildings, enabling more accurate decision making at district level. The methodology articulates the structure of the new information and the feedback generated during the process. To allow information interconnection a strategic information management is key. A multiscale information model based on CityGML, a standard data model issued by the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium), will be the baseline structure for all the district-scale information (geometric and semantic) that is necessary for decision making and management, organized into a single interoperable data model that will integrate information from different fields and at different levels of detail.European Commission's FP

ANCA-associated vasculitis in childhood: Recent advances

Abstract Anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA)-associated vasculitides are rare systemic diseases that usually occur in adulthood. They comprise granulomatosis with polyangiitis (GPA, Wegener’s), microscopic polyangiitis (MPA) and eosinophilic granulomatosis with polyangiitis (EGPA, Churg-Strauss syndrome). Their clinical presentation is often heterogeneous, with frequent involvement of the respiratory tract, the kidney, the skin and the joints. ANCA-associated vasculitis is rare in childhood but North-American and European cohort studies performed during the last decade have clarified their phenotype, patterns of renal involvement and their prognostic implications, and outcome. Herein, we review the main clinical and therapeutic aspects of childhood-onset ANCA-associated vasculitis, and provide preliminary data on demographic characteristics and organ manifestations of an Italian multicentre cohort

Computer Vision-based Reader for analogue Energy/Water Meters in low-cost embedded System: a Case Study in an Office Building in Scotland

Implementation of cost-effective energy conservation measures (ECMs) is expected to generate up to 18% of carbon emissions reductions in office buildings. In order to determine adequate ECMs for a specific building, operational data is required. However, buildings generally lack operational data in the form of time series that can limit a breath of analysis required for determining adequate ECMs. Energy time-series data is commonly lacking in the UK due to uneven availability of smart meters (heat, gas, water), security restrictions in Energy Information Systems (EIS) and building management systems (BMS), restrictions and costs associated for automated reporting from utility companies, etc. This work presents a non-intrusive computer vision-based reader to generate energy readings at 10-minute resolution using a Raspberry-Pi, a traditional webcam and an LED light. OpenCV, an open source computer vision library, is used to detect and interpret numeric values from a heat meter, which are in turn uploaded to a cloud-based energy platform to create a complete operational data set enabling detailed analytics, fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) and model calibration. A case study of an office building in Scotland is presented. The building has a heat meter with no remote access capabilities. The accuracy of the method, i.e. the ability of the script to accurately derive the rate of change between readings, resulted on a 92% percent during a test done for 100 samples. Recommendations for accuracy improvements are included in the conclusions

Methodology for a Socio-Technical Approach to Sharing Knowledge and Promoting Dialogue via Use of a Knowledge and Communication Platform

This paper outlines the methodology of a Knowledge and Communication Platform (KCP) as part of the Horizon2020 project Energy System Transition Through Stakeholder Activation, Education and Skills Development (ENTRUST). The ENTRUST project provides a mapping of Europe’s energy system and an in-depth understanding of how human behaviour around energy is shaped by both technological systems and socio-demographic factors. Central to the project is an in-depth engagement with six communities across Europe. The purpose of the KCP is to disseminate and share knowledge and to facilitate and promote dialogue on energy efficiency and transitioning to a low carbon system

Charged-particle multiplicity fluctuations in Pb–Pb collisions at √sNN = 2.76 TeV

Measurements of event-by-event fluctuations of charged-particle multiplicities in Pb–Pb collisions at sNN−−−√ = 2.76 TeV using the ALICE detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are presented in the pseudorapidity range |η|<0.8 and transverse momentum 0.2<pT<2.0 GeV/c. The amplitude of the fluctuations is expressed in terms of the variance normalized by the mean of the multiplicity distribution. The η and pT dependences of the fluctuations and their evolution with respect to collision centrality are investigated. The multiplicity fluctuations tend to decrease from peripheral to central collisions. The results are compared to those obtained from HIJING and AMPT Monte Carlo event generators as well as to experimental data at lower collision energies. Additionally, the measured multiplicity fluctuations are discussed in the context of the isothermal compressibility of the high-density strongly-interacting system formed in central Pb–Pb collisions