The case for new academic workspaces

Executive summary: This report draws upon the combined efforts of a number of estates professionals, architects, academics, designers, and senior managers involved in the planning of new university buildings for the 21st century. Across these perspectives, all would agree – although perhaps for different reasons - that this planning is difficult and that a number of particular considerations apply in the design of academic workspaces. Despite these difficulties, they will also agree that when this planning goes well, ‘good’ buildings are truly transformational – for both the university as a whole and the people who work and study in them. The value of well-designed buildings goes far beyond their material costs, and endures long after those costs have been forgotten ..

Reflecting on loss in Papua New Guinea

This article takes up the conundrum of conducting anthropological fieldwork with people who claim that they have 'lost their culture,' as is the case with Suau people in the Massim region of Papua New Guinea. But rather than claiming culture loss as a process of dispossession, Suau claim it as a consequence of their own attempts to engage with colonial interests. Suau appear to have responded to missionization and their close proximity to the colonial-era capital by jettisoning many of the practices characteristic of Massim societies, now identified as 'kastom.' The rejection of kastom in order to facilitate their relations with Europeans during colonialism, followed by the mourning for kastom after independence, both invite consideration of a kind of reflexivity that requires action based on the presumed perspective of another

Temporal decorrelation of collective oscillations in neural networks with local inhibition and long-range excitation

We consider two neuronal networks coupled by long-range excitatory interactions. Oscillations in the gamma frequency band are generated within each network by local inhibition. When long-range excitation is weak, these oscillations phase-lock with a phase-shift dependent on the strength of local inhibition. Increasing the strength of long-range excitation induces a transition to chaos via period-doubling or quasi-periodic scenarios. In the chaotic regime oscillatory activity undergoes fast temporal decorrelation. The generality of these dynamical properties is assessed in firing-rate models as well as in large networks of conductance-based neurons.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures. accepted for publication in Physical Review Letter

BIM’s role in improving the management and delivery of occupational safety and health and saving lives in construction

Published in BIM Coordinators Summit Magazine.Despite improvements and modernizations in construction processes, accidents are still persistent and have considerable financial and logistical impacts on projects. The UK HSE recently revealed that there were 145 work-related deaths in 2022/23 with the highest number of 45 occurring in construction. Research has shown that the lack of digital OHS information is a significant factor contributing to the poor performance of OHS management in construction. BIM applied to OSH management has not yet yielded the same benefits as other BIM applications, such as in architectural or structural design, or project management. However, scientific literature indicates that BIM has the potential to optimize OSH management and that the construction industry, especially major projects and larger general contractors, are starting to adopt these kinds of technologies for use in OSH management. BIM has a great potential for the planning of OSH and its use at the early stages of the project has been linked to an improvement in safety conditions. Standardization of BIM for OSH is rapidly progressing. Digital4OSH is preparing a novel solution in the form of a BIM4OSH Observatory designed to enable the observation and monitoring of implementation, trends and dynamics of BIM implementation for OSH and to enable the exchange of lessons learned about BIM for OSH. The adoption of BIM paves the way for a paradigm shift in OSH management, providing stronger links between production and safety. Therefore, any initiative that improves the take up of BIM for OSH in order to reduce accidents and deaths will be very important and considered welcomed by the wider construction community

BIM4OHS observatory: central repository to monitor the status of BIM implementation for OSH: purposed architecture

DOI livro: 10.24840/978-972-752-309-2Key Technological Developments (KTDs), in recent years, have led to a step change in dealing with Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) risk management. Building Information Modelling (BIM), part of a wider trend of applying digital technology in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operation (AECO) sector, has the potential to optimize the management of risks and costs of accidents at work and occupational diseases. Understanding the way OSH management can be improved using BIM is important as new processes and standards need to be created and existing procedures adapted. Currently there is no centralized sharing mechanism where countries, companies or projects can share lessons learned to help their implementation. Furthermore, there is no formal mechanism to observe and monitor trends and dynamics in the use of BIM for OSH at National, European or industry levels. Digital4OSH is a research group comprised of multidisciplinary academics and industry partners whose aim is to encourage the use of KTDs to improve OSH outcomes. Following a pilot study carried in a complex infrastructure megaproject in UK, this group proposes the development of an Observatory to overcome these gaps. The Observatory would be built on a web-based platform that can be used to obtain statistical longitudinal OSH data and provide information about the progress of national and European implementation of BIM for OSH (through dashboards); to capture, centralize and share (through factsheets) lessons learned from previous projects; to create a repository of technical and scientific information

Development of an innovative framework for clients' requirements information management in construction projects

Properly managing client requirements information can contribute to high construction productivity and improve the quality of built facilities. This paper presents an innovative framework which defines a life-cycle approach to managing client requirements information. The Enterprise Requirements Information Management Framework (eRIM) introduces an approach to managing client requirements throughout a project lifecycle. It defines an information-centric and process-oriented approach to requirements management and describes how Information Technology (IT) / Information Systems (IS) can serve as support tool. It supports life-cycle requirements information availability, facilitates coordination, enables visibility, traceability and dependency checking which is crucial for analysing the impact of proposed changes in requirements. The paper includes findings from three case studies of construction projects through observations of meetings and interviews with selected construction practitioners. The results indicate that implementation and incorporation of the framework in construction projects could contribute towards improved performance and more efficient and effective client requirements management

XMLTK: An XML Toolkit for Scalable XML Stream Processing

We describe a toolkit for highly scalable XML data processing, consisting of two components. The first is a collection of stand-alone XML tools, s.a. sort- ing, aggregation, nesting, and unnesting, that can be chained to express more complex restructurings. The second is a highly scalable XPath processor for XML streams that can be used to develop scalable solutions for XML stream applications. In this paper we dis- cuss the tools, and some of the techniques we used to achieve high scalability. The toolkit is freely available as an open-source project

Lifecycle approach to requirements information management in construction projects: state-of-the-art and future trends

Changes in client requirements are most frequent in construction and are known to contribute to budget over-runs and late delivery of projects. Such changes need to be managed adequately to enhance visibility, traceability and linked to the original requirements and communication with all stakeholders throughout the lifecycle of a facility. Traditionally, requirements management has principally been focused at the early stages of the construction process where elicited client requirements information is used as the basis for design and does not extend to the later phases. A life cycle approach is important because client requirements often change dramatically over a facility’s life. This evolution needs to be understood, for example, particularly if the facility is to be refurbished or adapted for uses other than those for which it was originally designed. This paper presents an empirical study to highlight the current state of managing clients’ requirements and to propose the need for a lifecycle approach to requirements information management in construction projects. An ethnographic study was conducted to examine the requirements management process based on participatory observations of construction project meetings and interviews with project managers. The study also details the state-of-the-art of requirements management by presenting a qualitative review of literature on this topic. This review includes industries other than construction. The paper concludes that currently, with no lifecycle insight, very few informal schemes detail the management of requirements beyond the design process into the later stages of the project. It proposes that the management of requirements should extend beyond elicitation and documentation and requires an approach that will enable changeability and impact analysis, accessibility, traceability and communication to all stakeholders

An integrated requirements management system for construction projects

Within the AEC/FM Industry, the current paper-based system used to manage client requirements information and the change request process lacks efficiency and effectiveness. Traditionally, requirements management has principally been focused at the early stages of a construction project where elicited client requirements information is used as the basis for design and does not extend to later phases. Links between corresponding requirements at different phases do not exist which makes traceability difficult. There are no methods to keep track of client requirements and the changes in a satisfactory way that take a whole lifecycle approach. Construction organisations, like other engineering related businesses, are turning to computer systems (to replace current manual and paper intensive processes) in their quest for practical ways to facilitate requirements information management. This paper presents a prototype system for client requirements information management taking a whole lifecycle approach. It comprises of integrated components made up of a repository and change management system (CMS). The prototype was developed following case studies of construction projects and interviews with construction experts in order to fully understand the need for such a system. The applicability and effectiveness of the prototype will be validated using a focus group made up of various construction stakeholders and academic practitioners

BPM-driven construction client requirements change management

Changing client requirements is one of the principal factors that contribute to delays and budget overruns of construction projects which as a result causes claims, disputes and client dissatisfaction. Change management ensures that such changes are handled through a properly coordinated and controlled process and retained throughout the project life cycle. This paper presents an empirical study that investigated the potential for an automated process of managing changes to clients’ requirements in construction projects. An initial focus group meeting was set up as a preliminary study which was followed by two case studies. Participant observation was used to conduct the case studies during which technical documents were also reviewed. The results show that current requirements change management process lacks efficiency. The paper concludes that business process management (BPM) approach could be a solution to better manage the requirements change process