A Trustworthy Approach to the Adaptive Composition of GeoServices

AbstractFor the automatic generation of geographical information service chain, this article defines the quality of service (QoS) metrics based on service response time, reliability, and matching degree, among others, and the error propagation model. Based on the semantic matching and trustworthiness assessment of the geographical information services, this article proposes a trustworthy adaptive composition framework and implementation algorithm for geographical information services, ensuring the composition of service chains to better meet various QoS constraints. The effectiveness of this approach is proven in the simulation experiments

Dynamic evaluation of daylight availability in a highly-dense Chinese residential area with a cold climate

Daylight utilization in urban areas is receiving increasing attention from urban planners and developers, architects and engineers. This study investigated the daylighting availability within buildings of a highly dense residential urban area under a cold climate in north-east China. Based on innovative simulations using climate-based daylight modelling (CBDM), three typical urban layouts have been assessed according to vertical daylight illuminance at the building facade. A comprehensive analysis of daylighting potential has been completed through various approaches including typical time (9 a.m., 12 p.m. and 3 p.m.), yearly average daylight illuminance and a proposed external daylight metric based on the frequency. Several interesting relationships are found between daylighting potential, urban forms, and climate conditions. A number of design strategies and guidelines are produced to support early stage urban planning and desig

AdaStreamLite: Environment-adaptive Streaming Speech Recognition on Mobile Devices

Streaming speech recognition aims to transcribe speech to text in a streaming manner, providing real-time speech interaction for smartphone users. However, it is not trivial to develop a high-performance streaming speech recognition system purely running on mobile platforms, due to the complex real-world acoustic environments and the limited computational resources of smartphones. Most existing solutions lack the generalization to unseen environments and have difficulty to work with streaming speech. In this paper, we design AdaStreamLite, an environment-adaptive streaming speech recognition tool for smartphones. AdaStreamLite interacts with its surroundings to capture the characteristics of the current acoustic environment to improve the robustness against ambient noise in a lightweight manner. We design an environment representation extractor to model acoustic environments with compact feature vectors, and construct a representation lookup table to improve the generalization of AdaStreamLite to unseen environments. We train our system using large speech datasets publicly available covering different languages. We conduct experiments in a large range of real acoustic environments with different smartphones. The results show that AdaStreamLite outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of recognition accuracy, computational resource consumption and robustness against unseen environments

Glazing type (colour and transmittance), daylighting, and human performances at a workspace: A full-scale experiment in Beijing

This study presents a human experiment of effects of glazing types (colour and transmittance) on participants' alertness and mood, working performance, and self-reported satisfaction in a full-scale office in Beijing, China. Seven glazing systems were tested in a winter period (17th Nov 2017–15th Jan 2018). Research methods included lighting measurements, KSS (Karolinska Sleepiness Scale) sleepiness evaluation, PANAS (Positive and Negative Affect Schedule) mood survey, reaction time test (GO/NOGO), and self-reported questionnaires. Key findings are as follows: Circadian Stimulus (CS) can be used as an indicator of alertness and mood in a daylit workspace. If a higher CS level (≥0.3) can be achieved, glazing colour and transmittance would not significantly affect human's alertness and sleepiness. A low CS level (<0.3) would bring in significant negative mood to occupants. On the other hand, the improvement of occupants' mood would be achieved through increasing glazing visual transmittance and/or decreasing its colour saturation. Self-reported satisfactions show that a preference will be given to the glazing systems with neutral colour and/or higher transmittance in terms of visual performance. It is unknown why the glazing systems with a medium CCT of 4400 K or a higher CCT of 8100 K can deliver shorter response time (RT) and better working performance in a reaction time task. It would be necessary to carry on investigations into the human performances and light colour, especially under daylighting conditions

The potential of circadian lighting in office buildings using a fibre optics daylighting system in Beijing

This study presents an investigation of circadian lighting potential for a fibre optics daylighting system (FODS) in a single office in Beijing, China. Research methods included the monitoring of FODS daylighting performance during a 11-month period, the indoor lighting simulations at the horizontal workplane and vertical planes using a single office model, and thus the theoretical calculations of circadian stimulus brought by the FODS. Key findings are as follows: There is a high possibility that a proper level of circadian light at a windowless workspace could be achieved through applying the FODS in northern China. With this FODS, the non-visual effect of lighting (circadian system entrainment) can be attained when a standard lighting requirement was met at the horizontal workplane based on occupants' visual performance in this office. Compared with typical artificial lighting systems, the FODS can deliver circadian light in a more efficient way. In addition, it can be found that the application of FODS system would benefit office workers in terms of both visual and non-visual aspects. It is the first study to investigate the non-visual performance of a fibre optics daylighting system

Biophilia and Visual Preference for Chinese Vernacular Windows: An Investigation into Shape

This study conducted a psychological experiment to test if there are differences of visual preference between 18 Chinese vernacular windows, and which biophilic factors can substantially affect the preference. The experiment recruited 95 Chinese adults to rate images of these windows on three biophilic qualities (perceived shape complexity, biomorphic form, fascination) and the visual preference. To summarize, the achieved results exposed some interesting findings. 1) Effects of window shapes on visual preference were significant, whereas geometric properties of these windows, such as the ratio of height-to-width and compactness, cannot deliver significant impact on the preference. 2) The visual preference for these windows with both urban and nature views was positively correlated with the three biophilic factors. 3) There was no association between perceived shape complexity and visual preference of windows without any views. 4) Apart from the rectangular window, the visual preference for these windows received no significant effects from the view