Turkey's grand challenge: Disaster-proof building inventory within 20 years

AbstractTurkey is located in a high seismicity region and has suffered extensive losses due to several major earthquakes that struck its various parts in the past two decades. While earthquakes are associated with damage and loss wherever they may occur, the destructive effects of those in Turkey are exacerbated by the large volume of code incompliant buildings constructed with poor materials and workmanship. As a large scale remedial initiative, Turkey has recently embarked upon a grand challenge of retrofitting or renewing all high-risk buildings within the next 20 years. This multi-million building and multi-billion dollar initiative has inevitably raised activity and debates in diverse disciplines regarding all aspects. This paper focuses on the methodologies and developing technologies for rapid condition assessment and structural evaluation of existing buildings in order to identify and prioritize high-risk buildings and for guiding decisions on retrofitting or renewal

Automatic Prediction of Impressions in Time and across Varying Context: Personality, Attractiveness and Likeability

© 2010-2012 IEEE. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal framework for automatically predicting the impressions of extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism , openness, attractiveness and likeability continuously in time and across varying situational contexts. Differently from the existing works, we obtain visual-only and audio-only annotations continuously in time for the same set of subjects, for the first time in the literature, and compare them to their audio-visual annotations. We propose a time-continuous prediction approach that learns the temporal relationships rather than treating each time instant separately. Our experiments show that the best prediction results are obtained when regression models are learned from audio-visual annotations and visual cues, and from audio-visual annotations and visual cues combined with audio cues at the decision level. Continuously generated annotations have the potential to provide insight into better understanding which impressions can be formed and predicted more dynamically, varying with situational context, and which ones appear to be more static and stable over time.This research work was supported by the EPSRC MAPTRAITS Project (Grant Ref: EP/K017500/1) and the EPSRC HARPS Project under its IDEAS Factory Sandpits call on Digital Personhood (Grant Ref: EP/L00416X/1)

Effect of the deposition time on optical and electrical properties of semiconductor ZnS thin films prepared by chemical bath deposition

Semiconductor ZnS thin films have been deposited by a chemical bath deposition (CBD) on a glass substrate at 80 °C with different deposition time (4, 6 and 8 h). The films have been further studied in order to determine the change in optical and electrical properties as a function of deposition time. The film thicknesses have been calculated between 210–1375 nm by using gravimetrical analysis. The optical properties of ZnS thin films have been determined by transmittance (%T) and absorbance (A) measurements by UV-Vis spectroscopy operated wavelength range between 300 and 1100 nm at room temperature. The optical transmittance values of ZnS thin films in the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum have been found to be between 51–90%. The calculations indicate that the refractive index (n) in the visible region is between 1.40 and 2.45. The optical band gaps (Eg) of thin films have been calculated between 3.61–3.88 eV while the band edge sharpness values (B) are varied between 6.95×109–8.96×1010 eV/cm2. The specific resistivity values (ρ) of the films are found to be between 1.08×105–1.01×106 Ω·cm and exhibit an n-type conductivity by Hall measurement

Automatic Replication of Teleoperator Head Movements and Facial Expressions on a Humanoid Robot

Robotic telepresence aims to create a physical presence for a remotely located human (teleoperator) by reproducing their verbal and nonverbal behaviours (e.g. speech, gestures, facial expressions) on a robotic platform. In this work, we propose a novel teleoperation system that combines the replication of facial expressions of emotions (neutral, disgust, happiness, and surprise) and head movements on the fly on the humanoid robot Nao. Robots' expression of emotions is constrained by their physical and behavioural capabilities. As the Nao robot has a static face, we use the LEDs located around its eyes to reproduce the teleoperator expressions of emotions. Using a web camera, we computationally detect the facial action units and measure the head pose of the operator. The emotion to be replicated is inferred from the detected action units by a neural network. Simultaneously, the measured head motion is smoothed and bounded to the robot's physical limits by applying a constrained-state Kalman filter. In order to evaluate the proposed system, we conducted a user study by asking 28 participants to use the replication system by displaying facial expressions and head movements while being recorded by a web camera. Subsequently, 18 external observers viewed the recorded clips via an online survey and assessed the quality of the robot's replication of the participants' behaviours. Our results show that the proposed teleoperation system can successfully communicate emotions and head movements, resulting in a high agreement among the external observers (ICC_E = 0.91, ICC_HP = 0.72).This work was funded by the EPSRC under its IDEAS Factory Sandpits call on Digital Personhood (Grant Ref· EP/L00416X/1)

Automated optimization for broadband flat-gain antenna designs with artificial neural network

An automated optimization process for designing and optimising high-performance single microstrip antennas is presented. It consists of the successive use of two optimization methods, bottom-up optimization (BUO) and Bayesian optimization (BO), which are applied sequentially, resulting in electromagnetic (EM)-based artificial neural network modelling. The BUO method is applied for the initial design of the structure of the antennas whereas the BO approach is successively implemented to predict suitable dimensional parameters, leading to broadband, high flat-gain antennas. The optimization process is performed automatically with the combination of an electronic design automation tool and a numerical analyser. The proposed method is easy to use; it allows one to perform the design with little experience, because both structure modelling and sizing are performed automatically. To verify the power of the proposed EM-based method experimentally, two single microstrip antennas have been designed, optimised, fabricated, and measured. The first antenna has flat-gain performance (6.9–7.2 dB) in a frequency band of 8.8–10 GHz. The second has been designed to perform in the 8.7- to 10-GHz band, where it exhibits flat-gain performance with reduced fluctuation in the range of 6.7–7 dB. The experimental results are in good agreement with the numerical data

High carrier concentration induced effects on the bowing parameter and the temperature dependence of the band gap of Ga_xIn_1−xN

The influence of intrinsic carrier concentration on the compositional and temperature dependence of the bandgap of GaxIn1-xN is investigated in nominally undoped samples with Ga fractions of x = 0.019, 0.062, 0.324, 0.52, and 0.56. Hall Effect results show that the free carrier density has a very weak temperature dependence and increases about a factor of 4, when the Ga composition increases from x = 0.019 to 0.56. The photoluminescence (PL) peak energy has also weak temperature dependence shifting to higher energies and the PL line shape becomes increasingly asymmetrical and broadens with increasing Ga composition. The observed characteristics of the PL spectra are explained in terms of the transitions from free electron to localized tail states and the high electron density induced many-body effects. The bowing parameter of GaxIn1-xN is obtained from the raw PL data as 2.5 eV. However, when the high carrier density induced effects are taken into account, it increases by about 14% to 2.9 eV. Furthermore, the temperature dependence of the PL peak becomes more pronounced and follows the expected temperature dependence of the bandgap variation

Evaluation of vertebral artery dominance, hypoplasia and variations in the origin: angiographic study in 254 patients

Background: The aim of this study was to determine the dimensional characteristics and variations in the origin of vertebral arteries (VA). Materials and methods: We retrospectively reviewed angiographic studies in 254 patients (133 males, 121 females) for the evaluation of diameter differences in VA. We examined different criteria from the literature (difference of ≥ 0.3 mm, ≥ 0.8 mm, ≥ 1 mm between the widths of two VA and diameter ratio more than 1.4) to find out the dominant VA, rate of co-dominance and hypoplasia. The differences among groups were analysed using the c2 and Kruskal-Wallis test. Also concordance analysis test was used to determine correspondence between the tests. We also noticed the variations in the origin of VA. Results: The average diameter of VA in 254 patients was 3.21 ± 0.7 mm on the right, and 3.16 ± 0.7 mm on the left. The average diameter difference was found 0.88 ± 0.7 mm. The rate of hypoplasia was found 7.1% on the right and 9.4% on the left. Among 254 patients according to the criterion of any diameter difference; right side was found wider in 126 (49.6%) patients and left side was found wider in 120 (47.2%) patients. The criterion of 0.3 mm or greater difference showed right VA dominance in 107 (42.1%) patients, left VA dominance in 99 (39%) patients. Co-dominance was mainly observed when we used the criteria of 0.8 mm and 1 mm or greater difference and diameter ratio more than 1.4. We found out harmony of two criterion of difference of ≥ 0.8 mm and ≥ 1 mm (concordance analysis test, 76.1%). There was no statistically significant relation between age, gender and any dominance criteria (p > 0.05). The majority of VA showed classical origin arising from both subclavian arteries with a rate of 94.9%. Conclusions: The most striking result we have found is the dominance of the right VA in diameter by using all different criteria unlike with previous reports in the literature.

Optimization for wideband linear array antenna through bottom-up method

This paper presents an automated design methodology for electromagnetic- based (EM-based) optimization of an array antenna by applying bottom-up approach. Firstly, one single antenna is optimized then bottom-up optimization (BUO) method has been implemented by increasing the number of single antennas, sequentially. The proposed method leads to automatically find an optimal array by setting the distance between single antennas. The optimization method is performed in an automated environment with the help of an electronic design automation (EDA) tool and a numerical analyzer. The results of the final design have been compared by means of two EDA tools such as ADS and HFSS. The optimized array antenna works in the frequency band from 12.9 GHz to 14.3 GHz. It offers a linear gain performance higher than 7.5 dB. The simulations in both ADS and HFSS tools illustrate a good match in S-parameter and gain simulation output results

Fully Automatic Analysis of Engagement and Its Relationship to Personality in Human-Robot Interactions

Engagement is crucial to designing intelligent systems that can adapt to the characteristics of their users. This paper focuses on automatic analysis and classification of engagement based on humans’ and robot’s personality profiles in a triadic human-human-robot interaction setting. More explicitly, we present a study that involves two participants interacting with a humanoid robot, and investigate how participants’ personalities can be used together with the robot’s personality to predict the engagement state of each participant. The fully automatic system is firstly trained to predict the Big Five personality traits of each participant by extracting individual and interpersonal features from their nonverbal behavioural cues. Secondly, the output of the personality prediction system is used as an input to the engagement classification system. Thirdly, we focus on the concept of “group engagement”, which we define as the collective engagement of the participants with the robot, and analyse the impact of similar and dissimilar personalities on the engagement classification. Our experimental results show that (i) using the automatically predicted personality labels for engagement classification yields an F-measure on par with using the manually annotated personality labels, demonstrating the effectiveness of the automatic personality prediction module proposed; (ii) using the individual and interpersonal features without utilising personality information is not sufficient for engagement classification, instead incorporating the participants’ and robot’s personalities with individual/interpersonal features increases engagement classification performance; and (iii) the best classification performance is achieved when the participants and the robot are extroverted, while the worst results are obtained when all are introverted.This work was performed within the Labex SMART project (ANR-11-LABX-65) supported by French state funds managed by the ANR within the Investissements d’Avenir programme under reference ANR-11-IDEX-0004-02. The work of Oya Celiktutan and Hatice Gunes is also funded by the EPSRC under its IDEAS Factory Sandpits call on Digital Personhood (Grant Ref.: EP/L00416X/1).This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers via http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2016.261452