Project Organizational Culture Framework in Construction Industry

Project organizational culture (POC) has been recognized as a significant influencing factor of the success or failure of a project. Although numerous studies on this topic have been conducted to develop organizational culture models, these have mainly been for generic business settings, and one has not yet been developed for construction organizations at the project level. The aim of this chapter was to perform this task in Vietnam. A case study shows that cultural artifacts were arranged into a five-factor project organizational culture framework: “Project goal setting,” “Contractor assurance,” “Cooperative emphasis,” “Empowerment assignment,” and “Workforce emphasis.” The chapter’s findings suggest that the construction contracting organizations are more focused on the culture of mission and adaptability, with a relatively higher emphasis on clear project goals and contractor assurance. They favored a culture of involvement less, with a relatively lower emphasis on empowerment and workforce

Towards Cloud Agnostic Quantum-Classical Hybrid Computing

Quantum classical hybrid computing is a paradigm which describes systems of classical and quantum computers that enable running quantum algorithms and hybrid algorithms consisting of classical and quantum parts in a programmable interface. Such quantum classical hybrid systems are provided by popular cloud computing providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud and IBM, to name a few. Using these services, researchers can access either real quantum computers or high-performance quantum simulators without owning the expensive hardware. However, each service comes a different set of available features, capabilities and, for example, supported set of basic quantum gates. Thus it is important to understand the differences between each service's provided capabilities when choosing a suitable cloud provider to run a quantum circuit. Managing cloud-provisioned infrastructure is an issue that should also be solved. One possible solution to such issue is to deterministically manage the cloud infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) methodology. The methodology enables declarative and deterministic approach to manage and provision cloud infrastructure via human-readable definition files. Abstraction is one additional benefit of using IaC, which means IaC definitions can be designed to be independent of cloud service providers, or cloud-agnostic. The purpose of this thesis is to designs an Infrastructure-as-code definition in Terraform language to manage cloud infrastructure from AWS and Azure. The definition is designed to enable an easy switch between such services. The thesis also explores and compares 2 above mentioned cloud providers. In particular, the thesis focuses on each provider's capabilities and efficiency of designing and running different quantum circuits

Indoor assistance for visually impaired people using a RGB-D camera

In this paper a navigational aid for visually impaired people is presented. The system uses a RGB-D camera to perceive the environment and implements self-localization, obstacle detection and obstacle classification. The novelty of this work is threefold. First, self-localization is performed by means of a novel camera tracking approach that uses both depth and color information. Second, to provide the user with semantic information, obstacles are classified as walls, doors, steps and a residual class that covers isolated objects and bumpy parts on the floor. Third, in order to guarantee real time performance, the system is accelerated by offloading parallel operations to the GPU. Experiments demonstrate that the whole system is running at 9 Hz

The Ethereum blockchain: Use cases for social finance applications

Centralized network solution have been around for a long time, despite having a considerable issue of trust, in which users need to rely on the implementation of the system. During unfortunate incidents such as centralized server hacking attacks, users' data can be stolen and distorted, as well as not available while requested. Blockchain is discovered and believed to be a distributed network solution which can mitigate the above issue. This bachelor's thesis studies how blockchain network can be integrated into a social financial mobile application. The research is completed by developing a smart contract and connect it with the mobile application. The smart contract is written in the Solidity programming language and run on the Ethereum network

Modelling, simulation and behaviour of sloshing liquid-tank-ship coupled system

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Upper Primary Students' Perceptions of Small Group Learning in Learning Vietnamese Language

The purpose of this study was to investigate the perceptions of upper-year students in Vietnamese primary schools about learning in small groups when studying Vietnamese language in comparison to traditional methods. Students’ perceptions of small group learning were explored through examination of five main factors: benefits, difficulties, group types, individual accountability, and group assessment. An interpretive approach was used to explore the topic, from which data were collected in a two-phase multi-case study using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Four classes of three primary schools in Ho Chi Minh City, having different applications of small groups in learning, were selected for observation and survey by questionnaire. Twenty four students from the first phase of the study varying in gender and learning achievement were chosen for face-to-face interviews to examine more in-depth their perceptions about small group learning. To improve the trustworthiness of the research, teachers from these classes and principles of the schools were interviewed to obtain a more accurate overview of the research. The study found that overall, Vietnamese upper-primary students preferred to learning in small groups to the traditional whole-class model despite the differences in implementing small group learning in each school. The results showed a positive concurrence with existing literature on the main findings, such as the three main benefits to students’ outcomes (e.g. academic achievement, social skills, and attitudes); and some inevitable difficulties when using this method for learning (e.g. time management, isolation and lack of group skills). The students’ choices of group types also reflected the current international students’ perceptions (e.g. preference for heterogeneous ability but homogeneous gender group). The research also presented some interesting points unique to the Vietnamese context which might enrich the current literature of students’ perceptions of small group learning. They were the preference for large group sizes, the two-aspects of leadership, the preference for whole-group assessment, and the suitability of this method for learning Vietnamese language rather than other subjects. The research also showed the underlying influences of the desire for better achievement, the consideration for others’ feelings and the collective cultural context on Vietnamese upper primary students’ views of small group learning in learning Vietnamese language. The relationships between students’ gender and achievement to their perceptions of small group learning were also mentioned and described though these were not strong enough to generalise. A theoretical framework was proposed to illustrate the research findings. These findings suggest that small group learning should be implemented more frequently in Vietnamese primary schools and the study recommends that there be further training in group skills for students

Publications on COVID-19 from Vietnam during 2020 and 2021: A bibliometric analysis

Background: Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, published research from Vietnam related to the pandemic was analysed using bibliometrics. Objectives: To examine the status of research on COVID-19 by authors from Vietnam. Methods: The following bibliometric aspects were considered in the analysis: international collaboration, institutions from Vietnam and their partner institutions worldwide, subjects and topics, types of documents, and individual authors. The basis of the study was data obtained from the Scopus database between 2020 and 2021. The data were analysed using Microsoft Excel, R, and VOSviewer, and the emerging trends illustrated through descriptive analysis and science mapping.  Results: Between 2020 and 2021, researchers from Vietnam co-authored 1034 documents related to COVID-19, amounting to 0.35% of the total of 296,148 such documents published worldwide as ascertained from the Scopus database. Vietnam’s top country collaborators in that research were USA, Australia, the United Kingdom, India, and Taiwan ROC. The top Vietnam institutions were Duy Tan University, Ton Duc Thang University, and the University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City. The research from Vietnam covered many subjects, from medicine and natural sciences to social sciences and economics. Eight clusters of topics related to COVID-19 were identified. In terms of citations, the most highly cited documents were the outcome of collaboration with international authors. Lastly, the study ranked top authors based on either the number of publications or the number of citations.  Conclusion: This study provides a preliminary picture of studies related to COVID-19 co-authored by researchers in Vietnam. The picture may help the Vietnam government in devising appropriate strategies for post-COVID-19 restoration of the country’s socio-economic status

Dynamic Analysis of Mindlin Plates Resting on a Viscoelastic Foundation Subjected to Moving Loads During Abrupt Braking using Moving Element Method

The paper proposes a new computational approach using the moving element method (MEM) for simulating the dynamic responses of Mindlin plate resting on a viscoelastic foundation subjected to moving loads during abrupt braking. In this approach, the governing equations as well as the plate element mass, damping and stiffness matrices are formulated in a convected coordinate in which the origin is attached to the applied point of the moving load. Thus, the proposed method simply treats the moving loads as ‘stationary’ at the nodes of the plate to avoid updating the locations of moving loads due to the change of the contact points on the plate. The interaction between the moving load and the plate during abrupt braking is accounted for through the vertical force and tangential wheel-pavement friction force. The effects of wheel sliding, load deceleration magnitude, friction coefficient, and plate thickness on the dynamic responses of plate are investigated