Structural identification: Opportunities and challenges

Some of the significant opportunities and facing successful implementation of the structural identification (St-Id) in civil infrastructure are discussed. The greatest challenges in successful applications of St-Id have emerged as systems integration requirements, requiring mastery in management, modeling and simulation, experimental arts, information technology, and decision-making. Formulating effective policies, strategies, and project-specific designs for improving their performance as systems cannot be expected unless it is understood how infrastructures perform as complex systems. The St-Id may be a means of establishing a quantitative and mechanistic baseline characterization for a newly constructed system similar to a birth certificate. Some major infrastructure owners and consultants have developed an appreciation of the value of St-Id in relation to retrofit design and historic preservation

V-ROOM: a virtual meeting system with intelligent structured summarisation

With the growth of virtual organisations and multinational companies, virtual collaboration tasks are becoming more important for employees. This paper describes the development of a virtual meeting system, called V-ROOM. An exploration of facilities required in such a system has been conducted. The findings highlighted that intelligent systems are needed, especially since information that individuals have to know and process, is vast. The survey results showed that meeting summarisation is one of the most important new features that should be added to virtual meeting systems for enterprises. This paper highlights the innovative methods employed in V-ROOM to produce relevant meeting summaries. V- ROOM's approach is compared to other methods from the literature and it is shown how the use of meta-data provided by parts of the V-ROOM system can improve the quality of summaries produced

Decidual cell regulation of trophoblast is altered in pregnancies at risk of pre-eclampsia

Successful implantation and placentation are dependent on the interaction between decidual stromal cells (DSC) and extravillous trophoblast (EVT) cells. The extent of trophoblast invasion relies on communication between the placenta and maternal decidua. The cyclical process of decidualisation induces a transformation of endometrial fibroblasts to secretory DSC; these secreted products have many functions including the control of trophoblast invasion. Inadequate trophoblast invasion and remodelling of the uterine vessels (the spiral arteries) are associated with pregnancy disorders such as pre-eclampsia. Uterine artery Doppler resistance index (RI) in the first trimester of pregnancy can be used as a proxy measure of remodelling. DSC were isolated from pregnancies with normal (normal RI) or impaired (high RI) spiral artery remodelling. Following isolation, DSC were re-decidualised using cAMP and MPA and secretion of the decidualisation markers IGFBP-1 and prolactin assessed. We examined the impact of DSC secreted factors on trophoblast cell function, using the EVT cell line SGHPL-4. We demonstrated that DSC exposed to decidual factors were able to re-decidualise in vitro and that the chemoattraction of trophoblasts by DSC is impaired in pregnancies with high RI. This study provides new insights into the role that DSC play in regulating EVT functions during the first trimester of pregnancy. This is the first study to demonstrate that DSC from pregnancies with impaired vascular remodelling in the first trimester secrete factors that inhibit the directional movement of trophoblast cells. This finding may be important in understanding aberrant trophoblast invasion in pregnancies where vascular remodelling is impaired

Vibration-based monitoring of civil infrastructure: challenges and successes

Author's manuscript. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13349-011-0009-5© Springer-Verlag 2011Co -published with International Society for Structural Health Monitoring of Intelligent InfrastructureStructural health monitoring (SHM) is a relatively new paradigm for civil infrastructure stakeholders including operators, consultants and contractors which has in the last two decades witnessed an acceleration of academic and applied research in related areas such as sensing technology, system identification, data mining and condition assessment. SHM has a wide range of applications including, but not limited to, diagnostic and prognostic capabilities. However, when it comes to practical applications, stakeholders usually need answers to basic and pragmatic questions about in-service performance, maintenance and management of a structure which the technological advances are slow to address. Typical among the mismatch of expectation and capability is the topic of vibration-based monitoring (VBM), which is a subset of SHM. On the one hand there is abundant reporting of exercises using vibration data to locate damage in highly controlled laboratory conditions or in numerical simulations, while the real test of a reliable and cost effective technology is operation on a commercial basis. Such commercial applications are hard to identify, with the vast majority of implementations dealing with data collection and checking against parameter limits. In addition there persists an unhelpful association between VBM and 'damage detection' among some civil infrastructure stakeholders in UK and North America, due to unsuccessful transfer of technology from the laboratory to the field, and this has resulted in unhealthy industry scepticism which hinders acceptance of successful technologies. Hence the purpose of this paper is showcase successful VBM applications and to make the case that VBM does provide valuable information in real world applications when used appropriately and without unrealistic expectations. © 2011 Springer-Verlag