Developing Sustainable Relationships through Public Private People Partnership (4P) Projects

Conference Theme: Global Challenges in Construction IndustryPublic Private Partnership (PPP) are sometimes used to procure public infrastructure, if deemed useful in mobilising private finance and expertise for generating innovations and enhanced ‘value’. However, when delivering desired ‘value’ to specific end-users, we should not neglect ‘overall value’ for the sustainable development of the parent community/society. To address such holistic issues in suitable broader-based projects, wider-ranging ‘Public Private People Partnership’ (4P) arrangements are proposed to invite and integrate contributions from societal stakeholders through relevant bodies, e.g. social enterprises, NGOs, academia and professional institutions. Selecting and integrating such stakeholders in a properly structured 4P procurement and operational framework can help formulate more widely acceptable and sustainable designs and mobilise more resources for procurement, construction, maintenance and operation of built assets. This will also help to address grass roots aspirations and concerns earlier, rather than try to resolve conflicts later. However, a major barrier to involving more stakeholders in already complex projects arises in managing their inputs, and relationships, while optimising outputs. Based on literature review and structured interviews, this paper presents pros and cons of using 4P in selected scenarios such as post-disaster reconstruction. Initial findings confirm that a 4P approach requires superior relationship management. This paper also draws on another study that highlighted the often neglected importance of relationship management in ‘traditional’ PPP projects. Combining these findings, a case is made for improving relationship management by mobilising the additional P (‘people’) to appropriate extents in selected PPP projects, so as to identify, prioritise and harmonise diverse stakeholder objectives and target optimal ‘overall value’ with sustainable relationships aimed at common goals.published_or_final_versio

Identifying the critical success factors for relationship management in PPP projects

postprin

Underwriting and investment risks in the property-liability insurance industry: Evidence prior to the 9-11 event

Underwriting and investment are two important and related business activities of insurance companies. However, studies on the interrelation between underwriting and investment risks of Property-Liability (P-L) insurance companies are sparse in the literature. Using a sample of US P-L insurers, this article conducts an empirical investigation of how these two risks are associated with each other in the 1994-2000 period (before the September 11th terrorist attack in 2001). Our results, robust to various estimations, suggest that there is no significant relationship between the underwriting and investment risks among our sample firms. Such results based on pre 9-11 event period provide some support for the conjecture of Achleitner et al. (Geneva Pap Risk Insur Issues Pract 27:275-282, 2002) that many insurance companies may have failed to take an integrated approach to risk management. This resulted in a heavy loss due to dual exposures in both underwriting and investment in the 9-11 event. In the aftermath of the recent global financial crisis, risk taking and risk management of financial institutions have received more attention and increasing scrutiny. We believe the current paper provides some useful insights in this vein. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.postprin

Transport of Live Cells under Sterile Conditions Using a Chemotactic Droplet

© 2018 The Author(s). 1-Decanol droplets, formed in an aqueous medium containing decanoate at high pH, become chemotactic when a chemical gradient is placed in the external aqueous environment. We investigated if such droplets can be used as transporters for living cells. We developed a partially hydrophobic alginate capsule as a protective unit that can be precisely placed in a droplet and transported along chemical gradients. Once the droplets with cargo reached a defined final destination, the association of the alginate capsule and decanol droplet was disrupted and cargo deposited. Both Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis cells survived and proliferated after transport even though transport occurred under harsh and sterile conditions

Evolution of Th2 responses : Characterization of IL-4/13 in sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax L.) and studies of expression and biological activity

Acknowledgements This research was funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7) of the European Union (Grant Agreement 311993 TARGETFISH). T.W. received funding from the MASTS pooling initiative (The Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland). MASTS is funded by the Scottish Funding Council (grant reference number HR09011) and contributing institutions.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Transcriptional activation of ENPP1 by osterix in osteoblasts and osteocytes

Ectonucleotide pyrophosphatase/phosphodiesterase 1 (ENPP1) is the main source of extracellular pyrophosphate. Along with tissue-nonspecific alkaline phosphatase (TNAP), ENPP1 plays an important role in balancing bone mineralisation. Although well established in pre-osteoblasts, the regulating mechanisms of ENPP1 in osteoblasts and osteocytes remain largely unknown. Using bioinformatic methods, osterix (Osx), an essential transcription factor in osteoblast differentiation and osteocyte function, was found to have five predicted binding sites on the ENPP1 promoter. ENPP1 and Osx showed a similar expression profile both in vitro and in vivo. Over-expression of Osx in MC3T3-E1 and MLO-Y4 cells significantly up-regulated the expression of ENPP1 (p < 0.05). The consensus Sp1 sequences, located in the proximal ENPP1 promoter, were identified as Osx-regulating sites using promoter truncation experiments and chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assays. The p38-mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signalling pathway was demonstrated to be responsible for ENPP1 promoter activation by Osx. Runt-related transcription factor 2 (Runx2) was confirmed to have synergistic effects with Osx in activating ENPP1 promoter. Taken together, these results provided evidence of the regulating mechanisms of ENPP1 transcription in osteoblasts and osteocytes

Ground truth annotation of traffic video data

This paper presents a software application to generate ground-truth data on video files from traffic surveillance cameras used for Intelligent Transportation Systems (IT systems). The computer vision system to be evaluated counts the number of vehicles that cross a line per time unit intensity-, the average speed and the occupancy. The main goal of the visual interface presented in this paper is to be easy to use without the requirement of any specific hardware. It is based on a standard laptop or desktop computer and a Jog shuttle wheel. The setup is efficient and comfortable because one hand of the annotating person is almost all the time on the space key of the keyboard while the other hand is on the jog shuttle wheel. The mean time required to annotate a video file ranges from 1 to 5 times its duration (per lane) depending on the content. Compared to general purpose annotation tool a time factor gain of about 7 times is achieved.This work was funded by the Spanish Government project MARTA under the CENIT program and CICYT contract TEC2009-09146.Mossi García, JM.; Albiol Colomer, AJ.; Albiol Colomer, A.; Oliver Moll, J. (2014). Ground truth annotation of traffic video data. Multimedia Tools and Applications. 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-013-1396-xS114Albiol A et al (2011) Detection of parked vehicles using spatiotemporal maps. IEEE Trans Intell Transport Syst 12(4):1277–1291Blunsden SJ, Fisher R (2010) The BEHAVE video dataset: ground truthed video for multi-person behavior classification. Annal British Mach Vis Assoc 4:1–12Bradski G, Kaehler A (2008) Learning OpenCV: Computer vision with the OpenCV library. O'Reilly Media, IncorporatedBrooke J. SUS: a “quick and dirty” usability scale. Usability evaluation in industry. Taylor and FrancisBrostow GJ et al (2009) Semantic object classes in video: a high-definition ground truth database. Pattern Recognit Lett 30(2):88–97Buch N et al (2011) A review of computer vision techniques for the analysis of urban traffic. IEEE Trans Intell Transp Syst 12(3):920–939D’Orazio T et al. (2009) A semi-automatic system for ground truth generation of soccer video sequences. Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance, 2009. AVSS’09. Sixth IEEE International Conference on (Sep. 2009), 559–564Dollar P et al (2012) Pedestrian detection: an evaluation of the state of the art. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 34(4):743–761Faro A et al (2011) Adaptive background modeling integrated with luminosity sensors and occlusion processing for reliable vehicle detection. IEEE Trans Intell Transport Syst 12(4):1398–1412Giro-i-Nieto X et al (2010) GAT: a graphical annotation tool for semantic regions. Multimed Tool Appl 46(2–3):155–174i-LIDS. Image Library for Intelligent Detection Systems: www.ilids.co.uk . Home Office Scientific Development Branch, United Kingdom. Last Accessed February 2013Kasturi R et al (2009) Framework for performance evaluation of face, text, and vehicle detection and tracking in video: data, metrics, and protocol. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 31(2):319–336Laganière R (2011) OpenCV 2 computer vision application programming cookbook. Packt Pub LimitedLorist MM et al (2000) Mental fatigue and task control: planning and preparation. Psychophysiology 37(5):614–625Russell B et al (2008) LabelMe: a database and web-based tool for image annotation. Int J Comput Vis 77(1):157–173Serrano M, Gracía J, Patricio M, Molina J (2010). Interactive video annotation tool. Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence, 325–332Traffic City Cameras. Ajuntament de València, Spain. http://camaras.valencia.es . Last Accessed February 2013TREC video retrieval evaluation. http://www-nlpir.nist.gov/projects/trecvid/Vezzani R, Cucchiara R (2010) Video Surveillance Online Repository (ViSOR): an integrated framework. Multimed Tool Appl 50(2):359–380ViPER: the video performance evaluation resource: http://viper-toolkit.sourceforge.net/Volkmer T et al. (2005) A web-based system for collaborative annotation of large image and video collections: an evaluation and user study. Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia (New York, NY, USA, 2005), 892–901Zhang HB, Li SA, Chen SY, Su SZ, Duh DJ, Li SZ (2012) Adaptive photograph retrieval method. Multimedia Tools and Applications, Published online September 2012.Zou Y et al (2011) Traffic incident classification at intersections based on image sequences by HMM/SVM classifiers. Multimed Tool Appl 52(1):133–14

Fungal Adenylyl Cyclase Acts As a Signal Sensor and Integrator and Plays a Central Role in Interaction with Bacteria

10.1371/journal.ppat.1003612PLoS Pathogens910

Improving Many-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms by Means of Edge-Rotated Cones

Given a point in $m$-dimensional objective space, any $\varepsilon$-ball of a point can be partitioned into the incomparable, the dominated and dominating region. The ratio between the size of the incomparable region, and the dominated (and dominating) region decreases proportionally to $1/2^{m-1}$, i.e., the volume of the Pareto dominating orthant as compared to all other volumes. Due to this reason, it gets increasingly unlikely that dominating points can be found by random, isotropic mutations. As a remedy to stagnation of search in many objective optimization, in this paper, we suggest to enhance the Pareto dominance order by involving an obtuse convex dominance cone in the convergence phase of an evolutionary optimization algorithm. We propose edge-rotated cones as generalizations of Pareto dominance cones for which the opening angle can be controlled by a single parameter only. The approach is integrated in several state-of-the-art multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) and tested on benchmark problems with four, five, six and eight objectives. Computational experiments demonstrate the ability of these edge-rotated cones to improve the performance of MOEAs on many-objective optimization problems

Distance Approximation for Dynamic Waste Collection Planning

Approximating the solution value of transportation problems has become more relevant in recent years, as these approximations can help to decrease the computational eort required for solving those routing problems. In this paper, we apply several regression methods to predict the total distance of the traveling salesman problem (TSP) and vehicle routing problem (VRP). We show that distance can be estimated fairly accurately using simple regression models and only a limited number of features. We use features found in scientific literature and introduce a new class of geographical features. The model is validated on a dynamic waste collection case in the city of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. We introduce a cost function that combines the travel distance and service level, and show that our model can reduce distances up to 17%, while maintaining the same service level, compared to a well-known heuristic approximation. Furthermore, we show the benefits of using approximations for combining oine learning with online or frequent optimization