Multicriteria decision-making method for sustainable site location of post-disaster temporary housing in urban areas

Many people lose their homes around the world every year because of natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes. In the aftermath of a natural disaster, the displaced people (DP) have to move to temporary housing (TH) and do not have the ability to choose the settlement dimensions, distributions, neighborhood, or other characteristics of their TH. Additionally, post-disaster settlement construction causes neighborhood changes, environmental degradation, and large-scale public expenditures. This paper presents a new model to support decision makers in choosing site locations for TH. The model is capable of determining the optimal site location based on the integration of economic, social, and environmental aspects into the whole life cycle of these houses. The integrated value model for sustainable assessment (MIVES), a multicriteria decision making (MCDM) model, is used to assess the sustainability of the aforementioned aspects, and MIVES includes the value function concept, which permits indicator homogenization by taking into account the satisfaction of the involved stakeholders.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

HouseDiffusion: Vector Floorplan Generation via a Diffusion Model with Discrete and Continuous Denoising

The paper presents a novel approach for vector-floorplan generation via a diffusion model, which denoises 2D coordinates of room/door corners with two inference objectives: 1) a single-step noise as the continuous quantity to precisely invert the continuous forward process; and 2) the final 2D coordinate as the discrete quantity to establish geometric incident relationships such as parallelism, orthogonality, and corner-sharing. Our task is graph-conditioned floorplan generation, a common workflow in floorplan design. We represent a floorplan as 1D polygonal loops, each of which corresponds to a room or a door. Our diffusion model employs a Transformer architecture at the core, which controls the attention masks based on the input graph-constraint and directly generates vector-graphics floorplans via a discrete and continuous denoising process. We have evaluated our approach on RPLAN dataset. The proposed approach makes significant improvements in all the metrics against the state-of-the-art with significant margins, while being capable of generating non-Manhattan structures and controlling the exact number of corners per room. A project website with supplementary video and document is here https://aminshabani.github.io/housediffusion

Severe Dyspnea due to Pulmonary Metastasis of Renal Cell Carcinoma: Is Cytoreductive Surgery of Value?

Here, we present a case in which cytoreductive surgery, like left radical nephrectomy, was effective in the treatment of pulmonary metastases and para-aortic metastases from renal cell carcinoma. A 28-year-old man underwent left radical nephrectomy with pulmonary metastasectomy for the diagnosis of metastatic left renal cell carcinoma. The histologic diagnosis was clear cell carcinoma G2, pT3N1M1. He subsequently underwent i.m. administration of IFN-α, 5 million units per day for 30 days. The nasal oxygen mask was weaned gradually, and the chest tube was removable due to cessation of the continuous production of pleural fluid. The patient was well until one year after operation

JigsawPlan: Room Layout Jigsaw Puzzle Extreme Structure from Motion using Diffusion Models

This paper presents a novel approach to the Extreme Structure from Motion (E-SfM) problem, which takes a set of room layouts as polygonal curves in the top-down view, and aligns the room layout pieces by estimating their 2D translations and rotations, akin to solving the jigsaw puzzle of room layouts. The biggest discovery and surprise of the paper is that the simple use of a Diffusion Model solves this challenging registration problem as a conditional generation process. The paper presents a new dataset of room layouts and floorplans for 98,780 houses. The qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the competing methods by significant margins

The effect of macroeconomic factors on credit risk in the banking system of Iran

These days, there are increasing changes on environmental and economic networks and different risks of various institutions affect the financial structure. Different institutions including financial and credit institutions are facing with the risk of lack of their timely obligations to make sure the repayment of the funds is granted. In this study, the effects of economic factors not affected by intentional behavior of customers are investigated. Statistical study of the banking system includes all public and private banks. Statistical research community from 2005 to 2010 is considered. The cross-sectional data of the study and a combination of regression analysis is used. The regression analysis of combined data, fixed effects model based on the data is a cross-sectional fit. According to results of regression analysis, Pearson and Spearman's Correlation Coefficient, there is no significant relationship between the inflation rate, employment rate, unemployment rate, the dollar, the euro, with import growth of credit risk in the banking system in Iran. Therefore, based on probability theory, it can be stated that the credit risk in the banking system in Iran under the influence of variables is not mentioned. In addition, positive and significant relationship between stock index and credit risk in the banking system in Iran has increased by Weber in this index increases and reducing credit risk is reduced

Integrated value model for sustainability assessment of residential solar energy systems towards minimizing urban air pollution in Tehran

Renewable energy applications are lucrative alternatives to minimize urban environmental impacts. Solar energy, the most abundant, inexhaustible, and cleanest of all renewable sources, provides an opportunity to transform buildings from energy consumers into active energy producers. Nevertheless, photovoltaic (PV) and hybrid photovoltaic/thermal (PV/T) are considered the most viable alternatives for urban settlements. This study, as part of a broader research project, develops a new model to evaluate solar systems' air pollution mitigation capacity and assist decision-makers in adopting the most suitable solution. The approach is based on the integrated value model for sustainability assessment (MIVES), combined with the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and sensitivity analysis. This multi-objective tool is applied to residential buildings in Tehran, a megacity example with unused rooftops, solar energy harvest potential, and air pollution reduction needs. Results reveal one square meter of PV and PV/T enables avoiding 211 and 488 kg CO2 emissions annually, as well as 1.2 and 1.9 g PM pollutants, respectively. Although PV achieves higher sustainability indexes as a better socio-economic alternative, PV/T can be a robust solution when stakeholders are more sensitive to environmental requirements and air pollution decrement potential. The critical obstacle to PV/T deployment is the lack of financial incentives. However, allocating 38 % of solar electricity feed-in tariffs to solar thermal energy could solve this issue. Compared to green roofs, solar systems stand out with CO2 saving and energy production potential. Researchers expect future solar collectors’ improvements, such as lower resource consumption, thus, becoming more environmentally friendly and cost-effective solutions.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Innovative approach to assist architecture teachers in choosing practical sessions

This article presents the first results of the project Architecture 360, which focuses on learning alternatives for developing working skills in higher education courses, and specifically construction competences for architecture students. The project aims to help teachers to choose the best learning solutions for their classes from numerous alternatives of strategies, dynamics and activities. The assistance is based on developing a new approach that combines several methods (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT); multi-criteria decision-making; Delphi; and the Knapsack problem) and draws from teachers’ experience, a panel of experts’ expertise, the revised Bloom Taxonomy and neuroscience for education. The new approach to assisting university teachers in choosing the best practical learning alternatives was successfully developed and validated for the case study of a course at Barcelona Architecture School. In general, the approach defined the main strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of 26 learning alternatives. In the case study, the following optimized set of alternatives were identified: blended learning, challenge-based learning, reflective learning, videos of real cases, case studies, site visits, interactive simulation and gamification. Moreover, 23 activities were analysed. It was concluded, for instance, that active alternatives would improve implementation, including teachers’ available teaching materials and dedication outside class.Peer ReviewedObjectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::4 - Educació de QualitatPostprint (published version

High Load Control Mechanism for SIP Servers

To start voice, image, instant messaging, and generally multimedia communication, session communication must begin between two participants. SIP (session initiation protocol) that is an application layer control induces management and terminates this kind of sessions. As far as the independence of SIP from transport layer protocols is concerned, SIP messages can be transferred on a variety of transport layer protocols including TCP or UDP. Mechanism of Retransmission that is embedded in SIP could compensate for the missing packet loss, in case of need. This mechanism is applied when SIP messages are transmitted on an unreliable transmission layer protocol like UDP. Also, while facing SIP proxy with overload, it could cause excessive filling of proxy queue, postpone increase of other contacts, and add to the amount of the proxy overload. In the present work, while using UDP as transport layer protocol, invite retransmission timer (T1) was appropriately regulated and SIP functionality was improved. Therefore, by proposing an adaptive timer of invite message retransmission, attempts were made to improve the time of session initiation and consequently improve the performance. Performance of the proposed SIP was implemented and evaluated by SIPP software in a real network environment and its accuracy and performance were demonstrated

Integrative computational mRNA-miRNA interaction analyses of the autoimmune-deregulated miRNAs and well-known Th17 differentiation regulators: An attempt to discover new potential miRNAs involved in Th17 differentiation

Th17 cells are a lineage of CD4(+) T helper cells in immune system which differentiate from naive CD4(+) T cells and have demonstrated to play a critical role in the pathogenesis of different autoimmune disorders. miRNAs are a novel group of non-coding RNAs which participate in post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression mostly by pairing with 3'UTR of their mRNA targets and inhibition of its translation. It has been demonstrated that miRNAs function in various cellular processes such as differentiation, proliferation, and apoptosis. By now, several signaling pathways and their downstream positive and negative regulators involve in Th17 differentiation have been discovered. Several studies have reported the aberrant miRNA expression profile in patients with autoimmune disease called autoimmune-deregulated miRNAs. Here, using integrative miRwalk database which assembles the data gathered from ten different bioinformatics databases designed to predict miRNA-target interaction, we analyzed possible targeting effect of ``autoimmune-deregulated miRNAs'' on prominent positive and negative regulators of Th17 differentiation. Our resulting mRNA-miRNA network simply nominated several miRNAs with strong possibility which probably may have inducing (miR-27b, miR-27a, miR-30c, miR-1, and miR-141) or inhibitory (miR-20b, miR-93, miR-20a, miR-152, miR-21, and miR-106a) role in Th17 differentiation by targeting negative or positive regulators of Th17 differentiation, respectively. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved