Structural Design: Technology and Computerization Not the Problem

The building industry is a double-faced demon. On one hand, it takes upon itself to help contain the challenges of overpopulation and urbanization by providing infrastructure and shelter to the current explosive population. On the other hand, it remains an unrepentant contributor of CO2 emissions to the environment up to 30% (N. Subramaman, 2007). It also remains the biggest consumer of extracted materials such as steel, bauxite and sand wined from the environment. The process of extracting these materials to satisfy this need often leave the environment depleted and polluted. The advent of computers has further exposed the industry to much complexities. Engineers have adapted to the use of computer based software to perform designs, analysis and specifications for buildings and structures. The advantages being the improvement in the accuracy of results, efficiency and reduction in time. However, these softwares can also impact negatively on the designs and sustainable construction. It is in this regard that this paper presents the results of an analysis and design of a G+5 building from STAAD Pro and ETABS respectively. The methodology employed involved the calculation of loads in both software according to the load combinations defined in IS 456:2000. The load is categorized analyzed as dead load (IS 875: Part 1), live load (IS 875: Part 2). The loads analyzed were then used to size the structural members. The following factors; resource conservation, cost efficiency and design for human adaptation were targeted for satisfaction.It was observed that the user must possess enough experience, knowledge in structural behavior, have a strong grasp of structural analysis to be able to manually check reports from the computer as well as have the ability to creatively think about the problems that are to be analyzed in order to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the design. It has also been observed from the percentage of steel data from ETABS, that, the cost of the project can be greatly influenced. The total quantity of reinforcement of 227374 N of 8mm, 10mm, 12mm, 16mm, 20mm and 25mm diameter bars were provided by STAAD Pro where as ETABS provided only areas of steel reinforcement. These provisions were compliant with the provisions of IS 456:2000 upon verification. Smart and cost effective as well as efficiently designed buildings can thus be employed to make construction sustainable. Keywords: computers, analysis, cost, efficient desig

Robustness-by-Construction Synthesis: Adapting to the Environment at Runtime

While most of the current synthesis algorithms only focus on correctness-by-construction, ensuring robustness has remained a challenge. Hence, in this paper, we address the robust-by-construction synthesis problem by considering the specifications to be expressed by a robust version of Linear Temporal Logic (LTL), called robust LTL (rLTL). rLTL has a many-valued semantics to capture different degrees of satisfaction of a specification, i.e., satisfaction is a quantitative notion. We argue that the current algorithms for rLTL synthesis do not compute optimal strategies in a non-antagonistic setting. So, a natural question is whether there is a way of satisfying the specification "better" if the environment is indeed not antagonistic. We address this question by developing two new notions of strategies. The first notion is that of adaptive strategies, which, in response to the opponent's non-antagonistic moves, maximize the degree of satisfaction. The idea is to monitor non-optimal moves of the opponent at runtime using multiple parity automata and adaptively change the system strategy to ensure optimality. The second notion is that of strongly adaptive strategies, which is a further refinement of the first notion. These strategies also maximize the opportunities for the opponent to make non-optimal moves. We show that computing such strategies for rLTL specifications is not harder than the standard synthesis problem, e.g., computing strategies with LTL specifications, and takes doubly-exponential time.Comment: 32 pages, 3 figure

Perceptions and practices on malaria in a rural population of Koraput district, Odisha

Background: Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease caused by a protozoan parasite i.e. Plasmodium parasites. It is one of the most prevalent disorders worldwide. India ranked the fourth-highest number of death cases. In Odisha, more than two-thirds of malaria cases are reported from ten southern districts. A high risk of malaria infection is found in Koraput district of Odisha. The present study aims to access the knowledge, attitude, and practices (KAP) about malaria among the individuals of Koraput district, Odisha.Methods: This is a cross-sectional study and 258 respondents were taken randomly from five villages of Koraput district. Data on demographics as well as knowledge, attitude, and practices about malaria was collected by using self-modified and pretested schedules.Results: A significant number of the respondent (97.29%) have reported that they had heard about malaria. 37.60% of respondents answered that they knew it from television, followed by health workers (23.26%) and friends (20.54%). The majority (98.06%) of the sample reported that it is caused by mosquito bites. Almost 63% of the respondents were consulted with a doctor whereas 24.81% consulted first to traditional healers of that region. The majority (99.22%) has a mosquito net and 98.83% of them were used it after a proper wash.Conclusions: Although the study found good knowledge on malaria, still further awareness is required to elevate the present status. In this study most of the respondents had a good level of knowledge about malaria, however, attitude and practices about malaria prevention still need to be improved. 

Preparation and Characterization of Bioactive Silica-Based Ceramics Derived from Rice Husk Ash

This thesis deals with the preparation and characterization of amorphous silica based bioactive ceramics using rice husk ash (RHA) as silica source. Three types of silica precursors were prepared depending on impurity and forms. Ceramics were fabricated through conventional powder compaction, polymeric sponge replication and gelcasting methods. Bioglass-ceramics and mesoporous silica aerogel were also prepared using silica precursor. Mechanical, in vitro bioactivity and biodegradability properties of above ceramics were investigated.Brown ash (BA), obtained by burning husk at 700 oC, contains about 96 wt.% amorphous SiO2 and the rest 4% impurities like CaO, Fe2O3, K2O, ZnO, and Mn2O3.White ash (WA), prepared by burning acid-leached husk, and contains almost pure silica(99.86%). Silica gel (SG) powder was prepared from BA through the alkaline extraction of silica from ash followed by acid neutralization. SG contains about 99.79% silica.During sintering, amorphous silica transformed into cristobalite phase at 1000, 1200, and 1300 oC, respectively for BA, SG, and WA ceramics. The earlier phase transformation in BA was due to its highest impurity content. There was a fall in compressive strength of all three (BA, SG and WA) sintered silica ceramics as and when amorphous silica transformed to cristobalite. This was due to the crack formation by the high-low displacive phase transformation of cristobalite. Amorphous silica based scaffolds were fabricated by slurry impregnation processusing polymeric sponge as the replica. The aqueous slurry with 40 wt.% solid loading showed good thixotropic behaviour in presence of polyvinyl alcohol(PVA) binder. The strength of scaffold decreased above a sintering temperature where the amorphous silica transformed into cristobalite. In vitro bioactivity test showed the formation of apatite layer on silica scaffold surface

Synthesizing Permissive Winning Strategy Templates for Parity Games

We present a novel method to compute \emph{permissive winning strategies} in two-player games over finite graphs with $\omega$-regular winning conditions. Given a game graph $G$ and a parity winning condition $\Phi$, we compute a \emph{winning strategy template} $\Psi$ that collects an infinite number of winning strategies for objective $\Phi$ in a concise data structure. We use this new representation of sets of winning strategies to tackle two problems arising from applications of two-player games in the context of cyber-physical system design -- (i) \emph{incremental synthesis}, i.e., adapting strategies to newly arriving, \emph{additional} $\omega$-regular objectives $\Phi'$, and (ii) \emph{fault-tolerant control}, i.e., adapting strategies to the occasional or persistent unavailability of actuators. The main features of our strategy templates -- which we utilize for solving these challenges -- are their easy computability, adaptability, and compositionality. For \emph{incremental synthesis}, we empirically show on a large set of benchmarks that our technique vastly outperforms existing approaches if the number of added specifications increases. While our method is not complete, our prototype implementation returns the full winning region in all 1400 benchmark instances, i.e., handling a large problem class efficiently in practice.Comment: CAV'2

Comparison of ocean color chlorophyll algorithms for IRS-P40CM sensor using in-situ data

In-situ chlorophyll concentration data and remote sensing reflectance (Rrs) measurements collected in -six different ship campaigns in the Arabian Sea were used to evaluate the accuracy, precision, and suitability of different ocean color chlorophyll algorithms for the Arabian Sea. The bio-optical data sets represent the typical range of biooptical conditions expected in this region and are composed of 47 stations encompassing chlorophyll concentration, between 0.072 and 5.90 mg m -3, with 43 observations in case I water and 4 observations in case I1 water. Six empirical chlorophyll algorithms [i.e. Aiken-C, POLDER-C, OCTS-C, Morel-3, Oceaa Chlorophyll-2 (OC2) and Ocean Chlorophyll-4 (OC4)] were selected for analysis on the Arabian Sea data set. Numerous statistical and graphical criterions were used to evaluate the performance of these algorithms. Among these six chlorophyll algorithms two chlorophyll algorithms (i.e. OC2 and OC4) performed well in the case I waters of the Arabian Sea. The OC2 algorithm, a modified cubic polynomial function which uses ratio of Rrs490 nm and Rrs555 nm (where, Rrs is remote sensing reflectance), performed well with r2=0.85; rms =0.15. The OC4 algorithm, a four-band (443, 490,510, 555 nm), maximum band ratio formulation was found best on the basis of statistical analysis results with r2=0.85 and rms=0.14. Both OC2 and OC4 algorithms failed to estimate chloróphyll in Trichodesmium dominated waters. The OC2 algorithm was preferred over OC4 algorithm for routine processing of the OCM data to generate chlorophyll-a images, as it uses a band ratio of 490/555 nm and atmospheric correction is more accurate in 490 nm compared to 443 nm band, which is used by OC4 algorithm

Computing Adequately Permissive Assumptions for Synthesis

We solve the problem of automatically computing a new class of environment assumptions in two-player turn-based finite graph games which characterize an ``adequate cooperation'' needed from the environment to allow the system player to win. Given an $\omega$-regular winning condition $\Phi$ for the system player, we compute an $\omega$-regular assumption $\Psi$ for the environment player, such that (i) every environment strategy compliant with $\Psi$ allows the system to fulfill $\Phi$ (sufficiency), (ii) $\Psi$ can be fulfilled by the environment for every strategy of the system (implementability), and (iii) $\Psi$ does not prevent any cooperative strategy choice (permissiveness). For parity games, which are canonical representations of $\omega$-regular games, we present a polynomial-time algorithm for the symbolic computation of adequately permissive assumptions and show that our algorithm runs faster and produces better assumptions than existing approaches -- both theoretically and empirically. To the best of our knowledge, for $\omega$-regular games, we provide the first algorithm to compute sufficient and implementable environment assumptions that are also permissive.Comment: TACAS 202