Impact of urban geometry on indoor air temperature and cooling energy consumption in traditional and formal urban environments

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the URI link.This study explores the effect of outdoor microclimatic environment on indoor conditions in a tropical warm-humid climate. An indoor air temperature and building energy performance analysis is carried out for the real case-study areas to examine the impact of urban geometry on building indoor conditions. The study incorporates microclimatic data from CFD, micro-climatic tool ENVI-met into building energy performance analysis using IES-VE. Findings reveal that diversity in urban geometry in deep urban canyons is helpful in reducing the indoor air temperature and cooling load. On average, cooling load in model rooms in the formal area is 21% higher for 1st floors (40% for top floors) compared to the corresponding rooms in the traditional area. In terms of solar gains, the difference was 30% for the 1st floors and 91% for the top floors, with rooms in the formal area having the higher ranges. Furthermore, the room air temperature in the traditional area was found to be 0.6-1.6 Deg C lower than those in the formal area

Supplementary material for: Effects of microclimatic and human parameters on outdoor thermal sensation in the high-density tropical context of Dhaka

The supplementary material has a separate DOI generated from ResearchGate: DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.30599.4496

ETS (Efficient, Transparent, and Secured) Self-healing Service for Pervasive Computing Applications

To ensure smooth functioning of numerous handheld devices anywhere anytime, the importance of self-healing mechanism cannot be overlooked. Incorporation of efficient fault detection and recovery in device itself is the quest for long but there is no existing self-healing scheme for devices running in pervasive computing environments that can be claimed as the ultimate solution. Moreover, the highest degree of transparency, security and privacy attainability should also be maintained. ETS Self-healing service, an integral part of our developing middleware named MARKS (Middleware Adaptability for Resource discovery, Knowledge usability, and Self-healing), holds promise for offering all of those functionalities

An Underwater SLAM System using Sonar, Visual, Inertial, and Depth Sensor

This paper presents a novel tightly-coupled keyframe-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system with loop-closing and relocalization capabilities targeted for the underwater domain. Our previous work, SVIn, augmented the state-of-the-art visual-inertial state estimation package OKVIS to accommodate acoustic data from sonar in a non-linear optimization-based framework. This paper addresses drift and loss of localization -- one of the main problems affecting other packages in underwater domain -- by providing the following main contributions: a robust initialization method to refine scale using depth measurements, a fast preprocessing step to enhance the image quality, and a real-time loop-closing and relocalization method using bag of words (BoW). An additional contribution is the addition of depth measurements from a pressure sensor to the tightly-coupled optimization formulation. Experimental results on datasets collected with a custom-made underwater sensor suite and an autonomous underwater vehicle from challenging underwater environments with poor visibility demonstrate performance never achieved before in terms of accuracy and robustness

Comparison of Distances for Supervised Segmentation of White Matter Tractography

Tractograms are mathematical representations of the main paths of axons within the white matter of the brain, from diffusion MRI data. Such representations are in the form of polylines, called streamlines, and one streamline approximates the common path of tens of thousands of axons. The analysis of tractograms is a task of interest in multiple fields, like neurosurgery and neurology. A basic building block of many pipelines of analysis is the definition of a distance function between streamlines. Multiple distance functions have been proposed in the literature, and different authors use different distances, usually without a specific reason other than invoking the "common practice". To this end, in this work we want to test such common practices, in order to obtain factual reasons for choosing one distance over another. For these reasons, in this work we compare many streamline distance functions available in the literature. We focus on the common task of automatic bundle segmentation and we adopt the recent approach of supervised segmentation from expert-based examples. Using the HCP dataset, we compare several distances obtaining guidelines on the choice of which distance function one should use for supervised bundle segmentation

Post-occupancy evaluation of architecturally-designed low-income housing in Ahmadabad, India

This paper presents post-occupancy evaluation of low-income houses that have been built through the DMU: Square Mile India Programme in Ahmedabad, India. Questionnaire and interviews were conducted which elicited information on respondents’ socio-cultural and environmental experiences in the new houses compared to the existing dwellings in the community. Findings include: 1. increased expectations and higher demands for space and facilities in the new houses, 2. discontent with integrated courtyard/ open spaces, 3. prioritising flood protection over environmental quality and thermal comfort conditions in the existing houses and 4. Significant change in the perception of social status of families in the new homes. The findings highlight residents’ need for adequate sleeping area, thermal comfort, safety from animals and security. These aspects must be critically considered in future design of similar houses. The paper produces empirical evidence on users’ perception that will provide better knowledge and understanding to the designer and policy-makers to identify important factors to improve residents’ quality of life in a low-income housing context