Industry-practice-based engineering hydrology education at USQ, Australia

Engineering education must embrace several challenges, such as increased numbers of work-based students, increased demand for online education, mismatches in employability skills and industry requirements, and lack of student engagement. The hydrology course at the University of Southern Queensland attracts more than 100 students every year, where more than 70% of students are off-campus and most of them are work-based. This study explored how an online hydrology course can embrace industry practice and engage students in order to achieve learning outcomes. Industrial careers in hydrology involve extensive use of hydroclimatological data and modeling applications. The course modules, learning objectives and outcomes, and assessment tools have been designed to align with industry practices. Active participation of students was observed in self-assessment quizzes and discussion forums. The course was rated very well in achieving learning outcomes and in overall student satisfaction. Students appreciated the well-structured real-world and professional practice in the course

Investigating Inquiry-based Learning: Teachers Perspectives at a K-12 School

Inquiry-based learning (IBL) is receiving a lot of attention and consideration as a modern instructional method. Teaching strategies that actively involve students in the learning process through inquiry instructions are more likely to increase conceptual understanding than of strategies that rely on more passive techniques. The purpose of this study is to better understand how a selected group of five teachers perceive and practice inquiry-based learning (IBL) as an instructional method in their classrooms across all disciplines at one K-12 school. This study employed a case study methodology to better understand teachers perceptions, practices, and technology integration, while using IBL in a metropolitan classroom setting. Data was accumulated through semi-structured, open-ended interviews and classroom observations. A qualitative case study approach was used to collect and interpret the teachers individual experiences. The following research questions guided this study: How do a selected group of teachers perceive, plan, implement, and integrate technology while utilizing Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) as an instructional strategy in their classrooms? This case study revealed four major themes: teachers understood and implemented IBL in different ways; teachers recognized that IBL is helpful for better knowledge construction; teachers expressed that planning an open inquiry learning environment is extraordinarily challenging, and technology is beneficial for an inquiry learning environment despite its own challenges. Finally, teachers liked IBL for its many learning benefits and acknowledged that it is difficult to plan an open-inquiry learning environment. Each of the teachers implemented IBL slightly differently though they all followed a comprehensive and complete learning cycle

Monitoring urban growth and land use land cover change in Al Ain, UAE using remote sensing and GIS techniques

Urbanization and industrialization cause a serious land degradation problem, including an increased pressure on natural resources such as deforestation, rise in temperature and management of water resources. The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effects of urbanization are widely acknowledged. Increase of impervious surface is a surrogate measure of urbanization and their effects on local hydrology is well reported in literature. This study investigates the spatial-temporal dynamics of land use and land cover changes in Al Ain, UAE, from 2006 to 2016. The Landsat images of two different periods, i.e., Landsat ETM of 2006 and Landsat 8 for 2016 were acquired from earth explorer site. Semi-supervised known as the hybrid classification method was used for image classification. The change detection was carried out through post-classification techniques. The study area was categorized into five major classes. These are agriculture, gardens, urban, sandy areas and mixed urban/sandy areas. It was observed that agricultural and urban land increases from 42,560 ha to 45,950 ha (8%) and 8150 ha to 9105 ha (12%), respectively. Consequently, the natural sandy area was reduced. It was also found that the urban area was expanded dramatically in the west and southwest directions. The outcomes of this study would help concerning authorities for a sustainable land and water resources management in the Al Ain region

The impact of occupancy on baseline building energy modelling performance

For promoting energy efficiency practices in the building sector, energy conservation measures are of utmost importance. The energy conservation measures implemented through Energy performance contracting (EPC) are predominantly linked with the performance of baseline building energy models. While occupants are recognized as one of the most important driving factors of energy use in buildings, current research has failed to identify if building occupancy rate can be an influential independent variable to predict baseline energy use in buildings. This research aims to identify the influence of considering occupancy rate as an explanatory variable on the modelling performance of baseline building energy. Six multivariate machine learning approaches (e.g., linear regression, regression trees, ensembles of trees, Gaussian Process, support vector machine, nonlinear Autoregressive Exogenous model (NARX)) and one univariate (e.g., reformed ten-parameter change point model) inverse modelling approach were employed in the baseline model development process of building heating and cooling energy use and electricity. The specified multivariate baseline modelling approaches were investigated to better isolate the impact of occupancy on building energy performance. NARX outperformed other baseline modelling approaches in terms of model predictive accuracy and data fitting capabilities. On the contrary, the proposed adapted change point model demonstrates the capability of providing operational insight into the case study building. The hourly fifteen-month worth of energy use data used in baseline models was extracted from the building management system (BMS) server of a real case study building. The prediction period was defined as the most recent six months of the available data representing the COVID lockdown period. The models were trained using the nine-month worth of data that immediately preceded the prediction period. The arrangement of different input parameters selected by a forward sequential feature selection approach was considered an important step to identify the influence of individual parameters on baseline energy use. The influence of occupancy on the accuracy of baseline models was quantitively evaluated from this analysis. The results show that baseline model performance slightly improves when occupancy data are considered as an explanatory variable. However, occupancy data can significantly influence the performance of a baseline energy use model in an occupant-centric building. The assessment of hourly energy data and associated occupancy data for the case study building indicates the necessity of implementing occupant-centric control strategies to improve its energy performance

Remediation of Polluted River Water by Biological, Chemical, Ecological and Engineering Processes

Selection of appropriate river water treatment methods is important for the restoration of river ecosystems. An in-depth review of different river water treatment technologies has been carried out in this study. Among the physical-engineering processes, aeration is an effective, sustainable and popular technique which increases microbial activity and degrades organic pollutants. Other engineering techniques (water diversion, mechanical algae removal, hydraulic structures and dredging) are effective as well, but they are cost intensive and detrimental to river ecosystems. Riverbank filtration is a natural, slow and self-sustainable process which does not pose any adverse effects. Chemical treatments are criticised for their short-term solution, high cost and potential for secondary pollution. Ecological engineering-based techniques are preferable due to their high economic, environmental and ecological benefits, their ease of maintenance and the fact that they are free from secondary pollution. Constructed wetlands, microbial dosing, ecological floating beds and biofilms technologies are the most widely applicable ecological techniques, although some variabilities are observed in their performances. Constructed wetlands perform well under low hydraulic and pollutant loads. Sequential constructed wetland floating bed systems can overcome this limitation. Ecological floating beds are highly recommended for their low cost, high effectiveness and optimum plant growth facilities

A Computational Model for Tensor Core Units

To respond to the need of efficient training and inference of deep neural networks, a plethora of domain-specific hardware architectures have been introduced, such as Google Tensor Processing Units and NVIDIA Tensor Cores. A common feature of these architectures is a hardware circuit for efficiently computing a dense matrix multiplication of a given small size. In order to broaden the class of algorithms that exploit these systems, we propose a computational model, named the TCU model, that captures the ability to natively multiply small matrices. We then use the TCU model for designing fast algorithms for several problems, including matrix operations (dense and sparse multiplication, Gaussian Elimination), graph algorithms (transitive closure, all pairs shortest distances), Discrete Fourier Transform, stencil computations, integer multiplication, and polynomial evaluation. We finally highlight a relation between the TCU model and the external memory model

Informatics, Logistics and Governance in Water Treatment Processes

Increasing demands of water for diverse uses of domestic, agricultural, and industrial consumption, both in quantity and quality, pose tremendous pressure on the need of well articulated management approaches. Such approaches are expected to address several challenges such as limited supplies, deteriorated quality of available and produced water, conflicting interests of public stakeholders and groups, adverse environmental and ecological impacts, climate changes, etc. Large number of these approaches exist and still evolve and develop for different purpose including data management, operation and governance, conjunctive management of water and energy, asset management, and intelligent systems in water treatment process

Distribution of heavy metals in vegetative biofiltration columns

This study investigated the distribution of heavy metals in vegetative biofiltration columns irrigated by synthetic greywater. Twelve species of ornamental plants (three plants from each species) were planted in the same designed 36 biofiltration columns. Samples of effluent water, soils, roots, shoots and leaves were collected and analyzed. It was observed that before irrigation, the distribution of copper was in soils (0%), roots (42%), leaves (37%) and shoots (21%). After irrigation, this distribution changed to soils (29%), roots (39%), leaves (17%) and shoots (15%). It was found that lead concentrations decreased in soils from (84% to 7%), but increased in plants (from 16% to 93%) following irrigation with greywater. In contrast, the distribution of zinc changed from leaves (46%), roots (22%) and soils (16%) before irrigation to 89% in leaves and soils and 11% in shoots following irrigation. The chromium distribution before and after irrigation was found to be almost unchanged in soils, shoots and effluent water, but it increased in roots (19.4% to 26.9%) and decreased in leaves (11.4% to 5.8%). The outcomes of this study demonstrated that heavy metals mostly accumulate in soils and roots, and it is necessary to investigate their potential detrimental effects on the receiving environment

Potable water saving by reusing greywater in the Al Ain City

Fresh water scarcity in arid regions is well acknowledged. Sources of urban water in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are groundwater, desalinated water and treated wastewater. In the Emirate of Abu Dhabi (EAD), about three-quarters of the costly desalinated water supplies are used for irrigation to amenity plantations and for home gardening (Environment Agency Abu Dhabi, 2009). The per capita water consumption in EAD ranges between 170 and 200 lpcd in flats and between 270 and 1,760 lpcd in villas. The amenity (park, gardens and recreation areas) irrigation has been increasing in the region with the rapid growth of its urban development. Currently about 98% of wastewater generated from households in EAD is centrally collected through an efficient sewerage networks and then treated for reuse in the irrigation to roadside plantations and public places. In current practice, treated sewage effluent is not conveyed for domestic gardening and toilet flushing purposes. This is because of necessity of dual reticulation system that will increase the marginal cost of water supply significantly. Greywater collected from shower, ablution, washing machine, bathroom sink and other household activities (except from toilet and kitchen source) are generally less contaminated than that of municipal wastewater and can be reused for non-potable consumptions (Mourad et al., 2011; Friedler and Hadari, 2006)

An Optimal Level-synchronous Shared-memory Parallel BFS Algorithm with Optimal parallel Prefix-sum Algorithm and its Implications for Energy Consumption

We present a work-efficient parallel level-synchronous Breadth First Search (BFS) algorithm for shared-memory architectures which achieves the theoretical lower bound on parallel running time. The optimality holds regardless of the shape of the graph. We also demonstrate the implication of this optimality for the energy consumption of the program empirically. The key idea is never to use more processing cores than necessary to complete the work in any computation step efficiently. We keep the rest of the cores idle to save energy and to reduce other resource contentions (e.g., bandwidth, shared caches, etc). Our BFS does not use locks and atomic instructions and is easily extendible to shared-memory coprocessors.Comment: 2 pages, brief announcemen