Regulatory Frameworks for the Successful Implementation of Construction and Demolition Waste Treatment Infrastructure

In an ever expanding world, our constant need to construct and to support a constantly growing population is resulting in significant increase in construction waste. Rapid expansion is a trend that can be seen throughout the Middle East therefore the need to manage the resulting construction waste should be seen as critical. According to the Qatar National Development Strategy (QNDS, 2018), construction waste was recorded at 3,796,540 tonnes per year in 2016 with a total of 11.5% successfully treated. The QNDS indicates that construction waste increase is expected to peak at approximately 6.6 million tonnes per annum by the year 2030 as a result of future development plans within the Qatar. A requirement exists to manage this material in a sustainable manner to minimise the quantities sent for final disposal at landfill sites which can be achieved through the treatment and reuse of the waste materials which arise form construction processes. This paper provides an overview of the methods considered suitable for the treatment of construction waste within the middle east region and describes in detail the regulatory frameworks that are typically required to support the successful implementation of construction waste treatment technology

Cut Carbon, Cut Cost - Feasibility of Applying PAS 2080

State of Qatar is committed to delivering its Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) secretariat. (Ministry of Environment, 2015). Though the INDC are voluntary, without any specific target threshold to commitments, Qatar has over the years developed robust policies and action plans with the intention to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2030. As a host country for the World Cup 2022, sustainable tourism and carbon neutral tournament are already high priority on the agenda. Meeting GHG emission reduction targets by 2030 will be a challenge for all sectors across Qatar and reduction of emissions from Qatar's infrastructure will soon be a regulatory requirement. The paper will be based on a literature review of the standard available in the industry, such as PAS 2080, for carbon management in infrastructure. The feasibility of applying such standards in Qatar will be reviewed in detail, with the objective of managing whole life carbon in infrastructure and achieve reduction in carbon and cost. The study will also detail how carbon reduction can not only be achieved by quantifying carbon and addressing carbon hotspots to improve efficiency but also by including changes in behaviors/culture, processes and systems, in addition to implementation of low carbon solutions

A versatile classification tool for galactic activity using optical and infrared colors

(abridged) The overwhelming majority of diagnostic tools for galactic activity are focused on active galaxies. Passive or dormant galaxies are often excluded from these diagnostics which usually employ emission line features. In this work, we use infrared and optical colors in order to build an all-inclusive galactic activity diagnostic tool that can discriminate between star-forming, AGN, LINER, composite, and passive galaxies, and which can be used in local and low-redshift galaxies. We explore classification criteria based on infrared colors from the 3 WISE bands supplemented with optical colors from the u, g, and r SDSS bands. From these we aim to find the minimal combination of colors for optimal results. Furthermore, to mitigate biases related to aperture effects, we introduce a new WISE photometric scheme combing different sized apertures. We develop a diagnostic tool using machine learning methods that includes both active and passive galaxies under one unified scheme using 3 colors. We find that the combination of W1-W2, W2-W3, and g-r colors offers good performance while the broad availability of these colors for a large number of galaxies ensures wide applicability on large galaxy samples. The overall accuracy is $\sim$81% while the achieved completeness for each class is $\sim$81% for star-forming, $\sim$56% for AGN, $\sim$68% for LINER, $\sim$65% for composite, and $\sim$85% for passive galaxies. Our diagnostic provides a significant improvement over existing IR diagnostics by including all types of active, as well as passive galaxies, and extending them to the local Universe. The inclusion of the optical colors improves their performance in identifying low-luminosity AGN which are generally confused with star-forming galaxies, and helps to identify cases of starbursts with extreme mid-IR colors which mimic obscured AGN galaxies, a well-known problem for most IR diagnostics.Comment: Accepted for publication in the A&A journal. The code for the application of our model can be accessed through the GitHub repository in https://github.com/BabisDaoutis/GalActivityClassifie

Integration of Environmental and Sustainability Management Practices into Construction Industry: A Case Study

Integration of environmental and sustainability management into the construction industry has become essential as a result of a need to improve financial performance, adopt international protocols in a global marketplace, address stakeholder interests, and attain high environmental performance. Communities also expect organizations to comply with environmental standards and reduce the environmental impacts in their daily operations. That may be a challenge, but it is also an opportunity for the organizations to demonstrate their commitment to environmental responsibility and sustainability. Environmental impacts arising from the construction industry and the consequences could be challenging if appropriate practices are not in place. Therefore, adopting responsible approach to management of environmental matters and embedding the environmental and sustainability principles into the full lifecycle of the projects, starting as early as conceptual design, is crucial for long-term success. Responsible environmental management and commitment to sustainability has been central to Public Works Authority (PWA)'s success as a leading government organization. This is evident from the manner in which PWA is requesting all contractors and consultants working on behalf of PWA projects to develop and implement Environmental Management System (EMS) and comply with international sustainability rating schemes for their projects. This paper provides information on a case study; namely the Musaimeer Pumping Station and Outfall (MPSO) project and discusses the strategies, systems, procedures, and tools developed and implemented by the Project Management Consultant (PMC) and the Contractor to achieve and exceed PWA's environmental and sustainability requirements for the project

Nature versus nurture: The simple contrast

We respond to the commentary of Franklin, Wright, and Davies (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 102, 239-245 [2009]) by returning to the simple contrast between nature and nurture. We find no evidence from the toddler data that makes us revise our ideas that color categories are learned and never innate

Attitudes and views of citizens regarding the contribution of the trail paths in protection and promotion of natural environment

In recent decades, large sections of trail paths throughout Greece have been maintained, revived, and marked, creating a wide network with a total length of approximately 3500 km. The trail paths are one of the main levers of tourism development as they contribute to the preservation, protection, and promotion of the countryside, cultural heritage, and tradition, to the more effective protection and management of areas of exceptional natural beauty and sensitive ecosystems with wildlife. This paper investigates the view of the citizens of the regional unit of Evros, Greece, on the contribution of the trail paths to the protection and promotion of the cultural and natural environment. The research was conducted with the use of a structured questionnaire and through personal interviews. The data were collected and analyzed with the use of descriptive statistical methods as well as multivariate analysis techniques. The results of the research show that the attitudes of citizens to the contribution of paths in the protection and promotion of the cultural and natural environment are directly or indirectly influenced by various factors. In particular, age directly affects the view of citizens towards the trail paths, with the younger ones having more positive views. Other important predictors of citizens’ views were the type of activity in the trail path, with citizens using them for leisure activities or using the easy roots having more positive views towards them

Intent-driven strategic tactical planning for autonomous site inspection using cooperative drones

Realization of industry-scale, goal-driven, autonomous systems with AI planning technology faces several challenges: flexibly specifying planning goal states in varying situations, synthesizing plans in large state spaces, re-planning in dynamic situations, and facilitating humans to supervise, give feedback and intervene. In this paper, we present Intent-driven Strategic Tactical Planning (ISTP) to address these challenges. We demonstrate its efficacy through its application for radio base station inspection across several locations using drones. The inspection task involves capturing images, thermal images or signal measurements - called knowledge-objects - of various components of the base stations for downstream processing. In the ISTP approach, an operator indicates her goals by flying the drone to different components of interest. These goals are generalized to capture the intent of the operator, which are then instantiated in new situations to generate goals dynamically. Towards planning and re-planning in large state spaces to achieve these goals efficiently, we extend the Strategic-Tactical Planning paradigm. All the components of ISTP are integrated in an intuitive UI and demonstrated through a real life use-case built on the UNITY simulator platform

Colour categories are reflected in sensory stages of colour perception when stimulus issues are resolved

Debate exists about the time course of the effect of colour categories on visual processing. We investigated the effect of colour categories for two groups who differed in whether they categorised a blue-green boundary colour as the same- or different-category to a reliably-named blue colour and a reliably-named green colour. Colour differences were equated in just-noticeable differences to be equally discriminable. We analysed event-related potentials for these colours elicited on a passive visual oddball task and investigated the time course of categorical effects on colour processing. Support for category effects was found 100 ms after stimulus onset, and over frontal sites around 250 ms, suggesting that colour naming affects both early sensory and later stages of chromatic processing

Artificial Cognition for Social Human-Robot Interaction: An Implementation

© 2017 The Authors Human–Robot Interaction challenges Artificial Intelligence in many regards: dynamic, partially unknown environments that were not originally designed for robots; a broad variety of situations with rich semantics to understand and interpret; physical interactions with humans that requires fine, low-latency yet socially acceptable control strategies; natural and multi-modal communication which mandates common-sense knowledge and the representation of possibly divergent mental models. This article is an attempt to characterise these challenges and to exhibit a set of key decisional issues that need to be addressed for a cognitive robot to successfully share space and tasks with a human. We identify first the needed individual and collaborative cognitive skills: geometric reasoning and situation assessment based on perspective-taking and affordance analysis; acquisition and representation of knowledge models for multiple agents (humans and robots, with their specificities); situated, natural and multi-modal dialogue; human-aware task planning; human–robot joint task achievement. The article discusses each of these abilities, presents working implementations, and shows how they combine in a coherent and original deliberative architecture for human–robot interaction. Supported by experimental results, we eventually show how explicit knowledge management, both symbolic and geometric, proves to be instrumental to richer and more natural human–robot interactions by pushing for pervasive, human-level semantics within the robot's deliberative system

The development of short-term memory in children: A cross-linguistic comparison and a study on Down syndrome.

This thesis examines the emergence and use of short-term memory (STM) strategies in children, with respect to the working memory model (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974). Of interest are the developmental shifts observed in the use of coding and rehearsal strategies. The questions addressed refer to the extent to which STM development is affected by contextual factors, namely language characteristics or limitations in processing speed; how these factors affect the use of strategies; and how fixed, time- related factors (e.g. articulation rate, item length) interact with the maturation of strategies to determine STM capacity. It is suggested that children are able to use, or learn to use, STM strategies flexibly to adapt to such contextual factors. This affects the patterns of STM performance observed at different ages. To explore this suggestion, a cross-linguistic study was conducted. Greek and English children were compared, as Greek words are on average longer than English words. The question addressed was whether this difference would be reflected in the patterns of STM performance of the two language groups. A study on STM in children with Down syndrome was also conducted, to explore how limitations in verbal abilities affect STM and strategy use. Greek and English children aged 4 to 10 years were compared on a number of STM tasks. Dissociations between visuo-spatial and verbal tasks and effects of phonological similarity, visual similarity, and word length on recall of spoken words and pictures were examined. The developmental patterns of STM performance in the two language groups differed in the chronology of their emergence. Greek children relied on visual coding for longer than English children, who showed a shift towards a preference for verbal coding at an earlier age than Greek children. Children in both language groups seemed able to use strategies flexibly according to the length of the items to be remembered. Native language and differences in literacy acquisition were considered as possible causal factors for these differences. The study of STM development in children with Down syndrome suggested a preference for visual coding in STM tasks. Children with Down syndrome may rely more on visual strategies, but they should be taught how to benefit from them in STM tasks