Engineering Commons^™

Adapting The Surveying Curriculum To New Dimensions Of The Profession, Fahria Masum, Reinfried Mansberger, Audrey Martin, Gerhard Navratil, Anthony Mushinge

Articles

Today the surveying profession is very different from what it was twenty years ago. Recent technological innovations, globalization, and global land-related challenges have allowed a wide range of advances in the surveying profession. The vision is to promote surveying practices that can enhance the quality of services in a variety of tracks in the land profession. According to the new adjacent professional areas and the needs of the labor market, academic courses for surveyors have to be adapted to meet the broader scope of the surveying profession and to supply highly qualified land professionals. This paper outlines the new challenges …

Mechanisms To Improve Employer Engagement In Apprenticeship In The Irish Construction Industry: A Mesolevel Analysis, Eoghan Ó Murchadha, Roisin Murphy

Conference papers

Apprentice training in Ireland remains within a state of flux. Although construction output is steady at present with the sector recording growth in excess of 60 percent over the last three years, there remains an alarming discordant issue of a lack of construction skills. In 2017, the largest representative body of construction related firms in Ireland, the Construction Industry Federation (CIF) endorsed a research study of their membership of more than 1,000 firms in an attempt to quantify the level of engagement in training. This study sought to identify the determinants of engagement and the constraints thereof. Findings from the …

A Modified Langevin-Debye Model For Investigating The Electro-Optic Behaviour Of De Vries Smectic Liquid Crystals, Vigneshwaran Swaminathan, Vitaly Petrovich Panov, Sithara Pavithran Sreenilayam, Yuri Panarin, J. K. Vij

Articles

An external electric field applied across a planar-aligned cell in Smectic A* phase of de Vries smectic liquid crystal induces director redistribution over a cone, resulting in a substantial increase in the birefringence and the apparent optical tilt angle. Such an electro-optic response is modelled by Shen et al. [Y. Shen et al., Phys. Rev. E 88, 062504 (2013)], who modified their previous hollow cone with a diffuse cone model by introducing the molecular distribution function limited over a range of tilt angles, that lie in between θmin and θmax. The limits in these two tilt …

Phase-Only Digital Encryption Using A Three-Pass Protocol, Jonathan Blackledge, Paul Tobin, W. Govere, S. Sibanda, C. M. Adolfo

Conference papers

Abstract—This paper considers an application of phase-only digital encryption to the three-pass protocol leading to a new ‘nokey- exchange algorithm’. After providing a study on the theoretical background to the method, an algorithm is presented on a step-by-step basis together with three examples of cryptanalysis. A prototype MATLAB function is provided for validation of the approach and for further development by interested readers.

The Chirp Function Revisited: A Uniqueness Conjecture For Chirplet Modulation, Jonathan Blackledge, Paul Tobin

Conference papers

The chirp function (a unit amplitude quadratic phase-only function with linear frequency modulation) is well known and is used in a wide range of applications including radar, digital communications, information coding and hiding and many other forms of signal and image processing. This is because the chirp provides an optimal solution to the problem of retrieving information from low energy signals with a low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR). The chirp function also occurs in the solution to many mathematical models used to describe the propagation and scattering of waves (in the Fresnel zone), in quantum mechanics (the quantum shutter problem) and …

Photovoltaic Supplied T-Type Three- Phase Inverter With Harmonic Current Compensation Capability, Zahera Batool, Samet Biricik, Hasan Komurcugil, Tuan Ngo, Tuyen V. Vu

Conference papers

In this paper, a T-Type grid-connected inverter with harmonic current compensation capability is proposed and studied for the on-grid photovoltaic (PV) systems. This idea is based on the modification of the existing photovoltaic inverter control algorithm with the adaptation of active power filter control algorithm. The grid-connected PV inverter has similar topology and control methods as that of the active power filter systems. However, such multifunctional inverters have not yet matured for commercial use and call for more research. In this work, a conventional phase locked-loop algorithm is used to determine the angular position of the synchronous reference of the …

Three-Phase Two-Leg T-Type Converter Based Active Power Filter, Samet Biricik, Hasan Komurcugil, Mohamed Trabelsi

Conference papers

In this work, a three-phase two-leg T-type active power filter topology is investigated when a three-level hysteresis band current modulation technique is applied. The three-phase two-leg T-type configuration which utilizes eight switching devices together split DC link capacitor banks is able to improve the reliability of the system as well as effectively reduces the power losses. The compensation of the current harmonics at each phase are achieved successfully with the control of phase-a and phase-b. Using this technique, the phase-c is directly connected to the midpoint of the split capacitors, which eliminates the necessity of additional control on the phase-c. …

Detection Of Grid Voltage Anomalies Via Broadband Subspace Decomposition, Samet Biricik, Soydan Redif

Conference papers

Due to the increase of sensitive loads on the mains power grid, measurement and monitoring of the power quality (PQ) have become an important factor for both consumers and operators. As is well-known, PQ problems occur in a very short time period with specific characteristics. In transmission or distribution systems, power quality data are collected from monitoring devices such as digital fault recorders, power quality and dynamic system monitors, etc. The recorded data has to be analysed in order to understand system anomalies. These anomalies may be due to sources of broadband noise. In this study, we employ broadband subspace …

Demand Response And Consumer Inconvenience, Chittesh Veni Chandran, Malabika Basu, Keith Sunderland

Conference papers

Balancing the energy demand and generation using the latest load management technologies is considered as an immediate requirement for peak demand management and to improve the operation of electrical distribution networks. However, load management technologies depriving consumers of utilizing their personal resources could be perceived as a consumer right violation by many consumers, and thus, the success of the program is significantly dependent on consumer satisfaction. This paper probes consumer engagement plans through an algorithm to minimize the consumer inconvenience caused by the load management/demand response (DR) program. Four different consumer engagement plans are proposed for consumers with different tolerance …

Building A Risk Model For The Patient-Centred Care Of Multiple Chronic Diseases, Stephane Deparis, Pierpaolo Tommasi, Alessandra Pascale, Hicham Rifai, Julie Doyle, John Dinsmore

Conference papers

With the increase of multimorbidity due to population ageing, managing multiple chronic health conditions is a rising challenge. Machine-learning can contribute to a better understanding of persons with multimorbidity (PwMs) and how to design an effective framework of care and support for them. We present a risk model of older PwMs that was derived from the TILDA dataset, a longitudinal study of the ageing Irish population. This model is based on a 26-nodes Bayesian network that represents patients possibly having one or more chronic conditions among diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and arthritis, through a joint probability distribution of demographic, …

Third-Order Optical Nonlinearity Properties Of Cdcl2-Modifed Ge–Sb–S Chalcogenide Glasses, Xiaosong Lu, Jianhui Li, Lu Yang, Runan Zhang, Yindong Zhang, Jing Ren, Aurelian Catalin Galca, Mihail Secu, Gerald Farrell, Pengfei Wang

Articles

We developed a new type of chalcohalide glasses with physicochemical and nonlinear optical properties that are tunable by composition. It is found that more than 60 mol.% CdCl2 heavy metal halide can be dissolved into the ternary Ge–Sb–S system and forming stable glasses. The visible-light transparency range is extended to shorter wavelengths with the addition of CdCl2, which is beneficial for the optical quality control and infra-red (IR) system alignment. The third-order optical nonlinearity (TONL) is studied using the femtosecond Z-scan method. The results show that both the nonlinear refractive index and two photon absorption co-efficient decrease with CdCl2. Benefiting …

Distance,Time And Terms In First Story Detection, Fei Wang

Doctoral

First Story Detection (FSD) is an important application of online novelty detection within Natural Language Processing (NLP). Given a stream of documents, or stories, about news events in a chronological order, the goal of FSD is to identify the very first story for each event. While a variety of NLP techniques have been applied to the task, FSD remains challenging because it is still not clear what is the most crucial factor in defining the “story novelty”. Giventhesechallenges,thethesisaddressedinthisdissertationisthat the notion of novelty in FSD is multi-dimensional. To address this, the work presented has adopted a three dimensional analysis of the …

Music Information Retrieval For Irish Traditional Music Automatic Analysis Of Harmonic, Rhythmic, And Melodic Features For Efficient Key-Invariant Tune Recognition, Pierre Beauguitte

Doctoral

Music making and listening practices increasingly rely on techno logy,and,asaconsequence,techniquesdevelopedinmusicinformation retrieval (MIR) research are more readily available to end users, in par ticular via online tools and smartphone apps. However, the majority of MIRresearchfocusesonWesternpopandclassicalmusic,andthusdoes not address specificities of other musical idioms. Irishtraditionalmusic(ITM)ispopularacrosstheglobe,withregular sessionsorganisedonallcontinents. ITMisadistinctivemusicalidiom, particularly in terms of heterophony and modality, and these character istics can constitute challenges for existing MIR algorithms. The bene fitsofdevelopingMIRmethodsspecificallytailoredtoITMisevidenced by Tunepal, a query-by-playing tool that has become popular among ITM practitioners since its release in 2009. As of today, Tunepal is the state of the art for tune recognition in ITM. The research in …

An Automated Negotiation System For Ecommerce Store Owners To Enable Flexible Product Pricing, Jake O'Halloran

Dissertations

If a store owner wishes to sell a product online, they traditionally have two options for deciding on a price. They can sell the product at a fixesd price like the products sold on sites like Amazon, or they can put the product in an auction and let demand from customers drive the final sales price like the products sold on sites like eBay. Both options have their pros and cons. An alternative option for deciding on a final sales price for the product is to enable negotiation on the product. With this, there is a dynamic nature to the …

Augmenting American Fuzzy Lop To Increase The Speed Of Bug Detection, Raviraj Mahajan

Dissertations

Whitebox fuzz testing is a vital part of the software testing process in the software development life cycle (SDLC). It is used for bug detection and security vulnerability checking as well. But current tools lack the ability to detect all the bugs and cover the entire code under test in a reasonable time. This study will explore some of the various whitebox fuzzing techniques and tools (AFL, SAGE, Driller, etc.) currently in use followed by a discussion of their strategies and the challenges facing them. One of the most popular state-of-the-art fuzzers, American Fuzzy Lop (AFL) will be discussed in …

Investigation Into The Perceptually Informed Data For Environmental Sound Recognition, Chenglin Kang

Dissertations

Environmental sound is rich source of information that can be used to infer contexts. With the rise in ubiquitous computing, the desire of environmental sound recognition is rapidly growing. Primarily, the research aims to recognize the environmental sound using the perceptually informed data. The initial study is concentrated on understanding the current state-of-the-art techniques in environmental sound recognition. Then those researches are evaluated by a critical review of the literature. This study extracts three sets of features: Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, Mel-spectrogram and sound texture statistics. Two kinds machine learning algorithms are cooperated with appropriate sound features. The models are …

Comparing Defeasible Argumentation And Non-Monotonic Fuzzy Reasoning Methods For A Computational Trust Problem With Wikipedia, Ryan Kirwan

Dissertations

Computational trust is an ever-more present issue with the surge in autonomous agent development. Represented as a defeasible phenomenon, problems associated with computational trust may be solved by the appropriate reasoning methods. This paper compares two types of such methods, Defeasible Argumentation and Non-Monotonic Fuzzy Logic to assess which is more effective at solving a computational trust problem centred around Wikipedia editors. Through the application of these methods with real-data and a set of knowledge-bases, it was found that the Fuzzy Logic approach was statistically significantly better than the Argumentation approach in its inferential capacity.

Predicting Violent Crime Reports From Geospatial And Temporal Attributes Of Us 911 Emergency Call Data, Vincent Corcoran

Dissertations

The aim of this study is to create a model to predict which 911 calls will result in crime reports of a violent nature. Such a prediction model could be used by the police to prioritise calls which are most likely to lead to violent crime reports. The model will use geospatial and temporal attributes of the call to predict whether a crime report will be generated. To create this model, a dataset of characteristics relating to the neighbourhood where the 911 call originated will be created and combined with characteristics related to the time of the 911 call. Geospatial …

Enhancing Partially Labelled Data: Self Learning And Word Vectors In Natural Language Processing, Eamon Mcentee

Dissertations

There has been an explosion in unstructured text data in recent years with services like Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp helping drive this growth. Many of these companies are facing pressure to monitor the content on their platforms and as such Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques are more important than ever. There are many applications of NLP ranging from spam filtering, sentiment analysis of social media, automatic text summarisation and document classification.

Performance Comparison Of Hybrid Cnn-Svm And Cnn-Xgboost Models In Concrete Crack Detection, Sahana Thiyagarajan

Dissertations

Detection of cracks mainly has been a sort of essential step in visual inspection involved in construction engineering as it is the commonly used building material and cracks in them is an early sign of de-basement. It is hard to find cracks by a visual check for the massive structures. So, the development of crack detecting systems generally has been a critical issue. The utilization of contextual image processing in crack detection is constrained, as image data usually taken under real-world situations vary widely and also includes the complex modelling of cracks and the extraction of handcrafted features. Therefore the …

Impact On Distribution System Protection With The Integration Of Eg On The Distribution Network, Jane Courtney, Aaron Mcdonnell

Conference papers

A significant increase in EG connections on the distribution network over the past decade in Ireland has presented challenges to the Distribution System Operator (DSO). The connection of EG can cause co-ordination of Distance protection to be altered and has resulted in variations in short circuit levels. Multidirectional power flow has been introduced into a Distribution system that was not designed for the direction change in current flow. The impact of connecting EG to a typical 38 kV Distribution Network was demonstrated as part of this study. Increasing fault levels and protection co-ordination selectivity problems were identified when the network …

Persistence Pays Off: Paying Attention To What The Lstm Gating Mechanism Persists, John D. Kelleher, Giancarlo Salton

Articles

Language Models (LMs) are important components in several Natural Language Processing systems. Recurrent Neural Network LMs composed of LSTM units, especially those augmented with an external memory, have achieved state-of-the-art results. However, these models still struggle to process long sequences which are more likely to contain long-distance dependencies because of information fading and a bias towards more recent information. In this paper we demonstrate an effective mechanism for retrieving information in a memory augmented LSTM LM based on attending to information in memory in proportion to the number of timesteps the LSTM gating mechanism persisted the information.

Languages For Different Health Information Readers: Multitrait-Multimethod Content Analysis Of Cochrane Systematic Reviews Textual Summary Formats, Jasna Karačić, Pierpaolo Dondio, Ivan Buljan, Darko Hren, Ana Marušić

Articles

Background: Although subjective expressions and linguistic fluency have been shown as important factors in processing and interpreting textual facts, analyses of these traits in textual health information for different audiences are lacking. We analyzed the readability and linguistic psychological and emotional characteristics of different textual summary formats of Cochrane systematic reviews. Methods: We performed a multitrait-multimethod cross-sectional study of Press releases available at Cochrane web site (n= 162) and corresponding Scientific abstracts (n= 158), Cochrane Clinical Answers (n= 35) and Plain language summaries in English (n= 156), French (n= 101), German (n= 41) and Croatian (n=156). We used SMOG index …

Is There A Correlation Between Wikidata Revisions And Trending Hashtags On Twitter?, Paula Dooley

Dissertations

Twitter is a microblogging application used by its members to interact and stay socially connected by sharing instant messages called tweets that are up to 280 characters long. Within these tweets, users can add hashtags to relate the message to a topic that is shared among users. Wikidata is a central knowledge base of information relying on its members and machines bots to keeping its content up to date. The data is stored in a highly structured format with the added SPARQL protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) endpoint to allow users to query its knowledge base.

Forecasting Anomalous Events And Performance Correlation Analysis In Event Data, Sonya Leech [Thesis]

Dissertations

Classical and Deep Learning methods are quite common approaches for anomaly detection. Extensive research has been conducted on single point anomalies. Collective anomalies that occur over a set of two or more durations are less likely to happen by chance than that of a single point anomaly. Being able to observe and predict these anomalous events may reduce the risk of a server’s performance. This paper presents a comparative analysis into time-series forecasting of collective anomalous events using two procedures. One is a classical SARIMA model and the other is a deep learning Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) model. It then …

Expressing Trust With Temporal Frequency Of User Interaction In Online Communities, Ekaterina Yashkina, Arseny Pinigin, Jooyoung Lee, Manuel Mazzara, Akinlolu Solomon Adekotujo, Adam Zubair, Luca Longo

Conference papers

Reputation systems concern soft security dynamics in diverse areas. Trust dynamics in a reputation system should be stable and adaptable at the same time to serve the purpose. Many reputation mechanisms have been proposed and tested over time. However, the main drawback of reputation management is that users need to share private information to gain trust in a system such as phone numbers, reviews, and ratings. Recently, a novel model that tries to overcome this issue was presented: the Dynamic Interaction-based Reputation Model (DIBRM). This approach to trust considers only implicit information automatically deduced from the interactions of users within …

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Building Services Engineering

No abstract provided.

Detection Of Offensive Youtube Comments, A Performance Comparison Of Deep Learning Approaches, Priyam Bansal

Dissertations

Social media data is open, free and available in massive quantities. However, there is a significant limitation in making sense of this data because of its high volume, variety, uncertain veracity, velocity, value and variability. This work provides a comprehensive framework of text processing and analysis performed on YouTube comments having offensive and non-offensive contents.

YouTube is a platform where every age group of people logs in and finds the type of content that most appeals to them. Apart from this, a massive increase in the use of offensive language has been apparent. As there are massive volume of new …

Phase Resolved Partial Discharge Evaluation At Dc Voltage, Tobias Dezenzo

Doctoral

Partial discharge diagnostics are common for the condition assessment of high voltage alternating current (ac) and direct current (dc) equipment. For ac applications the phase resolved partial discharge evaluation method has prevailed [1]. Even though, numerous methods for dc partial discharge diagnostics have been proposed no agreed standard exists. This is primarily because of the fact that these methods are not as easily applicable as the well-known, intuitive, pattern based phase resolved method. Due to the often assumed unavailability of a useable phase angle information [2]–[4] this method has never been transferred to dc partial discharge diagnostics. However, as a …

Public Private Partnership (Ppp): Sustainability In The Context Of Ppp Educational Building Projects, Renuka Rajput

Doctoral

This PhD research focuses on and examines the relationship between PPP procurement and sustainability and further aims to establish whether PPP projects can be sustainable with regards to social, enviornmnetal and economic sustainability. The scope of the research is primarily confined to the implementation of construction related sustainability practices within PPPs. It introduces various PPP concepts and critiques the underlying principles for the utilisation of PPP in education sector. This discussion leads to the identification of the core factors common to Sustainability and PPPs and the challenges facing the public and private partners in implementing sustainability in its entirety. In …