bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Effect of loading rate on the behaviour of unsaturated soils
Authors: Rojas J.C.  , Mancuso C.
Published: February 2025

The aim of this paper is to analyze the influence of loading rate on the observed soil behaviour. To this aim, a series of suction-controlled triaxial tests has been performed on reconstituted specimens of pyroclastic silty sand, including isotropic compression stages and deviator stages performed at different stress-rate and strain-rate, respectively. During the isotropic compression stages the loading rates of 2, 8, 32, 128 kPa/h have been applied under several suction values (i.e. 15, 45 and 300 kPa). The drained deviator stages have been carried out at the same suctions levels under strain rates of 0.25 and 2.50 %/h. No effect of loading rate was registered during isotropic compression stage at low suction values (i.e. 15 and 45 kPa). At higher suction (i.e. 300 kPa), as the loading rate is increased the stiffness of the soil also increases, however, a loading rate value was identified from which an opposite trend was observed. For the strain rates studied on deviator stage, no effect was observed on the soil behaviour.
A shaking table pad made of Kevlar fiber-reinforced polymers
Authors: Méndez Bogart  , Botero Eduardo  , Romo Miguel P.
Published: February 2025

The use of fiber reinforced polymers has been rapidly expanding to almost all engineering branches. Historically, aerospace engineering has used composite materials to solve their specific needs. Composites have also been used extensively in automobile industry, sport goods mechanical engineering, defense industry etc. In the past few decades, composite materials have found application into other engineering areas like structural engineering. Nowadays the use of composite materials in civil engineering has been explored extensively by many researchers. However, composite materials are still not commonly used in geotechnical engineering. This paper deals with that aspect and proposes the potential use of composites in some geotechnical problems. To this end, an experimental investigation was carried out to find static and dynamic properties of an in-house Kevlar fiber-reinforced polymer (KFRP). The KFRP specimens used in the experimental program were formed in the laboratory using easy-to-get commercial components, with inexpensive techniques. It should be stressed that the components used were relatively cheap as compared to those commonly used in the composites industry. Composite materials are still very expensive to build, especially when very sophisticated techniques are used to build them. The components used in this research were chosen such that they gave the best cost-benefit relation from the available choices in the non-specialized market. The specimens were conformed by wet lay-up technique and were cured in a vacuum bag in the laboratory under room temperature conditions. Kevlar fiber was used because it is easy to get from any DuPont distributor worldwide, and because its price is competitive with other high-performance fibers like carbon fibers. Also, Aramid fibers (like Kevlar) have very light weight and high tension strength as compared to fiber glass, which is very popular in the composites market. The laboratory program carried out included bending tests, free vibration tests and cycling loading. Global properties were back-calculated from these tests. Also, a strength-of-materials model was used to compute the composite's properties and its results agreed well with laboratory results. Static laboratory tests were simulated in a finite element model to corroborate experimental and analytical results. Finally, numerical simulations of the use of the advanced KFRP were carried out to show its potential use in geotechnical testing applications.
Settlement of reinforced subgrades under dynamic loading
Authors: Puri V.K.  , Kumar S.  , Das B.M.  , Prakash S.  , Yeo B.
Published: February 2025

Model tests were conducted in the laboratory to study the settlement behavior of small size footing resting on geogrid reinforced sand layer and subjected to dynamic loads. Tests were conducted by first subjecting the footing to an initial sustained static load and then superimposing additional predetermined dynamic loads. The frequency of dynamic load was kept at 1 Hz which was well below the resonant frequency of the system. Based on the observed test results, the nature of variation of the permanent settlement of the foundation with intensity of static loading and the amplitude of cyclic load are presented in this paper.
Do you still want to vote for your favorite politician? Ask Ontobella!
Authors: Garbacz Pawel  , Lechniak Marek  , Kulicki Piotr  , Trypuz Robert
Published: February 2025

The paper presents the preliminary version of Ontobella – a domain ontology of beliefs. The philosophical assumptions of this system are taken from the philosophy of Roman Ingarden and from the psychological results obtained in the Lvov-Warsaw school. Ontobella is applied as the conceptual framework for a computer system that collects information about political debates. We use it to retrieve and store beliefs expressed during sessions of the Polish parliament.
Reducing the Gap between Verification Models and Software Development Models
Authors: Pulvermueller Elke
Published: February 2025

A variety of models and notations are available to support the software developers. Such models help to gather requirements and to build a system implementing these requirements. However, it is often neglected to verify that the requirements are actually fulfilled in the design and implementation. The increasing demand for compliancy to requirements (e.g. due to laws) together with the increasing system complexity re-attracts notice to automatic verification technologies for that purpose. The low user-friendliness and, thus, the low applicability of the verification technologies often prevents their employment. In this paper we aim at closing the gap between software development models with their rich notation and semantics (e.g. Event Process Chains, EPCs) on the one hand and verification-oriented models (typically just simple structures like finite state automata) on the other hand. This is approached by extending the verification model in a controlled manner towards more semantics resulting in our extended Kripke structure. To profit from such a semantic extension we, in addition, extend the temporal logic language CTL. Our new temporal logic language allows to express the expected requirements more precisely.
An Approach for Refactoring using ESC/Java2 — A Simple Case Study —
Authors: Ishikawa Hiroshi
Published: February 2025

Refactoring is a structural transformation technique for program code, which preserves their functional or behavioral aspects. Check whether the transformed program codes preserve such properties or not is a significant process. It carried out to support quality assurance. This paper introduces an alternative approach for the checking process via program verification. In this approach, ESC/Java2 tool is used for refactoring program codes in Java.
On Solving MaxSAT Through SAT
Authors: Ansótegui Carlos  , Bonet María Luisa  , Levy Jordi
Published: February 2025

In this paper we present a Partial MaxSAT solver based on successive calls to a SAT solver. At the kth iteration the SAT solver tries to certify that there exist an assignment that satisfies all but k clauses. The key idea is to add an additional variable to each soft clause and to introduce, at each iteration, at-least and at-most cardinality constraints restricting the possible values of these variables. We prove the correctness of our algorithm and compare it with other (Partial) MaxSAT solvers.
Dynamic Modeling of Heart Dipole Vector for the ECG and VCG Generation
Authors: La Foresta Fabio  , Mammone Nadia  , Inuso Giuseppina  , Morabito Francesco Carlo
Published: February 2025

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is the major diagnostic instrument for the analysis of cardiac electrophysiology; this is due to two simple reasons, first because it is not invasive and secondly because an ECG is a source of accurate information about the heart functionality. For these reasons, in the last years, the ECG has attracted the interest of many scientists, who have developed algorithms and models to investigate the cardiac disorders. The aim of this paper is to introduce a novel dynamic model to simulate pathologic ECGs. We discuss a generalization of a well known model for normal ECG signals generation and we show that it can be extended to simulate the effects on ECG of some cardiac diseases. We also represent the 3D vector trajectory of the cardiac cycle by reconstructing the heart dipole vector (HDV) from the Frank lead system. Finally, we propose to generate the complete 12-lead ECG system by the HDV projection. The results shows this a powerful tool for pathologic ECG generation, future research will be devoted to set up an extensive synthetic ECG database which could open the door to new theories about the genesis of the ECG as well as new models of heart functionality.
The Department Store Metaphor: Organizing, Presenting and Accessing Cultural Heritage Components in a Complex Framework
Authors: Maniscalco Umberto  , Mascari Gianfranco  , Pilato Giovanni
Published: February 2025

We present a part of a wider research activity carried on within the CNR Interdepartmental Project named “Cultura e Territorio”. The project considers the interaction between culture and territory, this interaction determines co-evolving processes to which social, economic and knowledge phenomena are associated. Considering this very complex context we develop information management tools aiming to organize, present and access the CNR's research components in the field of cultural heritage fruition, monitoring and conservation in a adaptive and dynamic way. The Department Store metaphor to organize, present and access research components in a complex framework can be usefully adopted as a guide line to define components characteristics and clustering, adaptive and dynamic presentation and accessing strategy.
A real-time Speech-interfaced System for Group Conversation Modeling
Authors: Rocchi Cesare  , Principi Emanuele  , Cifani Simone  , Rotili Rudy  , Squartini Stefano  , Piazza Francesco
Published: February 2025

In this paper, a speech-interfaced system for fostering group conversations is presented. The system captures conversation keywords and shows visual stimuli on a tabletop display. A stimulus can be a feedback to the current conversation or a cue to discuss new topics. This work describes the overall system architecture and highlights details about the design choices of the overall system, with a particular focus on the real-time implementation issues. A suitable speech enhancement front-end and a keyword spotter have been integrated on a common software platform for real-time audio processing, namely Nu-Tech, resulting in a helpful and flexible architecture for real-world applications in group conversation modeling scenarios. Such system characteristics, jointly with some experimental results obtained from simulations on recorded speech data, seem to confirm the efficacy of the approach motivating the development of further features and the experimentation in new scenarios.
BestPortal: Lessons Learned in Lightweight Semantic Access to Court Proceedings
Authors: Hoekstra Rinke
Published: February 2025

The BestPortal is part of an initiative that aims to improve the ability of citizens to determine their legal position. Publishing court proceedings is a natural step to improve access and transparency of the legal system. We discuss the limitations of both such an ‘open data’ approach, and of more traditional knowledge intensive approaches, and present a flexible mechanism that allows us to bridge the gap between legal and layman conceptualisations of the world. This approach has been implemented as a publicly accessible portal and uses the BestMap ontology to define mappings between the two vocabularies.
Rapid Ontology Development
Authors: Labič Dejan  , Krisper Marjan
Published: February 2025

The applications of ontologies are mainly restricted to academia while successful employment in business environments is rare. Existing methodologies are complex and require technical expertise on language syntax and knowledge of the process. We propose Rapid Ontology Development (ROD) approach for ontology construction, where steps are constantly evaluated and the user is guided throughout the process. Following ROD approach the required technical knowledge for ontology modeling is minimized and the process doesn't end with the last successful iteration, but continues with post-development activities of using ontology as a functional component in other systems.
Use of manufactured pellet aggregates to study the effect of aggregate crushing on strength and deformation behavior at the concrete-soil interface
Authors: Danyildiz E.  , Baykal G.
Published: February 2025

Interface between construction materials and soils plays an important role in many geotechnical systems, including retaining walls, shallow and deep foundations. Interface behavior is studied using split samples consisting of concrete block at the bottom half and granular soil at the top half of the direct shear test. The objective of this research is to assess the effect of aggregate crushing at the concrete-soil interface. To be able to control the large number of parameters affecting the interface behavior, granular soil was manufactured using fly ash by cold-bonding pelletization technique with predetermined shape, size, grain size distribution, surface roughness, water absorption, unit weight and crushing strength. The physical and mechanical properties of these aggregates were investigated by using conventional soil mechanics tests. Interface test results between lightweight aggregates and concrete showed that grain crushing, particle shape, level of normal stress and the surface roughness of the grains play an important role in the interface behavior between granular soils and concrete. At low normal stress values, the crushing strength of aggregates did not affect the interface behavior. For the synthetic aggregates studied, the ratio of interface to internal friction angle decreased with increasing crushing strength.
Interfacial friction and vibration
Authors: Clariá J.J.  , Santamarina J.C.
Published: February 2025

We explore the effect of vibration on interfacial friction by applying normal and parallel base vibration to a block that rests on an inclined plane. Results show that the block can displace at significant lower angles than the limiting static angle, and that the acceleration level required to cause sliding increases with frequency. Limiting equilibrium analysis is insufficient to explain the observed behavior. Instead, we compute the displacement per cycle and show that (1) the apparent quasi-continuous motion of the block under vibration is the accumulation of successive slip-rest events, and (2) the displacement in every cycle must exceed a threshold displacement in order to cause sliding. The threshold displacement is 0.1 μm for polished granite surfaces; a relation between the threshold displacement and the length scale of surface features is anticipated.
Satellite Monitoring and Impact Assessment of Urban Growth in Stockholm, Sweden between 1986 and 2006
Authors: Furberg Dorothy  , Ban Yifang
Published: February 2025

The objective of this research is to investigate the extent of land-cover change in and around Stockholm from 1986 to 2006 and the nature of the resulting landscape fragmentation with a particular focus on the possible environmental impact. Four scenes of SPOT imagery over the Stockholm area were acquired for this study: two on 13 June 1986, one on 5 August 2006 and one on 4 June 2008. Various image processing and classification algorithms were tested and compared. The best classification results were obtained using an object-based and rule-based approach with texture measures as well as spectral data as inputs. The image pairs from the two decades were classified into seven land cover categories for Stockholm Municipality, i.e., low-density built-up, high-density built-up, industrial areas, open land, forest, mixed forest and open land, and water. The overall accuracies were 93% (kappa: 0.91) for 1986 and 97% (kappa: 0.96) for 2006. Landscape fragmentation and change was evaluated using spatial metrics. The spatial metric results reveal that urban areas increased at the expense of non-built up areas by around 2% both on the municipal and regional levels. The 2006/2008 classification gives evidence of being a more fragmented landscape than that of 1986. While urban areas have become denser within Stockholm municipality, which is in line with the region's development policy, more natural land cover types have at the same time been eroded; a development not in line with the regional goal of maintaining the area's green spaces. The classification technique used on the municipality will be expanded to the region as a whole, and regional trends and consequent recommendations will be the focus of future research.
Constructing Bodies and their Qualities from Observations
Authors: Scheider Simon  , Probst Florian  , Janowicz Krzysztof
Published: February 2025

The principle challenge for information semantics lies in the degrees of freedom to interpret symbols in terms of thoughts and experiences which leads to incompatible views on the world. Consequently, incompatible information ontologies and interpretations of the described data will remain. Even though there is usually a common experiential ground, it stays often unknown to users of semantically annotated data. This symbol grounding problem is a bottleneck of information semantics, which remains largely unsolved in ontological practice. In this paper, we suggest – in the spirit of Jeremy Bentham – to introduce formal primitives which are directly grounded in inter-subjective experience, and which serve to expose and construct complex qualities in information ontologies.
Ontologies for Distributed Command and Control Messaging
Authors: Nguyen Duc N.  , Kopena Joseph B.  , Loo Boon Thau  , Regli William C.
Published: February 2025

This paper presents the development of a set of ontologies for use in messaging systems within military and emergency first responder command and control applications. These ontologies are used to annotate and subscribe to messages within a content delivery and service discovery middleware connecting sensors, services, and agents on the network. Ontologies serve an important role in this middleware in providing for flexible addressing and querying that increases the decoupling between senders and receivers afforded by the middleware. This is particularly important in the target applications, which feature heterogenous components and software versions spanning development organizations and deployment time. Discussed here are application uses, development methodology, evaluation criteria, and other notes on these ontologies and their creation. The goal of this paper is to provide useful input to others engaged in similar development efforts.
Goals in a Formal Theory of Commonsense Psychology
Authors: Hobbs Jerry R.  , Gordon Andrew
Published: February 2025

In the context of developing formal theories of commonsense psychology, or how peole think they think, we have developed a formal theory of goals. In it we explicate and axiomatize, among others, the goal-related notions of trying, success, failure, functionality, intactness, and importance.
An experimental path towards Self-Management for Future Internet Environments
Authors: Kousaridas Apostolos  , Nguengang Gérard  , Boite Julien  , Conan Vania  , Gazis Vangelis  , Raptis Tilemachos  , Alonistioti Nancy
Published: February 2025

The current challenge for the network systems is the reduction of human intervention in the fundamental management functions and the development of mechanisms that will render the network capable to autonomously configure, optimize, protect and heal itself, handling in parallel the emerging complexity. The in-network cognitive cycle will allow the continuous improvement of management functions of individual network elements and collectively of a whole network system. This paper proposes the software components for the engineering of an innovative self-managed future Internet system that will support visionary research through experimentation.
Modular Upper-Level Ontologies for Semantic Complex Event Processing
Authors: Teymourian Kia  , Coskun Gökhan  , Paschke Adrian
Published: February 2025

Event-driven systems are highly depending on the quality of detection and processing of events. Many of complex real-world events cannot be processed by the existing event processing systems because they are too complex to be understood and processed by the systems. Complex events can be inferred from raw primitive events based on their incoming sequence, their syntax and semantics. Usage of ontological background knowledge about events and their relationship to other non-event concepts can improve the quality of event processing. In this paper, we discuss the profits and problems of ontology developing and usage in the area of event processing and propose modular upper-level ontologies for semantic enabled complex event processing. We discuss, why the modularity is needed and how these ontologies should be modular build up based on ontology engineering aspects to be able to address scalability, expressiveness and reuse.
Redesigning Maintenance Processes to Increase Delivery Performance of the A-check for Wide-body Aircraft at KLM E&M
Authors: Hooplot Jokoeza Nkanjezi  , Ghobbar Adel
Published: February 2025

This paper gives a summary of a thesis project conducted at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines Engineering and Maintenance. The research focuses on redesigning maintenance processes to increase the delivery performance of the A-check from a lean perspective. A theoretical framework is formulated based on the combination of lean thinking, six sigma and the theory of constraints. The A-check maintenance processes are analyzed from the gate (on-blocks) back to the gate (off-blocks). The chain of processes is analyzed with regard to the five lean principles. Through this analysis three improvement areas are identified namely buffer reduction, improved position management and reduction of interference between the (re)arranging process and the engine-run process. The processes are redesigned such that a future state is developed with improved customer value through increased delivery performance. Based on a reduction in waste and increased utilization of the primary constraint the delivery performance of the A-check is estimated to increase with 92%. The future state is designed in two phases namely an immediate solution which requires no significant investments and can be implemented right away and an ultimate solution.
Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem – Near Optimal Real-time Solution
Authors: Richter Peter H.
Published: February 2025

We present an θ(|S|·|EG|) deterministic construction heuristic for the Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem ATSP on digraphs G. The heuristic relies on the fast determination of an approximate bidirectional Steiner Tree with respect to the stopovers S⊆VG. The algorithm is a robust and very fast general ATSP-solution method. It has an astonishing approximation ϵ ≈ 0.05 and is therefore especially appropriate for online and real-time navigation applications with a high number of stopovers and where graph changes have to be considered just in time. It turns out that the proposed method is a new serious competitor for all existing ATSP heuristics, especially qualified for navigation apps of large problem sizes that depend on the tours' real-time calculation instantly executed on online graphs while observing turn restrictions.
How Relevant is Fieldwork to DSS Design-Science Research?
Authors: Arnott David  , Pervan Graham
Published: February 2025

Recent reviews of DSS research have indicated a need to improve its quality and relevance. Design science has an important role to play in this improvement as this research strategy can engage industry and the profession in intellectually important projects. DSS has a long history of design science, although most of this research was not conducted under this rubric. Recent publications have clarified what is required for quality outcomes in IS design science. A central issue in these publications is the evaluation of the design artifact, especially the use of the artifact in a field setting. Successful fieldwork is perhaps the most difficult, and most rewarding, aspect of design science. This paper presents research that used bibliometric content analysis to examine evaluation strategies, especially fieldwork, in a representative sample of 362 DSS design-science papers in 14 journals. The analysis found that DSS design-science papers whose artifacts are used in actual field environments are of significantly higher quality, have significantly higher organizational impact, and have significantly higher relevance with both IS professionals and managers. The major conclusion is that rigorous fieldwork should be the ultimate goal of DSS design-science evaluation.
Cognitive Decision-Making Process as Context Information
Authors: Pereira Andreia C.T.D.  , Santoro Flávia M.
Published: February 2025

Organizations are concerned about capturing their workers' knowledge in order to reuse internal knowledge. Since knowledge is directly related to the context in which it is produced, this work considers the cognitive process as part of context information. Decision-making is especially regarded. We argue that, in order to transform tacit into explicit knowledge, professionals should be able to register their cognitive decision-making process related to any activity performed. Therefore, we propose a model and guidelines to support this task.
Assessing the Theoretical Strength within the Literature Review Process: A Tool for Doctoral Researchers
Authors: Sammon David  , Nagle Tadhg  , O'Raghallaigh Paidi
Published: February 2025

Making a theoretical contribution can be viewed as one of the most important and confusing objectives for a doctoral researcher. Focusing on the literature review process, this paper highlights the need to develop a tool that will enable doctoral researchers to assess the theoretical strength of the literature they survey. Through synthesizing theory development literature, from both a general research and IS perspective, we propose a tool to aid ‘new’ doctoral researchers in understanding the theoretical landscape within a domain. We then discuss how the tool can be utilized in the wider doctoral research process to combat the issues of rigor and relevance that have permeated the fabric of Information Systems (IS) research, through aiding in a two step literature review process of [1] categorizing the literature and [2] developing a theoretical framework to guide making a theoretical contribution.
Highlights of Collaboration between Industry and Academia in the Area of Aluminium Metallurgy
Authors: van der Winden Menno  , Liu Cheng  , Ruvalcabe-Jiminez Démian  , Zhuang Lin
Published: February 2025

This paper highlights a number of recent developments that were carried out in collaboration between Aleris Europe and the Materials Innovation Institute (M2i) with the involvement of researchers from Corus Research, Development and Technology. Three examples are being discussed: cold cracking during DC-casting, precipitation in 6XXX alloys and Microstructural control by means of Through Process Modelling. From this overview it is concluded that there is a very successful collaboration where a number of key success factors are indentified.
Querying in ℰℒ
Authors: Knorr Matthias  , Alferes José Júlio
Published: February 2025

A general top-down algorithmization for the Well-Founded MKNF Semantics – a semantics for combining rules and ontologies – was recently defined based on an extension of SLG resolution for Logic Programming with an abstract oracle to the parametric ontology language. Here we provide a concrete oracle with practical usage, namely for ℰℒ+which is tractable for reasoning tasks like subsumption. We show that the defined oracle remains tractable (wrt. data complexity) so that the combined (query-driven) approach of non-monotonic rules with that oracle is tractable as well.
Brothers in Arms? On AI Planning and Cellular Automata
Authors: Hoffmann Jörg  , Fatès Nazim  , Palacios Hector
Published: February 2025

AI Planning is concerned with the selection of actions towards achieving a goal. Research on cellular automata (CA) is concerned with the question how global behaviours arise from local updating rules relating a cell to its direct neighbours. While these two areas are disparate at first glance, we herein identify a problem that is interesting to both: How to reach a fixed point in an asynchronous CA where cells are updated one-by-one? Considering a particular local updating rule, we encode this problem into PDDL and show that the resulting benchmark is an interesting challenge for AI Planning. For example, our experiments determine that, very atypically, an optimal SAT-based planner outperforms state-of-the-art satisficing heuristic search planners. This points to a severe weakness of current heuristics because, as we prove herein, plans for this problem can always be constructed in time linear in the size of the automaton. Our proof of this starts from a high-level argument and then relies on using a planner for flexible case enumeration within localised parts of the ar gument. Besides the formal result itself, this establishes a new proof technique for CAs and thus demonstrates that the potential benefit of research crossing the two fields is mutual.
Learning Aggregation Functions for Expert Search
Authors: Cummins Ronan  , Lalmas Mounia  , O'Riordan Colm
Published: February 2025

Machine learning techniques are increasingly being applied to problems in the domain of information retrieval and text mining. In this paper we present an application of evolutionary computation to the area of expert search. Expert search in the context of enterprise information systems deals with the problem of finding and ranking candidate experts given an information need (query). A difficult problem in the area of expert search is finding relevant information given an information need and associating that information with a potential expert.
Describing the Result of a Classifier to the End-User: Geometric-based Sensitivity
Authors: Alvarez Isabelle  , Martin Sophie  , Mesmoudi Salma
Published: February 2025

This paper addresses the issue of supporting the end-user of a classifier, when it is used as a decision support system, to classify new cases. We consider several kinds of classifiers: Statistical or machine learning classifiers, which are built on data, but also direct model-based classifiers that are built to solve a particular problem (like in viability or control problems). The end-user relies mainly on global information (like error rates or global sensitivity analysis) to assess the quality of the result given by the system. Class membership probability, if available, describes certainly the local statistical viewpoint. But it doesn't take into account other contextual information: Cases with high value of class membership probability can also be close to the decision boundary. In the case of numerical state space, we propose to use the decision boundary of the classifier (which always exists, even implicitly), to describe the situation of a particular case: The distance of a case to the decision boundary measures the robustness of the decision to a change in the input data. Other geometric concepts, such as the maximal maximal ball, can present a precise picture of the situation to the end-user. We show the interest of such a geometric study on different examples.
Feasibility of Interactive Localization and Navigation of People with Visual Impairments
Authors: Apostolopoulos Ilias  , Fallah Navid  , Folmer Eelke  , Bekris Kostas E.
Published: February 2025

Indoor localization and navigation systems for individuals with visual impairments (VI) typically rely upon extensive augmentation of the physical space or expensive sensors. Thus, few systems have been adopted. This work conducts a feasibility study of whether it is possible to localize and guide people with VI using inexpensive sensors, such as compasses and pedometers, which are available in portable devices like smart phones. The proposed approach takes advantage of interaction between the system and the human user, who confirms the presence of landmarks. Experiments are employed to study what kind of directions are successful in assisting human users to reach their destination. These experiments show that Bayesian localization tools provide sufficient accuracy, while achieving real-time operation, despite the minimalistic, noisy nature of sensors and the limited computational resources available on smart phones.
A Study of Using Wireless Sensoring Network (WSN) to Improve Tunnel Disaster Prevention and Rescuing Scheme
Authors: Chang Dave Ta Teh  , Lee Horng-Cheh  , Lee Ming-Ru  , Wang Liang-Tso
Published: February 2025

This study focuses on the using WSN in tunnel environmental temperature monitoring systems. Due to complex terrain and tunnel environment, conventional monitoring and alarm systems have severe restrictions on data transmission range and power supply. The inherited low-power and rechargeable battery module empowering the WSN based environmental surveillance system to overcome the complex power distribution and high maintenance problems. Through the fire exam testing, tunnel fire is simulated by using the fire dynamic simulator (FDS) program. Results indicate that the distribution of fire temperature along the tunnel significantly provide the people moving direction during fire. It is expected that the management units can be utilized as a base to establish an intelligent WSN early-warning notification system that can be truly applied in the current disaster prevention engineering.
A Knowledge Base System to Support Emergency Response of Geo-hazards under the conditions of Extreme Snow and Ice Disasters
Authors: Huang Haifeng  , Wang Shimei
Published: February 2025

Rapid and effective emergency response of geo-hazards is an important means to reduce disaster losses. Geo-hazards under the conditions of extreme snow and ice disasters are more complicated than conventional geological hazards. Therefore there's urgent need to build a knowledge base system for emergency response on geo-hazards under the conditions of extreme snow and ice disasters (KBS-ERG/ESID). Based on the analysis of specificity of geo-hazards and emergency response under the conditions of extreme snow and ice disasters and in accordance with the targets of knowledge base system, we put forward and elaborate a layered system architecture of KBS-ERG/ESID, which includes knowledge base layer, core control layer and graphical user interface layer. Then, some geographic information system (GIS) components are introduced into the system architecture due to the needs of displaying and analyzing spatial data when necessary. Finally, the operation steps of KBS-ERG/ESID are introduced by showing some critical system interfaces; meanwhile the effectiveness of the KBS-ERG/ESID is demonstrated.
Application of 3D Information Technology in Geotechnical Engineering Practice
Authors: Zhang Peng  , Zhang Fang  , Han Xuan
Published: February 2025

At present, the information technology is profoundly influencing the geotechnical engineering field. Firstly, from the practical perspective, the ideas about design and development of three-dimensional geotechnical engineering information system and subway monitoring and early warning information system by BGI Engineering Consultants LTD are introduced. Secondly, some problems are emphasized separately in the fields of geotechnical investigation, ground movements risk evaluation, groundwater numerical simulation, geo-environmental engineering, urban planning and the subway third-party monitoring, which have been solved by these two systems. With the effective application of information technology, some existing problems are summarized respectively and the development direction is indicated clearly. It has been found that the information technology shows powerful and prosperous vitality in the geotechnical engineering that has special requirements for systematicness, integration and real-time. However, it is a ubiquitous problem that how to refine the professional function to meet the demand of engineering and project management combining with the specific application trend.
Visual C++ Based Risk Assessment System for Ground Environment Damage Induced by Subway Tunneling
Authors: Liu Bo  , Huang Li  , Li Yan  , Lu Bo
Published: February 2025

In all environmental damages induced by subway tunneling excavation, the prediction and control of the ground surface settlement are the important problems to have to be solved. Therefore, combined with geographic information system (GIS), a new Subway Tunneling-induced ground-Environment-damage Assessment and control Design system, named STEAD, is developed and introduced. Subway Tunneling-induced ground-Environment-damage Risk assessment subsystem (STEAD-RISK) is a part of STEAD. This paper presents the development and application of STEAD-RISK. The developed subsystem employs stochastic medium theory and Peck prediction method, and is written in the Visual C++ program. The subsystem has the function of inputting monitoring data or predicting data by analyzing of computer to Access database, then exchanging data by Access database. STEAD-RISK includes three function menus for risk assessment: a) controlling of the surface deformation monitoring, is analyzed respectively from shield method, shallow-buried tunneling method and open cutting and shaft sinking method; b) controlling of the building foundation deformation, is divided into overall inclination of multi-storey and high building, partial incline of bricking-up bearing structure's foundation and adjacent isolated subsidence of frame structure's foundation; c) influence subarea and safety classification in tunnel and foundation pit of the project. The developed subsystem permits users to identify potential risk areas by combining with graphics and text. STEAD-RISK has successfully applied to many construction site of subway, such as Guangzhou subway line No.2 and No.3, Beijing subway line No.4 and No.10. The applications demonstrated that STEAD-RISK can be used as an efficient tool in the perspective of tunneling-induced ground-environment-damage risk management for tunneling projects in urban areas. Finally, its practical significance t is also discussed.
Argument Analysis: Components of Interpersonal Argumentation
Authors: Budzynska Katarzyna
Published: February 2025

The aim of the paper is to propose a robust model of interpersonal argumentation (IP). The IP-arguments directly address participants of communication, i.e. they refer to speech acts rather than to propositional contents. Argumentation theory recognizes several IP-arguments, e.g. argument from position to know or ad hominem arguments. The model proposed in the paper enables to describe references to different types of speech acts – not only assertives, but also commissives and directives. The IP-arguments are assumed to be warranted by the component of authorizing an agent to perform a given speech act. Consequently, the wider class of IP-communication can be expressed in the extended model, such as e.g. the structure of generic ad hominem can be explicitly represented as the undercutter.
Argumentation 3.0: how Semantic Web technologies can improve argumentation modeling in Web 2.0 environments
Authors: Schneider Jodi  , Passant Alexandre  , Groza Tudor  , Breslin John G.
Published: February 2025

Argumentative discussions are common in Web 2.0 applications, but the social Web still offers limited or no explicit support for argumentation. As Web 2.0 applications become more popular, modeling argumentation happening in these systems becomes important, to enable reuse and further understanding of online discussions. After reviewing four genres of online conversations – Web bulletin boards, Wiki talk pages, blog comments, and microblogs – and four current Web 2.0 argumentation systems, the paper suggests how Semantic Web technologies can be used to provide an interoperability layer for argumentation modeling across applications.
Estimating Interests Level of Person through Postures by Vision System
Authors: Hakura Jun  , Takahashi Nobuhiro  , Kurematsu Masaki  , Fujita Hamido
Published: February 2025

The paper proposed an estimation method of human interest/boredom for intelligent HCI system with a single vision system. The system estimates postures of the interactant by the facial feature points acquired from the vision system. The method uses the current software and hardware resources so that no extra device is required. This also results in achieving the real time estimation, i.e., low-cost computation. The experimental result implies that the method has possibilities to evaluate human-interest level as correct as the closer people of the interactant.
A Collection of Comparable Corpora for Under-resourced Languages
Authors: Skadiņa Inguna  , Aker Ahmet  , Giouli Voula  , Tufis Dan  , Gaizauskas Robert  , Mieriņa Madara  , Mastropavlos Nikos
Published: February 2025

This paper presents work on collecting comparable corpora for 9 language pairs: Estonian-English, Latvian-English, Lithuanian-English, Greek-English, Greek-Romanian, Croatian-English, Romanian-English, Romanian-German and Slovenian-English. The objective of this work was to gather texts from the same domains and genres and with a similar level of comparability in order to use them as a starting point in defining criteria and metrics of comparability. These criteria and metrics will be applied to comparable texts to determine their suitability for use in Statistical Machine Translation, particularly in the case where translation is performed from or into under-resourced languages for which substantial parallel corpora are unavailable. The size of collected corpora is about 1 million words for each under-resourced language.
Main Trends in Semantic-Research of Estonian Language Technology
Authors: Õim Haldur  , Orav Heili  , Kerner Kadri  , Kahusk Neeme
Published: February 2025

The paper gives a general overview of the development of computational semantics in Estonia beginning from the second half of the 20th century. Main focus concentrates on the work we have done so far and on the problems we try to solve at present in our research group of computational linguistics at Tartu University.
Detection of Cracks and Corrosion for Automated Vessels Visual Inspection
Authors: Bonnín-Pascual Francisco  , Ortiz Alberto
Published: February 2025

Vessel maintenance entails periodic visual inspections of internal and external parts of the vessel hull in order to detect cracks and corroded areas. Typically, this is done by trained surveyors at great cost. Clearly, assisting them during the inspection process by means of a fleet of robots capable of defect detection would decrease the inspection cost. In this paper, two algorithms are presented for visual detection of the aforementioned two kinds of defects. On the one hand, the crack detector is based on a percolation process that exploits the morphological properties of cracks in steel surfaces. On the other hand, the corrosion detector follows a supervised classification approach taking profit from the spatial distribution of color in rusty areas. Both algorithms have shown successful rates of detection with close to real-time performance.
Towards Dynamic Agent Interaction Support in Open Multiagent Systems
Authors: Fogués Ricard L.  , Alberola Juan M.  , Such Jose M.  , Espinosa Agustin  , Garcia-Fornes Ana
Published: February 2025

Open Multiagent Systems, in which heterogeneous agents interact with each other and organize themselves into Virtual Organizations, demand infrastructures supporting these features. In these systems, dynamic and complex interactions between agents may arise. Interaction Protocols allow the definition of communication patterns. However in open systems, dynamic and complex interactions may also require these patterns be modified at execution time. We propose a support for modelling complex, concurrent and dynamic interactions between agents in terms of conversations. Conversations between agents follow predefined Interaction Protocols that can be dynamically modified without restarting the system. This support is provided at agent level and is integrated into the Magentix Multiagent Platform.
On the Emergence of Novel Behaviours From Complex Non Linear Systems
Authors: Riano Lorenzo  , McGinnity T.M.
Published: February 2025

Emergent behaviours are believed to be a property of complex cognitive architectures. However it is difficult to observe them in carefully engineered systems. We believe that, in order to obtain interesting and surprising behaviours, the designer has to remove some predictability requirements.
First-Order Multi-class Subgroup Discovery
Authors: Abudawood Tarek  , Flach Peter
Published: February 2025

Subgroup discovery is concerned with finding subsets of a population whose class distribution is significantly different from the overall distribution. Previously subgroup discovery has been predominantly investigated under the propositional logic framework. This paper investigates multi-class subgroup discovery in an inductive logic programming setting, where subgroups are defined by conjunctions in first-order logic. We present a new weighted covering algorithm, inspired by the Aleph first-order rule learner, that uses seed examples in order to learn diverse, representative and highly predictive subgroups that capture interesting patterns across multiple classes. Our approach experimentally shows considerable and statistically significant improvement of predictive power, both in terms of accuracy and AUC, and theory construction time, by considering fewer hypotheses.
Machine Learning versus Knowledge Based Classification of Legal Texts
Authors: de Maat Emile  , Krabben Kai  , Winkels Radboud
Published: February 2025

This paper presents results of an experiment in which we used machine learning (ML) techniques to classify sentences in Dutch legislation. These results are compared to the results of a pattern-based classifier. Overall, the ML classifier performs as accurate (>90%) as the pattern based one, but seems to generalize worse to new laws. Given these results, the pattern based approach is to be preferred since its reasons for classification are clear and can be used for further modelling of the content of the sentences.
Interactive Inductive Learning System
Authors: Birzniece Ilze
Published: February 2025

Inductive learning system learns classification from training examples and uses induced rules for classifying new instances. If a decision cannot be inferred from system rule base, a default rule is usually applied. In the paper a new interactive approach is proposed where in uncertain conditions an interactive inductive learning system can ask for human decision and improve its knowledge base with the rule derived from this decision. Problems and solutions of incorporation of human-made decision into rule base and aspects of choosing between static and incremental learning algorithms are analyzed in context of the proposed approach. An interactive inductive learning system is proposed to assist in study course comparative analysis.