Passive building strategies such as form, orientation and window ratio can have an essential impact on the indoor temperature. Building form ordination obtain heat gains. The designer usually designs buildings with little consideration of This study pointed to influence in internal temperature moderate hot climates. In present paper, thermal comfort conditions expressed terms is numerically inv...

This paper describes the use of a building database and a three-dimensional formulation of the Fresnel-Kirchoff diffraction theory to compute the shadowing by buildings in the general situation where diffraction can occur by building edges of both horizontal and vertical orientation. The storage format of buildings in a geographi_c information systems database is described. An algorithm is pres...

TODS is an object storage platform we are building to offers scalability, availability, performance and ease of use, to simplify the building of scalable Internet services. It enables the convergence of programming and storage model to Object-Orientation and provides transparent persistence for data objects, which greatly simplifies application development. Decentralized cluster design and effi...

When incorrectly designed, windows can be responsible for unnecessary energy consumption in a building. This may result from its dimensions, orientation and shadowing. In a moderate climate like the Portuguese, and considering an annual thermal comfort assessment of a space, if windows are under-dimensioned or overshadowed, they can contribute to the increase of heating needs. However, when ove...

In this paper we outline the design for an indoor navigation system for the visually impaired. Our long-term goal is for a portable, self-contained system that will allow visually impaired individuals to travel through familiar and unfamiliar environments without the assistance of guides. The system, as it exists now, consists of the following functional components: (1) assistance for determini...

 This paper investigates the influence of indigenous Indonesian management behaviours during international business negotiations in an Indonesian context, and the impact of these behaviours upon multinational corporations (MNC) in Indonesia.  Through an inductive analysis of interviews with 55 Indonesian and nonIndonesian managers, this paper applies a postcolonial theoretical lens to identif...

The problem of building geometric models has been a central application in photogrammetry. Our goal is to partially automate this process by finding the features necessary for computing the exterior orientation. This is done by robustly computing the fundamental matrix, and trilinear tensor for all images pairs and some image triples. The correspondences computed from this process are chained t...

In this paper, we present the design and analysis of a portable position and orientation (pose) estimation aid for the visually impaired. Our prototype navigation aid consists of a foot-mounted pedometer and a white cane-mounted sensing package, which is comprised of a 3-axis gyroscope and a 2D laser scanner. We introduce a two-layered estimator that tracks the 3D orientation of the white cane ...