To improve energy efficiency—during new buildings design or during a building retrofit—evaluating the energy savings potential of energy conservation measures (ECMs) is a critical task. In building retrofits, occupant behavior significantly impacts building energy use and is a leading factor in uncertainty when determining the effectiveness of retrofit ECMs. Current simulation-based assessment ...

In renovations of occupied buildings, identification of occupant interactions, which occur when tenants and/or crews share the same space, is a critical task to ensure the timely execution of renovation work while maintaining the operational requirements of building tenants. Failure to identify occupant interactions can lead to loss in productivity for tenants and crews, as well as cost and sch...

This paper presents a preliminary study on occupant behavior modeling for estimating high-resolution electricity demand profile of residential buildings. First, the existing occupant behavior models are considered. We then introduce an occupant behavior model developed on the basis of the approach employed in an existing model and an energy demand model that uses the output of the occupant beha...

Vehicle roll direction and occupant position have been shown to affect occupant kinematics. Data from NASS-CDS were analyzed for risk of serious or greater injuries and ejection with respect to the position of the occupant (near side or far side). The risk of AIS 3+ injuries was higher for unrestrained occupants, for ejected occupants, for occupants involved in rollovers with higher numbers of ...

We consider the problem of indexing a text T (of length n) with a light data structure that supports efficient search of patterns P (of length m) allowing errors under the Hamming distance. We propose a hash-based strategy that employs two classes of hash functions—dubbed Hamming-aware and de Bruijn—to drastically reduce search space and memory footprint of the index, respectively. We use our s...

In this paper, we present the Truncated Generalized Suffix Automaton (TGSA) and present an efficient on-line algorithm for its construction. TGSA is a novel type of finite automaton suitable for indexing DNA and RNA sequences, where the text is degenerate i.e. contains sets of characters. TGSA indexes the so called k-factors, the factors of the degenerate text with length not exceeding a given ...

We present a probabilistic model that assesses student emotional reaction during interaction with an educational game. Following a well-known cognitive theory of emotions (the OCC theory), the model predicts a student’s emotional state by assessing the student’s appraisal of her interaction with the game, in light of the student’s goals and personality. We illustrate how the model relies on a D...

The relative risks of malignant lymphomas among road transport workers were investigated using the National Cancer Registry in England and Wales. Drivers of buses and coaches (OCC unit 120) had increased risks for both Hodgkin's and non-Hodgkin's lymphomas and the drivers of other road passenger vehicles (OCC unit 121) for Hodgkin's lymphomas only. Although the increased risks did not show stat...

Objectives To evaluate the relationship between the pass rate of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) certifying exam and the characteristics of residency programs. Methods The study used a retrospective, cross-sectional design with publicly available data from the ABIM and the Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database. All categorical residency programs with reported p...

Airbag deployment has been known to be responsible for huge death, incidental injuries and broken bones due to low crash severity and wrong deployment decisions. Therefore, the authorities and industries have been looking for more innovative and intelligent products to be realized for future enhancements in the vehicle safety systems (VSSs). Although the VSSs technologies have advanced consider...