Urbanization itself accounts for a vast amount of energy and cities are centres of resource consumption and buildings can account for 40-60% of the urban energy usage which mostly relies on high Green-House-Gas (GHG) emitting fossil fuels. Climate change and other environmental concerns drive the policy initiatives to be renewable energy oriented. Increasing the share of renewable sources in th...

The notion of fair e-cash schemes was suggested and implemented in the last decade. It balances anonymity with the capability of tracing users and transactions in cases of crime or misbehavior. The issue was raised both, in the banking community and in the cryptographic literature. A number of systems were designed with an off-line fairness, where the tracing authorities get involved only when ...

Text and Knowledge Bases are complementary sources of information. Given the success of distributed word representations learned from text, several techniques to infuse additional information from sources like WordNet into word representations have been proposed. In this paper, we follow an alternative route. We learn word representations from text and WordNet independently, and then explore si...

The present study investigates the force transfer mechanisms for open hoop fiber reinforced plastic (FRP) strips attached at reinforced concrete (R/C) beams with or without anchorage. These open hoop FRP strips are utilized in R/C beams that are in need of shear capacity upgrade. This type of retrofitting is necessary for R/C structures designed with less stringent seismic loading conditions th...

Stormwater management using water sensitive urban design is expected to be part of future drainage systems. This paper aims to model the combination of local retention units, such as soakaways, with subsurface detention units. Soakaways are employed to reduce (by storage and infiltration) peak and volume stormwater runoff; however, large retention volumes are required for a significant peak red...

One of the greatest causes of casualties in major earthquakes around the world is the collapse of non-engineered masonry buildings (those built without engineering input). Yet by definition non-engineered structures remain largely outside of the scope of modern engineering research, meaning that the majority of those at risk often remain so. A further barrier to realising research in this field...

In 2006, a social marketing campaign was developed to increase the installation of rollover protective structures (ROPS) on unprotected New York tractors. Using data gathered from the program's hotline, the impact of price increases on farmers' interest in ROPS is examined. Pricing data were obtained for all rigid ROPS kits commercially available in the U.S. since 2006. These data were stratifi...