It is well recognized that adaptive and flexible flood risk strategies are required to account for future uncertainties. Development of such strategies is, however, a challenge. Climate change alone is a significant complication, but, in addition, complexities exist trying to identify the most appropriate set of mitigation measures, or interventions. There are a range of economic and environmen...

Choquet integrals are one of the appropriate methods for fusing numerical information. They aggregate numerical values with respect to a fuzzy measure, a way to represent importance that is an alternative to the weights in a weighted mean. The use of fuzzy measures, although extremely flexible when compared with weighting vectors, presents some difficulties when used in real applications: to de...

This paper deals with independence measures for linear mixtures of mutually independent random variables. Such measures, also known as contrasts, constitute useful criteria in solving blind source separation problems. By making use of the Schur convexity properties, we show that it is possible to define a wide-ranging class of contrast functions based on the auto-cumulants of the components of ...

This paper aims to assess the application of Support Vector Machine (SVM) regression in order to analysis flexible pavements. To this end, 10000 Four-layer flexible pavement sections consisted of asphalt concrete layer, granular base layer, granular subbase layer, and subgrade soil were analyzed under the effect of standard axle loading using multi-layered elastic theory and pavement critical r...

The growth of eCommerce is being hampered by a lack of trust between providers and consumers of Web-based services. While researchers in many disciplines have addressed Web trust issues, a comprehensive approach has yet to be established. This paper proposes a conceptual trust-profiling framework through a range of new user-centred trust measures. W3TF is a generic form of trust assessment that...

Studies carried out in classroom-based learning context, have consistently shown a positive relation between students’ conscientiousness and their academic success. We hypothesize that time management and regularity are main constructing blocks of students’ conscientiousness in the context of online education. In online education, despite intuitive arguments supporting on-demand courses as more...

This paper discusses the evaluation of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems developed for practical applications, suggesting a set of criteria for application-oriented performance measures. The commonly used word error rate (WER), which poses ASR evaluation as a string editing process, is shown to have a number of limitations with respect to these criteria, motivating alternative or addit...

Urban Freight Distribution (UFD) represents a very important activity in terms of cities economy, but can also be a problem for the daily life of citizens, due to traffic, noise and environmental contamination. Therefore UFD activities must be managed cautiously, to avoid or minimise external negative effects. In this context, this research aims to evaluate existing UFD measures, ranking them f...

Disease frequency is measured through estimating incidence rates or disease risk. Several measures are used for assessing exposure-disease association, with adjusted estimates based on standardization, stratification, or more flexible regression techniques. Several measures are available to assess an exposure impact in terms of disease occurrence at the population level, including the commonly ...