The most common method of benchmarking energy use in buildings is to compare the energy use of the building under consideration with the energy use of a population of like buildings. Usually there is some empirical compensation for features and factors that affect energy use such as the size of the building and the weather conditions. Two fundamental limitations of this approach are: 1) only si...

Buildings are designed and built to sustain its initial functions and beauty for both the present and future users. Building required maintenance for high performance regardless of whether it meets the sustainability consideration or not. An important segment in the maintenance management system is the identification and analysis of defects in the buildings and the urgency of repair needed. Def...

An important activity in urban three-dimensional (3D) mobile navigation is browsing the buildings in the environment and matching them to those in the 3D city map. There are different factors affecting the recognition process such as changes in the appearances of buildings, weather, and illumination conditions. The current aim was to study the salience of different types of visual cues in the r...

double- unsymmetric-plan medium-rise buildings subjected to bi-directional seismic excitation are complex structures where higher-mode effects in plan and elevation are important in estimating the seismic responses using nonlinear static or pushover analysis. considering two horizontal components of the ground motions makes the problem more intricate. this paper presents a method for nonlinear ...

Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems consume almost half of the total energy use of commercial buildings. To optimize HVAC energy usage, it is important to understand the energy consumption of individual HVAC components at fine granularities. However, buildings typically only have aggregate building level power and thermal meters. We present HVACMeter, a system which leverag...

Energy consumed the in urban sector accounts for a large proportion of total world delivered energy consumption. Residential building energy consumption is an important part of urban energy consumption. However, there are few studies focused on this issue and that have simulated the energy consumption of residential buildings using questionnaire data. In this research, an eQUEST study was condu...

Airborne laser scanning systems generate 3-dimensional point clouds of high density and irregular spacing. These data consist of multiple returns coming from terrain, buildings, and vegetation. The major difficulty is the extraction of object categories, usually buildings. In the field of disaster management, the detection of building damages plays an important role. Therefore, the question ari...

Demolition of buildings at the end of their life cycle has become more and more important. These buildings are either no longer attractive in an architectural sense or did not reach sufficient standards. Especially industrial buildings which are no longer used because of technological or business reasons are often demolished by controlled explosives. To avoid damage of neighboring buildings or ...

Direct gaze is a crucial signal in human social communication, which is known to attract visual attention and modulate a wide range of behaviours. The present study investigated whether direct gaze facilitates rapid orienting to faces, which is important for adaptive on-line communication, and its neural correlates. Fifteen participants performed a rapid orienting task, in which they were instr...