Due to heavy snow fall in winter 2005-2006, two building catastrophes happened in Katowice (Poland) and Moscow (Russia) killing and injuring dozens of people. Roof collapses, caused by heavy snow and ice accumulation were the direct causes, but it was questioned whether other circumstances such as construction stability would play an additional triggering role. Moreover, both buildings were loc...

This paper describes the design and development of a Virtual Archival Exhibition System (VAES) that facilitates the authoring of web-based virtual exhibitions that can be tailored to serve the needs of various user groups. VAES is a joint collaborative project between the National Archive of Singapore (NAS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Based on an XML-based metadata da...

Chen-Pu Li, 2 Hong-Bin Chen, 4 and Zhi-Gang Zheng 4, ∗ 1 Department of Physics, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China 2 College of Science, Hebei University of Architecture, Zhang Jiakou 075000 ,China Institute of Systems Science (ISS), Huaqiao University, Xiamen 361021, China College of Information Science and Engineering, Huaqiao University, Xiamen 361021, China (Dated: October 5, ...

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This paper compares the paradigms of LiDAR and aerophotogrammetry in the context of building extraction and briefly discusses two roof building contour extraction methodologies. The assets and drawbacks of both data capturing system have been reported several times. In general, empirical and theoretical studies have confirmed that LiDAR methodologies are more suitable in deriving building heigh...

A green roof can reduce the peak thermal cooling loads and reduce the building energy consumption during the summer. It is also necessary to understand the thermal performance of these green roof assemblies during the winter when affected by an accumulation of snow on the rooftops. This study presents an experimental investigation and discusses the snow influence on the heat transfer processes ...

The 2001 American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Mobile Robot Exhibition provided a forum for robots to operate outside a competitive arena. With a wide variety in behavior and form, the robots in the exhibition created a sense of the broad range of function in the robotic community. As one of the only events with no scoring or judges, the exhibition takes on a very different fe...

By combining the capabilities of latest computers, communication and multimedia technologies, web-based multimedia systems pro vide an exciting means and communication channel for information access and sharing throughout the world. These systems have immense potential in public education, stimulating the learning process by exploring and doing, and enabling children to go on trips around the w...

The organizing centers and molecules that pattern the cerebral cortex have been elusive. Here we show that cortical patterning involves regulation of the Lhx2 homeobox gene by the roof plate. Roof plate ablation results in reduced cortical size and Lhx2 expression defects that implicate roof plate signals in the bimodal regulation of Lhx2 in vivo. Bimodal Lhx2 regulation can be recapitulated in...

3D city model reconstruction is one of the main application of airborne laser scanning system. Roof detection is a primary step which needs to find each roof from irregular point clouds with noise points involved. Another problem existed in roof detection is that the detected sequence of roofs will affect the size and shape of detected roofs even though a lot fancy algorithm are applied. In thi...