Self-Development of Competences for Social Inclusion Using the TENCompetence Infrastructure

This paper describes a pilot study centred on the technology-enhanced self-development of competences in lifelong learning education carried out in the challenging context of the Association of Participants Àgora. The pilot study shows that the use of the TENCompetence infrastructure, i.e. in this case the Personal Development Planner tool, provides various kinds of benefits for adult participants with low educational profiles and who are traditionally excluded from the use of innovative learning technologies and the knowledge society. The selforganized training supported by the PDP tool aims at allowing the learners to create and control their own learning plans based on their interests and educational background including informal and non-formal experiences. In this sense, the pilot participants had the opportunity to develop and improve their competences in English language (basic and advanced levels) and ICT competence profiles which are mostly related to functional and communicative skills. Besides, the use of the PDP functionalities, such as the self-assessment, the planning and the self-regulating elements allowed the participants to develop reflective skills. Pilot results also provide indications for future developments in the field of technology support for self-organized learners. The paper introduces the context and the pilot scenario, indicates the evaluation methodology applied and discusses the most significant findings derived from the pilot study.

Western Iowa Missouri River Flooding -- Geo-Infrastructure Damage Assessment, Repair and Mitigation Strategies, TR-638, 2013

The 2011 Missouri River flooding caused significant damage to many geo-infrastructure systems including levees, bridge abutments/foundations, paved and unpaved roadways, culverts, and embankment slopes in western Iowa. The flooding resulted in closures of several interchanges along Interstate 29 and of more than 100 miles of secondary roads in western Iowa, causing severe inconvenience to residents and losses to local businesses. The main goals of this research project were to assist county and city engineers by deploying and using advanced technologies to rapidly assess the damage to geo-infrastructure and develop effective repair and mitigation strategies and solutions for use during future flood events in Iowa. The research team visited selected sites in western Iowa to conduct field reconnaissance, in situ testing on bridge abutment backfills that were affected by floods, flooded and non-flooded secondary roadways, and culverts. In situ testing was conducted shortly after the flood waters receded, and several months after flooding to evaluate recovery and performance. Tests included falling weight deflectometer, dynamic cone penetrometer, three-dimensional (3D) laser scanning, ground penetrating radar, and hand auger soil sampling. Field results indicated significant differences in roadway support characteristics between flooded and non-flooded areas. Support characteristics in some flooded areas recovered over time, while others did not. Voids were detected in culvert and bridge abutment backfill materials shortly after flooding and several months after flooding. A catalog of field assessment techniques and 20 potential repair/mitigation solutions are provided in this report. A flow chart relating the damages observed, assessment techniques, and potential repair/mitigation solutions is provided. These options are discussed for paved/unpaved roads, culverts, and bridge abutments, and are applicable for both primary and secondary roadways.

Issue review : Secure an Advanced Vision for Education, or (SAVE) funding, fiscal year 2011 report and analysis.

During the 2010 legislative session, House File 2531, Fiscal Year 2011 Standing Appropriations Act, was enacted and required school districts to report the specific use of sales tax dollars for school infrastructure purposes to the Department of Education. The Department published SAVE SILO annual report reflecting data for fiscal year 2011. This issue review provides a summary and additional analysis of that information.

The Spanish Infrastructure Stock, 1844-1935

This paper presents the first estimates of Spanish infrastructure stock and investment for the period 1845-1935. Several sources and techniques have been used in the estimation, and the new series are reasonably reliable to the standards of historical statistics. Two distinct periods may be distinguished in the series: the years before 1895 (characterized by the prominence of railroads) and the period 1895-1935 (when most investment was addressed to other assets). The new series allow a preliminary comparison of the Spanish infrastructure endowment with that of the most advanced countries, showing a gradual process of convergence before 1936.

A randomized double-blind control study of early intra-coronary autologous bone marrow cell infusion in acute myocardial infarction: the REGENERATE-AMI clinical trial?.

AIMS: Clinical trials suggest that intracoronary delivery of autologous bone marrow-derived cells (BMCs) 1-7 days post-acute myocardial infarction (AMI) may improve left ventricular (LV) function. Earlier time points have not been evaluated. We sought to determine the effect of intracoronary autologous BMC on LV function when delivered within 24 h of successful reperfusion therapy. METHODS AND RESULTS: A multi-centre phase II randomized, double-blind, and placebo-controlled trial. One hundred patients with anterior AMI and significant regional wall motion abnormality were randomized to receive either intracoronary infusion of BMC or placebo (1:1) within 24 h of successful primary percutaneous intervention (PPCI). The primary endpoint was the change in left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) between baseline and 1 year as determined by advanced cardiac imaging. At 1 year, although LVEF increased compared with baseline in both groups, the between-group difference favouring BMC was small (2.2%; 95% confidence interval, CI: -0.5 to 5.0; P = 0.10). However, there was a significantly greater myocardial salvage index in the BMC-treated group compared with placebo (0.1%; 95% CI: 0.0-0.20; P = 0.048). Major adverse events were rare in both treatment groups. CONCLUSION: The early infusion of intracoronary BMC following PPCI for patients with AMI and regional wall motion abnormality leads to a small non-significant improvement in LVEF when compared with placebo; however, it may play an important role in infarct remodelling and myocardial salvage. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION: Clinicaltrials.gov NCT00765453 and EudraCT 2007-002144-16.

The adoption of advanced feed-in tariffs in Ontario : a case of institutional layering

En mai 2009, l’Ontario a adopté la Loi sur l’énergie verte et devint ainsi la première juridiction en Amérique du Nord à promouvoir l’énergie renouvelable par le biais de tarifs de rachat garantis. En novembre 2010, dans son Plan énergétique à long terme, la province s’est engagée à déployer 10,700 MW en capacité de production d’énergie renouvelable non-hydroélectrique par 2018. Il s’agit de la cible de déploiement la plus élevée dans ce secteur au Canada. Les infrastructures de production et de distribution d’électricité comprennent des coûts d’installation élevés, une faible rotation des investissements et de longs cycles de vie, facteurs qui servent habituellement à ancrer les politiques énergétiques dans une dynamique de dépendance au sentier. Depuis le début des années 2000, cependant, l’Ontario a commencé à diverger de sa traditionnelle dépendance aux grandes centrales hydroélectriques, aux centrales à charbon et aux centrales nucléaires par une série de petits changements graduels qui feront grimper la part d’énergie renouvelable dans le mix énergétique provincial à 15% par 2018. Le but de ce mémoire est d’élucider le mécanisme de causalité qui a sous-tendu l’évolution graduelle de l’Ontario vers la promotion de l’énergie renouvelable par le biais de tarifs de rachat garantis et d’une cible de déploiement élevée. Ce mémoire applique la théorie du changement institutionnel graduel de Mahoney et Thelen au cas du développement de politiques d’énergie renouvelable en Ontario afin de mieux comprendre les causes, les modes et les effets du changement institutionnel. Nous découvrons que le contexte canadien de la politique énergétique favorise la sédimentation institutionnelle, c’est-à-dire un mode changement caractérisé par de petits gains favorisant l’énergie renouvelable. Ces gains s’accumulent pourtant en transformation politique importante. En Ontario, la mise sur pied d’une vaste coalition pour l’énergie renouvelable fut à l’origine du changement. Les premiers revendicateurs de politiques favorisant l’énergie renouvelable – les environnementalistes et les premières entreprises d’approvisionnement et de service en technologies d’énergie renouvelable – ont dû mettre sur pied un vaste réseau d’appui, représentant la quasi-totalité de la société ontarienne, pour faire avancer leur cause. Ce réseau a fait pression sur le gouvernement provincial et, en tant que front commun, a revendiqué l’énergie renouvelable non seulement comme solution aux changements climatiques, mais aussi comme solution à maints autres défis pressants de santé publique et de développement économique. La convergence favorable d’un nombre de facteurs contextuels a certes contribué à la réussite du réseau ontarien pour l’énergie renouvelable. Cependant, le fait que ce réseau ait trouvé des alliés au sein de l’exécutif du gouvernement provincial s’est révélé d’importance cruciale quant à l’obtention de politiques favorisant l’énergie renouvelable. Au Canada, les gouvernements provinciaux détiennent l’ultime droit de veto sur la politique énergétique. Ce n’est qu’en trouvant des alliés aux plus hauts échelons du gouvernement que le réseau ontarien pour l’énergie renouvelable a pu réussir.

On Real-Time Monitoring And Control For Efficient Management Of Drinking Water Networks: Barcelona Case Study

Drinking water utilities in urban areas are focused on finding smart solutions facing new challenges in their real-time operation because of limited water resources, intensive energy requirements, a growing population, a costly and ageing infrastructure, increasingly stringent regulations, and increased attention towards the environmental impact of water use. Such challenges force water managers to monitor and control not only water supply and distribution, but also consumer demand. This paper presents and discusses novel methodologies and procedures towards an integrated water resource management system based on advanced ICT technologies of automation and telecommunications for largely improving the efficiency of drinking water networks (DWN) in terms of water use, energy consumption, water loss minimization, and water quality guarantees. In particular, the paper addresses the first results of the European project EFFINET (FP7-ICT2011-8-318556) devoted to the monitoring and control of the DWN in Barcelona (Spain). Results are split in two levels according to different management objectives: (i) the monitoring level is concerned with all the aspects involved in the observation of the current state of a system and the detection/diagnosis of abnormal situations. It is achieved through sensors and communications technology, together with mathematical models; (ii) the control level is concerned with computing the best suitable and admissible control strategies for network actuators as to optimize a given set of operational goals related to the performance of the overall system. This level covers the network control (optimal management of water and energy) and the demand management (smart metering, efficient supply). The consideration of the Barcelona DWN as the case study will allow to prove the general applicability of the proposed integrated ICT solutions and their effectiveness in the management of DWN, with considerable savings of electricity costs and reduced water loss while ensuring the high European standards of water quality to citizens.

Development of eco-efficient and sustainable urban infrastructure in Asia and Latin America: eco-efficiency and sustainable infrastructure in the United States and Canada

Incluye bibliografía

Mobile application as a tool for urban traffic data collection and generation to advanced traveler information systems using Wi-Fi networks available in urban centers

This paper presents an Advanced Traveler Information System (ATIS) developed on Android platform, which is open source and free. The developed application has as its main objective the free use of a Vehicle-to- Infrastructure (V2I) communication through the wireless network access points available in urban centers. In addition to providing the necessary information for an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) to a central server, the application also receives the traffic data close to the vehicle. Once obtained this traffic information, the application displays them to the driver in a clear and efficient way, allowing the user to make decisions about his route in real time. The application was tested in a real environment and the results are presented in the article. In conclusion we present the benefits of this application. © 2012 IEEE.

A communication infrastructure to support knowledge level agents on the web

Agent Communication Languages (ACLs) have been developed to provide a way for agents to communicate with each other supporting cooperation in Multi-Agent Systems. In the past few years many ACLs have been proposed for Multi-Agent Systems, such as KQML and FIPA-ACL. The goal of these languages is to support high-level, human like communication among agents, exploiting Knowledge Level features rather than symbol level ones. Adopting these ACLs, and mainly the FIPA-ACL specifications, many agent platforms and prototypes have been developed. Despite these efforts, an important issue in the research on ACLs is still open and concerns how these languages should deal (at the Knowledge Level) with possible failures of agents. Indeed, the notion of Knowledge Level cannot be straightforwardly extended to a distributed framework such as MASs, because problems concerning communication and concurrency may arise when several Knowledge Level agents interact (for example deadlock or starvation). The main contribution of this Thesis is the design and the implementation of NOWHERE, a platform to support Knowledge Level Agents on the Web. NOWHERE exploits an advanced Agent Communication Language, FT-ACL, which provides high-level fault-tolerant communication primitives and satisfies a set of well defined Knowledge Level programming requirements. NOWHERE is well integrated with current technologies, for example providing full integration for Web services. Supporting different middleware used to send messages, it can be adapted to various scenarios. In this Thesis we present the design and the implementation of the architecture, together with a discussion of the most interesting details and a comparison with other emerging agent platforms. We also present several case studies where we discuss the benefits of programming agents using the NOWHERE architecture, comparing the results with other solutions. Finally, the complete source code of the basic examples can be found in appendix.

Design of optical networks for advanced applications

Nowadays, computing is migrating from traditional high performance and distributed computing to pervasive and utility computing based on heterogeneous networks and clients. The current trend suggests that future IT services will rely on distributed resources and on fast communication of heterogeneous contents. The success of this new range of services is directly linked to the effectiveness of the infrastructure in delivering them. The communication infrastructure will be the aggregation of different technologies even though the current trend suggests the emergence of single IP based transport service. Optical networking is a key technology to answer the increasing requests for dynamic bandwidth allocation and configure multiple topologies over the same physical layer infrastructure, optical networks today are still “far” from accessible from directly configure and offer network services and need to be enriched with more “user oriented” functionalities. However, current Control Plane architectures only facilitate efficient end-to-end connectivity provisioning and certainly cannot meet future network service requirements, e.g. the coordinated control of resources. The overall objective of this work is to provide the network with the improved usability and accessibility of the services provided by the Optical Network. More precisely, the definition of a service-oriented architecture is the enable technology to allow user applications to gain benefit of advanced services over an underlying dynamic optical layer. The definition of a service oriented networking architecture based on advanced optical network technologies facilitates users and applications access to abstracted levels of information regarding offered advanced network services. This thesis faces the problem to define a Service Oriented Architecture and its relevant building blocks, protocols and languages. In particular, this work has been focused on the use of the SIP protocol as a inter-layers signalling protocol which defines the Session Plane in conjunction with the Network Resource Description language. On the other hand, an advantage optical network must accommodate high data bandwidth with different granularities. Currently, two main technologies are emerging promoting the development of the future optical transport network, Optical Burst and Packet Switching. Both technologies respectively promise to provide all optical burst or packet switching instead of the current circuit switching. However, the electronic domain is still present in the scheduler forwarding and routing decision. Because of the high optics transmission frequency the burst or packet scheduler faces a difficult challenge, consequentially, high performance and time focused design of both memory and forwarding logic is need. This open issue has been faced in this thesis proposing an high efficiently implementation of burst and packet scheduler. The main novelty of the proposed implementation is that the scheduling problem has turned into simple calculation of a min/max function and the function complexity is almost independent of on the traffic conditions.

Automated Analysis Methods for the Assessment of Bicycle Infrastructure and Demand

A first phase of the research activity has been related to the study of the state of art of the infrastructures for cycling, bicycle use and methods for evaluation. In this part, the candidate has studied the "bicycle system" in countries with high bicycle use and in particular in the Netherlands. Has been carried out an evaluation of the questionnaires of the survey conducted within the European project BICY on mobility in general in 13 cities of the participating countries. The questionnaire was designed, tested and implemented, and was later validated by a test in Bologna. The results were corrected with information on demographic situation and compared with official data. The cycling infrastructure analysis was conducted on the basis of information from the OpenStreetMap database. The activity consisted in programming algorithms in Python that allow to extract data from the database infrastructure for a region, to sort and filter cycling infrastructure calculating some attributes, such as the length of the arcs paths. The results obtained were compared with official data where available. The structure of the thesis is as follows: 1. Introduction: description of the state of cycling in several advanced countries, description of methods of analysis and their importance to implement appropriate policies for cycling. Supply and demand of bicycle infrastructures. 2. Survey on mobility: it gives details of the investigation developed and the method of evaluation. The results obtained are presented and compared with official data. 3. Analysis cycling infrastructure based on information from the database of OpenStreetMap: describes the methods and algorithms developed during the PhD. The results obtained by the algorithms are compared with official data. 4. Discussion: The above results are discussed and compared. In particular the cycle demand is compared with the length of cycle networks within a city. 5. Conclusions

Advanced quality systems : guidelines for establishing and maintaining construction quality databases /

"HRDI-12/11-06(2M)E"--P. [4] of cover.

Servitization capabilities for advanced services:a multi-actor perspective

Servitization is the process by which manufacturers add services to their product offerings and even replace products with services. The capabilities necessary to develop and deliver advanced services as part of servitization are often discussed in the literature from the manufacturer’s perspective, e.g., having a service-focused culture or the ability to sell solutions. Recent research has acknowledged the important role of customers and, to a lesser extent, other actors (e.g., intermediaries) in bringing about successful servitization, particularly for use-oriented and results-oriented advanced services. The objective of this study is to identify the capabilities required to successful develop advanced services as part of servitization by considering the perspective of manufacturers, intermediaries and customers. This study involved interviews with 33 managers in 28 large UK-based companies from these three groups, about servitization capabilities. The findings suggest that there are eight broad capabilities that are important for advanced services; 1) personnel with expertise and deep technical product knowledge, 2) methodologies for improving operational processes, helping to manage risk and reduce costs, 3) the evolution from being a product- focused manufacturer to embracing a services culture, 4) developing trusting relationships with other actors in the network to support the delivery of advanced services, 5) new innovation activities focused on financing contracts (e.g., ‘gain share’) and technology implementation (e.g., Web-based applications), 6) customer intimacy through understanding their business challenges in order to develop suitable solutions, 7) extensive infrastructure (e.g., personnel, service centres) to deliver a local service, and 8) the ability to tailor service offerings to each customer’s requirements and deliver these responsively to changing needs. The capabilities required to develop and deliver advanced services align to a need to enhance the operational performance of supplied products throughout their lifecycles and as such require greater investment than the capabilities for base and intermediate services.