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Showing papers by "Ryerson University published in 2015"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The need to develop appropriate and efficient analytical methods to leverage massive volumes of heterogeneous data in unstructured text, audio, and video formats is highlighted and the need to devise new tools for predictive analytics for structured big data is reinforced.

2,962 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The different metrics of urban smartness are reviewed to show the need for a shared definition of what constitutes a smart city, what are its features, and how it performs in comparison to traditional cities.
Abstract: As the term “smart city” gains wider and wider currency, there is still confusion about what a smart city is, especially since several similar terms are often used interchangeably. This paper aims to clarify the meaning of the word “smart” in the context of cities through an approach based on an in-depth literature review of relevant studies as well as official documents of international institutions. It also identifies the main dimensions and elements characterizing a smart city. The different metrics of urban smartness are reviewed to show the need for a shared definition of what constitutes a smart city, what are its features, and how it performs in comparison to traditional cities. Furthermore, performance measures and initiatives in a few smart cities are identified.

2,207 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A systematic survey on the use of gamification in published theoretical reviews and research papers involving interactive systems and human participants is presented and points of departure are suggested for continued empirical investigations of gamified practice and its effects.
Abstract: Gamification has drawn the attention of academics, practitioners and business professionals in domains as diverse as education, information studies, human-computer interaction, and health. As yet, the term remains mired in diverse meanings and contradictory uses, while the concept faces division on its academic worth, underdeveloped theoretical foundations, and a dearth of standardized guidelines for application. Despite widespread commentary on its merits and shortcomings, little empirical work has sought to validate gamification as a meaningful concept and provide evidence of its effectiveness as a tool for motivating and engaging users in non-entertainment contexts. Moreover, no work to date has surveyed gamification as a field of study from a human-computer studies perspective. In this paper, we present a systematic survey on the use of gamification in published theoretical reviews and research papers involving interactive systems and human participants. We outline current theoretical understandings of gamification and draw comparisons to related approaches, including alternate reality games (ARGs), games with a purpose (GWAPs), and gameful design. We present a multidisciplinary review of gamification in action, focusing on empirical findings related to purpose and context, design of systems, approaches and techniques, and user impact. Findings from the survey show that a standard conceptualization of gamification is emerging against a growing backdrop of empirical participants-based research. However, definitional subjectivity, diverse or unstated theoretical foundations, incongruities among empirical findings, and inadequate experimental design remain matters of concern. We discuss how gamification may to be more usefully presented as a subset of a larger effort to improve the user experience of interactive systems through gameful design. We end by suggesting points of departure for continued empirical investigations of gamified practice and its effects. We present findings from a survey of the gamification literature.Theoretical findings suggest that gamification is a distinct concept.Conceptual foundations tend to converge on psychological theories of motivation.Early applied work suggests positive-leaning but mixed results.Empirical work on specific elements with direct ties to theory and stronger experimental designs is needed.

1,585 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
18 May 2015
TL;DR: The most successful generator-converter configurations are addressed along with few promising topologies available in the literature from the market based survey, and the past, present and future trends in megawatt WECS are reviewed in terms of mechanical and electrical technologies, integration to power systems, and control theory.
Abstract: This paper presents a comprehensive study on the state-of-the-art and emerging wind energy technologies from the electrical engineering perspective. In an attempt to decrease cost of energy, increase the wind energy conversion efficiency, reliability, power density, and comply with the stringent grid codes, the electric generators and power electronic converters have emerged in a rigorous manner. From the market based survey, the most successful generator-converter configurations are addressed along with few promising topologies available in the literature. The back-to-back connected converters, passive generator-side converters, converters for multiphase generators, and converters without intermediate dc-link are investigated for high-power wind energy conversion systems (WECS), and presented in low and medium voltage category. The onshore and offshore wind farm configurations are analyzed with respect to the series/parallel connection of wind turbine ac/dc output terminals, and high voltage ac/dc transmission. The fault-ride through compliance methods used in the induction and synchronous generator based WECS are also discussed. The past, present and future trends in megawatt WECS are reviewed in terms of mechanical and electrical technologies, integration to power systems, and control theory. The important survey results, and technical merits and demerits of various WECS electrical systems are summarized by tables. The list of current and future wind turbines are also provided along with technical details.

694 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a literature review of previous studies about the acoustic properties of some natural materials, including wood, hemp, coconut, cork, cane, cardboard, and sheep wool, is presented.

421 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the advancement of airborne LiDAR technology, including data configuration, feature spaces, classification techniques, and radiometric calibration/correction, is reviewed and discussed, with an emphasis on identification of the approach, analysis of pros and cons, investigating the overall accuracy, and how the classification results can serve as an input for different urban environmental analyses.

401 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify and analyze the metrics that have been published in the literature on green supply chain management (GSCM) and sustainable supply chain Management (SSCM).

395 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A thorough review of advancement in slaughterhouse wastewater (SWW) characteristics, treatment, and management in the meat processing industry is presented and facilitates a better understanding of current difficulties that can be found during production and management of the SWW, including treatment and characteristics of the final effluent.

296 citations


Posted Content
TL;DR: This paper addresses the challenge of 3D full-body human pose estimation from a monocular image sequence with a novel approach that integrates a sparsity-driven 3D geometric prior and temporal smoothness and outperforms a publicly available 2D pose estimation baseline on the challenging PennAction dataset.
Abstract: This paper addresses the challenge of 3D full-body human pose estimation from a monocular image sequence. Here, two cases are considered: (i) the image locations of the human joints are provided and (ii) the image locations of joints are unknown. In the former case, a novel approach is introduced that integrates a sparsity-driven 3D geometric prior and temporal smoothness. In the latter case, the former case is extended by treating the image locations of the joints as latent variables. A deep fully convolutional network is trained to predict the uncertainty maps of the 2D joint locations. The 3D pose estimates are realized via an Expectation-Maximization algorithm over the entire sequence, where it is shown that the 2D joint location uncertainties can be conveniently marginalized out during inference. Empirical evaluation on the Human3.6M dataset shows that the proposed approaches achieve greater 3D pose estimation accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines. Further, the proposed approach outperforms a publicly available 2D pose estimation baseline on the challenging PennAction dataset.

296 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is shown that the linear domain model can better represent prior information for better estimation of reflectance and illumination than the logarithmic domain.
Abstract: In this paper, a new probabilistic method for image enhancement is presented based on a simultaneous estimation of illumination and reflectance in the linear domain We show that the linear domain model can better represent prior information for better estimation of reflectance and illumination than the logarithmic domain A maximum a posteriori (MAP) formulation is employed with priors of both illumination and reflectance To estimate illumination and reflectance effectively, an alternating direction method of multipliers is adopted to solve the MAP problem The experimental results show the satisfactory performance of the proposed method to obtain reflectance and illumination with visually pleasing enhanced results and a promising convergence rate Compared with other testing methods, the proposed method yields comparable or better results on both subjective and objective assessments

276 citations


Proceedings ArticleDOI
18 Apr 2015
TL;DR: Dynamo, a platform to support the Mechanical Turk community in forming publics around issues and then mobilizing, finds that collective action publics tread a precariously narrow path between the twin perils of stalling and friction, balancing with each step between losing momentum and flaring into acrimony.
Abstract: By lowering the costs of communication, the web promises to enable distributed collectives to act around shared issues. However, many collective action efforts never succeed: while the web's affordances make it easy to gather, these same decentralizing characteristics impede any focus towards action. In this paper, we study challenges to collective action efforts through the lens of online labor by engaging with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Through a year of ethnographic fieldwork, we sought to understand online workers' unique barriers to collective action. We then created Dynamo, a platform to support the Mechanical Turk community in forming publics around issues and then mobilizing. We found that collective action publics tread a precariously narrow path between the twin perils of stalling and friction, balancing with each step between losing momentum and flaring into acrimony. However, specially structured labor to maintain efforts' forward motion can help such publics take action.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a conceptual framework for integrating human factors into planning models of order picking activities is proposed, and the authors hypothesize that doing so improves the performance of an OP system and workers' welfare.
Abstract: Order picking (OP) activities, essential to logistics operations, are laborious and time-intensive. Humans are central actors in the OP process and determine both OP effectiveness and efficiency. Many researchers have developed models for planning OP activities and increasing the efficiencies of such systems by suggesting different warehouse layouts, OP routes or storage assignments. These studies have, however, ignored workers’ characteristics, or human factors, suggesting that they cannot be substantiated, which led to only partially realistic results. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for integrating human factors into planning models of OP activities and hypothesises that doing so improves the performance of an OP system and workers’ welfare. The framework is based on a systematic literature review that synthesises findings documented in the OP and human factors literature. The results of the paper may assist researchers and practitioners in designing OP systems by developing planning models ...

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Simulation and experimental results are presented to validate the proposed charging station architecture and provide complementary balancing capabilities by the use of an additional NPC leg acting as a bidirectional dc-dc stage, simulating the minimal load condition and allowing the modulator to keep the control on the dc voltages under any load scenario.
Abstract: This paper proposes a novel architecture for plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) dc charging station at the megawatt level, through the use of a grid-tied neutral point clamped (NPC) converter. The proposed bipolar dc structure reduces the step-down effort on the dc–dc fast chargers. In addition, this paper proposes a balancing mechanism that allows handling any difference on the dc loads while keeping the midpoint voltage accurately regulated. By formally defining the unbalance operation limit, the proposed control scheme is able to provide complementary balancing capabilities by the use of an additional NPC leg acting as a bidirectional dc–dc stage, simulating the minimal load condition and allowing the modulator to keep the control on the dc voltages under any load scenario. The proposed solution enables fast charging for PEVs concentrating several charging units into a central grid-tied converter. In this paper, simulation and experimental results are presented to validate the proposed charging station architecture.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The proposed adaptive unscented Kalman filtering method provides better accuracy both in battery model parameters estimation and the battery SoC estimation.
Abstract: In this brief, to get a more accurate and robust state of charge (SoC) estimation, the lithium-ion battery model parameters are identified using an adaptive unscented Kalman filtering method, and based on the updated model, the battery SoC is estimated consequently. An adaptive adjustment of the noise covariances in the estimation process is implemented using a technique of covariance matching in the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) context. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated through experiments under different power duties in the laboratory environment. The obtained results are compared with that of the adaptive extended Kalman filter, extended Kalman filter, and unscented Kalman filter-based algorithms. The comparison shows that the proposed method provides better accuracy both in battery model parameters estimation and the battery SoC estimation.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors evaluated the ability of unshaded courtyards for providing thermally comfortable outdoor spaces according to different design configurations and scenarios, including the orientations, height and albedo of wall enclosure, and use of vegetation.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Concerns about pain contribute to vaccine hesitancy across the lifespan and noncompliance with vaccination compromises the individual and community benefits of immunization by contributing to outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases.
Abstract: Pain from vaccine injections is common, and concerns about pain contribute to vaccine hesitancy across the lifespan.[1][1],[2][2] Noncompliance with vaccination compromises the individual and community benefits of immunization by contributing to outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases. Individuals

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper reviews segmentation methodologies and techniques for the disc and cup boundaries which are utilized to calculate theDisc and cup geometrical parameters automatically and accurately to help the professionals in the glaucoma to have a wide view and more details about the optic nerve head structure using retinal fundus images.
Abstract: Glaucoma is the second leading cause of loss of vision in the world. Examining the head of optic nerve (cup-to-disc ratio) is very important for diagnosing glaucoma and for patient monitoring after diagnosis. Images of optic disc and optic cup are acquired by fundus camera as well as Optical Coherence Tomography. The optic disc and optic cup segmentation techniques are used to isolate the relevant parts of the retinal image and to calculate the cup-to-disc ratio. The main objective of this paper is to review segmentation methodologies and techniques for the disc and cup boundaries which are utilized to calculate the disc and cup geometrical parameters automatically and accurately to help the professionals in the glaucoma to have a wide view and more details about the optic nerve head structure using retinal fundus images. We provide a brief description of each technique, highlighting its classification and performance metrics. The current and future research directions are summarized and discussed.

Journal ArticleDOI
Harald Bauder1
TL;DR: In this paper, Bauder et al. argue that academic labour operates in a separate labour market in which the experiences of international mobility differ from the experiences workers have in other occupations and explore how academic labour is valorized and devalued in the migration process.
Abstract: Robert Park (1928) presented a powerful narrative about migration. He suggested that migration is “an agency of progress” (883); it interrupts “the routine of existing habit” (885) and releases “energies that were formerly controlled by custom and tradition” (887). A similar narrative dominates the literature of transnational academic mobility today: migration exposes academics to new contexts and unleashes creative forces that propel scientific knowledge production. Academics, however, are not only knowledge producers but also workers who are, like all migrants, embedded in employment relations and social and cultural contexts. The contemporary literature, however, rarely assumes a labour market perspective when examining transnational academic mobility. In this article, I address this shortcoming. In particular, I assume political-economy and segmentation-theory perspectives of labour mobility. The first thesis I pursue in this article is that academic labour operates in a separate labour market in which the experiences of international mobility differ from the experiences workers have in other occupations. I examine this thesis by drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s work (e.g. 1984, 1988, 1998) to explore how academic labour is valorized and devalued in the migration process. Although the literature has linked Bourdieu’s ideas of habitus and cultural capital to migration (Bauder, 2006a; Erel, 2010) and academic mobility (e.g. Hoffmann, 2007; Jons, 2008), it has neglected these ideas in the political-economy context of academic labour mobility. A second question I pursue is whether academics are able to retain or increase the value of their labour through mobility. The conventional narrative in the migration literature is that migration devalues labour, allocates it to the lower labour market segments, and contributes to the flexibilization and neoliberalization of labour markets (e.g. Piore, 1979; Sassen, 2000; Bauder, 2006a). The mobility of academics may contradict this conventional narrative. For example, internationally mobile academics are more likely to be employed full-time in most national systems of higher education (Welch, 1997: 330), and foreign-born female academics are more engaged in prestigious research activities and less in teaching and administration than their native-born colleagues (Mamiseishvili, 2010). Mobility can be an effective accumulation strategy of social, cultural and economic capital (Ong, 1999). The migration literature has paid relatively little attention to how migrant workers may be able to retain or increase the value of their labour through migration. I find this relative lack of attention perplexing given the growing scholarly interest in international labour mobility and increasing

Proceedings ArticleDOI
23 Aug 2015
TL;DR: In this paper, a new state-of-the-art for document image classification and retrieval, using features learned by deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), is presented.
Abstract: This paper presents a new state-of-the-art for document image classification and retrieval, using features learned by deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In object and scene analysis, deep neural nets are capable of learning a hierarchical chain of abstraction from pixel inputs to concise and descriptive representations. The current work explores this capacity in the realm of document analysis, and confirms that this representation strategy is superior to a variety of popular handcrafted alternatives. Extensive experiments show that (i) features extracted from CNNs are robust to compression, (ii) CNNs trained on non-document images transfer well to document analysis tasks, and (iii) enforcing region-specific feature-learning is unnecessary given sufficient training data. This work also makes available a new labelled subset of the IIT-CDIP collection, containing 400,000 document images across 16 categories.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This study highlights the importance of understanding the production, distribution, and abundance of these long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LC-PUFA) in the marine and terrestrial environments.
Abstract: Long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LC-PUFA) are critical for the health of aquatic and terrestrial organisms; therefore, understanding the production, distribution, and abundance of these comp...

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jun 2015-BMJ Open
TL;DR: Nurse practitioners in alternative provider ambulatory primary care roles have equivalent or better patient outcomes than comparators and are potentially cost-saving and evidence for their cost-effectiveness is promising, but limited by the few studies.
Abstract: Objective To determine the cost-effectiveness of nurse practitioners delivering primary and specialised ambulatory care. Design A systematic review of randomised controlled trials reported since 1980. Data sources 10 electronic bibliographic databases, handsearches, contact with authors, bibliographies and websites. Included studies Randomised controlled trials that evaluated nurse practitioners in alternative and complementary ambulatory care roles and reported health system outcomes. Results 11 trials were included. In four trials of alternative provider ambulatory primary care roles, nurse practitioners were equivalent to physicians in all but seven patient outcomes favouring nurse practitioner care and in all but four health system outcomes, one favouring nurse practitioner care and three favouring physician care. In a meta-analysis of two studies (2689 patients) with minimal heterogeneity and high-quality evidence, nurse practitioner care resulted in lower mean health services costs per consultation (mean difference: −€6.41; 95% CI −€9.28 to −€3.55; p Conclusions Nurse practitioners in alternative provider ambulatory primary care roles have equivalent or better patient outcomes than comparators and are potentially cost-saving. Evidence for their cost-effectiveness in alternative provider specialised ambulatory care roles is promising, but limited by the few studies. While some evidence indicates nurse practitioners in complementary specialised ambulatory care roles improve patient outcomes, their cost-effectiveness requires further study.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper attempts to resolve the issue of preventing or detecting malicious nodes launching grayhole or collaborative blackhole attacks by designing a dynamic source routing (DSR)-based routing mechanism, which is referred to as the cooperative bait detection scheme (CBDS), that integrates the advantages of both proactive and reactive defense architectures.
Abstract: In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), a primary requirement for the establishment of communication among nodes is that nodes should cooperate with each other. In the presence of malevolent nodes, this requirement may lead to serious security concerns; for instance, such nodes may disrupt the routing process. In this context, preventing or detecting malicious nodes launching grayhole or collaborative blackhole attacks is a challenge. This paper attempts to resolve this issue by designing a dynamic source routing (DSR)-based routing mechanism, which is referred to as the cooperative bait detection scheme (CBDS), that integrates the advantages of both proactive and reactive defense architectures. Our CBDS method implements a reverse tracing technique to help in achieving the stated goal. Simulation results are provided, showing that in the presence of malicious-node attacks, the CBDS outperforms the DSR, 2ACK, and best-effort fault-tolerant routing (BFTR) protocols (chosen as benchmarks) in terms of packet delivery ratio and routing overhead (chosen as performance metrics).

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, gray-box models of the residential heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system were developed for the TRCA Archetype Sustainable House (TRCA-ASH) HVAC systems located at Kortright Centre for Conservation in Vaughan, Ontario, Canada.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This framework addresses the environmental dimension of software performance, as applied here by a paper mill and a car-sharing service.
Abstract: This framework addresses the environmental dimension of software performance, as applied here by a paper mill and a car-sharing service.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a mathematical model for assessing sustainability in the supply chain is proposed, based on the notion that a probabilistic representation of sustainability can realistically account for its challenges and the development of the proposed model was guided by the need for ease of use, simplicity, and the ability to quickly provide feedback on the sustainability status of supply chains over time.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present two models that consider energy used for production along with the greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions from production and transportation operations in a single-vendor (manufacturer) single-buyer system under a multi-level emission-taxing scheme.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: An integrated dark fermentation and microbial electrochemical cell (MEC) process was evaluated for hydrogen production from sugar beet juice, and the overall hydrogen production was 25% of initial COD (equivalent to 6 mol H2/mol hexoseadded).

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a review of the available literature on solar systems (solar thermal collectors and Photovoltaic-Thermal (PV/T) collectors) and their integration with heat pumps is presented.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: An optimization algorithm, which can provide a schedule for smart home appliance usage, is proposed based on the mixed-integer programming technique and shows that adding a PV system in the home results in the reduction of electricity bills and the export of energy to the national grid in times when solar energy production is more than the demand of the home.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a solution to the problem of scheduling of a smart home appliance operation in a given time range. In addition to power-consuming appliances, we adopt a photovoltaic (PV) panel as a power-producing appliance that acts as a micro-grid. An appliance operation is modeled in terms of uninterruptible sequence phases, given in a load demand profile with a goal of minimizing electricity cost fulfilling duration, energy requirement, and user preference constraints. An optimization algorithm, which can provide a schedule for smart home appliance usage, is proposed based on the mixed-integer programming technique. Simulation results demonstrate the utility of our proposed solution for appliance scheduling. We further show that adding a PV system in the home results in the reduction of electricity bills and the export of energy to the national grid in times when solar energy production is more than the demand of the home.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper describes the development of automated algorithms for extracting road features (road surfaces, road markings, and pavement cracks) from MLS point cloud data and concludes that MLS is a reliable and cost-effective alternative for rapid road inspection.
Abstract: This paper presents a survey of literature about road feature extraction, giving a detailed description of a Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) system (RIEGL VMX-450) for transportation-related applications. This paper describes the development of automated algorithms for extracting road features (road surfaces, road markings, and pavement cracks) from MLS point cloud data. The proposed road surface extraction algorithm detects road curbs from a set of profiles that are sliced along vehicle trajectory data. Based on segmented road surface points, we create Geo-Referenced Feature (GRF) images and develop two algorithms, respectively, for extracting the following: 1) road markings with high retroreflectivity and 2) cracks containing low contrast with their surroundings, low signal-to-noise ratio, and poor continuity. A comprehensive comparison illustrates satisfactory performance of the proposed algorithms and concludes that MLS is a reliable and cost-effective alternative for rapid road inspection.