48440 research outputs found
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Under the Stars: A Sincere Third Space
No full textUnder the Stars is a paidic third space that aims to encourage viewers to find childlike wonder in everyday life and find little moments of Utopia. Using an intentionally designed playful setting, it aims to create an opportunity for audience members to discuss their own childhood play spaces and daydreams and reflect upon the imaginary worlds they created and desired. It offers an opportunity to escape from stressful and scary realities and play pretend like a child. The space was designed with Belan's personal reflection of childhood play serving as the seed for conversation
Bioinspired Approaches for Enhancing Concrete Durability and Sustainability
No full textConcrete is the backbone of modern infrastructure, yet its durability and environmental impact remain significant concerns. As the most widely used construction material, it accounts for approximately 8% of global CO2 emissions, contributing to climate change while facing inherent challenges such as cracking, permeability, and steel reinforcement corrosion. These factors significantly reduce service life, necessitate frequent repairs, and increase maintenance costs. Traditional repair methods, such as epoxy coatings and chemical corrosion inhibitors, often fail to provide long-term resilience, while conventional reinforcement techniques—primarily steel rebars and fiber additives—lack adaptability and efficiency in mitigating stress concentrations. The need for sustainable, long-lasting, and high-performance solutions for concrete durability has never been more urgent, particularly as global infrastructure demands continue to grow. This research presents a bioinspired approach to enhancing concrete performance by leveraging Carbonic Anhydrase (CA), a naturally occurring enzyme, to improve corrosion resistance and self-healing capabilities. CA acts as a catalyst, accelerating the reaction between atmospheric CO2 and calcium ions in the cementitious matrix to precipitate calcium carbonate CaCO3, which seals cracks and densifies the microstructure. Laboratory tests on CA-modified concrete demonstrate significantly reduced permeability, enhanced crack-sealing properties, and greater resistance to chloride ion ingress, a primary driver of rebar corrosion. Microstructural analysis confirms that CA-treated samples develop denser pore structures and mineralized protective layers, slowing degradation and extending structural longevity. Accelerated corrosion testing further indicates delayed crack formation and reduced corrosion rates, outperforming conventional repair materials. Computational diffusion modeling supports these findings, highlighting reduced ion transport rates and extended service life predictions for enzymatic concrete. Beyond structural benefits, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) reveals that enzymatic concrete provides significant environmental advantages, primarily by extending infrastructure lifespan, reducing material consumption, and minimizing CO2 emissions associated with repairs and replacements. By sequestering carbon dioxide into durable mineral phases, this method contributes to carbon capture efforts, presenting a scalable, low-energy alternative for increasing concrete resilience while addressing sustainability concerns. Additionally, this research explores an innovative reinforcement strategy using 3D-printed auxetic structures with negative Poisson ratios (NPRs). Auxetic geometries, such as brick-and-mortar, bowtie, and tubular designs, are fabricated using stainless steel, aluminum, and polylactic acid (PLA) and evaluated for their impact on stress distribution and energy absorption. Experimental and numerical results indicate that stainless steel tubular auxetic reinforcements surpass conventional reinforcement strategies in load redistribution and crack propagation delay. These findings demonstrate the potential for integrating auxetic reinforcement with enzymatic concrete to further enhance resilience, toughness, and mechanical efficiency. By combining bioinspired self-healing strategies with advanced reinforcement techniques, this research provides a transformative framework for next-generation concrete materials. The findings offer a scalable solution to improving structural durability, reducing environmental impact, and increasing the sustainability of concrete infrastructure worldwide
Diagnosing Ambiguous Faults in Robotic Swarms
No full textRobotic swarms can suffer from seemingly endless technical issues when applied in real-world applications. This is because robots become less reliable as parts of their system fail over repeated use. This issue is exacerbated in swarms as there can be multiple robots failing at different times. Failures may also induce similar behaviors in agents, making these faults difficult to distinguish from one another. Ideally, a swarm of robots could identify and handle any faults as they arise to prevent or mitigate negative effects on performance. This means that agents will need to successfully diagnose robots despite minor differences in faults and understand the unique characteristics of robots experiencing potentially detrimental faults. A swarm capable of accurately diagnosing faulty agents would be essential to self maintenance, which would make the swarm more robust and capable. This paper aims to develop a fault detection and diagnosis system that individuals in a swarm can use to diagnose even ambiguous faults in other agents
Online Course for Water-Based Citizen Science
No full textThe quality of natural water sources around the world impacts the people and environment that rely on them. Citizen participation is crucial to increasing this quality and making this impact purely positive. With assistance from the AUA Acopian Center for the Environment and its members, we have created a citizen science-based curriculum to help increase awareness in water quality monitoring. Our course explains issues affecting water, their importance, and how participants can help by using citizen science
Pre-Silicon Hierarchical Root-Cause Analysis of Side-Channel and Fault Vulnerabilities in System-on-Chip Designs
No full textThe growing complexity of modern System-on-Chip (SoC) designs has made analyzing security vulnerabilities, such as side-channel leakage and fault effects, increasingly challenging. Traditionally, vulnerability assessment is performed only after design fabrication. This post-silicon black-box approach provides limited insight into design details, identifying weaknesses without explaining their root causes and resulting in both challenging countermeasure design and costly refabrication. This dissertation argues that vulnerability assessment can be supported to an earlier (pre-silicon) stage, where full access to the internal design enables root-cause analysis and allows the development of more effective mitigations. The key lies in the hierarchical evaluation of vulnerabilities, which bridges software and hardware layers to capture how weaknesses propagate through the design hierarchy. We propose two primary contributions. First, sidechannel leakage can be addressed through a top-down analysis that traces how sensitive, software-defined asset (e.g., cryptographic key or nonce) influence lower hardware layers, enabling early detection and mitigation of leakage sources. Second, fault effects can be examined through a bottom-up analysis that tracks how hardware disturbances propagate to software outputs, revealing critical fault paths and guiding the design of effective mitigation
Tracking Impact: A Framework of a Data Strategy for Banksia
No full textThis project provided a data strategy framework to guide the department of Circular Economy and Sustainability within Banksia Gardens Community Services (BGCS) through the 2025-2030 phase of their strategic plan to advance circular economy and sustainability principles within their community. To track BGCS’s progress towards strategic goals, the team identified impact indicators and data acquisition methodologies. Guided by scientific literature and interviews with BGCS’s staff, the team centralized BGCS’s sustainability data, created data collection templates and a strategic map linking impact indicators to strategic goals. Using sponsor input, the team provided BGCS with a user guide for the tools, explaining templates, suggestions, and recommendations
Beach Drowning Prevention on Victoria's Shorelines
No full textLife Saving Victoria (LSV) strives to save lives and empower communities to safely enjoy water through statewide outreach. Our work focused on the Mornington Peninsula and the Bass Coast, two ‘blackspot’ locations with higher-than-normal fatal drowning rates. To help address this issue, we conducted a study using virtual reality headsets to evaluate beachgoer behavior in response to three different safety signs. We then analyzed the results to identify which design would most effectively encourage safer practices and should be installed onsite. We also conducted in-person surveys to understand current engagement levels and planned a communications campaign to strengthen awareness of the importance of reading signage, helping guide effective coastal safety improvements
Enhancing Environmental Conservation Through Data Insights
No full textThe Rendere Environmental Trust, whose mission is to restore and protect Australia’s biodiversity, supports organizations across Australia but previously lacked a centralized system to track partner information, funding, and impact. This project created an integrated Airtable database and an interactive Kumu.io network map to improve data management and visualization. Indicators based on the Australian Environmental Grantmakers Networks' 7 Levers of Change and selected Global Biodiversity Framework Targets were used to develop standardized checklists and applied across 39 partner organizations. These tools enhance Rendere’s ability to assess impact, identify gaps, and demonstrate its reach in Australia’s environmental sector
Documenting Information about Toxic Substances in Textiles
No full textThe goal of this project was to document the impacts, regulations, and consumer awareness of bisphenols, azo dyes, and synthetic microfibers used in sports. To start, a multiple-choice questionnaire was set out through Arnika’s newsletter to document current knowledge, levels of concern, and topics of interest related to these substances. Interviews with subject matter experts at universities in the Czech Republic were also conducted, and recent scientific and regulatory literature was reviewed to document health and environmental impacts, current regulations, and alternatives. Findings were consolidated into a briefing paper that summarizes the impacts, regulations, and alternatives for the substances of concern and provides practical guidance for limiting exposure
Improving Zoo Praha’s Mobile Application and App Marketing
No full textPrague is home to Zoo Praha, known for its exhibits and conservation efforts. With over 150 exhibits and 58 hectares of land, navigating the zoo can be difficult. To help solve this problem, Zoo Praha developed an app. However, due to shortcomings of the app and its marketing, improvements need to be made before the app becomes a staple of the visitor experience. The goal of this project is to develop recommendations for improvements to Zoo Praha’s mobile application and marketing to increase app usage. To understand the current state of the application and its usage, interviews and surveys were conducted. These findings guided the development of a list of feature improvements, alternative routes of app development, and recommended next steps