74 research outputs found
Art and tradition of Sri Lanka - Volume 01: Music of Sri Lanka
No full textMusic Singing and playing musical instruments
have been developed and spread according to their unique
traditions all over the world. Therefore this book titled
‘Art and Tradition of Sri Lanka: Music of Sri Lanka’ can be
considered as a timely necessary task.
The author Dr. Gayathri Madubhani Ranathunga,
Senior Lecturer at the Fashion Design and Product
Development of the Department of Textile and Clothing
Technology, University of Moratuwa has made a noteworthy
effort in exploring the socio-cultural aspects of the history
of music of Sri Lanka. The book consists of four chapters.
The first chapter is about an unsighted overview of the
tradition in Sri Lanka. The second is about the chronological
development of the music tradition of Sri Lanka. The third
is about the history of musical instruments of Sri Lanka.
The forth is about musical instruments of today.Explorations
are based on archaeological evidences of Sri Lanka and it is
important that the author was able to build a sound dialogue
between Sri Lankan music tradition and its interaction with
society.
This scholarly work is very much vital for researchers
and students of the respective subject areas. Besides, anyone
who studies the practical side of aesthetic subjects can be
guided with insight into the music of Sri Lanka through a different perspective. Also, any who seeks subject matter
related to music of Sri Lanka can understand the content
easily.
One of the responsibilities of a university lecturer is to
contribute to the research culture and generously share and
publish earned knowledge. Therefore, I would like to wish
the author all success and may she involve in such service
and publish more research work in the future as well
Supplementary_Material - Design and baseline characteristics of the Biomarkers Of Risk In Colorectal Cancer (BORICC) Follow-Up study: A 12+ years follow-up
No full textSupplementary_Material for Design and baseline characteristics of the Biomarkers Of Risk In Colorectal Cancer (BORICC) Follow-Up study: A 12+ years follow-up by F.C. Malcomson, S.P. Breininger, K. ElGendy, A. Joel, R.M.T.K. Ranathunga, T.R. Hill, D. Michael Bradburn, D.M. Turnbull, L.C. Greaves and J.C. Mathers in Nutrition and Health</p
Nutrient digestion by dairy cows fed diets replacing starch with non-forage fiber.
No full textCorn starch is used as the main energy source in lactating dairy cow diets. Feeding high levels of corn starch may be associated with negative health impacts on lactating dairy cows, such as ruminal acidosis and laminitis along with higher feed costs and lower income from reduced milk components. Dried distillers grains with solubles (DG), a co-product of the ethanol industry, is an excellent source of energy. Ranathunga et al. (2010) demonstrated that that incrementally reducing the amount of starch in a ration from a high of 29% to a low of 20% by adding DG resulted in similar milk production and composition by lactating dairy cows. The objective of the study was to evaluate the effect of replacing starch from corn with non-forage fiber from DG and soybean hulls on the nutrient flow to the omasum, ruminal nutrient degradability, total tract nutrient digestibility, and nitrogen partition of lactating dairy cows
A Novel aspect taxonomy and aspect extraction methodology for scholarly book reviews
No full textMany people decide on the quality of a product based on its online reviews, which is also the most commonly used method when purchasing books from online book stores. Compared to other products, a scholarly book is one of the most difficult products to purchase online since customers have limited access to its internal content. Therefore, a customer has to go through multiple reviews in order to get insight on the book. However, the sheer volume of online reviews makes it difficult for a human to process and extract all the meaningful information in order to make an educated purchase. As a result, a requirement for a sentiment analysis system for scholarly book reviews are much needed at this stage. A more accurate opinion of the book can be obtained through aspect-based summarization. This type of summarization of opinions is critical for scholarly book reviews since content, organization, and other features interpret whether the book can be recommended to a customer at a certain education level.
Compared to sentiment analysis on reviews of products/services such as movies or restaurants, there is no well-defined research in aspect extraction or aspect-based sentiment analysis of scholarly book reviews. Not surprisingly for this domain, there is no well-defined aspect taxonomy or an annotated dataset available to extract aspects or to identify aspect categories. Compared to other domains, identifying aspects of book reviews is difficult since aspects such as the quality of the book or the discussed topics always appear implicitly in reviews.
The main contribution of this research is to identify potential aspects and an aspect taxonomy for scholarly book reviews. We also present a (1.) dependency rule-based unsupervised model for aspect extraction, which works better than state-of-the-art unsupervised methods, and (2.) a clustering-based aspect category identification method. Both of these are important first steps for aspect-based sentiment analysis.
The aspect taxonomy for scholarly book reviews is a hierarchical model. Book and Author have been identified as the first level of the taxonomy. Readability, content, worthiness and price, are the next level of aspect taxonomy under the book aspect category. Author expertise has been identified as an aspect category under author. In order to validate the aspect taxonomy, an unsupervised aspect extraction and clustering algorithm is proposed. An existing dependency rule-based aspect extraction algorithm is improved by adding new rules that extract aspects from book reviews. Two existing clustering algorithms for aspect clustering are merged to obtain a new clustering algorithm to discover the categories of aspect terms. The clustering algorithm is able to find the semantic similarity of aspect terms, while considering the sharing words between aspect terms, and groups similar aspects in to a one cluster. After successfully generating an annotated corpus for the scholarly book reviews in the computer science domain with Cohen’s kappa statistics of 0.76, the dependency rule-based aspect extractor was able to extract both implicit and explicit aspects with precision 76.04%, recall 75.99% and overall F1-score 76.02%. The proposed semantic similarity based aspect clustering algorithm identifies the aspect in the following categories; book, author, readability, content, worthiness, price and author expertise with rand-index 14.41%, V-measure 36.29%, homogeneity 66.18% and completeness 25%
Automatic answer generation for math word problems
No full textA math word problem (MWP) is a mathematical problem expressed using
natural language. In this research, elementary level set-related word problems in
which information is given in set notation are considered. As per our knowledge,
this is the first research addressing set theory related word problems.
This research introduces an abstract representation to interpret mathematical
semantics of set expressions and relations between sets. Two methods to extract
given set related expressions were implemented: rule based method and a statistical
method. Results show that statistical method is more robust to typing errors
and unexpected expression formats. A parser based on a context free grammar is
introduced to validate set related expressions and give feedback to the user when
there are incorrect expressions. Along with these functionalities, we present a
complete set problem solver system that understand and solve a given set word
problem.
In addition to the solver, we experiment in extracting mathematical expressions
from unstructured plain text using sequential classifiers. Several sequential
classification models including conditional random-fields (CRF) and Long-Short
Term Memory (LSTM) networks were compared with word and character level
features. The results show that using character level features significantly increase
the performance of mathematical expression extraction
People-Centric, ICT-Enabled Process Innovations via Community, Public and Private Sector Partnership, and e-Leadership: The Case of the Dompe eHospital in Sri Lanka
No full text<b>(a) Situation faced:</b> This case study is a unique example of a people-centric ICT-enabled BPM effort that overcame many challenges through steady championship fuelled by a multi-sectorial support network (local community, government agencies, private sector and institutes of higher education). Driven by a desire to make a difference, a weekly reputed regional hospital in Sri Lanka with chaotic, mundane, manual processes became a landmark success in its service efficiency and effectiveness via staged-continuous improvements, collaborative ideation, creative resource utilisation, and effective management of its “people” aspects.\ud
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<b>(b) Action taken:</b> The project took a multi-staged people-centric approach. Major attitudinal change efforts with staff helped to build a unified internal workforce that was empowered to understand the patients’ needs. The hospital’s physical environment was transformed into a peaceful, pleasant atmosphere that was free of chaos. The entire patient-care-process was mapped, analysed, and transformed with IT enabled process improvements. A new patient records management system and a mobile-channeling system was implemented to eliminate long queues and increase the quality of patient care. Continued reviews and improvements are key in this case, as the vision to make a difference does not end with a single initiative. \ud
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<b>(c) Results achieved:</b> The case illustrates how an ordinary government regional hospital’s patient-care pro-cess was transformed with the collective efforts of multi-stakeholder power. The reforms have enabled the hospital to increase the quality of patient care, enhance staff satisfaction, gain deep support, and get buy-in from higher authorities and the community. These process reform efforts enabled not only a one-off improvement initiative but a sustained success story that has received national and international attention.\ud
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<b>(d) Lessons learned:</b> A key takeaway is how all of the enabling elements (championship, community, and executive support), lined up, each making its own significant contribution. The absence or misaligned timing of any one of these elements could have caused the effort to stall or fail. The e-champion and his supporters selected and managed the people-centric resources and opportunities in a highly resource-constrained environment while balancing and strengthening the ongoing stakeholder relationships. These efforts served as the foundation for the success and sustainability of this case
Interfacing a cognitive agent platform with Second Life
No full textSecond Life is a multi-purpose online virtual world that provides a rich platform for remote human interaction. It is increasingly being used as a simulation platform to model complex human interactions in diverse areas, as well as to simulate multi-agent systems. It would therefore be beneficial to provide techniques allowing high-level agent development tools, especially cognitive agent platforms such as belief-desire-intention (BDI) programming frameworks, to be interfaced to Second Life. This is not a trivial task as it involves mapping potentially unreliable sensor readings from complex Second Life simulations to a domain-specific abstract logical model of observed properties and/or events. This paper investigates this problem in the context of agent interactions in a multi-agent system simulated in Second Life. We present a framework which facilitates the connection of any multi-agent platform with Second Life, and demonstrate it in conjunction with an extension of the Jason BDI interpreter.Unpublished1. Linden Lab. Second Life Home Page. http://secondlife.com
2. OpenMetaverse Organization. libopenmetaverse developer wiki. http://lib.openmetaverse.org/wiki/Main_Page
3. Ranathunga, S., Cranefield, S., Purvis, M.: Integrating Expectation Handling into Jason. Discussion Paper 2011/03, Department of Information Science, University of Otago (2011). http://eprints.otago.ac.nz/1093/
4. Cranefield, S., Winikoff, M.: Verifying social expectations by model checking truncated paths. Journal of Logic and Computation (2010). Advance access, doi:10.1093/logcom/exq055
5. Veksler, V.D.: Second Life as a Simulation Environment: Rich, high-fidelity world, minus the hassles. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference of Cognitive Modeling (2009)
6. Weitnauer, E., Thomas, N., Rabe, F., Kopp, S.: Intelligent agents living in social virtual environments bringing Max into Second Life. In: H. Prendinger, J. Lester, M. Ishizuka (eds.) Intelligent Virtual Agents, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 5208, pp. 552–553. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg (2008)
7. Bordini, R.H., Hubner, J.F., Wooldridge, M.: Programming Multi-Agent Systems in AgentSpeak using Jason. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, England (2007)
8. EsperTech. Esper Tutorial. http://esper.codehaus.org/tutorials/tutorial/tutorial.html
9. Vstex Company. SecondFootball Home Page. http://www.secondfootball.com
10. Varvello, M., Picconi, F., Diot, C., Biersack, E.: Is there life in Second Life? In: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM CoNEXT Conference, CoNEXT ’08, pp. 1:1–1:12. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2008)
11. Eno, J., Gauch, S., Thompson, C.: Intelligent crawling in virtual worlds. In: Pro- ceedings of the 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 03, WI-IAT ’09, pp. 555–558. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA (2009)
12. Kappe, F., Zaka, B., Steurer, M.: Automatically detecting points of interest and social networks from tracking positions of avatars in a virtual world. In: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining, pp. 89–94. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA (2009)
13. Friedman, D., Steed, A., Slater, M.: Spatial social behavior in Second Life. In: C. Pelachaud, J.C. Martin, E. Andr, G. Chollet, K. Karpouzis, D. Pel (eds.) Intelligent Virtual Agents, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4722, pp. 252–263. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg (2007)
14. Yee, N., Bailenson, J.N., D, P., Urbanek, M., Chang, F., Merget, D.: The unbearable likeness of being digital; the persistence of nonverbal social norms in online virtual environments. Cyberpsychology and Behavior 10, 115–121 (2007)
15. La, C.A., Michiardi, P.: Characterizing user mobility in Second Life. In: Proceedings of the first workshop on Online social networks, WOSP ’08, pp. 79–84. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2008)
16. Cranefield, S., Li, G.: Monitoring social expectations in Second Life. In: J. Padget, A. Artikis, W. Vasconcelos, K. Stathis, V. Silva, E. Matson, A. Polleres (eds.) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems V, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, vol. 6069, pp. 133–146. Springer (2010)
17. Burden, D.J.H.: Deploying embodied AI into virtual worlds. Knowledge-Based Systems 22, 540–544 (2009)
18. Ullrich, S., Bruegmann, K., Prendinger, H., Ishizuka, M.: Extending MPML3D to Second Life. In: H. Prendinger, J. Lester, M. Ishizuka (eds.) Intelligent Virtual Agents, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 5208, pp. 281–288. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg (2008)
19. Jan, D., Roque, A., Leuski, A., Morie, J., Traum, D.: A virtual tour guide for virtual worlds. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA ’09, pp. 372–378. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg (2009)
20. Bogdanovych, A., Rodriguez-Aguilar, J.A., Simoff, S., Cohen, A.: Authentic interactive reenactment of cultural heritage with 3D virtual worlds and artificial intelligence. Applied Artificial Intelligence 24(6), 617–647 (2010
Interfacing a cognitive agent platform with Second Life
No full textSecond Life is a multi-purpose online virtual world that provides a rich platform for remote human interaction. It is increasingly being used as a simulation platform to model complex human interactions in diverse areas, as well as to simulate multi-agent systems. It would therefore be beneficial to provide techniques allowing high-level agent development tools, especially cognitive agent platforms such as belief-desire-intention (BDI) programming frameworks, to be interfaced to Second Life. This is not a trivial task as it involves mapping potentially unreliable sensor readings from complex Second Life simulations to a domain-specific abstract logical model of observed properties and/or events. This paper investigates this problem in the context of agent interactions in a multi-agent system simulated in Second Life. We present a framework which facilitates the connection of any multi-agent platform with Second Life, and demonstrate it in conjunction with an extension of the Jason BDI interpreter.Unpublished1. Linden Lab. Second Life Home Page. http://secondlife.com
2. OpenMetaverse Organization. libopenmetaverse developer wiki. http://lib.openmetaverse.org/wiki/Main_Page
3. Ranathunga, S., Cranefield, S., Purvis, M.: Integrating Expectation Handling into Jason. Discussion Paper 2011/03, Department of Information Science, University of Otago (2011). http://eprints.otago.ac.nz/1093/
4. Cranefield, S., Winikoff, M.: Verifying social expectations by model checking truncated paths. Journal of Logic and Computation (2010). Advance access, doi:10.1093/logcom/exq055
5. Veksler, V.D.: Second Life as a Simulation Environment: Rich, high-fidelity world, minus the hassles. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference of Cognitive Modeling (2009)
6. Weitnauer, E., Thomas, N., Rabe, F., Kopp, S.: Intelligent agents living in social virtual environments bringing Max into Second Life. In: H. Prendinger, J. Lester, M. Ishizuka (eds.) Intelligent Virtual Agents, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 5208, pp. 552–553. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg (2008)
7. Bordini, R.H., Hubner, J.F., Wooldridge, M.: Programming Multi-Agent Systems in AgentSpeak using Jason. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, England (2007)
8. EsperTech. Esper Tutorial. http://esper.codehaus.org/tutorials/tutorial/tutorial.html
9. Vstex Company. SecondFootball Home Page. http://www.secondfootball.com
10. Varvello, M., Picconi, F., Diot, C., Biersack, E.: Is there life in Second Life? In: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM CoNEXT Conference, CoNEXT ’08, pp. 1:1–1:12. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2008)
11. Eno, J., Gauch, S., Thompson, C.: Intelligent crawling in virtual worlds. In: Pro- ceedings of the 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 03, WI-IAT ’09, pp. 555–558. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA (2009)
12. Kappe, F., Zaka, B., Steurer, M.: Automatically detecting points of interest and social networks from tracking positions of avatars in a virtual world. In: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining, pp. 89–94. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA (2009)
13. Friedman, D., Steed, A., Slater, M.: Spatial social behavior in Second Life. In: C. Pelachaud, J.C. Martin, E. Andr, G. Chollet, K. Karpouzis, D. Pel (eds.) Intelligent Virtual Agents, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4722, pp. 252–263. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg (2007)
14. Yee, N., Bailenson, J.N., D, P., Urbanek, M., Chang, F., Merget, D.: The unbearable likeness of being digital; the persistence of nonverbal social norms in online virtual environments. Cyberpsychology and Behavior 10, 115–121 (2007)
15. La, C.A., Michiardi, P.: Characterizing user mobility in Second Life. In: Proceedings of the first workshop on Online social networks, WOSP ’08, pp. 79–84. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2008)
16. Cranefield, S., Li, G.: Monitoring social expectations in Second Life. In: J. Padget, A. Artikis, W. Vasconcelos, K. Stathis, V. Silva, E. Matson, A. Polleres (eds.) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems V, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, vol. 6069, pp. 133–146. Springer (2010)
17. Burden, D.J.H.: Deploying embodied AI into virtual worlds. Knowledge-Based Systems 22, 540–544 (2009)
18. Ullrich, S., Bruegmann, K., Prendinger, H., Ishizuka, M.: Extending MPML3D to Second Life. In: H. Prendinger, J. Lester, M. Ishizuka (eds.) Intelligent Virtual Agents, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 5208, pp. 281–288. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg (2008)
19. Jan, D., Roque, A., Leuski, A., Morie, J., Traum, D.: A virtual tour guide for virtual worlds. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA ’09, pp. 372–378. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg (2009)
20. Bogdanovych, A., Rodriguez-Aguilar, J.A., Simoff, S., Cohen, A.: Authentic interactive reenactment of cultural heritage with 3D virtual worlds and artificial intelligence. Applied Artificial Intelligence 24(6), 617–647 (2010
Air-conditioners condensate recovery system for buildings
No full textMost conventional cooling systems produce water as a byproduct, which can be recovered and put to good use. In order to product cool air from a compressed refrigerant, a set of coils allow a hot, high-pressured refrigerant to dissipate its heat and condense into a liquid. An expansion valve is then typically used to evaporate and cool the refrigerant. This cool gas then runs through a set of coils that allows it to absorb heat and cool the air, which is blown over the coils and into the inside of the building.
This process cools the warm coils, so when the warm air blowing past the coils reaches its dew point the moisture in the air condenses onto the coils, producing what is essentially distilled water. This byproduct of air conditioning units is called as Condensate drain water.
The quality of condensate created by Air Conditioners is typically very high, having low amounts of suspended solids, a neutral to slightly acidic pH, and low temperatures. These characteristics make the condensate adequate for several non-potable uses such as irrigation, cooling tower make-up or toilet flushing. In addition to quality water, high recovery capacity is a major benefit of these systems. Although the amount of condensate produced can vary greatly and depends on the size and operational load of the Air-conditioning system as well as the ambient temperature and humidity within a particular region.
A rule of thumb created by Karen Guz (Director of the Conservation Department for the San Antonio Water System, USA) is that 0.1 to 0.3 gallons of condensate per ton of air being chilled is produced every hour that the system is operating. Seizing this opportunity by replacing or supplementing potable water with the recovered condensate can considerably reduce a building’s demand for potable water.
By implementing a condensate recovery system free, clean and unused water will be replacing costly, treated, high demand potable water. Decreasing the use of potable water within buildings plays a major role in conserving municipal sources.
Moreover following potential LEED credits can be achieved.
Water Efficient Landscaping
a. WE Credit 1.1
b. WE Credit 1.
Improving a building’s indoor environment quality
No full textThe quality of indoor air is directly related to the amount of Ventilation in a building. A person’s health, comfort and well-being can be significantly affected by the quality of the indoor air. Building ventilation systems are used to introduce fresh air from outdoors into the building while exhausting “old” air.
The amount of ventilation in a building affects the indoor air quality by introducing clean outside air into the building. The heating or cooling system will have to work harder to maintain a comfortable interior temperature. In order to mitigate the effects of ventilation on the heating and cooling system, most mechanical heating, ventilation and cooling (HVAC) systems are designed to re-circulate a significant portion of the indoor conditioned air. The recirculation of old air has a detrimental effect on the indoor air quality and should be monitored to verify that the air still meets the minimum standards for building occupancy and use.
Mechanical Ventilation System
Active (mechanical) ventilation systems use fans to draw fresh outside air into the building. Mechanical ventilation systems can provide consistent air flow to interior spaces and can be designed to maximize the indoor environment quality by controlling factors such as air speed, air quality, temperature and humidity. High efficiency filter systems can improve indoor air quality when they are integrated into building’s HVAC system.
Passive Ventilation System
Cross-Ventilation System
Stack Ventilation
Hybrid Integrated Ventilation Systems
Methods of improving indoor air quality during Construction
Construction activities can produce a significant amount of air pollution that can pose a health threat to construction workers and future building occupants. There are many strategies to avoid indoor air quality problems during construction and to mitigate long term effects. Most of the methods for controlling indoor air quality during construction must be planned and implemented before construction begins.
Construction Air Quality Plan
An indoor air quality plan should be prepared an implemented before construction of the building. The plan should address the following factors.
Methods for controlling the pollutant source
Mitigation of indoor air contaminant dispersion
Education for employees and subcontractors regarding the method of pollution control
Ways to verify implementation of the plan
Improving air Quality during Construction
Proper cleanup and material storage during and after construction can significantly reduce the amount of air pollution generated by construction activities. Some good procedures to follow include;
Protecting porous materials from air contaminants before and after installation
Using a vacuum with high-efficiency filter to clean up debris
Using wetting agents to control dus
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