The evolution of building codes typically produce design provisions that are expected to create safer and more accurate designs. We as engineers expect building codes to advance the state of the art with each successive edition. The 2009 International Building Code (IBC) and the Building Code Requirements for Structural Concrete (ACI 318-08) have significant revisions affecting the design of ti...

This paper estimates reduced-form Phillips curves for Brazil with a framework of time series with unobserved components, in the spirit of Harvey (2011). However, we allow for expectations to play a key role using data from the Central Bank of Brazil’s Focus survey. Besides GDP, we also use industrial capacity utilization rate and IBC-Br index, as measures of economic activity. Our findings supp...

To improve accuracy and reliability, Boolean combination (BC) can efficiently integrate the responses of multiple biometric systems in the ROC space. However, BC techniques assume that recognition systems are conditionally-independent and that their ROC curves are convex. These assumptions are rarely valid in practice, where systems face complex environments, and are designed using limited enro...

Data-Driven Inversion-Based Control (D-IBC) is a recently introduced control design method for uncertain nonlinear systems, relying on a two degree-of-freedom architecture, with a nonlinear controller and a linear controller running in parallel. In this paper, extending to the MIMO case a previous result holding for the SISO case, we derive a finite-gain stability sufficient condition for a clo...