If we are stepping out of windows, what are we stepping into? We suggest it is into cooperative buildings. For the foreseeable future, at least, we can identify two major characteristics of the cooperative building. The spaces of the building will be augmented in various ways, providing an ambient environment that bridges spatial discontinuities in workgroups and provides a continuous window in...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the respiratory symptoms and atopic sensitization to fungi and its relation with the building type where school children were attending. We also compared the prevalence of sensitization to different fungi and respiratory symptoms in 2 different school buildings in a particular area of Turkey. METHODS Using simple random sampling, 301 school children aged 16-19 years a...

In the recent years, there has been an increasing academic and industrial interest for analyzing the electrical consumption of commercial buildings. Whilst having similarities with the Non Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) tasks for residential buildings, the nature of the signals that are collected from large commercial buildings introduces additional difficulties to the NILM research causing e...

Airborne laser altimetry has become a very popular technique for the acquisition of digital elevation models. The high point density that can be achieved with this technique enables applications of laser data for many other purposes. This paper deals with the construction of 3D models of the urban environment. A three-dimensional version of the well-known Hough transform is used for the extract...

The paper presents the results of a study conducted at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim on the occurrence of biodeterioration. Visual assessment of the buildings revealed signs of deterioration of the buildings in the form of dampness, bulging and crumbling plaster, and wood fiber splitting. The external surfaces, and especially the concrete strips and ground immediately adjoinin...

Due to the environmental and economical processes of the world the architectural thinking is started to change radically in the last decades. The danger of the global warming and the climate change motivated us to revalue our activity and its impacts. The concept of sustainability came into being and its role became more and more important in the architecture. It isn‟t visible that the sustaina...

The problem addressed here is the guidance of a mobile robot within an unknown indoor environment, and in particular mapping. Although much success has been reported using laser scanners for this task, the use of vision-based sensing presents both problems and advantages. The revisiting problem in mapping is addressed by using the Consistent Pose Estimation algorithm.

Nowadays there are many software tools available which, in case of a gas release, allow to calculate the dispersion of the gases (and hence predict the size and shape of the cloud) and to calculate the overpressures as a function of distance if this gas cloud should explode. The next step is then to predict what the consequences of these overpressures will be: to what extent will buildings (and...

This survey is intended as a brief introduction to the theory of hyperbolic buildings and their lattices. Hyperbolic buildings are negatively curved geometric objects which also have a rich algebraic and combinatorial structure, and the study of these buildings and the lattices in their automorphism groups involves a fascinating mixture of techniques from many different areas of mathematics. Ro...

18 IE E E S P E C T R U M • A u g u st 2 00 3 would instantly seal them off and contact authorities [see “The Road Ahead” on the Web at http://www.spectrum. ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/ aug03/bbroad.html]. For now, though, efforts to make buildings smarter are focusing on cutting costs by streamlining building operations like air conditioning and lighting. Building automation is critical to ...