iii List of Figures and Tables iv

With some recent developments, the zero energy building and near zero energy building has gained a worldwide attention and now it is seen as the future building concept. Since such buildings are now the center of attraction, various advancements in this area are being reported. This paper is a detailed review of the literature on the zero (or near zero) energy building (ZEB) envelope components...

Our goal is to build knowledge-based systems capable of answering a wide variety of questions, including questions that are unanticipated when the knowledge base is built. For systems to achieve this level of competence and generality, they require the ability to dynamically construct new concept representations, and to do so in response to the questions and tasks posed to them. Our approach to...

We propose a new method for amorphous bio-compatible computing using deoxyribozyme logic gates [1] in which oligonucleotides act as enzymes on other oligonucleotides, yielding oligonucleotide products. Moreover, these reactions can be controlled by inputs that are also oligonucleotides. We interpret these reactions as logic gates, and the concentrations of chemical species as signals. Since the...

This paper describes a standard of software components for building energy and control systems modeling. This technology is well positioned to overcome the limits of existing tools and to allow better collaboration between various engineering domains coexisting in building field. A standard named ICAr is proposed in addition to the Modelica approach to ensure models interoperability. So, the st...

A major cause of the knowledge-engineering bottleneck is the inability to transfer repre-sentational fragments from one knowledge base to another due to the idiosyncratic nature of domain-speciic representations. In this paper, we show that representations can be built automatically by composing abstract, reusable components. Moreover, we describe how representations of speciic situations, that...

The complexity of reconfigurable systems is in great part the complexity of the hardware-software environment where they are integrated. Many different reconfigurable architectures and respective development tools have been proposed in the literature, but few reconfigurable computing startups have succeeded at creating sustainable business models. The extraordinary infrastructure needed to oper...

Today, advanced heuristic approaches for discrete optimization are usually implemented from scratch. We discuss some crucial problems that have so far prevented us from having a “heuristics stockroom” with ready-to-use software components available. Then, we analyze the domain to be covered by reusable software and introduce and discuss a design for a framework for heuristic search. Finally, we...

Safe and secure reuse demands construction and use of verified reusable software components. Such verified components need much more than typical code for components in popular languages, such as C++ or Java. The components need to have formal specifications of behavior against which their implementations are verified. To be trusted, such verification must go beyond extensive testing and argume...

We summarize our experiences building a comprehensive suite of tests for a statistical natural language processing toolkit, ClearTK. We describe some of the challenges we encountered, introduce a software project that emerged from these efforts, summarize our resulting test suite, and discuss some of the les-