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As most elderly people are believed to spend the majority of their time indoors, the physical interior environment is likely to be of particular importance to them. Research relating to the concerns of elderly people and their perceptions has been subject to significant growth in recent times. This study, then, is concerned with acquiring knowledge of elderly people’s perceptions toward sheltered housing design. The principal aims are to examine and apply multi-methodologies to improve the effectiveness of data gathered from elderly respondents and to understand their perceptions of the interior environments they inhabit. Moreover, the purpose of the study is to determine the relative importance that the elderly attach to the various key interior elements and spatial areas within a sheltered housing scheme, in order to facilitate an improvement in these schemes as a whole. Initially, this thesis provides an introduction briefly explaining the motivation and background of the study along with the research aims and objectives. The related academic literature is then presented along with an outline of the background of each method used. Following this, the main research is detailed describing the four different methods, namely: Visual Record survey, Sketch Map survey, Detailed Recall survey and User-centred Conversational Tour, which are subsequently integrated with the goal of achieving more accurate and reliable results. Furthermore, the findings of the study established the priority of selected interior elements and spatial areas within the recent sheltered housing scheme, as assessed by elderly subjects. The design issues were summarised as the subjects’ perceptions of sheltered housing arrangements and their spatial design preferences. Indeed, they provide a provisional check list for the future design of residential environments for the elderly or modifications to existing facilities. In addition, the study provides a basic understanding of how elderly people observe unfamiliar spaces. More specifically, the results could be used to establish budget priorities relative to the building of new sheltered accommodation and should certainly be considered in the design or modification of residential environments for the elderly. The research was carried out by De Montfort University and in association with Leicester City Council Housing Department (LCC Housing Department). It was an investigation into elderly persons' perceptions of the interior environments of sheltered housing, with the intention of improving contemporary sheltered housing design. The facts presented and views expressed in this thesis are, however, those of the author and not necessarily those of the LCC Housing department.

Aircraft conceptual design, as the first design stage, provides major opportunity to compress design cycle time and is the cheapest place for making design changes. However, traditional aircraft conceptual design programs, which are monolithic programs, cannot provide satisfactory functionality to meet new design requirements due to the lack of domain flexibility and analysis scalability. Therefore, we are in need of the next generation aircraft conceptual design environment (NextADE). To build the NextADE, the framework and the data management problem are two major problems that need to be addressed at the forefront. Solving these two problems, particularly the data management problem, is the focus of this research. In this dissertation, a distributed object-oriented framework is firstly formulated and tested for the NextADE. In order to improve interoperability and simplify the integration of heterogeneous application tools, data management is one of the major problems that need to be tackled. To solve this problem, taking into account the characteristics of aircraft conceptual design data, a robust, extensible object-oriented data model is then proposed according to the distributed object-oriented framework. By overcoming the shortcomings of the traditional approach of modeling aircraft conceptual design data, this data model makes it possible to capture specific detailed information of aircraft conceptual design without sacrificing generality. Based upon this data model, a prototype of the data management system, which is one of the fundamental building blocks of the NextADE, is implemented utilizing the state of the art information technologies. Using a general-purpose integration software package to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework and the data management system, the NextADE is initially implemented by integrating the prototype of the data management system with other building blocks of the design environment. As experiments, two case studies are conducted in the integrated design environments. One is based upon a simplified conceptual design of a notional conventional aircraft; the other is a simplified conceptual design of an unconventional aircraft. As a result of the experiments, the proposed framework and the data management approach are shown to be feasible solutions to the research problems.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of South Florida, 2005. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 138-156).

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Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:24:10Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2010-10-26Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:10:25Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 nakata_cm_me_bauru.pdf: 1968573 bytes, checksum: c97ddfe20e858eb97a0458cb9ebde4e4 (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Uma das características dos espaços urbanos externos que mais influencia o comportamento humano é o clima. As características climáticas das cidades geram o ambiente térmico sob o qual o ser humano desenvolve suas atividades, causando comportamentos específicos dos pedestres para as diferentes regiões e países. Abordando o campo da ergonomia ambiental, esta pesquisa tem por objetivo avaliar a influência do ambiente térmico urbano no comportamento do pedestre. Para isso são realizadas medições microclimáticas e levantamentos com pedestres em áreas externas de um bairro residencial na cidade de Bauru. Paralelamente, são realizadas simulações do ambiente térmico da mesma área, através da aplicação do software ENVI-met, além de posterior simulação do comportamento do pedestre através do sotware BOT-World. O software ENVI-met se configura em uma ferramenta de análise tri-dimensional de microclima e do BOTworld em um sistema Multi-agent de simulação de sensações e comportamentos de pedestres. A metodologia proposta permite comparações entre os dados reais e simulados, validando-se e ajustando-se o modelo computadcional de simulação microclimática para a área de estudo. É feita ainda uma avaliação de comportamento e sensação térmica de pedestres virtuais para a situação real e para um cenário hipotético de verticalização. Como resultados, as simulações permitiram identificar as diferentes características térmicas geradas pelo desenho urbano da área de estudo e o consequente comportamento do pedestre / Climate is one of the features of external urban areas, which has a large influence on human behavior. Climate characteristics of cities generate the thermal environment under which human beings develop their activities, what produces specific pedestrian behaviors for different regions and countries. Approaching the field of the environmental ergonomics, this research aims to evaluate the influence of the urbam thermal environmental in the pedestrian behavior. In order to do so, microclimatic measurements and pedestrian survey in open spaces are carried out for a residential neighborhood in the city of Bauru. Simultaneously, thermal environment simulations are performed by applyng the ENVI-met software and afterwards the pedestrian behavior is simulated by the application of the BOTworld software. ENVI-met is a tri-dimensional tool for microclimate analysis, while BOTworld is a Multi-agent system for simulation of pedestrian thermal sensation and behavior. The proposed methodology allows the comparison of real and simulated data, validating and adjusting the computational model of microclimatics simulation for the study area. An evaluation of the virtual pedestrian behavior and thermal sensations is developed for the real situation and also for a hypothetical scenario of verticalization. The results identify different thermal characteristics generated by the urban design of the study area and their consequences on pedestrian behavior

In this thesis, we address several generic problems concerned with procurement of tasks from a crowd that consists of strategic workers with uncertainty in their qualities. These problems assume importance as the quality of services in a service marketplace is known to degrade when there is (unchecked) information asymmetry pertaining to quality. Moreover, crowdsourcing is increasingly being used for a wide variety of tasks these days since it offers high levels of flexibility to workers as well as employers. We seek to address the issue of quality uncertainty in crowdsourcing through mechanism design and machine learning. As the interactions in web-based crowdsourcing platform are logged, the data captured could be used to learn unknown parameters such as qualities of individual crowd workers. Further, many of these platforms invite bids by crowd workers for available tasks but the strategic workers may not bid truthfully. This warrants the use of mechanism design to induce truthful bidding. There ensues a complex interplay between machine learning and mechanism design, leading to interesting technical challenges. We resolve some generic challenges in the context of the following problems. Design of a quality eliciting mechanism with interdependent values We consider an expert sourcing problem, where a planner seeks opinions from a pool of experts. Execution of the task at an assured quality level in a cost effective manner turns out to be a mechanism design problem when the individual qualities are private information of the experts. Also, the task execution problem involves interdependent values, where truthfulness and efficiency cannot be achieved in an unrestricted setting due to an impossibility result. We propose a novel mechanism that exploits the special structure of the problem and guarantees allocative efficiency, ex-post incentive compatibility and strict budget balance for the mechanism, and ex-post individual rationality for the experts. Design of an optimal dimensional crowdsourcing auction We study the problem faced by an auctioneer who gains stochastic rewards by procuring multiple units of a service from a pool of heterogeneous strategic workers. The reward obtained depends on the inherent quality of the worker; the worker’s quality is fixed but unknown. The costs and capacities are private information of the workers. The auctioneer is required to elicit costs and capacities (making the mechanism design dimensional) and further, has to learn the qualities of the workers as well, to enable utility maximization. To solve this problem, we design a dimensional multi-armed bandit auction that maximizes the expected utility of the auctioneer subject to incentive compatibility and individual rationality while simultaneously learning the unknown qualities of the agents. Design of a multi-parameter learning mechanism for crowdsourcing We investigate the problem of allocating divisible jobs, arriving online, to workers in a crowd-sourcing platform. Each job is split into a certain number of tasks that are then allocated to workers. These tasks have to meet several constraints that depend on the worker performance. The performance of each worker in turn is characterized by several intrinsic stochastic parameters. In particular, we study a problem where each arriving job has to be completed within a deadline and each task has to be completed, honouring a lower bound on quality. The job completion time and quality of each worker are stochastic with fixed but unknown means. We propose a learning mechanism to elicit the costs truthfully while simultaneously learning the stochastic parameters. Our proposed mechanism is dominant strategy incentive compatible and ex-post individually rational with asymptotically optimal regret performance.

Resumo: Uma das características dos espaços urbanos externos que mais influencia o comportamento humano é o clima. As características climáticas das cidades geram o ambiente térmico sob o qual o ser humano desenvolve suas atividades, causando comportamentos específicos dos pedestres para as diferentes regiões e países. Abordando o campo da ergonomia ambiental, esta pesquisa tem por objetivo avaliar a influência do ambiente térmico urbano no comportamento do pedestre. Para isso são realizadas medições microclimáticas e levantamentos com pedestres em áreas externas de um bairro residencial na cidade de Bauru. Paralelamente, são realizadas simulações do ambiente térmico da mesma área, através da aplicação do software ENVI-met, além de posterior simulação do comportamento do pedestre através do sotware BOT-World. O software ENVI-met se configura em uma ferramenta de análise tri-dimensional de microclima e do BOTworld em um sistema Multi-agent de simulação de sensações e comportamentos de pedestres. A metodologia proposta permite comparações entre os dados reais e simulados, validando-se e ajustando-se o modelo computadcional de simulação microclimática para a área de estudo. É feita ainda uma avaliação de comportamento e sensação térmica de pedestres virtuais para a situação real e para um cenário hipotético de verticalização. Como resultados, as simulações permitiram identificar as diferentes características térmicas geradas pelo desenho urbano da área de estudo e o consequente comportamento do pedestre / Abstract: Climate is one of the features of external urban areas, which has a large influence on human behavior. Climate characteristics of cities generate the thermal environment under which human beings develop their activities, what produces specific pedestrian behaviors for different regions and countries. Approaching the field of the environmental ergonomics, this research aims to evaluate the influence of the urbam thermal environmental in the pedestrian behavior. In order to do so, microclimatic measurements and pedestrian survey in open spaces are carried out for a residential neighborhood in the city of Bauru. Simultaneously, thermal environment simulations are performed by applyng the ENVI-met software and afterwards the pedestrian behavior is simulated by the application of the BOTworld software. ENVI-met is a tri-dimensional tool for microclimate analysis, while BOTworld is a Multi-agent system for simulation of pedestrian thermal sensation and behavior. The proposed methodology allows the comparison of real and simulated data, validating and adjusting the computational model of microclimatics simulation for the study area. An evaluation of the virtual pedestrian behavior and thermal sensations is developed for the real situation and also for a hypothetical scenario of verticalization. The results identify different thermal characteristics generated by the urban design of the study area and their consequences on pedestrian behavior / Orientador: Léa Cristina Lucas de Souza / Coorientador: João Roberto Gomes de Faria / Banca: José Carlos Plácido da Silva / Banca: Gianna Melo Barbirato / Mestre