BCIT Citations Collection | BCIT Institutional Repository

BCIT Citations Collection

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Indoor humidity levels of houses in Pacific coastal climate
9th International Conference on Indoor Air Quality, Ventilation & Energy Conservation (IAQVEC), October 23-26, 2016, Songdo, South Korea. This project studied the relative humidity and indoor temperature variations in three houses in the pacific coastal climates. The houses have been monitored for one month in each four different seasons under different size of occupants, temperature variation and living conditions. These three houses represent different air tightness, number of occupants and floor size. The temperature and RH data loggers are used in every room in each house to better understand which rooms in a certain living conditions are more susceptible to moisture related problems. In addition, three existing models (European Indoor Class Model, ASHRAE 160P simple and intermediate models) are used to generate the indoor humidity level and the calculated values are compared to the measured field data., Conference paper, Published.
Initial evaluation of the FreeWheel™ wheelchair attachment
Proceedings of Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America Annual Conference 2011. The FreeWheel™ wheelchair attachment was developed to overcome the burden that front casters pose to manual wheelchairs., Conference paper, Published.
Intelligent Micro Grid research at BCIT
Proceedings of IEEE EPEC’08 Conference, Vancouver, Oct 2008. This paper describes a major research initiative by British Columbia Institute of Technology for the construction of an Intelligent Micro Grid on its campus in Burnaby, BC, Canada., Conference paper, Published.
Iterated belief change
Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-05) in Edinburgh, Scotland, 2005. We use a transition system approach to reason about the evolution of an agent’s beliefs as actions are executed. Some actions cause an agent to perform belief revision and some actions cause an agent to perform belief update, but the interaction between revision and update can be nonelementary. We present a set of basic postulates describing the interaction of revision and update, and we introduce a new belief evolution operator that gives a plausible interpretation to alternating sequences of revisions and updates., Conference paper, Published.
Life-cycle performance framework for building sustainability
Proceedings from the International High Performance Buildings Conference 2010. In spite of the progress in the development of methods and tools to support sustainable building design, there is still a lack of a formal method to bridge the “no man’s land” gap between the traditional building engineering disciplines, and between these and the architecture, to achieve the level of building integration required for sustainability. The framework described in this paper is an attempt to develop such a method. The framework, grounded on building science, facilitates a comprehensive assessment of the life-cycle performance of buildings and building systems, by enabling multiple function-performance factors of a building to be addressed iteratively. Quantitative methods and test protocols can be incorporated into the framework for assessing the long-term viability of proposed solutions. The organization of the underlying principles of building life-cycle performance described in this paper will hopefully conduct to a more integrated treatment of buildings in research, education, and practice., Peer reviewed, Conference proceeding, Published.
Linking education and research
Proceedings of 2010 IEEE Transforming Engineering Education: Creating Interdisciplinary Skills for Complex Global Environments, Dublin, Ireland, 6-9 April 2010. Most engineering careers will require engineers to work in multi-disciplinary teams. It is necessary for post-secondary institutions to provide opportunities for engineering students to work in multi-disciplinary teams during their education so that they can function and thrive in these environments upon graduation. One model for introducing and sustaining multi-disciplinary engineering education has been to link a number of the British Columbia Institute of Technology's (BCIT) engineering and technology capstone projects with the hub of multi-disciplinary researchers at the BCIT Technology Centre., Conference paper, Published.
A logical approach to promoting trust over knowledge to trust over action
Proceedings of 2016 14th Annual Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST) in Auckland, New Zealand 12-14 Dec. 2016. We discuss two related forms of trust. One form of trust is related to the perceived knowledge of other agents; we accept the information that another agent provides if we believe they have sufficient expertise in a particular domain. The second form is related to action; we trust another agent to act on our behalf if we believe they will choose acceptable actions. In this paper, we explore the relationship between these two forms of trust. In particular, we use an existing model of trust to demonstrate how trust over knowledge can determine when trust over actions is appropriate. We take a formal approach to this problem, using logic-based tools for representing and reasoning about actions and beliefs to characterize trust over action. While our primary aim is to develop a formal methodology that permits trust over actions to be defined in terms of trust over knowledge, we also consider applications that are both practical and speculative. On the practical side, we consider how our methods can be used to reason about trusted third parties in communication protocols. On the speculative side, we suggest that models of trust have a role to play in the development of ethical decision-making agents., Conference paper, Published.
Low voltage distribution substation integration in smart Microgrid
Proceeding of IEEE 8th Conference on PowerElectronics, Jeju Island, South Korea, June 2011. A strategy is proposed to introduce a limited set of monitoring and control functions into a legacy low voltage distribution substation, and as such integrate it into a larger command and control architecture of a smart Microgrid. The focus of the work shall be on the retrofit strategy of some of the key components for measurement, monitoring, protection and control systems of the substation. Also Volt/VAR optimization of the feeder shall be considered as a part of the design. The article discusses the structure of the substation under study, followed by the actual design of IEC 61850 subsystems for the substation. A simulation model of the pilot project and its results is also included in the paper., Conference paper, Published.
Measuring gene expression noise in early drosophila embryos
Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2012. In recent years the analysis of noise in gene expression has widely attracted the attention of experimentalists and theoreticians. Experimentally, the approaches based on in vivo fluorescent reporters in single cells appear to be straightforward and effective tools for bacteria and yeast. However, transferring these approaches to multicellular organisms presents many methodological problems. Here we describe our approach to measure between-nucleus variability (noise) in the primary morphogenetic gradient of Bicoid (Bcd) in the precellular blastoderm stage of fruit fly (Drosophila) embryos. The approach is based on the comparison of results for fixed immunostained embryos with observations of live embryos carrying fluorescent Bcd (Bcd-GFP). We measure the noise using two-dimensional Singular Spectrum Analysis (2D SSA). We have found that the nucleus-to-nucleus noise in Bcd intensity, both for live (Bcd-GFP) and for fixed immunstained embryos, tends to be signal-independent. In addition, the character of the noise is sensitive to the nuclear masking technique used to extract quantitative intensities. Further, the method of decomposing the raw quantitative expression data into a signal (expression surface) and residual noise affects the character of the residual noise. We find that careful masking of confocal images and use of appropriate computational tools to decompose raw expression data into trend and noise makes it possible to extract and study the biological noise of gene expression., Conference paper, Published.
Mechanical properties of low-strength concrete blocks simulating construction in developing countries
Proceedings of the 12th North American Masonry Conference in Boulder, Colorado, May 17-20th, 2015. It is believed that one of the causes for unacceptably high death toll in the 2010 Haiti earthquake was due to use of low-strength hollow concrete blocks for masonry construction. After the earthquake, a team of BCIT faculty and students started to work on developing a low-cost nondestructive testing device for strength evaluation of concrete blocks which could be used in Haiti and other countries. The concept is based on the relationship between the compressive strength and the corresponding resonant frequency determined when a block is subjected to a mild impact. A simple block mould procured from Haiti was used to manufacture units with varying mix proportions typical of low-to medium-strength concrete blocks. In total, more than 70 concrete blocks and companion cylinders were made using13 different mix proportions to determine the compressive strength and other mechanical properties., Conference paper, Published.
Mobile forensics for cloud data
Proceedings of 2016 14th Annual Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST) in Auckland, New Zealand, 12-14 Dec. 2016. Forensic examinations of a mobile phone that consider only the internal memory can miss potentially vital data that is accessible from the device, but not stored locally. In this paper, we look at a forensic tool that is able to download data stored on the cloud, using credentials gleaned from device extractions. Through experimention with a variety of devices and configurations, we examine the effectiveness of the software for its stated purpose. The results suggest that we are able to obtain information from the cloud in this manner, but only under some relatively strong assumptions. Practical issues and legal considerations are discussed., Conference paper, Published.
MobiSense
Proceedings of Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America Annual Conference 2014. Mobile devices such as phones and tablets are now ubiquitous and have become important tools in our daily lives. Our activities and behaviours are becoming increasingly coupled to these new devices with their ever improving sensor technologies. With current devices, mobility patterns and physical activity levels are particularly amenable to inference and analysis by leveraging the integration of GPS, accelerometers, and other sensors. Coupled with feedback through display screens, speakers, and vibration, mobile technology has reached a level of sophistication that it now presents as an attractive platform for assistive technology research and health-related applications. [...] The general goals of the MobiSense project are: 1) to collect mobility data in a simple to use manner; 2) to provide easily accessible summaries and analysis of daily behaviours; and 3) to enable further research and development by providing a sandbox environment for rapid prototyping and experimentation. The specific objectives of the research reported here are to leverage mobile data collection technology and centralized analysis to detail a wheelchair user's daily activity; thus, we developed a system based on Android phones, cloud computing and storage services, and custom web services., Conference paper, Published.

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