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This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/02632770210426693. When citing the article, please cite: Albert T.P. So, K.C. Wong, (2002), “On the quantitative assessment of intelligent buildings”, Facilities, Vol. 20 Iss: 5/6, pp. 208 - 216.

Intelligent building (IB) is the future of our building industry. All new commercial buildings and probably luxurious domestic buildings are designed with a common goal – to become intelligent buildings. However, the official definition of IB has not yet been standardised around the world. In the USA, an IB is categorised by four basic elements, namely building structure, building systems, building services and building management. In Europe, the emphasis is on information technology and the genuine need of the user. In Singapore and China, it appears that the term “automation” has been dominating with a great emphasis on high technology. It is our view that a proper definition of IB should be based on users’ needs instead of the image of the building itself. We have therefore developed a new method for defining and specifying IBs. The requirements of users are categorised into eight key modules. All building systems and features are summarised in terms of tens of elements. Selected elements are assigned to a particular key area, i.e. module. Each type of building is then allocated certain key areas for detailed design. Once the areas have been chosen, the elements will automatically be assigned for the consultants to carry out detailed design works. This concept of definition has both advantages of comprehensiveness and flexibility, hoping that it will be useful for the developments of IBs not merely in Asia but also the whole world.

To examine the role of predicted mean vote (PMV) in air‐conditioned environments by conducting a thermal comfort study.

A formal statistical approach was adopted for the credibility of the study. Thermal measurements and questionnaire filling were carried out in commercial offices to collect the required data. Statistical analysis on the collected data and logical reasoning were then employed to derive the conclusions.

Provide an evidence to support PMV to be an appropriate thermal comfort index in air‐conditioned environments. Guarantee high productivity of occupants by using PMV in air‐conditioning control.

Future research work should be carried out to investigate any significant relationship between improvement in PMV and the profits gained by occupants inside an air‐conditioned space. With such relationship, it is possible to develop an intelligent air‐conditioning control to yield the most cost‐effective thermal environments for commercial offices.

Air‐conditioning engineers are highly recommended to employ PMV to assess the thermal comfort environment in air‐conditioned offices.

This paper highlights the importance aspect on choosing a thermal comfort index for comfort assessment in air‐conditioned offices. The index itself should not consider adaptive actions. Otherwise, the productivity of occupants would be severely deteriorated. It is well known that PMV is the thermal comfort index that can fulfill this requirement.

This paper presents the results of an attitudinal survey of residential and commercial building users from three Chinese cities – Hong Kong, Shanghai and Taipei. The results have been obtained from a much larger survey, primarily involving the living and working standards in the three cities. Apart from the descriptive statistics showing the preferences of the user, inferential statistics also showed significant differences among the attitudes of citizens living in the three cities. The results could give insights to designers and developers on the improvement of building standards.

A paper on a new definition of intelligent buildings for Asia was published in Facilities in late 1999. This definition was later adopted by The Asian Institute of Intelligent Buildings as the official definition of intelligent buildings (IBs). The requirements of users were categorised into nine quality environment modules. Under each module, there are technologies and facilities supporting the operation of an IB. The beauty of that definition is that it can be further explored to arrive at a comprehensive and quantitative method of assessment for IBs, the Intelligent Building Index (IBI). Existing methods of assessment, in particular for environmentally friendly buildings in the USA and Hong Kong, have been reviewed. Shortcomings of the existing methodology and the room for improvement have been highlighted and discussed. The concept, mathematics and utilisation of the IBI are detailed in this paper.

Modern building systems, such as HVAC, lighting, life safety, security, vertical transportation and electrical power distribution, make use of modern direct digital control and communication technologies. Such an approach has initiated the use of the adjective ″smart″ when referring to buildings that are equipped with a significant portion of these new systems. Integrated building automation and management systems (BAS/BMS) have been developed for newly constructed commercial, domestic and industrial buildings. Building management staff can gain access to any building system through the BAS for the purpose of data monitoring and real‐time control inside the control room. With the advent of Internet technology, all critical data in a BAS can be transmitted to and from any authorized user around the world, who can then perform the same function of monitoring and control even when the user is thousands of miles away from the building as when the user is sitting in front of the control console inside the control room. Describes the development and features of the Internet‐based system using an air‐handling unit simulator as an illustrative example. Discusses details of the hardware and software of the Internet site.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

The purpose of this research is to achieve automatic and accurate book purchase forecasts for the university libraries and improve efficiency of manual book purchase.

The authors presented a Book Purchase Forecast model with A Lite BERT(ALBERT-BPF) to achieve their goals. First, the authors process all the book data to unify format of books' features, such as ISBN, title, authors, brief introduction and so on. Second, they exploit the book order data to label all books supplied by booksellers with “purchased” or “non-purchased”. The labelled data will be used for model training. Last, the authors regard the book purchase task as a text classification problem and present a model named ALBERT-BPF, which applies ALBERT to extract text features of books and BPF classification layer to forecast purchased books, to solve the problem.

The application of deep learning in book purchase task is effective. The data the authors exploited are the historical book purchase data from their university library. The authors’ experiments on the data show that ALBERT-BPF can seek out the books that need to be purchased with an accuracy of over 82%. And the highest accuracy reached is 88.06%. These indicate that the deep learning model is sufficient to assist the traditional manual book purchase way.

This research applies ALBERT, which is based on the latest Natural Language Processing (NLP) architecture Transformer, to library book purchase task.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

It is probably well known to the majority of educated Englishmen that in the United States of America two kinds of Government exist side by side, and are jointly responsible to the people for the conduct of the external and internal relations of the Republic. These two forms of government are represented by the Federal Government and by the several governments of the different States of the Union.