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The purpose of this paper is to propose a Chebyshev collocation method (CCM) for Hallén’s equation of thin wire antennas.

Since the current induced on the thin wire antennas behaves like the square root of the distance from the end, a smoothed current is used to annihilate this end effect. Then the CCM adopts Chebyshev polynomials to approximate the smoothed current from which the actual current can be quickly recovered. To handle the difficulty of the kernel singularity and to realize fast computation, a decomposition is adopted by separating the singularity from the exact kernel. The integrals including the singularity in the linear system can be given in an explicit formula while the others can be evaluated efficiently by the fast cosine transform or the fast Fourier transform.

The CCM convergence rate is fast and this method is more efficient than the other existing methods. Specially, it can attain less than 1 percent relative errors by using 32 basis functions when a/h is bigger than 2×10−5 where h is the half length of wire antenna and a is the radius of antenna. Besides, a new efficient scheme to evaluate the exact kernel has been proposed by comparing with most of the literature methods.

Since the kernel evaluation is vital to the solution of Hallén’s and Pocklington’s equations, the proposed scheme to evaluate the exact kernel may be helpful in improving the efficiency of existing methods in the study of wire antennas. Due to the good convergence and efficiency, the CCM may be a competitive method in the analysis of radiation properties of thin wire antennas. Several numerical experiments are presented to validate the proposed method.

The practice of artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being promoted by technology developers. However, its adoption rate is still reported as low in the construction industry due to a lack of expertise and the limited reliable applications for AI technology. Hence, this paper aims to present the detailed outcome of experimentations evaluating the applicability and the performance of AI object detection algorithms for construction modular object detection.

This paper provides a thorough evaluation of two deep learning algorithms for object detection, including the faster region-based convolutional neural network (faster RCNN) and single shot multi-box detector (SSD). Two types of metrics are also presented; first, the average recall and mean average precision by image pixels; second, the recall and precision by counting. To conduct the experiments using the selected algorithms, four infrastructure and building construction sites are chosen to collect the required data, including a total of 990 images of three different but common modular objects, including modular panels, safety barricades and site fences.

The results of the comprehensive evaluation of the algorithms show that the performance of faster RCNN and SSD depends on the context that detection occurs. Indeed, surrounding objects and the backgrounds of the objects affect the level of accuracy obtained from the AI analysis and may particularly effect precision and recall. The analysis of loss lines shows that the loss lines for selected objects depend on both their geometry and the image background. The results on selected objects show that faster RCNN offers higher accuracy than SSD for detection of selected objects.

The results show that modular object detection is crucial in construction for the achievement of the required information for project quality and safety objectives. The detection process can significantly improve monitoring object installation progress in an accurate and machine-based manner avoiding human errors. The results of this paper are limited to three construction sites, but future investigations can cover more tasks or objects from different construction sites in a fully automated manner.

This paper’s originality lies in offering new AI applications in modular construction, using a large first-hand data set collected from three construction sites. Furthermore, the paper presents the scientific evaluation results of implementing recent object detection algorithms across a set of extended metrics using the original training and validation data sets to improve the generalisability of the experimentation. This paper also provides the practitioners and scholars with a workflow on AI applications in the modular context and the first-hand referencing data.

Knowledge sharing has entered the stage of knowledge payment with the typical models of paid Q&A, live session, paid subscription, course column and community service. Numerous knowledge suppliers have begun to pour into the knowledge payment market, and users' willingness to pay for premium content has increased. However, the academic research on knowledge payment has just begun.

In this paper, the authors searched several bibliographic databases using keywords such as “knowledge payment”, “paid Q&A”, “pay for answer”, “social Q&A”, “paywall” and “online health consultation” and selected papers from aspects of research scenes, research topics, etc. Finally, a total of 116 articles were identified for combing studies.

This study found that in the early research, scholars paid attention to the definition of knowledge payment concept and the discrimination of typical models. With the continuous enrichment of research literature, the research direction has gradually been refined into three main branches from the perspective of research objects, i.e. knowledge provider, knowledge demander and knowledge payment platform.

This paper focuses on discussing and sorting out the key research issues from these three research genres. Finally, the authors found out conflicting and contradictory research results and research gaps in the existing research and then put forward the urgent research topics.