Search results

This study was conducted to address the methodical shortcomings and high associated cost of understanding the use of new, poorly understood architectural spaces, such as makerspaces. The proposed quantified method of enhancing current post-occupancy evaluation (POE) practices aims to provide architects, engineers and building professionals with accessible and intuitive data that can be used to conduct comparative studies of spatial changes, understand changes over time (such as those resulting from COVID-19) and verify design intentions after construction through a quantified post-occupancy evaluation.

In this study, we demonstrate the use of ultra-wideband (UWB) technology to gather, analyze and visualize quantified data showing interactions between people, spaces and objects. The experiment was conducted in a makerspace over a four-day hackathon event with a team of four actively tracked participants.

The study shows that by moving beyond simply counting people in a space, a more nuanced pattern of interactions can be discovered, documented and analyzed. The ability to automatically visualize findings intuitively in 3D aids architects and visual thinkers to easily grasp the essence of interactions with minimal effort.

By providing a method for better understanding the spatial and temporal interactions between people, objects and spaces, our approach provides valuable feedback in POE. Specifically, our approach aids practitioners in comparing spaces, verifying design intent and speeding up knowledge building when developing new architectural spaces, such as makerspaces.

The future construction site will be pervasive, context aware and embedded with intelligence. The purpose of this paper is to explore and define the concept of the digital skin of the future smart construction site.

The paper provides a systematic and hierarchical classification of 114 articles from both industry and academia on the digital skin concept and evaluates them. The hierarchical classification is based on application areas relevant to construction, such as augmented reality, building information model-based visualisation, labour tracking, supply chain tracking, safety management, mobile equipment tracking and schedule and progress monitoring. Evaluations of the research papers were conducted based on three pillars: validation of technological feasibility, onsite application and user acceptance testing.

Technologies learned about in the literature review enabled the envisaging of the pervasive construction site of the future. The paper presents scenarios for the future context-aware construction site, including the construction worker, construction procurement management and future real-time safety management systems.

Based on the gaps identified by the review in the body of knowledge and on a broader analysis of technology diffusion, the paper highlights the research challenges to be overcome in the advent of digital skin. The paper recommends that researchers follow a coherent process for smart technology design, development and implementation in order to achieve this vision for the construction industry.

This paper aims to present a study on the effect of income and expense shifting on the corporate income tax evasion – an example of intentional noncompliance practiced by tax agents. The authors expected that the tool used would differentiate the extent of understatement of tax liability.

Two experiments were conducted in which young (N = 62) and experienced (N = 68) tax agents read a scenario placing them in a position of an employee responsible for tax planning and calculations of tax liabilities. The respondents’ task was to decide about the extent of the tax liability understatement using income or expense shifting.

Research demonstrated significantly higher extent of corporate income tax understatement when using income shifting compared to expense shifting in case of experienced tax agents (Study 2) and on tendency level among young tax agents (Study 1).

Results of the studies might be of interest to managers paying attention to tax procedures within the company, governmental agencies investigating corporate tax evasion, as well as educators responsible for tax agents’ initial training and lifelong learning.

This study concentrates on tax agents who are employed in companies and corporate income tax evasion, which has not been analyzed in the literature so far.

Porous silicon (Si) was fabricated by using three different wet etching methods, namely, direct current photo-assisted electrochemical (DCPEC), alternating CPEC (ACPEC) and two-step ACPEC etching. This study aims to investigate the structural properties of porous structures formed by using these etching methods and to identify which etching method works best.

Si n(100) was used to fabricate porous Si using three different etching methods (DCPEC, ACPEC and two-step ACPEC). All the samples were etched with the same current density and etching duration. The samples were etched by using hydrofluoric acid-based electrolytes under the illumination of an incandescent lamp.

Field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) images showed that porous Si etched using the two-step ACPEC method has a higher porosity and density than porous Si etched using DCPEC and ACPEC. The atomic force microscopy results supported the FESEM results showing that porous Si etched using the two-step ACPEC method has the highest surface roughness relative to the samples produced using the other two methods. High resolution X-ray diffraction revealed that porous Si produced through two-step ACPEC has the highest peak intensity out of the three porous Si samples suggesting an improvement in pore uniformity with a better crystalline quality.

Two-step ACPEC method is a fairly new etching method and many of its fundamental properties are yet to be established. This work presents a comparison of the effect of these three different etching methods on the structural properties of Si. The results obtained indicated that the two-step ACPEC method produced an etched sample with a higher porosity, pore density, surface roughness, improvement in uniformity of pores and better crystalline quality than the other etching methods.

This study aims to propose a computationally efficient framework for multi-objective optimization (MO) of antennas involving nested kriging modeling technology. The technique is demonstrated through a two-objective optimization of a planar Yagi antenna and three-objective design of a compact wideband antenna.

The keystone of the proposed approach is the usage of recently introduced nested kriging modeling for identifying the design space region containing the Pareto front and constructing fast surrogate model for the MO algorithm. Surrogate-assisted design refinement is applied to improve the accuracy of Pareto set determination. Consequently, the Pareto set is obtained cost-efficiently, even though the optimization process uses solely high-fidelity electromagnetic (EM) analysis.

The optimization cost is dramatically reduced for the proposed framework as compared to other state-of-the-art frameworks. The initial Pareto set is identified more precisely (its span is wider and of better quality), which is a result of a considerably smaller domain of the nested kriging model and better predictive power of the surrogate.

The proposed technique can be generalized to accommodate low- and high-fidelity EM simulations in a straightforward manner. The future work will incorporate variable-fidelity simulations to further reduce the cost of the training data acquisition.

The fast MO optimization procedure with the use of the nested kriging modeling technology for approximation of the Pareto set has been proposed and its superiority over state-of-the-art surrogate-assisted procedures has been proved. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this approach to multi-objective antenna optimization is novel and enables obtaining optimal designs cost-effectively even in relatively high-dimensional spaces (considering typical antenna design setups) within wide parameter ranges.