Greenhouse gas emissions reduction is a critical topic in the scientific community, as researchers strive to produce knowledge for the betterment of society. However, it is important to acknowledge ...that researchers themselves engage in activities that have a significant environmental impact. Group meetings and conferences are under the spot due to their extensive contribution to emissions through travel, catering, hosting, and other event-related activities. To address this issue, our work aims to conduct an environmental diagnosis of an ongoing H2020 European project, focusing on the impacts associated with the periodical group meetings organized in each country involved. We also sought to evaluate researchers’ stance on online meetings and collected environmental and personal opinions through dedicated online forms. Results show that while travel is the primary contributor to emissions, catering, meeting structures, and hosting support should not be overlooked. Conference location and availability of public transportation also play a crucial role in the final impact of the event, as they affect directly the 87% share of emissions due to travels. Besides, using local distributors and reducing hotel stays (representing about 5% of the final impact) may reduce the potential environmental burden of these events. On the other side, besides the obtained positive feedback from online meetings, in-person activities are still more effective for reinforcing human bonds and collaborations.
SUMMARY
Several attempts have been made in the past to develop a European harmonized testing and assessment method for façades before the European commission decided to publish a call for tender on ...the topic. A project consortium from five countries (Sweden, UK, France, Germany and Hungary) applied to the call for tender and was contracted to develop a European approach to assess the fire performance of façades. 24 sub‐contractors and 14 stakeholder entities were part of the project. The objective of the European project was to address a request from the Standing Committee of Construction (SCC) to provide EC Member States regulators with a means to regulate the fire performance of façade systems based on a European approach agreed by SCC. The initial stages of this project were focused on establishing a register of the regulatory requirements in all Member States in relation to the fire performance of façade systems, and to identify those Member States who have regulatory requirements for the fire performance façade systems which go beyond the current EN 13501 (reaction to fire and fire resistance) classification systems and to collate the details of these additional requirements. After having confirmed the regulatory needs a testing and classification methodology based on BS 8414 and DIN 4102‐20 was developed to address the identified key performance and classification characteristics. This paper is a short overview of results the two‐year development work, which Final Report published by the European Commission in 2018.
The results of dynamic centrifuge tests carried out to study the effects of seismic input, fine crust and existing structure on liquefaction triggering and manifestations are presented. The basic ...concept of the experimentation was to analyse the seismic behaviour of level ground, saturated, 14 m deep sandy deposits, homogeneous or stratified, subjected to increasing seismic excitations up to liquefaction, with or without a one degree of freedom structure on shallow foundations. The study was performed in the framework of the European project Horizon2020 “LIQUEFACT”.
- This full paper addresses an innovative practice in the experimental teaching/learning in Engineering courses. Engineering is a practical profession where doing is the key. Experimental work and ...the immersing in the lab environment (hands-on, simulations, remote labs) helps students to construct and strengthen their knowledge. The VISIR+ Project (ERASMUS+), launched in November 2015 and concluded in Abril 2018, intended to disseminate VISIR - Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (the most used remote lab in electric and electronics area of expertise) in Latin American countries (Argentina and Brazil) by installing a system in five Higher Educational Institutions. It involved 13 educational institutions, 25 different courses, several of them with successive didactical implementations. It comprised 49 teachers and 1,595 students. During the project about 27 research papers were published disseminating the projects' results. At the end of the project, the expectations were that the impact could remain in the long-term promoting VISIR remote lab and the dissemination of good practices. The project ended four years ago, and each installed VISIR system continued to promote teaching diversification using different experimental resources (including VISIR) then contributing to student learning. The aim of this work is to understand the impact of these didactical practices while using VISIR in these last years. This study was based on a questionnaire complemented with an interview with each person of contact. The results point to an increase of VISIR's usage in almost all institutions, particularly during the pandemic period. Overall, the educational impact involved more than 23 different institutions, 45 courses (most of them with several editions), 118 teachers and 4,866 students. The impact in the scientific community implied additional 31 publications with VISIR as its main core. These numbers support the sustainability of the VISIR+ project over the years, positively contributing to a more diversified engineering education of these students and their experimental competences development.
Data Mining from Open Fiscal Data Chudán, David; Svátek, Vojtěch; Kuchař, Jaroslav ...
Acta Informatica Pragensia,
6/2018, Volume:
7, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Data mining methods are still more popular, even in domains where there is traditionally limited support by analytical tools and where the analyst´s manual work still prevails. Using these methods in ...the fiscal domain enables deeper analysis and can bring new findings. The deployment of data mining methods is one part of the OpenBudgets.eu project, which focuses on transparency and accountability in the public funds management. This overview article summarizes selected experiences of the authors of the project from the development, implementation and application of selected data mining methods on mining fiscal data. These methods are integrated into the central platform of the project available for the advanced and common users interested in fiscal data analysis. The pilot analysis showed that the problem of data mining in this domain is the large amount of found rules together with its heterogenous origin.
Microzonation for earthquake-induced liquefaction hazard is the subdivision of a territory at a municipal or submunicipal scale in areas characterized by the same probability of liquefaction ...manifestation for the occurrence of an earthquake of specified intensity. The liquefaction hazard at a site depends on the severity of expected ground shaking as well as on the susceptibility to liquefaction of that site. This in turn depends on geological, geomorphological, hydrogeological and geotechnical predisposing factors. Thus, liquefaction hazard implies the existence of territories characterized by a moderate to high level of intensity of expected ground shaking. Microzonation charts for ground shaking and liquefaction hazard play a key role for the mitigation of seismic risk of an urban centre as they provide a valuable tool for the implementation of prevention strategies and land use planning. The LIQUEFACT project fully addressed the problem of microzoning a territory for earthquake-induced liquefaction hazard in a specific work package. Four municipal testing areas were selected across Europe as peculiar case studies where to construct microzonation charts for earthquake-induced liquefaction hazard. They are located in Emilia-Romagna region (Italy), Lisbon metropolitan area (Portugal), Brežice territory (Slovenia) and Marmara region (Turkey). Their location was identified based on the following criteria: severity of expected seismic hazard, availability of geological and geotechnical data, presence of liquefiable soil deposits, documented cases of liquefaction manifestations occurred in historical earthquakes, representativeness of different geological settings, density of population in selected areas (exposure). This paper illustrates the general procedure developed in LIQUEFACT for the assessment of earthquake-induced liquefaction hazard at urban scale and presents the main achievements of the microzonation studies carried out at the four previously mentioned European testbeds. Since the microzonation studies have been carried out using a shared framework and methodology, this paper has the ambition to serve as technical guidelines for updating the standards and the operational criteria currently used in different countries worldwide to construct seismic microzonation maps of liquefaction hazard.
Adolescent young carers (AYCs) are a sub-group of young carers who carry out significant or substantial caring tasks and assume a level of responsibility which would usually be associated with an ...adult. They are a potentially vulnerable group of minors because of the risk factors associated with their caring role. AYCs face a critical transition phase from adolescence to adulthood often with a lack of tailored support from service providers. The recently completed European funded 'ME-WE' project, which forms the focus of this paper, aimed to change the 'status quo' by advancing the situation of AYCs in Europe, via responsive research and knowledge translation actions. This paper outlines the participatory, co-creation approach employed in the project to optimise AYC's involvement. It describes the ethical framework adopted by the project consortium to ensure the wellbeing of AYCs within all project activities. Ethical issues that arose in the field study work in all six countries are presented, followed by a discussion of the level of success or otherwise of the consortium to address these issues. The paper concludes with lessons learned regarding ethically responsible research with and for AYCs that are likely transferable to other vulnerable research groups and pan-European projects.
LIQUEFACT was a EU H2020 funded project to investigate earthquake induced liquefaction potential across Europe and develop a series of tools to understand better the impacts that earthquake induced ...liquefaction disaster events have on the resilience of built assets and communities. A resilience assessment and improvement framework was developed to provide the theoretical underpinning for the LIQUEFACT project and to provide practical guidance on the assessment of built assets to Earthquake Induced Liquefaction Disaster events through the LIQUEFACT software tool and built asset management planning framework. This paper outlines the theoretical basis to the resilience assessment and improvement framework and built asset management planning framework and presents the results from a validation exercise through their application to a hypothetical healthcare scenario. The paper also describes the different stages of the research that led to the definition of the resilience assessment and improvement framework and built asset management planning framework. To this end the paper concludes that the resilience assessment and improvement framework and built asset management framework provide a longitudinal, holistic view of disaster vulnerability and resilience that can inform the selection of ground improvement mitigation actions to improve business continuity and resilience planning.
► European project aimed at improving energy performance in educational buildings. ► Development and updating of technical competence through training courses. ► Development of “Educa-RUE method”, a ...model of energy management for public buildings. ► Local Energy Plans, based on environmentally friendly criteria. ► Results obtained by testing and proving Educa-RUE method in different regional areas.
The aim of Educa-RUE project is to improve energy performance in building sector at local level and with particular attention to educational buildings, by promoting the ability of local players to guide and orient initiatives, designed to encourage energy saving by means of specific measures and integrated tools.
The project is therefore focused to speed up the implementation of European Directive on Energy Performance in Buildings, EPBD (2002/91/EC), in Member States at local government level and to ensure its operability, within the various national legislations of reference.
Educa-RUE lasted 30months, from January 2008 to June 2010, and involved the following eight partners: for Italy, Provinces of Potenza (project leader), Perugia, Rieti and Palermo; for other Countries, Climate Energy Ltd. Essex and Energy Solutions North West London (UK), Associación Aragonesa de Entidades Locales ASAEL (Spain), Municipality of Prenzlau (Germany).
A number of closely interconnected actions were carried on in eight Work Packages (WPs) to face the energy efficiency aspects identified as primary problems by the partners. The project developed a model process, known as “Educa-RUE method”, to assess possible policies of intervention on educational buildings, owned or managed by each Partner.
In particular the Province of Perugia, leader of WP 2 and 5, provided guide lines and tools in order to: identify the state of the art of EPBD implementation and the main non-technological barriers, which are preventing its application at local level; select, within the Province/area patrimony, the most suitable educational building, to be used as a shining example to develop the following testing phases of the project; carry on an energy check, or audit, of selected buildings, by involving the educational community as user and active participant in the whole process; elaborate an executive project, concerning the description of all the building elements (structure, roof, heating/cooling plants, etc.) which need to be replaced/improved and the application of an energy/environmental assessment; plan refurbishing interventions for the rest of the school buildings directly managed by each Partner, according to specific priority selection criteria, which represents a guiding and coordinating act for those Administrations directly or indirectly interested in the Project.
This paper presents the results obtained by testing and proving Educa-RUE method in different regional areas. Its findings can be extended to other building typologies in order to create a reference model for local planners and responsible.
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