Understanding Infrastructure Resiliency in Chennai, India Using Twitter＇s Geotags and Texts： A Preliminary Study

Geotagging is the process of labeling data and information with geographical identification metadata, and text mining refers to the process of deriving information from text through data analytics. Geotagging and text mining are used to mine rich sources of social media data, such as video, website, text, and Quick Response （QR） code. They have been frequently used to model consumer behaviors and market trends. This study uses both techniques to understand the resilience of infrastructure in Chennai, India using data mined from the 2015 flood. This paper presents a conceptual study on the potential use of social media （Twitter in this case） to better understand infrastructure resiliency. Using feature- extraction techniques, the research team extracted Twitter data from tweets generated by the Chennai population during the flood. First, this study shows that these techniques are useful in identifying locations, defects, and failure intensities of infrastructure using the location metadata from geotags, words containing the locations, and the frequencies of tweets from each location. However, more efforts are needed to better utilize the texts generated from the tweets, including a better understanding of the cultural contexts of the words used in the tweets, the contexts of the words used to describe the incidents, and the least frequently used words.

Developing Framework for Alternative Funding Options in Water Infrastructure Projects

The United States is facing a crisis in which less financial resources are available to maintain the quality and to meet increasing demand of our water infrastructure system. Water utility owners across the nation are faced with the incredible challenge of finding ways to invest because of limited government funding, from local to federal levels. The funding gap between available and necessary funds has been increasing and expected to increase in the future. With government unable to provide adequate funding, water utility owners should consider alternative funding sources such as private partnerships and investment. There are many key aspects of an effective funding strategy for water utility owners to achieve successful water infrastructure planning and development. This paper presents various funding alternatives and provides a framework for utilizing alternative funding in water infrastructure planning and development to help alleviate funding gaps while simultaneously encouraging future sustainability in public water infrastructure.

THE GREEN STATUS OF FIRE STATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES:AN ANALYSIS OF LEED-NC V3

Fire protection is an essential public service but also one of the costliest ones.Considerable resources are devoted to fire protection including equipment,staff,training,and the facilities to house them.Fire stations,in particular,have a significant cost impact on state and municipal budgets.Fire stations are required in most local governments and like other municipal buildings are central to identity.To limit the cost of operating a fire station,municipalities have looked to more green building options.Green-rating systems such as the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design(LEED)system have been used in the U.S.to assess green buildings.Thus,this paper aims to analyze 95 certified fire stations under the LEED-NC 2009 version(v3)that are located in the United States.A scorecard analysis(credits and points)of public data available serve as the foundation to describe the status of the green design and construction of these fire stations.The findings indicate that the points in the Material Resources(MR)category are achieved at the lowest rate compared to the other categories,on average 38%of 14 available points were earned.In addition,the points in the Energy and Atmosphere(EA)category are one of the lowest achievement rates,equal to 40.2%.The data also shows that 82%of LEED-certified fire stations belong to career or mostly career type,which are municipality fire departments funded by local governments.The significance of this study is to demonstrate the importance of both MR and EA categories for the design and construction phases of green fire stations.

Named entity recognition for Chinese construction documents based on conditional random field

Named entity recognition(NER)is essential in many natural language processing(NLP)tasks such as information extraction and document classification.A construction document usually contains critical named entities,and an effective NER method can provide a solid foundation for downstream applications to improve construction management efficiency.This study presents a NER method for Chinese construction documents based on conditional random field(CRF),including a corpus design pipeline and a CRF model.The corpus design pipeline identifies typical NER tasks in construction management,enables word-based tokenization,and controls the annotation consistency with a newly designed annotating specification.The CRF model engineers nine transformation features and seven classes of state features,covering the impacts of word position,part-of-speech(POS),and word/character states within the context.The F1-measure on a labeled construction data set is 87.9%.Furthermore,as more domain knowledge features are infused,the marginal performance improvement of including POS information will decrease,leading to a promising research direction of POS customization to improve NLP performance with limited data.

A review of sustainability metrics for the construction and operation of airport and roadway infrastructure

Sustainability has become increasingly important,however,relatively little attention has focused on metrics for the construction and operation of airport and roadway infrastructure.Most attention has focused on buildings,with high profile BREEAM and LEED projects taking center stage.Sustainability is also important in airport and roadway infrastructure projects,which have significant public impact but have a much lower profile than vertical construction when it comes to sustainability.Sustainable infrastructure is important in China and India where new infrastructure is under construction to meet growing and developing economies,and in the US,where infrastructure is in substandard condition and requires reconstruction.The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview and discussion of sustainability rating systems for airport and roadway infrastructure,including both construction and operation.Specific projects that highlight both proven and innovative sustainable practices are included to illustrate the application of these concepts.Finally,the relationship between sustainable transportation infrastructure and resilient transportation infrastructure is addressed since resiliency is of growing interest and there is overlap between these concepts.

Experimental-mechanistic analysis of pavement base deflections measured with light weight deflectometer

An extensive experimental-mechanistic study was conducted to reveal the relationship between the light weight deflectometer(LWD)measured deflections and the degree of compaction of pavement base materials.Both laboratory experiments and test pits experiments were performed with different types of pavement base materials.The modulus based maximum allowable LWD deflections under different structural and compaction conditions were developed for the most commonly used pavement base aggregate in Indiana.The maximum allowable deflections are based on the equivalent subgrade modulus and the thickness of the layer to be compacted.It is emphasized that the LWD deflections must be measured as soon as the material is compacted or before the moisture content decreases beyond a specified range.Therefore,the maximum allowable deflections are specified in terms of the difference between the actual moisture content and the optimum moisture content.The maximum allowable deflection values provide a sound basis for compaction quality control using LWD devices.