Rohinton Emmanuel | Glasgow Caledonian University (original) (raw)

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Papers by Rohinton Emmanuel

Increasingly, sustainability assessment is applied as a valuable tool for assessing and monitorin... more Increasingly, sustainability assessment is applied as a valuable tool for assessing and monitoring the performance of construction projects in delivering sustainable buildings. Sustainability assessment has been traditionally regarded as a technical process to determine the performance of projects against environmental, social and economic criteria. Calls are emerging for assessment to evolve as a tool better integrated with the subjectively based decisions taken across the project lifecycle, supporting stakeholder engagement and promoting a culture of learning about sustainability in practice. In order for assessment to fully realise this wider role; it is necessary to recognise the significance played by knowledge and its flow between stakeholders in the promotion of a common understanding of the actions required to deliver a sustainable urban environment. This paper presents the findings of a knowledge mapping exercise focused on understanding the nature of this flow during susta...

Increasingly, sustainability assessment is applied as a valuable tool for assessing and monitorin... more Increasingly, sustainability assessment is applied as a valuable tool for assessing and monitoring the performance of construction projects in delivering sustainable buildings. Sustainability assessment has been traditionally regarded as a technical process to determine the performance of projects against environmental, social and economic criteria. Calls are emerging for assessment to evolve as a tool better integrated with the subjectively based decisions taken across the project lifecycle, supporting stakeholder engagement and promoting a culture of learning about sustainability in practice. In order for assessment to fully realise this wider role; it is necessary to recognise the significance played by knowledge and its flow between stakeholders in the promotion of a common understanding of the actions required to deliver a sustainable urban environment. This paper presents the findings of a knowledge mapping exercise focused on understanding the nature of this flow during susta...

Springer Proceedings in Complexity

Climate

This study analyses the interactions and impacts between multiple factors i.e., urban greening, b... more This study analyses the interactions and impacts between multiple factors i.e., urban greening, building layout, and meteorological conditions that characterise the urban microclimate and thermal comfort in the urban environment. The focus was on two neighbourhoods of Lecce city (southern Italy) characterised through field campaigns and modelling simulations on a typical hot summer day. Field campaigns were performed to collect greening, building geometry, and microclimate data, which were employed in numerical simulations of several greening scenarios using the Computational Fluid Dynamics-based and microclimate model ENVI-met. Results show that, on a typical summer day, trees may lead to an average daily decrease of air temperature by up to 1.00 °C and an improvement of thermal comfort in terms of Mean Radiant Temperature (MRT) by up to 5.53 °C and Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) by up to 0.53. This decrease is more evident when the urban greening (in terms of green surfaces and trees) ...

Built-Environment Sri Lanka

Sustainable Cities and Society

Air, Soil and Water Research

Daytime urban heat island effects can be weak compared to night time and even reversed (as in the... more Daytime urban heat island effects can be weak compared to night time and even reversed (as in the case of cool islands, where urban locations display lower temperatures than at a rural site), mostly due to shading effects from buildings, vegetation, and other possible obstructions. The study of the relationship between the sky-view factor, an indicator of urban geometry in terms of sky openness, and urban heat island intensity generally focus on night time periods; only a few report on the daytime effect of the SVF. Such effect will also vary according to background atmospheric conditions of the period of measurements. This article is a commentary on a recent publication by the authors on a study of diurnal intra-urban temperature differences in a location with Koeppen’s Cfb climate.

Science of The Total Environment

Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences

Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences

The random neural network (RNN) is a probabilitsic queueing theory-based model for artificial neu... more The random neural network (RNN) is a probabilitsic queueing theory-based model for artificial neural networks, and it requires the use of optimization algorithms for training. Commonly used gradient descent learning algorithms may reside in local minima, evolutionary algorithms can be also used to avoid local minima. Other techniques such as artificial bee colony (ABC), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and differential evolution algorithms also perform well in finding the global minimum but they converge slowly. The sequential quadratic programming (SQP) optimization algorithm can find the optimum neural network weights, but can also get stuck in local minima. We propose to overcome the shortcomings of these various approaches by using hybridized ABC/PSO and SQP. The resulting algorithm is shown to compare favorably with other known techniques for training the RNN. The results show that hybrid ABC learning with SQP outperforms other training algorithms in terms of mean-squared err...

IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2016

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2016

Rethinking Planning and Design Opportunities, 2016

Increasingly, sustainability assessment is applied as a valuable tool for assessing and monitorin... more Increasingly, sustainability assessment is applied as a valuable tool for assessing and monitoring the performance of construction projects in delivering sustainable buildings. Sustainability assessment has been traditionally regarded as a technical process to determine the performance of projects against environmental, social and economic criteria. Calls are emerging for assessment to evolve as a tool better integrated with the subjectively based decisions taken across the project lifecycle, supporting stakeholder engagement and promoting a culture of learning about sustainability in practice. In order for assessment to fully realise this wider role; it is necessary to recognise the significance played by knowledge and its flow between stakeholders in the promotion of a common understanding of the actions required to deliver a sustainable urban environment. This paper presents the findings of a knowledge mapping exercise focused on understanding the nature of this flow during susta...

Increasingly, sustainability assessment is applied as a valuable tool for assessing and monitorin... more Increasingly, sustainability assessment is applied as a valuable tool for assessing and monitoring the performance of construction projects in delivering sustainable buildings. Sustainability assessment has been traditionally regarded as a technical process to determine the performance of projects against environmental, social and economic criteria. Calls are emerging for assessment to evolve as a tool better integrated with the subjectively based decisions taken across the project lifecycle, supporting stakeholder engagement and promoting a culture of learning about sustainability in practice. In order for assessment to fully realise this wider role; it is necessary to recognise the significance played by knowledge and its flow between stakeholders in the promotion of a common understanding of the actions required to deliver a sustainable urban environment. This paper presents the findings of a knowledge mapping exercise focused on understanding the nature of this flow during susta...

Springer Proceedings in Complexity

Climate

This study analyses the interactions and impacts between multiple factors i.e., urban greening, b... more This study analyses the interactions and impacts between multiple factors i.e., urban greening, building layout, and meteorological conditions that characterise the urban microclimate and thermal comfort in the urban environment. The focus was on two neighbourhoods of Lecce city (southern Italy) characterised through field campaigns and modelling simulations on a typical hot summer day. Field campaigns were performed to collect greening, building geometry, and microclimate data, which were employed in numerical simulations of several greening scenarios using the Computational Fluid Dynamics-based and microclimate model ENVI-met. Results show that, on a typical summer day, trees may lead to an average daily decrease of air temperature by up to 1.00 °C and an improvement of thermal comfort in terms of Mean Radiant Temperature (MRT) by up to 5.53 °C and Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) by up to 0.53. This decrease is more evident when the urban greening (in terms of green surfaces and trees) ...

Built-Environment Sri Lanka

Sustainable Cities and Society

Air, Soil and Water Research

Daytime urban heat island effects can be weak compared to night time and even reversed (as in the... more Daytime urban heat island effects can be weak compared to night time and even reversed (as in the case of cool islands, where urban locations display lower temperatures than at a rural site), mostly due to shading effects from buildings, vegetation, and other possible obstructions. The study of the relationship between the sky-view factor, an indicator of urban geometry in terms of sky openness, and urban heat island intensity generally focus on night time periods; only a few report on the daytime effect of the SVF. Such effect will also vary according to background atmospheric conditions of the period of measurements. This article is a commentary on a recent publication by the authors on a study of diurnal intra-urban temperature differences in a location with Koeppen’s Cfb climate.

Science of The Total Environment

Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences

Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences

The random neural network (RNN) is a probabilitsic queueing theory-based model for artificial neu... more The random neural network (RNN) is a probabilitsic queueing theory-based model for artificial neural networks, and it requires the use of optimization algorithms for training. Commonly used gradient descent learning algorithms may reside in local minima, evolutionary algorithms can be also used to avoid local minima. Other techniques such as artificial bee colony (ABC), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and differential evolution algorithms also perform well in finding the global minimum but they converge slowly. The sequential quadratic programming (SQP) optimization algorithm can find the optimum neural network weights, but can also get stuck in local minima. We propose to overcome the shortcomings of these various approaches by using hybridized ABC/PSO and SQP. The resulting algorithm is shown to compare favorably with other known techniques for training the RNN. The results show that hybrid ABC learning with SQP outperforms other training algorithms in terms of mean-squared err...

IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2016

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2016

Rethinking Planning and Design Opportunities, 2016