FARU - 2013

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://192.248.9.226/handle/123/14711

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    item: Conference-Full-text
    An Effective Approach for Personalized Web Search based on Community-Cluster Analysis
    Thanthriwatta, TM; Karunaratne, PM
    The concept of Personalized Web Search is commonly used for improving the quality of web search results by identifying and facilitating different users’ search needs. There are several techniques such as user profiling, content analysis, hyperlink analysis and biased PageRank algorithm that are used to achieve web personalization. User Profiling is one of the widely used techniques for personalizing web search at large scale. But it contains several technical and ethical issues such as privacy violations, inefficient use of computing resources as well. Collaborative web search is also a kind of a relatively new concept which defines the way of optimizing/personalizing search results by using details of group of people and contributing the knowledge of all of them about web search. This paper presents the details of an alternative approach for personalizing web results by using user profiling technique with community cluster analysis of collaborative web search by adapting concept of reusability among web results.
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    item: Conference-Abstract
    Study on the trends of rainfall and temperature patterns to identify the influence of climate variation in coastal cities in Sri Lanka
    (2015-05-08) Jayasinghe, AB; Abenayake, CC; Mahanama, PKS; Bandara, PKBDB
    Climate change has been universally recognized as a fundamental human development challenge in 21stcentury and thereafter; which impacts both natural and built environment. Although different parts of the world are predicted to be affected by climate change to varying degrees, many of the studies focused on climate change in global or region level. However, there is a dearth of climatological studies addressing the temporal trends in rainfall and temperature at city scale. On other hand recent rainfall and temperature extremes have adverse impacts on the natural and built environment of most of coastal cities in Sri Lanka.In this context this research attempted to examinetrends of rainfall and temperature patterns over the last four decades in seven coastal cities (namely; Rathmalana, Hambantota, Trincomalle, Puttalam, Katunayake, Batticaloa and Galle) in Sri Lanka to see whether they support toclaim the long-term climate changeby identifying temporal trends in the rainfall and temperature during the period of 1971-2011.The findings of the study revealed averaged over all stations;the indices of temperature extremes indicate warming of both daily minimum and maximum temperature between 1971 and 2011. For precipitation, most of the indices show significant changes. Relative to the changes in the total amounts, there is a very significantchangein the precipitation extreme days. Accordingly this study emphasize the need of integrating the climatic variations wisely in the urban planning can invest the capital of the country to the development rather than unnecessarily spend it on post disaster rehabilitations.
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    A Study on the factors affecting safety behavior of construction workers
    (2015-04-21) De Silva, END; Manjula, NHC
    Construction industry, being one of the most injury-prone industries worldwide in terms of serious injuries, lost work time, hospitalization, disability, and mortality, is in a great need to improve occupational safety. Behavior Based Safety (BBS) is an approach that can be applied successfully in managing occupational safety; it is gaining more interest across industry sectors globally,and has the great advantage of needing the involvement of the individual employee. This paper therefore aimed to investigate the factors governing construction workers’ safety behaviorThe factors affecting construction workers’ safety behaviorwere identified through a comprehensive literature survey. Expert interviews were conducted in order to validate and generalize the factors found in literature,to the Sri Lankan context.Two categories of factors were basically identified which affect the safety behaviorof construction workers, namely personal and organizational. The personal factors included age, marital status, education level, working experience, having dependents, and safety knowledge. Study indicated that personal factors such as habits and social life might also have an impact on a workers safety behavioryet need longitudinal research before generalizing to a particular context. Organizational factors identified were management commitment, OSH systems and feedback mechanisms, continuous monitoring of these systems, training and awareness for workers, accidents reporting, and workforce empowerment. The findings of this research were modeled in a model of construction workers’ safety behavior.Findings of this study can be used in enhancing the safety performance of the construction industry
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    item: Conference-Abstract
    Surface fraction as a variable for urban heat island Amelioration in Colombo
    (2015-04-01) Perera, NGR; Langappuli, BLT
    Rapid urbanization has resulted in the change of land use and thus land cover from rural natural, pervious green surfaces to impervious urban land. It is identified as a key reason for microclimatic changes that create the Urban Heat Island (UHI) phenomenon that effect many cities. Although, the planning parameters for Colombo, Sri Lanka do specify the building to non-built surface fraction, it does not define the nature of the non-built areas. It is also deemed that such planning and building regulations are not based on any overall climatic goals for the city. In this context, the need is to quantify urban parameters that can be controlled by urban design. This study explores the effect of the building surface fraction, impervious surface fraction, and pervious surface fraction of an urban block, as a strategy for UHI amelioration in Colombo. The range of the combinations of the above are limited to the range defined by the Local Climate Zone (LCZ) classification system. It is further focussed on the predominant LCZs of Colombo, LCZ3 - Compact Lowrise and LCZ2 – Compact Midrise. The study uses the computer simulation software ENVI-met to model the existing as well as the modelled surface fraction of a particular urban block, in Colombo. Results and Analysis will discuss the comparative implications of the changing surface cover on the UHI mitigation possibility in warm humid Colombo