Marco Lazzari

Applying AI to structural safety monitoring and evaluation

Four decision-support systems: Mistral, Damsafe, Kaleidos, and Igor provide powerful AI-based tools for evaluating structural data. The paper considers how safety managers, engineers, and authorities are using the systems to handle safety problems in structures.

Massively distributed authorship of academic papers

Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that would be necessary or useful to the writing process. The process of collaboratively writing this paper was used to discover, negotiate, and document issues in massively authored scholarship. Our work provides the first extensive discussion of the experiential aspects of large-scale collaborative research.

Embedding a Geographic Information System in a Decision Support System for Landslide Hazard Monitoring

In this paper we present an application that exploitsa geographic information system as a front-end of acomplex information system supporting the managementof landslide hazard in Valtellina, an alpine valley inNorthern Italy.A decision support system (EYDENET, operational sinceOctober 1996), incorporating a geographic informationsystem and a data interpreter based on artificialintelligence techniques, processes the readings of the250 most significant instruments of a monitoring netof about 1000 sensors installed on differentlandslides in several alpine valleys.Data gathered by extensometers, clinometers andpluviometers, to check both movements of rocks andclimatic conditions which could affect them, areprocessed by EYDENET, that provides on-lineinterpretation of data, helps the users analyse them,and generates natural language explanations and alarmmessages for the people responsible for theenvironmental management and the civil protection.

A causal modelling framework for the simulation and explanation of the behaviour of structures

An approach to the modelling of systems in civil engineering is presented. It allows the integration of quantitative relations in a qualitative causal framework which uses objects and Petri nets to represent the device and process ontologies. This approach supports the modelling and simulation of the behaviour of a physical system and causal explanations of it. The explanations are customisable depending on the needs of different users. The approach is shown by modelling the seismic behaviour of a masonry building, simulating it and generating causal explanations tailored for the needs of different users. An example application is presented through IGOR, a decision support system for seismic assessment of buildings and planning of precautionary operations.

Improved monitoring and surveillance through integration of artificial intelligence and information management systems

Describes the results of a project which aims to improve the capabilities of an information system (IS) which supports the management of dam safety. The improvement has been achieved through the incorporation of additional components developed using AI concepts and technologies. We describe the pre-existing IS (comprised of automatic monitoring systems, telemetry and databases), identify user requirements driving the evolution of the IS and explain how AI concepts and technologies may contribute. We describe the functions, the architecture and the AI techniques of two systems (MISTRAL and DAMSAFE) added to the IS. Moreover, we discuss the issue of integration of the AI components and the pre-existing system and we present the technology developed to support this process. Finally, we give the implementation status of the project (which has delivered components that have been operational since 1992) and some information about the user acceptance, development effort and applicability to other fields.<<ETX>>

Diagnosing Ancient Monuments with Expert Software

After the 1989 collapse of the Civic Tower of Pavia, Italy, the Italian government appointed a scientific committee to analyse the causes of the collapse and to check the state of other monuments i...

Augmentative and alternative communication on tablet to help persons with severe disabilities

In this paper we present an experience of the application of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) with four persons with severe language (and motor) impairments treated at an adult day centre for people with disabilities. Two apps on Android tablets were tried with one subject who had negatively experienced traditional communication boards in the past and with three subjects who had never been considered before for AAC intervention. After a six-month trial we achieved encouraging results: the ease of use of the proposed instruments enabled the persons involved in the experimentation to improve their communication capabilities, to better express their choices and feelings, and to potentially extend their communication circles. This experience testifies that AAC can be successfully applied to severe disabilities and encourages research in this direction.

21 – Integrating Databases, Data Communication, and Artificial Intelligence for Applications in Systems Monitoring and Safety Problems

Publisher Summary The integration of different information management technologies helps to deal with safety problems. Artificial intelligence techniques provide powerful tools for processing information stored in archives of safety-related data, such as measurements, documents, and test data. Internet technologies can be successfully coupled with these data processing tools to distribute data and knowledge among safety managers. This chapter describes a chain of software tools currently being used to face different aspects of safety management procedures in different fields of engineering. The main achievements of the joint application of these software techniques consist of the automatic support of those in charge of safety management, a performance that reduces the requests for expert intervention and the associated costs and delays, and increases the reliance upon the safety of the facility under examination.

Looking for analogues in structural safety management through connectionist associative memories

This paper describes the first successful achievements of an experimental application of connectionist hashed associative memories for realising analogical reasoning. The application field is the management of structural safety, where analogical reasoning is used to retrieve, given the qualitative description of the state of a structure, the closest-matching cases stored in a case base, which can help safety managers to interpret the current situation. This work extends the use of Greenes associative memories by proposing a complex data structure and a compositional algorithm which is able to access the case base through structured keywords.

Safety management of civil structures using knowledge based systems

With regard to the problems of safety of civil engineering structures, the technology of knowledge-based systems can provide new tools to manage the problem complexity and to assist safety experts and operators. The approach of the so called second-generation or deep-knowledge expert systems extends the idea of numerical modelling. It proposes the construction of software systems which implement complex models (with quantitative and qualitative attributes) and functions able to reason about the model structure and behaviour. These models and reasoning functions can support human activities like the fusion of information, diagnosis, explanation and forecasting. The aim of such systems is not to substitute the expert, but to extend the experts ability to deal quickly and efficiently with complex problems. In this paper, a family of knowledge-based systems is presented, whose members share the same conceptual reference framework to deal with seismic risk evaluation of masonry buildings and safety assessment of concrete dams.