Esfahan metro stations, opportunities for urban regeneration

Màster universitari en Estudis Avançats en Arquitectura: UrbanismeEsfahan City is composed by varied interconnected classes of crossings which represent the idea of difference plus coincidence in the city. These crossings can happen in the varied formats of superimposition, juxtaposition, or accumulation of different layers, which could be known as different size centers, key points, and such places that give services and provide varied options to the local and passengers, and get constructed by accumulating different things, constructive elements such as historical and new passages, architecture, uses and activities around the corners of the meeting points, intersections, or historical and new centralities. As there are a high numbers of city crossings which have been emerged to the life of the city by super imposition of complete alien systems of roads and streets and recently metro stations, on the historical structure and layers of the city, there is a big opportunity for the city to think of putting ignoring elements in contact, joining them, letting them to boost each other rather than just passing without having any constructive dialogue, constructing new centralities and regenerating the cities through enterprising, and doing specific and different size interventions on these points of intersections. As a part of whole new system of public transportation, “Metro stations”, the most recent type of city crossings imposed on previous city structure, to get it more complete and diverse. Metro stations can be counted as complete examples of underground collective spaces. The spaces of metro, including stations, their platforms and wagons are like ground level streets and squares or such those places where the quality of collective life get materialized there. This thesis will look at the “metro stations” as the strategic places which have merit of being new centralities for the city, where there are lot of uses, activities and possibilitis and options for people to chose from, working as intermediated collective spaces in the center of each site. These spaces are linking or interconnecting different existing elements, such as other sourrounded crossings or intersections, different system of passages, modes of mobility, uses activities and important facilities, with each other through having connectivity with the new centralities of metro stations and their platforms. It is really interesting to see how theses regenerative punctual intervention of metro stations, as a part of grand urban and regional enterprise for the metropolitan city of Esfahan are in a close interaction with different existing elements and logics and, simultaneously, in various scales from local and city scale to the territorial

Witness-Functions versus Interpretation-Functions for Secrecy in Cryptographic Protocols: What to Choose?

Proving that a cryptographic protocol is correct for secrecy is a hard task. One of the strongest strategies to reach this goal is to show that it is increasing, which means that the security level of every single atomic message exchanged in the protocol, safely evaluated, never deceases. Recently, two families of functions have been proposed to measure the security level of atomic messages. The first one is the family of interpretation-functions. The second is the family of witness-functions. In this paper, we show that the witness-functions are more efficient than interpretation-functions. We give a detailed analysis of an ad-hoc protocol on which the witness-functions succeed in proving its correctness for secrecy while the interpretation-functions fail to do so.Comment: Accepted at the IEEE SMC (6 two column pages) on 2017-07-1

Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus: current situation and travel-associated concerns

This article is made available for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic.The emergence of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in 2012 brought back memories of the occurrence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in 2002. More than 1500 MERS-CoV cases were recorded in 42 months with a case fatality rate (CFR) of 40%. Meanwhile, 8000 cases of SARS-CoV were confirmed in six months with a CFR of 10%. The clinical presentation of MERS-CoV ranges from mild and non-specific presentation to progressive and severe pneumonia. No predictive signs or symptoms exist to differentiate MERS-CoV from community-acquired pneumonia in hospitalized patients. An apparent heterogeneity was observed in transmission. Most MERS-CoV cases were secondary to large outbreaks in healthcare settings. These cases were secondary to community-acquired cases, which may also cause family outbreaks. Travel-associated MERS infection remains low. However, the virus exhibited a clear tendency to cause large outbreaks outside the Arabian Peninsula as exemplified by the outbreak in the Republic of Korea. In this review, we summarize the current knowledge about MERS-CoV and highlight travel-related issues

An Approach for spatial and temporal data analysis: application for mobility modeling of workers in Luxembourg and its bordering areas

In this paper, we propose a general visual analytic approach to synthesis very large spatial data and discover interesting knowledge and unknown patterns from complex data based on Origin-Destination (OD) matrices. The research studies of Tobler constitute a good basis in this topic. This paper is interested in the proposal of 2 methods entitled respectively ?Weighted Linear Directional Mean: WLDM? and ?DS-WLDM?. The latter incorporates the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence with WLDM. Both of the developed methods are an extension of ?Linear Directional Mean: LDM? for mobility modeling. With classical techniques such as LDM among others, the results of data mapping are not intelligible and easy to interpret. However with both WLDM and DS-WLDM methods it is easy to discover knowledge without losing a lot of information which is one of the interests of this paper. This proposal is generic and it intends to be applied for data mapping such as for geographical presentation of social and demographic information (e.g. mobility of people, goods and information) according to multiple spatial scales (e.g. locality, district, municipality). It could be applied also in transportation field (e.g. traffic flow). For the application, administrative data is used in order to evaluate spatial and temporal aspects of the daily and the residential mobility of workers in Luxembourg and its bordering areas.Mobility modeling; data mapping; spatial mobility; geographic knowledge discovery; location uncertainty; daily and residential mobility

A method and a tool for geocoding and record linkage

For many years, researchers have presented the geocoding of postal addresses as a challenge. Several research works have been devoted to achieve the geocoding process. This paper presents theoretical and technical aspects for geolocalization, geocoding, and record linkage. It shows possibilities and limitations of existing methods and commercial software identifying areas for further research. In particular, we present a methodology and a computing tool allowing the correction and the geo-coding of mailing addresses. The paper presents two main steps of the methodology. The first preliminary step is addresses correction (addresses matching), while the second caries geocoding of identified addresses. Additionally, we present some results from the processing of real data sets. Finally, in the discussion, areas for further research are identified.addresses correction; geocodage; matching; data management; record linkage

Simulation of land use changes using cellular automata and artificial neural network

This paper presents a method integrating artificial neural network (ANN) in cellular automata (CA) to simulate land use changes in Luxembourg and the areas adjacent to its borders. The ANN is used as a base of CA model transition rule. The proposed method shows promising results for prediction of land use over time. The ANN is validated using cross-validation technique and Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve analysis, and compared with logit model and a support vector machine approach. The application described in this paper highlights the interest of integrating ANNs in CA based model for land use dynamic simulation.Artificial neural network; Cellular automata; Modelling; Land use changes; Spatial planning and dynamics

Culture, Privacy Conception and Privacy Concern: Evidence from Europe before PRISM

This article analyses individuals’ online privacy concerns between cultural country groups. We use a dataset of more than 14 000 Internet users collected by the European Union in 2010 in 26 EU countries. We use a probit model to examine the variables associated with the probability of being concerned about privacy, in order to draw policy and regulatory implications. The results show that women and poor people are more concerned than their counterparts. People who often use Internet are not privacy concerned. Privacy concerned people are those who have heard bad privacy experience in the media, through word of mouth or have acquaintance who have bad privacy experience. Trusting Internet company leads to no privacy concern. Individuals in hierarchical and competitive countries are privacy concerned and those in countries characterized by equality, cooperation, and favorable for change are not privacy concerned. And finally, having a large view of information considered as personal leads to be privacy concerned