Indoor Outdoor Research Articles

A year-long field investigation on the spatio-temporal variations of occupant's thermal comfort in Chinese traditional courtyard dwellings

Multiple researchers have proven the different thermal perceptions of occupants living in naturally ventilated dwellings. As one of the representatives of Chinese traditional dwellings, courtyard-style vernacular residence is the result of human wisdom in adapting to the natural thermal environment through architectural forms. Exploring whether such classical building form still meets the thermal comfort needs of contemporary residents can help architects generate relevant design concepts when dealing with energy-saving-oriented projects in the context of carbon neutralization and rural revitalization. A year-long follow-up investigation is conducted on a typical courtyard dwelling in Wufu Town, Fujian Province. Based on the built digital twin platform, relevant parameters were monitored by various sensors from different investigation points throughout the year. Additionally, year-round monthly thermally neutral temperatures are obtained from over 1000 Thermal Sensation Vote questionnaires. By applying the adaptive thermal comfort theoretical model, which is widely recognized in the field of thermal assessment on naturally ventilated buildings, the linear relationship between indoor neutral temperature and outdoor air temperature can be generated. According to ASHRAE Standard 55, the time-series predicted acceptable thermal comfort ranges are then calculated to evaluate the measured operative temperature. Results show no large gap between the actual temperature and the predicted acceptable range in semi-open spaces and interior spaces. With suitable optimized renovations and the application of several low-power conditioning equipment, such courtyard dwellings are still capable of providing occupants comfortable thermal environment throughout the year.

Towards control facilities for mimicking plant growth optimum action spectrum: Efficient near-ultraviolet to far-red light-conversion in Cr3+-doped rare-earth aluminate phosphors

Phosphor-converted materials have recently become promising candidates for the next generation horticulture and agriculture owing to their ability to overcome the daily sunlight limitations. Here, Tb0.7La0.3ZnAl11O19:Cr3+ (TLZA:Cr3+) was prepared by a high-temperature solid state method, which showed high near-ultraviolet (NUV) and green light to far-red conversion efficiencies. In the optimized TLZA:6%Cr3+ phosphor, the energy transfer from the host to the dopant was carried out through a dipole-quadrupole interaction mechanism with an efficiency of 99.62 %. The phosphor-converted light-emitting diode (pc-LED) devices were fabricated by combining TLZA:6%Cr3+, blue and red phosphors with 380 nm NUV-chips, which modulated the optimum action spectrum for indoor plant growth. TLZA:6%Cr3+ luminescent film laminated glass (LFLG) adjusted the composition of the solar spectrum to red/blue light ratio of 3:1 and promoted plant growth in outdoor horticultural greenhouses. Therefore, the pc-LED and LFLG fabricated with the TLZA:6%Cr3+ phosphor in this work are excellent spectral control devices for indoor plant lighting and outdoor horticultural facilities, respectively.

Real-Time Step Length Estimation in Indoor and Outdoor Scenarios.

In this paper, human step length is estimated based on the wireless channel properties and the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) method. The path loss between two ankles, called the on-ankle path loss, is converted from the RSSI, which is measured by our developed wearable hardware in indoor and outdoor ambulation scenarios. The human walking step length is estimated by a reliable range of RSSI values. The upper threshold and the lower threshold of this range are determined experimentally. This paper advances our previous step length measurement technique by proposing a novel exponential weighted moving average (EWMA) algorithm to update the upper and lower thresholds, and thus the step length estimation, recursively. The EWMA algorithm allows our measurement technique to process each shorter subset of the dataset, called a time window, and estimate the step length, rather than having to process the whole dataset at a time. The step length is periodically updated on the fly when the time window is "sliding" forwards. Thus, the EWMA algorithm facilitates the step length estimation in real-time. The impact of the EWMA parameter is analysed, and the optimal parameter is discovered for different experimental scenarios. Our experiments show that the EWMA algorithm could achieve comparable accuracy as our previously proposed technique with errors as small as 3.02% and 0.30% for the indoor and outdoor scenarios, respectively, while the processing time required to output an estimation of the step length could be significantly shortened by 53.96% and 60% for the indoor walking and outdoor walking, respectively.

A mobile EEG study on the psychophysiological effects of walking and crowding in indoor and outdoor urban environments

Environmental psychologists have established multiple psychological benefits of interaction with natural, compared to urban, environments on emotion, cognition, and attention. Yet, given the increasing urbanisation worldwide, it is equally important to understand how differences within different urban environments influence human psychological experience. We developed a laboratory experiment to examine the psychophysiological effects of the physical (outdoor or indoor) and social (crowded versus uncrowded) environment in healthy young adults, and to validate the use of mobile electroencephalography (EEG) and electrodermal activity (EDA) measurements during active walking. Participants (N = 42) were randomly assigned into a walking or a standing group, and watched six 1-min walk-through videos of green, urban indoor and urban outdoor environments, depicting high or low levels of social density. Self-reported emotional states show that green spaces is perceived as more calm and positive, and reduce attentional demands. Further, the outdoor urban space is perceived more positively than the indoor environment. These findings are consistent with earlier studies on the psychological benefits of nature and confirm the effectiveness of our paradigm and stimuli. In addition, we hypothesised that even short-term exposure to crowded scenes would have negative psychological effects. We found that crowded scenes evoked higher self-reported arousal, more negative self-reported valence, and recruited more cognitive and attentional resources. However, in walking participants, they evoked higher frontal alpha asymmetry, suggesting more positive affective responses. Furthermore, we found that using recent signal-processing methods, the EEG data produced a comparable signal-to-noise ratio between walking and standing, and that despite differences between walking and standing, skin-conductance also captured effectively psychophysiological responses to stimuli. These results suggest that emotional responses to visually presented stimuli can be measured effectively using mobile EEG and EDA in ambulatory settings, and that there is complex interaction between active walking, the social density of urban spaces, and direct and indirect affective responses to such environments.

Traditional Passive Design Solutions as a Key Factor for Sustainable Modern Urban Designs in the Hot, Arid Climate of the United Arab Emirates

Sustainable architecture is a key approach for creating sustainable cities and reducing the impact of climate change. In hot, arid regions, the passive design traditional architecture is known for its ability to provide comfortable indoor environments and outdoor shaded areas, in contrast to the use of energy-intensive air conditioners in a great deal of modern architecture. Thus, this research used a qualitative methodology based on ENVI-met software to study, investigate, and compare the thermal performance of two urban fabrics as case studies (traditional and modern districts) in the hot, arid climate of the United Arab Emirates. The thermal performance of the old urban districts was better than the new ones, with a lower maximum potential air temperature and an improvement in the level of thermal comfort, measured by a predicted mean vote. Moreover, it was found that enhancing the shade in the outdoor open areas in the modern district, mimicking the traditional passive design solutions, resulted in lower air temperature and PMVs. This research is expected to be one step among many towards creating sustainable, innovative modern architecture.

Assessment of the exposure to PM2.5 in different Lebanese microenvironments at different temporal scales.

The weak potential of using the sole outdoor concentrations to represent personal exposure to PM2.5 is confirmed by the literature; therefore, it is important to account for a person’s movements over time when estimating the short-term personal air pollution exposure within different microenvironments (MEs). This study is an example of applying an assessment method of the exposure to PM2.5 in different microenvironments at different temporal scales. A low-cost particle counter (the Dylos 1700) was used; its performance was validated in comparison with equivalent instruments such the SidePak AM520 Personal Aerosol Monitor (R2 = 0.89). This validation also provided a function to convert measured particle number concentrations (PNCs) into calculated particle mass concentrations. The 150 profiles that was collected on a minute-by-minute basis regarding PM2.5 concentration from December 2018 to May 2021 highlight the influence of individual activities and contextual factors on the air quality, so that Lebanon’s annual PM2.5 mean (24.2 µg⁄m3) is 142% higher than the World Health Organization (WHO) annual mean guideline (10 µg⁄m3). Winter is the most polluted period due to the increased application of space heating devices. Additionally, the occurrence of dusty winds during the spring period leads to the elevated levels of dispersed PM2.5. Simultaneously, the rural zones are more polluted than urban ones due to the usage of more traditional heating equipment, in addition to the usage of chemical products like pesticides and fertilizers in agricultural activities in such areas. Furthermore, the (outdoor–indoor–transport) MEs indicate that the transport and indoor MEs have similar levels of suspended fine particulates, while outdoor MEs are less polluted. Studies based on the personal exposure to PM2.5 were generally applied on specific and limited places such as schools, workplaces, or residences. The study aims to shed light on the modern method in an attempt to estimate the personal exposure to PM2.5 and to inspire similar studies to achieve the maximum efficiency.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10661-022-10607-6.

Perceptions of thermal comfort and coping mechanisms related to indoor and outdoor temperatures among participants living in rural villages in Limpopo province, South Africa

Global heating is considered one of the greatest threats to human health and well-being. Supporting human resilience to heating threats is imperative, but under-investigated. In response, this article reports a study that drew together results from quantitative data on perceptions of thermal comfort and mechanisms for coping with thermal discomfort among 406 households in a study in Giyani, Limpopo province. Indoor dwelling and outdoor temperatures were also analysed. Most participants perceived their dwellings to be too hot when it was hot outdoors. People relied on recommended heat health actions such as sitting outdoors in the shade or opening windows. While this agency is meaningful, resilience to climate change requires more than personal action. In light of the climate threats and climate-related disaster risks facing South Africa, an all-encompassing approach, including education campaigns, climate-proofed housing, access to basic services, and financial considerations that will help support resilient coping among South Africans, is urgently required.

Indoor–Outdoor Point Cloud Alignment Using Semantic–Geometric Descriptor

Aligning indoor and outdoor point clouds is a challenging problem since the overlapping area is usually limited, thus resulting in a lack of correspondence features. The windows and doors can be observed from both sides and are usually utilized as shared features to make connections between indoor and outdoor models. However, the registration performance using the geometric features of windows and doors is limited due to the considerable number of extracted features and the mismatch of similar features. This paper proposed an indoor/outdoor alignment framework with a semantic feature matching method to solve the problem. After identifying the 3D window and door instances from the point clouds, a novel semantic–geometric descriptor (SGD) is proposed to describe the semantic information and the spatial distribution pattern of the instances. The best object match is identified with an improved Hungarian algorithm using indoor and outdoor SGDs. The matching method is effective even when the numbers of objects are not equal in the indoor and outdoor models, which is robust to measurement occlusions and feature outliers. The experimental results conducted in the collected dataset and the public dataset demonstrated that the proposed method could identify accurate object matches under complicated conditions, and the alignment accuracy reached the centimeter level.

Identification of Health Effects of Complex Air Pollution in China.

After the Chinese government introduced a series of policies to strengthen the control of air pollution, the concentration of particulate matter has decreased, but the concentration of ozone has increased, and the problem of complex air pollution still exists, posing a serious threat to public health. Therefore, disentangling the health effect of multi-pollutants has been a long-discussed challenge in China. To evaluate the adverse effects of complex air pollution, a generalized additive model was used to assess the health risks of different pollution types in eight metropolises in different climates in China from 2013 to 2016. Instead of directly introducing multiple pollutant concentrations, we integrated the concentration levels of PM2.5, NO2, and O3 into a set of predictors by grouping methods and divided air pollution into three high single-pollutant types and four high multi-pollutant types to calculate mortality risk in different types. The comprehensive results showed that the impact of high multi-pollutant types on mortality risk was greater than that of high single-pollutant types. Throughout the study period, the high multi-pollutant type with high PM2.5, NO2, and O3 and the high multi-pollutant type with high PM2.5 and NO2 were more associated with death, and the highest RRs were 1.129 (1.080, 1.181) and 1.089 (1.066, 1.113), respectively. In addition, the pollution types that most threaten people are different in different cities. These differences may be related to different pollution conditions, pollutant composition, and indoor–outdoor activity patterns in different cities. Seasonally, the risk of complex air pollution is greater in most cities in the warm season than in the cold season. This may be caused by the modifying effects of high temperature on pollutants in addition to different indoor–outdoor activity patterns in different seasons. The results also show that calculating the effect of individual air pollutants separately and adding them together may lead to an overestimation of the combined effect. It further highlights the urgency and need for air pollution health research to move towards a multi-pollutant approach that considers air pollution as a whole in the context of atmospheric abatement and global warming.

LTI-SAM: Lidar-Template Matching-Inertial Odometry via Smoothing and Mapping

Robust localization is an essential requirement for autonomous land vehicles. In similar scenes such as corridors and tunnels or open scenes such as airports and mines, the performance of the traditional algorithm of laser odometry will be seriously deteriorated or even become completely invalid due to the similarity of observation data. Based on the LIO-SAM algorithm, LTI-SAM is proposed in this article, that is to use the downward-facing camera and inertial measurement unit (IMU) to perform dead reckoning through template matching algorithm and use template matching visual odometry (VO) to judge themotion state and decidewhether to save the keyframe if the laser odometer fails and the keyframe is not saved. If the keyframe is kept, theVOis added between two keyframes instead of the laser odometry to optimize through the factor graph, which improves the accuracy of localization and mapping. The proposed algorithm with loose coupling between template matching VO and laser inertial navigation is implemented under the robot operating system (ROS) platform, and the algorithm is verified by indoor and outdoor experiments. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can bring significant performance improvement in both similar indoor scenes and outdoor degraded scenes.

Multi-objective optimisation of human exposure for various 5G network topologies in Switzerland

The constant increase in the required user capacity and the evolution of wireless network technologies impact the exposure that users experience from wireless networks. This paper evaluates various 5G network topologies regarding human exposure, mobile communication quality, and sustainability. We assess human exposure, based on a novel Exposure Ratio (ER) metric, in 5G networks that include Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MaMIMO) and compare them with existing 4G deployments in three environments in Switzerland. The quality and sustainability of mobile communication are evaluated by extrapolating data rates from mobile operators to the year 2030. A multi-objective optimisation algorithm is implemented to design the 5G network topologies, maximising the user coverage while minimising the downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) exposure. An extensive set of simulations investigated three municipalities, three operators plus one unified network, three use cases (UL/DL data rates), three scenarios (indoor and outdoor coverage), and two optimisation methods. The study results confirm that the human exposure in a 5G network is dominated by the UL being ten times larger than the DL exposure. Furthermore, comparing a 5G deployment with 10 times the traffic capacity of a real 4G network, DL exposure increases by 36% on average, and UL exposure decreases by up to 75% depending on the scenario. Regarding indoor coverage versus outdoor only, our results show that DL exposure can be reduced by a factor of 10 if only outdoor coverage is targeted. Finally, the study concludes that from the human exposure perspective, the ideal network should use 5G MaMIMO and be optimised for both UL and DL exposure.

PEMBUATAN PROFIL INSTANSI BALAI PENYULUHAN PERTANIAN KECAMATAN BELIK BERBASIS WEB MENGGUNAKAN FRAMEWORK CODEIGNITER

Belik Subdistrict Agricultural Extension Center (BPP Belik) is a government extension agency that fosters farmers in Belik village. Every month at BPP Belik many activities are carried out. Both indoor activities and outdoor activities. The PPL (Field Agricultural Extension) officers provide a lot of training and coaching to farmers in Belik Village. However, the involvement of the participating farmers is still very limited, considering that BPP Belik has very limited funds and time. This makes information not spread evenly to farmers in Belik Village. Dissemination of information in the form of training or articles evenly will certainly increase agricultural production. Based on the existing problems, it is necessary to have a new information system, namely the creation of a website profile of the Belik District Agricultural Extension Center as an effort to provide alternative solutions for PPLs in disseminating information to farmers. The development of information systems on the website profile of the Belik District Agricultural Extension Center is using the waterfall method. Which consists of the analysis process, system design, design and implementation. The data analysis stage was obtained from interviews. Creating a website profile for BPP Belik agencies using the PHP programming language and MySql database. As well as using the php Codeigniter framework. The system trial on the BPP Belik Agency profile website is using the black box method. This test was carried out by 2 admins and writers at BPP Belik. The tests carried out are testing the appearance / user interface on the admin page and on the main page of the website.

Laser Power Efficiency of Partial Histogram Direct Time-of-Flight LiDAR Sensors

On-chip capacity for storing temporal photon data in direct time-of-flight (dToF) lidar sensors is limited. This has prompted the development of various partial histogram approaches to reduce the amount of data stored on-chip. The aim of this paper is to inform sensor design by providing a taxonomy of these approaches, models for evaluating their impact on system laser power and identification of additional trade-offs which must be considered. All published on-chip partial histogram lidar approaches to-date are reviewed and two main categories are established: <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">zooming</i> and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">sliding.</i> A means of evaluating any specific configuration based on its histogram reduction ratio (HRR) is also established. To quantitatively evaluate partial histogram approaches, a model to determine the minimum number of required laser cycles is developed. Both zooming and sliding are compared to an ideal baseline using this model, in order to establish a laser power penalty benchmark for each approach. These are evaluated over a range of real-world design conditions for two contrasting designs: short-range indoor and long-range outdoor. In general, a sliding approach is found to be the most laser power-efficient for long-range outdoor applications, while a zooming approach becomes increasingly more effective under low ambient conditions. Power efficient <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">cycle-scaled</i> variations on the conventional zooming and sliding approaches are introduced. These are shown to consistently reduce the laser power penalty across all tested design conditions. It is also shown that a cycle-scaled sliding histogram approach can be adopted to reduce the required on-chip histogram storage capacity by half, with almost no additional laser power penalty. Finally, a qualitative discussion of zooming and sliding compares additional key design considerations such as sensitivity to motion artefacts.

Population Growth Performance of Arma custos (Faricius) (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae) at Different Temperatures.

Arma custos (Fabricius) (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae) is a natural predator that can control various agricultural and forestry pests. This study aimed to clarify the effects of temperature on the growth, reproduction, and population of the predator and to simulate its population growth. Using the age–stage, two-sex life table method, 18°C, 22°C, 26°C, 30°C, and 34°C were selected as the temperature conditions. A. custos can complete its life cycle at 18°C–30°C, and the developmental duration of each A. custos stage, adult pre-oviposition period, total pre-oviposition period, and the mean generation time (T) were shortened with the increase in temperature. The pre-adult mortality was significantly reduced at 26°C and 30°C. In addition, the fecundity of a single female and the gross reproductive rate were the highest at 30°C. Significant differences were observed in the intrinsic rate of increase (r) and the finite rate of increase (λ) under different temperature conditions, and both reached the maximum at 30°C. Results showed that adult A. custos raised at 26°C had a longer lifespan and the fecundity was higher at 30°C in comparison with the other temperatures. This study is the first to report the life cycle of A. custos at different temperatures, and the results can provide a scientific theoretical basis for the indoor artificial reproduction, outdoor release, and colonization of A. custos.

DroneTalk: An Internet-of-Things-Based Drone System for Last-Mile Drone Delivery

At present, drone delivery systems usually function only in global positioning system (GPS)-friendly environments and thus cannot deliver goods into customers’ houses, which is an element of urban last-mile delivery. In this study, we investigated solutions for enabling drones to fly autonomously in mixed indoor–outdoor environments. We propose a novel Internet of Things (IoT)-based drone delivery system, namely DroneTalk, for mail delivery. DroneTalk combines a GPS, an inertial measurement unit, and visual information to achieve mixed indoor–outdoor autopilot operation. Furthermore, DroneTalk integrates an autonomous drone control system with an IoT device management platform to enable a drone to achieve automatic online weather awareness. Most importantly, DroneTalk is a novel work considering communication, processing, and control latencies simultaneously during autopilot operation to avoid problems related to drone collisions. These problems have always existed but become more serious when drones are flying close to buildings. Simulation results indicate that the proposed system can attain a high user-defined flight success rate (i.e., 99% in our simulations) without any collisions; thus, the proposed system can be feasibly used in real-world environments.

Metric, Topological, and Syntactic Accessibility in Three-Dimensional Urban Networked Spaces: Modeling Options and Visualization

In this paper, we take the position that cities gain to be represented as three-dimensional spaces populated by scores of micro-scale-built spaces (buildings, rooms, passageways, squares, etc.). Effective algorithms that evaluate place-based accessibility in built structures while considering the indoor spaces’ complexity at a fine granularity are essential for indoor–outdoor seamless urban planning, navigation, way findings, and supporting emergencies. We present a comprehensive set of spatial modeling options and visualizations of indoor accessibility for an entire built structure based on various notions of travel impedance. Notably, we consider the metric length of the paths and their cognitive complexities due to topologic, syntactic, or integrated intricacy within our approaches. Our work presents a comprehensive selection of indoor accessibility analysis with a detailed implemental discussion that can be applied as a solid foundation for smart city applications or seamless urban research and planning. The analysis and visualization techniques presented in this paper can be easily applied to analyze and visualize built interior geographic spaces to study accessibility differentials in cities with vast vertical expansion aimed at achieving (or at avoiding) specific accessibility outcomes.

Deep-learning based photon-efficient 3D and reflectivity imaging with a 64 × 64 single-photon avalanche detector array.

A single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) is a high sensitivity detector that can work under weak echo signal conditions (≤1 photon per pixel). The measured digital signals can be used to invert the range and reflectivity images of the target with photon-efficient imaging reconstruction algorithm. However, the existing photon-efficient imaging reconstruction algorithms are susceptible to noise, which leads to poor quality of the reconstructed range and reflectivity images of target. In this paper, a non-local sparse attention encoder (NLSA-Encoder) neural network is proposed to extract the 3D information to reconstruct both the range and reflectivity images of target. The proposed network model can effectively reduce the influence of noise in feature extraction and maintain the capability of long-range correlation feature extraction. In addition, the network is optimized for reconstruction speed to achieve faster reconstruction without performance degradation, compared with other existing deep learning photon-efficient imaging reconstruction methods. The imaging performance is verified through numerical simulation, near-field indoor and far-field outdoor experiments with a 64 × 64 SPAD array. The experimental results show that the proposed network model can achieve better results in terms of the reconstruction quality of range and reflectivity images, as well as reconstruction speed.

RG-GCN: A Random Graph Based on Graph Convolution Network for Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation

Point cloud semantic segmentation, a challenging task in 3D data processing, is popular in many realistic applications. Currently, deep learning methods are gradually being applied to point cloud semantic segmentation. However, as it is difficult to manually label point clouds in 3D scenes, it remains difficult to obtain sufficient training samples for the supervised deep learning network. Although an increasing number of excellent methods have been proposed in recent years, few of these have focused on the problem of semantic segmentation with insufficient samples. To address this problem, this paper proposes a random graph based on graph convolution network, referred to as RG-GCN. The proposed network consists of two key components: (1) a random graph module is proposed to perform data augmentation by changing the topology of the built graphs; and (2) a feature extraction module is proposed to obtain local significant features by aggregating point spatial information and multidimensional features. To validate the performance of the RG-GCN, the indoor dataset S3DIS and outdoor dataset Toronto3D are used to validate the proposed network via a series of experiments. The results show that the proposed network achieves excellent performance for point cloud semantic segmentation of the two different datasets.

Risk Assessment of the Fungicide Luna Privilege with the Active Substance Fluopyram

Luna Privilege is a new fungicide for use in apples, pears, outdoor and indoor strawberries, outdoor and indoor lettuces, peas, beans and indoor tomatoes, and contains the new active substance fluopyram.&#x0D; VKM was requested by the Norwegian Food Safety Authority to consider the possible health risk for operators related to the properties of Luna Privilege and fluopyram; in particular to evaluate the potential for bioaccumulation, reproductive and neurotoxic effects, and discuss possible mechanisms involved in liver and thyroid tumor formation observed in rats, and the establishment of NOAELs and reference values.&#x0D; VKM was also asked to evaluate the fate and behaviour of fluopyram in the environment, and the ecotoxicological effects and risks related to its use, in particular the potential for groundwater contamination, safety margins and possible effects on birds and aquatic organisms.&#x0D; The assessment was finalized in a meeting on December 13. 2013 by VKM’s Panel on Plant Protection Products.&#x0D; VKM’s conclusions are as follows:&#x0D; Health:&#x0D; It is the opinion of VKM that:&#x0D; &#x0D; The active ingredient fluopyram has low potential for bioaccumulation, and the data do not suggest a sex-specific excretion.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; An in vivo Comet Assay in rat liver could help to further elucidate the genotoxic potential of fluopyram.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; It can not be excluded that the reported incidence of “gall bladder absent” is treatment related.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; NOAEL for the 90-day feeding study in rats should be set to 3.06 mg/kg bw/day, resulting in an AOEL of 0.03 mg/kg bw/day.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The “dumb-bell or incomplete ossification and/or bipartite/normal cartilage” should be considered as a malformation and regarded as treatment related.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The time points used for neurotoxic measurements are not optimal to detect neurotoxic effects from acute exposure, since the time window between the first and second measurements is too long.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The studies where effects of fluopyram and phenobarbital are compared can not be used to exclude human relevance of the tumor-inducing effect of fluopyram in the liver of female rats.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The results from the mechanistic studies are insufficient to support the proposed mode of action for the induction of thyroid follicular cell tumors in male mice, and thus the induction of thyroid tumors in male mice could be relevant for humans.&#x0D; &#x0D; VKM proposes:&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; NOAEL of 1.2 mg/kg bw/day based on a 2 year feeding study in rats.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; ADI: 0.012 mg/kg bw/day&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; AOEL: 0.03 mg/kg bw/day&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; ARfD: 0.25 mg/kg bw/day&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Risk calculations for field use of Luna Privilege show minimal risk if personal protective equipment is used. The AOEL of fluopyram for greenhouse use is not exceeded, even without protective equipment. Re-entry and bystander exposure is calculated to be well below the AOEL.&#x0D; Environment:&#x0D; It is the opinion of VKM that:&#x0D; &#x0D; Worst case degradation rates from laboratory studies should preferably be used to calculate PECsoil values for fluopyram.&#x0D; Both fluopyram and fluopyram-7-hydroxy have a high potential for groundwater contamination.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The efficacy of buffer zones needs to be considered on a case-by-case basis, and further validation of values for efficacy from the model simulation is necessary.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; It is further the opinion of VKM that all the refinements used in the risk assessment for birds are relevant. Since the TER values estimated for all crops except for orchards are below the trigger following refinements, it is the view of VKM that the data indicate medium risk for strawberries and pulses, and high risk for lettuce in open field.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The use of LC50 values for fluopyram in the TER calculations with a TER trigger value of 100 is overly conservative, and a reduction of the acute trigger for both invertebrates and fish from 100 to 10 for such calculations are suggested.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The trigger for acute toxicity is not exceeded for any of the crops. For chronic toxicity, VKM concludes that there is a moderate risk for effects on fish when Luna Privilege is applied to beans/strawberries without the use of a vegetated mitigation buffer-strip.&#x0D;

A Funnel Fukunaga–Koontz Transform for Robust Indoor–Outdoor Detection Using Channel-State Information in 5G IoT Context

The massive machine-type communication will be at the core of ambient connectivity, requiring for energy-efficient systems. Earlier studies highlighted the efficiency of positioning approaches based on channel-state information (CSI) in different environments. Many works limited the solution assessment to a single room in a fully indoor testbed. This article extends the application of CSI for indoor–outdoor detection on an unprecedented large area and considers mMTC-oriented long-term evolution and fifth-generation Internet of Things in the sub-GHz frequency band. Hinged on a novel long-term evolution protocol dedicated for machine-type communications, the results focus on a unique packet exchange with a single access point to save battery life and simplify deployment. The study evaluates different input features and investigates the target positioning accuracy for multiple unsupervised and supervised dimensionality reduction methods. We present a new dimension reduction scheme consisting of an unsupervised funnel on top of a supervised dimension reduction approach. Results show that the introduced Funnel Fukunaga–Koontz transform outperforms other dimension reduction approaches, regardless of the input features and the number of locations.