Adaptation Platform Research Articles

Global protection from tropical cyclones by coastal ecosystems—past, present, and under climate change

Coastal ecosystems have the potential to contribute to disaster risk reduction and adaptation to climate change. While previous studies have estimated the value of current coastal ecosystems for reducing coastal risk, there have been relatively few studies that look at changes in ecosystem service provision, in the past and under climate change. We employ the probabilistic, event-based CLImate ADAptation platform (CLIMADA) to quantify the protection from tropical cyclones (TCs) provided by coastal ecosystems, modeling the number of beneficiaries in the past and under future climate change. We also investigate the potential of nature-based solutions (NbS), such as mangrove restoration. We find that currently, one in five (21%) of all people impacted annually by TCs in the global low-elevation coastal zone is within the protection distance of coastal ecosystems. Over the last 30 years, the share of protected people has decreased by approximately 2%, due to ecosystem loss. With climate change, the average annual number of people impacted will increase by 40%. Simultaneously, the proportion of people protected by coastal ecosystems with climate change decreases due to changes in TC distribution (−1%). The importance of current coastal protection, and the potential for increasing protection by NbS, varies widely between countries. While the number of people protected globally only increases slightly with mangrove restoration, the share of people protected in individual countries can increase by up to 39%. Our findings provide a basis for NbS planning and adaptation policy, by highlighting areas which will be crucial for coastal protection services in a world altered by climate change.

Use of a smartphone platform for temporomandibular joint arthroscopy

Temporomandibular joint (TMJ) arthroscopy, a diagnostic and therapeutic procedure involving the introduction of a small-calibre optical scope into the joint compartments for the treatment of internal derangement, has been gaining prominence and is now being recommended as the first therapeutic option due to the good results obtained and minimal invasiveness. However, the technical difficulty, high cost, need for specific instruments, and video tower system remain limiting factors for the implementation of TMJ arthroscopy by practicing professionals. The objective of this study was to examine the possibility of using a smartphone optical adaptation platform in TMJ arthroscopy. Ten qualified examiners with different levels of expertise in TMJ arthroscopy located four points of interest in the upper TMJ compartment of a validated realistic simulator and assessed the resolution of the images obtained and ergonomics of the smartphone platform for each point of interest, assigning a score of 0–2 (0 = poor, 1 = intermediate, and 2 = good performance in comparison to the video tower). For image quality, 77.5% of scores were ‘good’, while 22.5% were ‘intermediate’. For ergonomics, 62.5% of scores were ‘good’ and 37.5% were ‘intermediate’. In conclusion, the platform appears to be safe for TMJ arthroscopy in humans.

Canada and ocean climate adaptation: tracking law and policy responses, charting future directions

This research article provides a law and policy summary of climate change adaptation initiatives in Canada at the ocean-climate nexus. Three levels of governance are examined (national, provincial, and Indigenous) with a focus on the Atlantic region. The research method was the review of relevant and newly amended laws, regulations and policy statements, and related commentaries. The roles of the federal government are first described with key developments including the launch of a Climate Adaptation Platform in 2012 to share adaptation experiences and information and release of a National Adaptation Strategy and accompanying Adaptation Action Plan in November 2022. Federal adaptation efforts in the areas of fisheries, aquaculture and shipping are also reviewed along with progress in establishing marine protected areas (MPAs) and other effective area-based conservation measures. Provincial adaptation initiatives are next summarized with a focus on the four Atlantic provinces. Those provinces have established a regional hub, CLIMAtlantic, to provide climate information and advance climate-related research and training. Each province has developed a climate action plan which includes climate adaptation priorities. Indigenous-led climate engagement and adaptation initiatives are finally described including the publication in 2019 of a National Inuit Climate Change Strategy, regional initiatives of the Atlantic Policy Congress of First Nations Chiefs Secretariat, and the development of climate adaptation plans by select First Nation communities in the Atlantic region. The paper concludes by discussing future law and policy directions to make Canada more “climate ready.” Adoption of climate adaptation strategies for governmental departments and agencies with ocean and coastal responsibilities should be a priority. Incorporating climate change adaptation responsibilities through legislative and regulatory changes also needs to be considered, for example, by amending Canada’s Oceans Act to recognize the role of oceans in climate adaptations and mitigation, to authorize the designation of MPAs as climate refuges and to require adaptive and dynamic MPA management plans through strict monitoring and timely review provisions. Indigenous peoples must be effectively included in all climate adaptation discussions and planning.

Domain Adaptation through Photorealistic Enhanced Images for Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, three types of domain adaptation which are defined as image-level domain adaptation, interdomain adaptation, and intradomain adaptation are efficiently combined to construct a high efficiency framework for semantic segmentation. The proposed domain adaptation platform can achieve a high reduction of time-consuming to generate exhausted supervised data in the real world using photorealistic images. The proposed framework achieved a mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) of 45.0%. Furthermore, by combining the proposed method with intradomain adaptation, the improvement of 1.2% mIoU is achieved compared to previous work.

Investigate the Feasibility of Using CBCT to Assess the Dose Validation for Spot-Scanning Proton Arc (SPArc) Therapy for Advanced Staged Lung Cancer Treatment

<h3>Purpose/Objective(s)</h3> Spot-scanning proton arc therapy has been developed to improve the dose conformity and plan quality in varieties of disease indications, including advanced staged lung cancer treatment. Recently, the artificial Intelligent based synthetic CT method has been introduced in the proton clinic to assess the plan's robustness daily using CBCT. This study investigated the dose validation accuracy of using AI based synthetic-CT for SPArc in comparison with conventional IMPT delivery. <h3>Materials/Methods</h3> Twenty-seven advanced stage lung cancer patients' CT/CBCT data sets were used for training. A Generative-Adversarial-Network (GAN) model, including one generator with Residual-Unet (Res-GAN) architecture and one discriminator using a multi-layer convolutional neural net (CNN), were trained from scratch to predict synthetic CT from CBCT, with random 3D B-spline deformation as data augmentation. Another six patients with the same day re-plan CT (reCT) and CBCT were retrospectively selected for the dose validation comparison. Synthetic CT (synCT) was predicted from CBCT and compared to reCT in terms of Mean Absolute Error (MAE). Both IMPT 2-3 field and SPArc plans were generated on the reCT using the same robust optimization parameters (± 3mm setup and ± 3.5% range uncertainty) as well as planning objectives. Then, both plans were recalculated on the synCT from the same day CBCT. 3D Gamma Index was used to quantitatively assess the dose distribution discrepancy between the synCT and reCT for both IMPT and SPArc techniques. <h3>Results</h3> The result show that the image similarity between the synCT and reCT is very close with average MAE of 32.6 ± 7.5 HU. Overall, SPArc plans have superior 3D gamma index passing rate compared the multi-field IMPT plan in terms of 1%1mm; 2%2mm, 3%/3mm (<i>P</i> < 0.05) as shown in the table. In other words, SPArc effectively mitigated the dosimetric impact from the proton range differences or CT HU error in the synthetic CT. <h3>Conclusion</h3> Deep-learning CBCT-based synthetic CT could be used in dose validation not only for IMPT but also for SPArc even though SPArc plan has better dose conformity to the target. This finding paves the road map to the CBCT-based adaptation platform for SPArc adaptive therapy of lung cancer patient.

Experimental study on hydrodynamic characteristics of three truss-type legs of jack-up offshore platform

The research came from the project for 400-foot jack-up offshore platform's adaptation to environment. The empirical value of load coefficient is often selected by each Classification Society and the influence of other complex factors on hydrodynamic characteristics is ignored, which may make the result too conservative. Therefore, this paper took the jack-up offshore platform truss pile leg as research object, and the model experiments of single pile leg and three pile legs were conducted respectively, and the hydrodynamic coefficient under experimental conditions were studied. Based on the single-legged, the effects of three-legged model under different working conditions were quantitatively analyzed by defining the force component coefficient and the total force coefficients of group piles. This research may provide data support for structural optimization design and strength check analysis of jack-up offshore platform truss legs, which plays an important role in the fatigue detection and life evaluation of offshore platform.

BIG MOBILITY DATA ANALYTICS FOR TRAFFIC MONITORING AND CONTROL

With the overpopulation of large cities, the problems with citizens’ mobility, transport inefficiency, traffic congestions and environmental pollution caused by the heavy traffic require advanced ITS solutions to be overcome. Recent advances and wide proliferation of mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, carried by people, built in vehicles and integrated in a road infrastructure, enable collection of large scale data related to mobility and traffic in smart cities, still with a limited use in real world applications. In this paper, we propose the traffic monitoring, control and adaptation platform, named TrafficSense, based on Big Mobility Data processing and analytics. It provides a continuous monitoring of a traffic situation and detection of important traffic parameters, conditions and events, such as travel times along the street segments and traffic congestions in real time. Upon detecting a traffic congestion on an intersection, the TrafficSense application leverages the feedback control loop mechanism to provide a traffic adaptation based on the dynamic configuration of traffic lights duration in order to increase the traffic flows in critical directions at the intersections. We tested and evaluated the developed application on the distributed cloud computing infrastructure. By varying the streaming workload and the cluster parameters we show the feasibility and applicability of our approach and the platform.

Head And Neck Quad Shot Using CT Based Adaptive Treatment On A Ring Gantry LINAC

The head and neck (HN) quad shot (QS) regimen entails three cycles of four fractions given BID for two days, with 3-4 weeks between cycles. The current workflow requires patients to come in before each cycle for an additional CT simulation to determine whether the current plan is suitable or if a new plan is required. Here we propose an alternative workflow with a commercially available CBCT-guided online adaptation platform coupled with ring gantry LINAC and determine the feasibility of online adaptation at the beginning of each new cycle for HN QS patients. Three HN patients were planned with the QS regimen on the initial CT simulation. Adapted workflow was simulated using CBCT images acquired with C-arm or the ring gantry LINAC. Each step in the adapted workflow was timed and artificial intelligence (AI) guided automatic contours were graded as needing no edits, minor edits, or major edits by a physician. The initial plan (scheduled) is calculated utilizing the CBCT image of the treatment day, and an adapted plan is optimized and calculated. The physician decided whether to continue with the scheduled plan or use the newly adapted plan for the entire cycle. The total time to an approved plan was recorded. Five fractions were successfully simulated for three patients. The table below shows the origin of the CBCT utilized as well as the time (in minutes) for each step of the adapted workflow. Only one fraction needed major edits on any of the automated contours, the target contour from the C-arm LINAC CBCT. This is likely due to the inferior image quality to that of the ring gantry’s CBCTs. The best image quality as noted by the physician was the Pelvis Large Fast protocol with breath hold (25 second scan time). On average, the physician spent 3.5 minutes reviewing and editing all contours. The average time to get an approved plan was 11.2 minutes. For patients 1 and 2, the original scheduled plan was determined suitable to continue using. For patient 3, the adapted plan had improved quality over the scheduled plan due to patient weight loss. An adaptive workflow for the first fraction of each cycle for head and neck quad shot regimen has been shown to be feasible. With automated contouring and planning, an adapted plan can be created in under 15 minutes. This workflow would obviate the need for additional CT simulations resulting in less travel burden for patients receiving palliative therapy and reduce CT simulation workload.Abstract 3972; TablePatientCBCTProtocolAI OAR auto contours time (min)MD OAR review/edits (min)AI Target auto-contour time (min)MD target review/edits (min)Plan computationPlan ReviewApproved plan (total min)1C-armHead0.5Minor (2)2Major (4)23Scheduled (15)2Ring-gantryHead1none (0.5)3none (3)12Scheduled (11)2Ring-gantryPelvis Large Fast1none (0.5)2none (1)0.53Scheduled (9)3Ring-gantryPelvis Large Fast – breath hold1Minor (1)1none (2)22Adapted (12)3Ring-gantryPelvis Large Fast1none (0.5)1Minor (3)21Adapted (9)Average0.90.91.82.61.52.211.2 Open table in a new tab

Who Is Connected with Whom? A Social Network Analysis of Institutional Interactions in the European CCA and DRR Landscape

Communication and collaboration are critical for designing and implementing responses to climate change impacts and related disasters. This acknowledgement has increased interest in understanding social and institutional networks for climate change adaptation (CCA) and disaster risk reduction (DRR). In this study, we used Social Network Analysis (SNA) to explore institutional interactions within and across the communities of the aforementioned domains in Europe. Firstly, we investigated the type and intensity of interactions. We calculated SNA metrics to assess the roles of different actors and applied cluster analysis to identify actors with similar patterns of connections. SNA showed that communication is often more intensive within the two communities, while collaboration is frequent around topics related to both CCA and DRR. Cluster analysis revealed that actors tied with DRR were more closely connected, while actors tied with CCA and those with mixed connections showed no obvious clustering affinity. The European Climate Adaptation Platform, Climate-ADAPT, had the highest value for various SNA metrics, reflecting its popularity in the network and its potential for enhancing interactions among its actors. Finally, SNA was complemented by qualitative interviews, which emphasised the importance of connecting CCA and DRR in organisational mission and vision statements.

DECISION MAKING SUPPORT TOOLS FOR ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE - A MINI REVIEW

The climate trends and climate scenario for the Republic of Serbia show a continuous increase in annual average temperature and change in precipitation patterns. In line with the forthcoming national program for adaptation to climate change, the objective of this research is a brief review of relevant decision support tools. For this purpose, 150 tools from three databases had been analyzed: 1) Climate-ADAPT, European Climate Change Adaptation Platform 2) United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Adaptation Knowledge Portal database and 3) U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit managed by the Climate Change Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Tools are analyzed with respect to four criteria: adaptation aspect, spatial level, types and application.

Time-accurate multi-scale anisotropic mesh adaptation for unsteady flows in CFD

This paper deals with anisotropic mesh adaptation applied to unsteady inviscid CFD simulations. Anisotropic metric-based mesh adaptation is an efficient strategy to reduce the extensive CPU time currently required by time-dependent simulations in an industrial context. In this work, we detail the time-accurate extension of multi-scale anisotropic mesh adaptation for steady flows [35] (a control of the interpolation error in Lp norm to capture all the scales of the solution contrary to the L∞ norm that only focuses on the larger scales) to unsteady flows when time advancing discretizations are considered. This is based on a space–time error analysis and an enhanced version of the fixed-point algorithm [3]. We also show that each stage – remeshing, metric field computation, solution transfer, and flow solution – is important to design an efficient time-accurate anisotropic mesh adaptation process. The parallelization of the whole mesh adaptation platform is also discussed. The efficiency of the approach is emphasized on three-dimensional problems with convergence rate and CPU time analysis.

Climate Adaptation Planning: The context of EU Cohesion Policy and Evidence from Urban Projects in Greece

As awareness of climate change increases, world-wide organizations such as the UN and the EU as well as individual countries, regions and cities undertake action to address the causes of the problem and its inevitable impacts. Since climate change impacts are mostly felt at the local (urban and regional) level, it is at this level to which climate adaptation measures are mostly applied. Cities appear to be extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change in various sectors which concern their built and natural environment as well as their functions. This is especially true for metropolitan areas where the complexity of organizational and spatial structure intensifies the degree of vulnerability. Thus, developing comprehensive and integrated climate adaptation strategies is essential for cities and metropolitan areas. At the EU level, “Promoting climate change adaptation, risk prevention and management” is one out of eleven thematic objectives which EU cohesion policy funding addresses in the programming period 2014-20. The European Climate Adaptation Platform is a web-based tool that supports cities, regions and countries in implementing the EU climate policy, through scientific and operational instruments. Greek cities have to exploit this context in order to prepare climate adaptation strategies and implement climate adaptation interventions with the aim of enhancing climate proofing and resilience. This paper examines the above issues with an emphasis on EU funded urban climate projects in Greece, and seeks to identify potentialities for an integrated approach.

Social Context as a Service: Managing Adaptation in Collaborative Pervasive Applications

We present a social context as a service (SCaaS) platform for managing adaptations in collaborative pervasive applications that support interactions among a dynamic group of actors such as users, stakeholders, infrastructure services, businesses and so on. Such interactions are based on predefined agreements and constraints that characterize the relationships between the actors and are modeled with the notion of social context. In complex and changing environments, such interaction relationships, and thus social contexts, are also subject to change. In existing approaches, the relationships among actors are not modeled explicitly, and instead are often hard-coded into the application. Furthermore, these approaches do not provide adequate adaptation support for such relationships as the changes occur in user requirements and environments. In our approach, inter-actor relationships in an application are modeled explicitly using social contexts, and their execution environment is generated and adaptations are managed by the SCaaS platform. The key features of our approach include externalization of the interaction relationships from the applications, representation and modeling of such relationships from the domain and actor perspectives, their implementation using a service oriented paradigm, and support for their runtime adaptation. We quantify the platform's adaptation overhead and demonstrate its feasibility and applicability by developing a telematics application that supports cooperative convoy.

Fuzzy Adjustment Control in Command Evaluation Platform.

For motor handicapped persons, the use of computer interface devices could be a challenging task. Two research venues have been explored to address the usability problem for handicapped users of computer systems. In the first, the focus is on development of new peripheral devices to accommodate the needs of such users. The second venue, which is the focus of this article, addresses the development of efficient rehabilitation algorithms that can adapt existing interface devices to commands from handicapped users. The main goal of this article is to analyze the existing software adaptation platform PLatform to Evaluate ICT for Assistance with a focus on evaluating and enhancing the use of pointing devices for increased adaptation to interface commands. In the first part of this article, a new quantitative analysis approach is presented, which is useful to occupational therapists in choosing among existing information and communication technologies. We define quantification indicators to be used in the analysis of a person's movements. The proposed indicators would be classified in two categories: Task indicators and adaption indicators. In the second part of the article, we present a fuzzy rehabilitation complementary module that adapts the user command without the need to adjust the interface device. The subject is a quadriplegic 12-year-old boy. The test was conducted using five attempts after a brief description and a small demonstration of the experiment. The test was rerun the second day for another five attempts. The subject could not command the joystick in the left direction without a customized device. With a customized device, he was able to control properly the mouse cursor on the screen. The adaptation technique used in this work helped the subject to properly control the computer pointing device. The evaluation technique helped assess the subject and give the proper parameters to the adaptation algorithm.

Toward a seamless adaptation platform for Internetware

Internetware applications must adapt themselves to keep their satisfaction with sufficient functionality, performance and dependability. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive technical platform to support such adaptations. Dynamic and low disruptive software updating techniques for multi-grained abstractions, namely objects, processes/workflows, components and coordinated systems, are proposed toward a seamless adaptation experience. The platform integrates all the techniques organically to support the practical adaptation scenarios that need the synergy of multiple techniques. We implement the platform in accordance with industrial standards with its feasibility and efficiency demonstrated and hope the platform can be a stepping stone for future technical research for the Internetware paradigm.

An adaptation platform for multimedia applications CSC (component, service, connector)

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present a supervised adaptation platform for applications‐based components.Design/methodology/approachThe platform is designed using a model based top‐down approach. The authors use UML diagrams and particularly scenarios and activity diagrams.FindingsThe CSC (component, service and connector) platform is based on a component/service model that allows adaptation of component‐based applications and uses service‐oriented architecture for providing adaptation services to be embedded in adaptation connectors.Originality/valueThe paper proposes CSC, a self‐adaptation platform based on MMSA, to describe software architectures for multimedia‐oriented application and providing adaptation capabilities. The platform is based on services and offer architecture, with three layers particularly adapted to adaptation of multimedia flow (types, formats, properties) and which allows solving the heterogeneity problems of components.

Advanced delivery of sensitive multimedia content for better serving user expectations in Virtual Collaboration applications

A major challenge when accessing protected multimedia content in heterogeneous usage environments is the ability to provide acceptable levels of quality of experience to all involving users. Additionally, different levels of protection should be possible to be addressed when manipulating the content towards the quality of experience maximization. This paper describes the use of a context-aware and Digital Rights Management (DRM)-enabled content adaptation platform towards meeting these challenges. The platform was conceived to deliver advanced content adaptation within different application scenarios, among which Virtual Collaboration (VC) was central. Descriptions of use cases implemented by the platform in heterogeneous VC environments are provided. Conducted experiments have highlighted the benefits to users when compared to an operation without the platform. Results of different adaptations suitable to sensed context conditions are also provided and analyzed. A brief description of the platform functionality is included together with pointers to additional information.

OneWeb: web content adaptation platform based on W3C Mobile Web Initiative guidelines

Restrictions regarding navigability and user-friendliness are the main challenges the Mobile Web faces to be accepted worldwide. W3C has recently developed the Mobile Web Initiative (MWI), a set of directives for the suitable design and presentation of mobile Web interfaces. This article presents the main features and functional modules of OneWeb, an MWI-based Web content adaptation platform developed by Mobile Devices Applications Development Interest Group’s (W@PColombia) research activities, forming part of the Universidad de Cauca’s Telematics Engineering Group. Some performance measurement results and comparison with other Web content adaptation platforms are presented. Tests have shown suitable response times for Mobile Web environments; MWI guidelines were applied to over twenty Web pages selected for testing purposes.

A similarity measure for the negotiation in web services

This paper presents a new negotiation approach integrating a similarity-based metric to measure the client's satisfaction level by quantifying the correspondence between the features required by the client and the ones proposed by the service. This negotiation process is integrated within an adaptation platform for multimedia presentations supporting different types of terminals. The negotiation and adaptation processes are based on the management of user's and service's profiles. We also propose an extension of the SIP protocol to ensure the communication between the client and the server by defining new functionalities.

Provision of the expressive multisensory adaptation platform for heterogeneous multimedia devices in the ubiquitous home

This paper presents a multimedia service platform to express multisensory media effects for heterogeneous appliances and a home server in the ubiquitous home networks. The platform is equipped with an adaptation technology to process multimedia service based on a home server. The proposed adaptation consists of a multimedia parser, analyzer, device profile gatherer, device selector and a media player. The multisensory adaptation communicates with service modules for integrating the control of various home appliances. The multimedia service supports not only multimedia contents subscriptions but also presents additional sensory effects to the high quality multimedia services for various different homes via the adaptation.