Chemical fingerprinting of volatile organic compounds from asphalt binder for quantitative detection

Asphalt material is an irreplaceable material in road construction. However, it releases VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds), which do cause pollution to the surrounding environment, during its full life cycle, especially in high-temperature paving stage and summer service time. Asphalt VOCs release mechanism and effective emission reduction...

Timing is everything: Analysis and synthesis of traffic patterns in event-triggered control

Event-triggered control (ETC) and self-triggered control (STC) are sample-and-hold control paradigms in which sensor data is only updated to the controller when necessary, often aperiodically, in contrast to the well-established periodic sampling paradigm. In ETC, a state-dependent event triggers a transmission, while in STC the controller...

Airport Market Share Forecasting in Multi Airport Regions

Urbanization is a worldwide trend that drives an immense increase in air traffic demand. The worldwide aviation network makes global business possible which generates economic growth, creates jobs and facilitates international tourism and trade. Many of the world's transport hubs like The Greater London Area have allocated this demand over...

Effectiveness of Doctoral Defense Preparation Methods

The doctoral defense is an important step towards obtaining the doctoral degree, and preparation is necessary. In this work, I explore the relation between the way in which a doctoral candidate prepares for the defense and two important aspects of the defense: the outcome of the defense, and the student perception during and after the defense. I...

Challenges and Opportunities for Academic Parents During COVID-19

Parents in academic careers face notable challenges that may go unrecognized by university management and/or policy makers. The COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on some of these challenges, as academic parents shifted to working from home while simultaneously caring for children. On the other hand, many parents found that the shift to working...

Quantitative three-dimensional evaluation of ablation margins for the prediction of local tumor progression

<b>Introduction</b> The objective of this research is to assess whether there is a correlation between quantitatively assessed ablation margins and the occurrence of local tumor progression (LTP) using dedicated image processing software.<br/><b>Methods</b> 28 patients with 45 de novo HCCs treated with percutaneous thermal ablation, e.g....

Conversation Quality: Modeling in Free-Standing Conversational Groups

Social interactions in general are multifaceted and there exists an wide set of factors and events that influence them. Hence, interactions as a social phenomena have been studied by researchers in the fields of psychology and social signal processing from different stand points. The common trend in literature is to perform an in-depth study on...

Quantifying flood damage: A case-study in Kumasi, Ghana

In this research, the flood damage caused by heavy rain and plastic blockage in the neighbourhood of Atonsu, Kumasi is quantified. Rapid urbanisation and poor waste management result in floods with an increasing impact in Kumasi, the fastest growing city of Ghana. This rapid growth of the city results in uncontrolled urbanisation of the...

Investigating Target Selection and Financial Impact of Service Fraud: An empirical research into criminal activities on underground markets and their implications for businesses

A portion of the digital fraud occurring on the dark web comprises the illegal exchange of vouchers, coupons, and stolen accounts, defined in this research as service fraud. Despite its existence, this type of fraud had not been previously explored. This thesis employs a quantitative approach to examine which company characteristics influence...

The Role of Consumers’ Knowledge in Battery Electric Vehicle Diffusion: A Study of the Norwegian Battery Electric Vehicle Advancement Through Structural Equation Modelling

Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are considered an important contribution to the global task of creating a greener society as it allows for the benefits of commuting to sustain, without the consequence of pollution. Consequently, central and local governments across the globe are attempting to spark the diffusion of BEVs through various measures...

Comparing Quantitative Metrics for Generative Adversarial Neural Networks

Since their conception in 2014, a large number of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) [2] has been pro- posed and developed. GANs have achieved great results in realistic image generation, among other fields. Recently, stunning images have been produced. The theory and application of GANs has received much attention. However, the evaluation...

Study for a Quantitative Risk Assessment on Accidental Actions

Lately structural safety is an often discussed subject in The Netherlands. Recent collapses have made people question if our buildings are actually safe enough. Research shows that the individual probability of death due to structural failure is below the limit of 10-5 per year. However, it is unknown if every single building is safe enough as...

Who is next?: Identifying characteristics of European banks that are key in influencing the target selection of banking malware.

The European financial sector is a frequent victim of banking malware leading to massive losses. It appears that not all customers’ banks are equally attractive targets among cybercriminals who deploy banking malware. This research established a comprehensive regression model explaining why certain banks are more attractive to cybercriminals....

Quantitative flood risk analysis of road infrastructures (Publishable version): A case study considering Climate change effect

This thesis adopt existing methodologies for flood-risk assessment in other civil infrastructure (such as dams or urban flooding) and apply them in road type infrastructure in order to quantitatively assess flood vulnerability and risk in project locations where historical closure data is not available and the complex global network-approach...

Damen Yard Performance: The performance of Damen yards compared to the industry and direct competing shipyards

This research goes into detail about a quantitative performance analysis of a shipyard. This analysis is based on publically available information. The goal is to define the performance of a shipyard and thereby define the place of a shipyard in the market. Differences in performance can be used as learning and developing opportunities.

Advanced electron crystallography through model-based imaging

The increasing need for precise determination of the atomic arrangement of non-periodic structures in materials design and the control of nanostructures explains the growing interest in quantitative transmission electron microscopy. The aim is to extract precise and accurate numbers for unknown structure parameters including atomic positions,...

Why them? Extracting intelligence about target selection from Zeus financial malware

A quantitative analysis of hydrogen-induced cracking

Internal hydrogen embrittlement, stress corrosion cracking and external hydrogen embrittlement of high strength steel are analysed. They are found to have lattice decohesion as a common source.