Abstract

Door and window openings are unavoidable components in RC masonry in-filled frames because of functional and ventilation requirements. The presence of openings in RC masonry in- filled frames reduces the lateral stiffness and strength of the wall, which modifies the actual behavior of structure. If these openings are located in the restricted zones like areas within middle two thirds of a wall panel, then the wall needs to be strengthened by providing necessary structural elements such as lintel or lintel bands (i.e., horizontal/vertical bands) around them. Lack of such strengthening techniques may cause the structure to undergo severe damage during the seismic excitations. In this paper, the change in response of RC masonry infilled frames due to the presence of lintels and lintel bands above the openings is studied. For studying the behavior of the frames, static non-linear pushover analysis using Applied Element Method (AEM) based analysis tool has been used.

Abstract

Buildings in urban areas and metropolitan cities are constructed very close to each other. This is because of the requirement of functional usage and high land value. Because of the insufficient gap between the adjacent buildings or adjacent units of the same buildings, they are most vulnerable for seismic damage like pounding. The adjacent land generally belongs to different land owners, where they construct the buildings for different requirements (residential, public). This leads to different dynamic properties of the adjacent buildings. During the earthquakes these may vibrate in or out-of-phase leading to damages, varying from slight architectural damages to severe structural damages. In this paper the pounding analysis is done for different cases of different building positions like buildings of same height and same floor level to buildings in row, are analyzed using SAP (2000) software package. When the two buildings are placed at different floor levels the impact force is more than buildings with the same floor levels. Also when buildings are in a row exterior building suffers more pounding damage than the interior building.

Abstract

Centre for Earthquake Engineering, Brick mamasory is one of the oldest material used for the construction of load bering

Abstract

For many, Accessibility is about disability and aiding the disabled user. We argue for a much broader definition: One that is inclusive of not only the disabled and the technologically deprived, but also the able-bodied, who may still be facing linguistic, socio-cultural, cognitive type barriers. Further, we discuss how to overcome this new broad set of barriers (which have elsewhere been called New Accessibility). Modification of original static content to new target content – a technique of Renarration – is modeled as a webpage transformation. This is operationally realized as "Sweets". Sweets are external meta data used for transformation of the web page. They are collaboratively and socially produced either by humans or human triggered Sweet based web applications. The entire web architecture featuring Sweets, their repositories and their web applications is explained and shared as a potential mechanism for overcoming New Accessibility barriers. Two web applications, Alipi and Mural Annotation for IDH, are finally showcased to highlight that Sweets based architecture does indeed help in facing the barriers of New Accessibility.

Abstract

Cross origin interactions constitute the core of today’s collaborative Word Wide Web. They are, however, also the cause of malicious behaviour like Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF), clickjacking, and cross-site timing attacks, which we collectively refer as Web Infiltration attacks. These attacks are a rampant source of information stealth and privacy intrusion on the web. Existing browser security policies like Same Origin Policy, either ignore this class of attacks or, like Content Security Policy, insufficiently deal with them. In this paper, we propose a new declarative browser security policy — “Cross Origin Request Policy” (CORP) — to mitigate such attacks. CORP enables a server to have fine-grained control on the way different sites can access resources on the server. The server declares the policy using HTTP response headers. The web browser monitors cross origin HTTP requests targeting the server and blocks those which do not comply with CORP. Based on lessons drawn from examining various types of cross origin attacks, we formulate CORP and demonstrate its effectiveness and ease of deployment. We formally verify the design of CORP by modelling it in the Alloy model checker. We also implement CORP as a browser extension for the Chrome web browser and evaluate it against real-world cross origin attacks on open source web applications. Our initial investigation reveals that most of the popular websites already segregate their resources in a way which makes deployment of CORP easier.

Abstract

Presence of information from multiple sources on the internet requires evaluating the credibility of the information, before its utilization. Researchers have suggested that internet users experience difficulty in accessing necessary information and do not pay enough attention to its credibility. We present here the design and implementation of an automated Web Credibility Assessment Support Tool (WebCAST) that considers multiple factors (type of website, popularity, sentiment, date of last update, reputation and review based on users' ratings reflecting personal experience) for assessing the credibility of information and returns a summary indication of the credibility of a website. We use Potentially All Pairwise RanKings of all possible Alternatives (PAPRIKA) method of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) to give weights to the scale values on each factor, representing the relative importance of the attributes. An empirical evaluation of the tool was conducted by computing the correlation between the tool-generated credibility scores and that of human judges. The correlation was found to be 0.89, thus verifying the validity of the tool. In the future the proposed tool can be made useful to students in their learning process of credibility assessment.

Abstract

This paper is an attempt at a vision, driven by experiences in India, of a set of research and technical challenges for software engineering researchers that stem from critical concerns of scale and variety when designing educational technologies. Educational concerns are the same everywhere. To be holistic, we have to consider points of view of all concerned stake holder groups of educational systems: they are grouped as: {students, teachers, employers, society}, {administrators}, and {managers}. The first group is concerned with the technical content to be transacted through education and its quality and value to them. It is concerned with integrity with the body of knowledge of the subject, constrained by the level at which the subject is to be taught or learnt, further constrained by the time available for a course on that subject - this is a source of variety, as do the different languages of instruction that may be used, whilst the subjects themselves and the level at which they are dealt with present a concern for scale. Further sources of variety are: the student as a novice, a beginner, an advanced student, or one revising the subject matter for the purposes of a test or an examination - the kind of student presents a source of variety, and the number of students presents a matter of scale; the teacher as an expositor, a tutor, a coach, or a mentor - the kind of teachers presents variety, whereas the number of teachers needed in the system are a matter of scale; as an employer, as the next level of an educational system, or the society as the beneficiary of education, and the student is both a product of the Educational System, as well as a consumer, the immediate beneficiary. There is lastly, the quality of the Educational System as a whole, as seen from each stakeholders point of view. This is all about technical content to be transacted in the process of educational services. In addition, we will need to look for support to administrative and managerial aspects of educational systems.

Abstract

As education and technology merge, the diversity of teaching and learning methods expand even more. Virtual labs are a set of web applications containing learning materials that compliment the various courses in an Engineering curriculum. The primary intent of the virtual labs is to provide in-lab experience to their users even when the physical lab infrastructure is not available. In this paper, we propose a method for providing access to virtual labs for all those lack internet access. Our aim is to facilitate availability and usage of Virtual Labs without network connectivity. We preinstall the virtual labs with full environment on an Operating System and also use Debian packages for easy installation of the labs on existing Operating System.

Abstract

e propose set of guidelines for virtual labs to improve end user experience based on analysis of experimental results. Virtual labs were designed and developed by people with different technical backgrounds based on their familiarity with the technologies and the complexity of virtual lab. As a result each lab developer decided to use his or her own set of tools and technologies leading to performance issues during execution of the virtual labs. Performance of a web application depends upon the content of the web page. Therefore, we did analysis on web pages of virtual lab and listed guidelines to enhance user experience.

Abstract

Cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) is one of the efficient scheme that helps in improving the spectrum sensing performance of a cognitive radio network. In this paper we propose a Dempster-Shafer theory (DST) based CSS for cognitive radio network. The fusion rule is the D-S combination rule which is well known for its ability to handle uncertainty and has been used in quite a different number of fields. Noise uncertainty, which is unavoidable in practical field, can gravely limit the detection performance of CSS. In this paper we specially investigate sensor nodes undergoing uncertainty in noise power when the detection scheme is based on energy of the received signal and use DS theory to minimize such effects. Simulation results reveal significant improvement in CSS gain as compared to previous traditional methods.