Accurate recognition of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) plays an important role in providing assistance and support to the elderly and cognitively impaired. Current knowledge-driven and ontology-based techniques model object concepts from assumptions and everyday common knowledge of object use for routine activities. Modelling activities from such information can lead to incorrect recognition of particular routine activities resulting in possible failure to detect abnormal activity trends. In cases where such prior knowledge are not available, such techniques become virtually unemployable. A significant step in the recognition of activities is the accurate discovery of the object usage for specific routine activities. This paper presents a hybrid framework for automatic consumption of sensor data and associating object usage to routine activities using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling. This process enables the recognition of simple activities of daily living from object usage and interactions in the home environment. The evaluation of the proposed framework on the Kasteren and Ordonez datasets show that it yields better results compared to existing techniques.

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Purpose This study aims to develop a more inclusive working definition and a formalised classification system for offsite construction to enable common basis of evaluation and communication. Offsite manufacturing (OSM) is continuously getting recognised as a way to increase efficiency and boost productivity of the construction industry in many countries. However, the knowledge of OSM varies across different countries, construction practices and individual experts thus resulting into major misconceptions. The lack of consensus of what OSM is and what constitutes its methods creates a lot of misunderstanding across Architecture Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry professionals, therefore, inhibiting a global view and understanding for multicultural collaboration. Therefore, there is a need to revisit these issues with the aim to develop a deep understanding of the concepts and ascertain what is deemed inclusive or exclusive. Design/methodology/approach A state-of-the-art review and analysis of literature on OSM was conducted to observe trends in OSM definitions and classifications. The paper identifies gaps in existing methods and proposes a future direction. Findings Findings suggest that classifications are mostly aimed towards a particular purpose and existing classification system are not robust enough to cover all aspects. Therefore, there is need to extend these classification systems to be fit for various purposes. Originality/value This paper contributes to the body of literature on offsite concepts, definition and classification, and provides knowledge on the broader context on the fundamentals of OSM.

a b s t r a c tReplication techniques are widely applied in and for cloud to improve scalability and availability. In such context, the well-understood problem is how to guarantee consistency amongst different replicas and govern the trade-off between consistency and scalability requirements. Such requirements are often related to specific services and can vary considerably in the cloud. However, a major drawback of existing service-oriented replication approaches is that they only allow either restricted consistency or none at all. Consequently, service-oriented systems based on such replication techniques may violate consistency requirements or not scale well. In this paper, we present a Scalable Service Oriented Replication (SSOR) solution, a middleware that is capable of satisfying applications' consistency requirements when replicating cloud-based services. We introduce new formalism for describing services in service-oriented replication. We propose the notion of consistency regions and relevant service oriented requirements policies, by which trading between consistency and scalability requirements can be handled within regions. We solve the associated sub-problem of atomic broadcasting by introducing a Multi-fixed Sequencers Protocol (MSP), which is a requirements aware variation of the traditional fixed sequencer approach. We also present a Region-based Election Protocol (REP) that elastically balances the workload amongst sequencers. Finally, we experimentally evaluate our approach under different loads, to show that the proposed approach achieves better scalability with more flexible consistency constraints when compared with the state-of-the-art replication technique.

Abstract-The significance of personalization towards learners' needs has recently been agreed by all web-based instructional researchers. This study presents a novel ontology semantic-based approach to design an e-learning Decision Support System (DSS) which includes major adaptive features. The ontologically modelled learner, learning domain and content are separately designed to support personalized adaptive learning. The proposed system utilise captured learners' models during the registration phase to determine learners' characteristics. The system also tracks learner's activities and tests during the learning process. Test results are analysed according to the Item Response Theory in order to calculate learner's abilities. The learner model is updated based on the results of test and learner's abilities for use in the adaptation process. Updated learner models are used to generate different learning paths for individual learners. In this study, the proposed system is implemented on the "Fraction topic" of the mathematics domain. Experimental test results indicated that the proposed system improved learning effectiveness and learner's satisfaction, particularly in its adaptive capabilities.