Geopolymer concrete offers a favourable alternative to conventional Portland concrete due to its reduced embodied carbon dioxide (CO2) content. Engineering properties of geopolymer concrete, such as compressive strength, are commonly characterised based on experimental practices requiring large volumes of raw materials, time for sample preparation, and costly equipment. To help address this inefficiency, this study proposes machine learning-assisted numerical methods to predict compressive strength of fly ash-based geopolymer (FAGP) concrete. Methods assessed included artificial neural network (ANN), deep neural network (DNN), and deep residual network (ResNet), based on experimentally collected data. Performance of the proposed approaches were evaluated using various statistical measures including R-squared (R2), root mean square error (RMSE), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). Sensitivity analysis was carried out to identify effects of the following six input variables on the compressive strength of FAGP concrete: sodium hydroxide/sodium silicate ratio, fly ash/aggregate ratio, alkali activator/fly ash ratio, concentration of sodium hydroxide, curing time, and temperature. Fly ash/aggregate ratio was found to significantly affect compressive strength of FAGP concrete. Results obtained indicate that the proposed approaches offer reliable methods for FAGP design and optimisation. Of note was ResNet, which demonstrated the highest R2 and lowest RMSE and MAPE values.
In recent years, the focus of healthcare and wellness technologies has shown a significant shift towards personal vital signs devices. The technology has evolved from smartphone-based wellness applications to fitness bands and smartwatches. The novelty of these devices is the accumulation of activity data as their users go about their daily life routine. However, these implementations are device specific and lack the ability to incorporate multimodal data sources. Data accumulated in their usage does not offer rich contextual information that is adequate for providing a holistic view of a user’s lifelog. As a result, making decisions and generating recommendations based on this data are single dimensional. In this paper, we present our Data Curation Framework (DCF) which is device independent and accumulates a user’s sensory data from multimodal data sources in real time. DCF curates the context of this accumulated data over the user’s lifelog. DCF provides rule-based anomaly detection over this context-rich lifelog in real time. To provide computation and persistence over the large volume of sensory data, DCF utilizes the distributed and ubiquitous environment of the cloud platform. DCF has been evaluated for its performance, correctness, ability to detect complex anomalies, and management support for a large volume of sensory data.