The maritime industry is under pressure to increase energy efficiency for climate change mitigation. Navigational data, combining vessel operational and environmental measurements from onboard instruments and external sources, are critical for achieving this goal. Short-sea shipping presents a unique challenge due to the significant influence of surrounding landscape characteristics. With high-resolution onboard data increasingly accessible through IoT devices, appropriate data representations and AI/ML analytical tools are needed for effective decision support. The aim of this study is to investigate the fuel consumption estimation model’s role in developing an energy efficiency decision support tool. ML models that lacking explainability may neglect important factors and essential constraints, such as the need to meet arrival time requirements. Onboard weather measurements are compared to external forecasts, and our findings demonstrate the necessity of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques for effective decision support. Real-world data from a short-sea passenger vessel in southern Sweden, consisting of 1754 voyages over 15 months (More of data description and code sources of this study can be found in the GitHub repository at https://github.com/MohamedAbuella/ST4EESSS), are used to support our conclusions.

Deep learning and Computer vision are becoming a part of everyday objects and machines. Involvement of artificial intelligence in human’s daily life open doors to new opportunities and research. This involvement provides the idea of improving upon the in-hand research of spatial relations and coming up with a more generic and robust algorithm that provides us with 2-D and 3-D spatial relations and uses RGB and RGB-D images which can help us with few complex relations such as ‘on’ or ‘in’ as well. Suggested methods are tested on the dataset with animated and real objects, where the number of objects varies in every image from at least 4 to at most 10 objects. The size and orientation of objects are also different in every image.  

Survival Analysis models usually output functions (survival or hazard functions) rather than point predictions like regression and classification models. This makes the explanations of such models a challenging task, especially using the Shapley values. We propose SurvSHAP, a new model-agnostic algorithm to explain survival models that predict survival curves. The algorithm is based on discovering patterns in the predicted survival curves, the output of the survival model, that would identify significantly different survival behaviors, and utilizing a proxy model and SHAP method to explain these distinct survival behaviors. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the SurvSHAP is able to capture the underlying factors of the survival patterns. Moreover, SurvSHAP results on the Cox Proportional Hazard model are compared with the weights of the model to show that we provide faithful overall explanations, with more fine-grained explanations of the sub-populations. We also illustrate the wrong model and explanations learned by a Cox model when applied to heterogeneous sub-populations. We show that a non-linear machine learning survival model with SurvSHAP can better model the data and provide better explanations than linear models.

Time-To-Event (TTE) modeling using survival analysis in industrial settings faces the challenge of premature replacements of machine components, which leads to bias and errors in survival prediction. Typically, TTE survival data contains information about components and if they had failed or not up to a certain time. For failed components, the time is noted, and a failure is referred to as an event. A component that has not failed is denoted as censored. In industrial settings, in contrast to medical settings, there can be considerable uncertainty in an event; a component can be replaced before it fails to prevent operation stops or because maintenance staff believe that the component is faulty. This shows up as “no fault found” in warranty studies, where a significant proportion of replaced components may appear fault-free when tested or inspected after replacement.

In this work, we propose an expectation-maximization-like method for discovering such premature replacements in survival data. The method is a two-phase iterative algorithm employing a genetic algorithm in the maximization phase to learn better event assignments on a validation set. The learned labels through iterations are accumulated and averaged to be used to initialize the following expectation phase. The assumption is that the more often the event is selected, the more likely it is to be an actual failure and not a “no fault found”.

Experiments on synthesized and simulated data show that the proposed method can correctly detect a significant percentage of premature replacement cases.

There is a major ongoing transition from utilizing fossil fuel to electricity in buses for enabling a more sustainable, environmentally friendly, and connected transportation ecosystem. Batteries are expensive, up to 30% of the total cost for the vehicle (A. Fotouhi 2016), and considered safety-critical components for electric vehicles (EV). As they deteriorate over time, monitoring the health status and performing the maintenance accordingly in a proactive manner is crucial to achieving not only a safe and sustainable transportation system but also a cost-effective operation and thus a greater market satisfaction. As a widely used indicator, the State of Health (SOH) is a measurement that reflects the current capability of the battery in comparison to an ideal condition. Accurate estimation of SOH is important to evaluate the validity of the batteries for the intended application and can be utilized as a proxy to estimate the remaining useful life (RUL) and predict the end-of-life (EOL) of batteries for maintenance planning. The SOH is computed via an on-board computing device, i.e. battery management unit (BMU), which is commonly developed based on controlled experiments and many of them are physical-model based approaches that only depend on the internal parameters of the battery (B. Pattipati 2008; M. H. Lipu 2018). However, the deterioration processes of batteries in hybrid and full-electric buses depend not only on the designing parameters but also on the operating environment and usage patterns of the vehicle. Therefore, utilizing multiple data sources to estimate the health status and EOL of the batteries is of potential internet. In this study, a data-driven prognostic method is developed to estimate SOH and predict EOL for batteries in heterogeneous fleets of hybrid buses, using various types of data sources, e.g. physical configuration of the vehicle, deployment information, on-board sensor readings, and diagnostic fault codes. A set of new features was generated from the existing sensor readings by inducing artificial resets on each battery replacement. A neural network-based regression model achieved accurate estimates of battery SOH status. Another network was used to indicate the EOL of batteries and the result was evaluated using battery replacement based on the current maintenance strategy. © ESREL2020-PSAM15 Organizers. Published by Research Publishing, Singapore.

Recently and due to the advances in sensor technology and Internet-of-Things, the operation of machinery can be monitored, using a higher number of sources and modalities. In this study, we demonstrate that Multi-Modal Translation is capable of transferring knowledge from a modality with higher level of applicability (more usefulness to solve an specific task) but lower level of accessibility (how easy and affordable it is to collect information from this modality) to another one with higher level of accessibility but lower level of applicability. Unlike the fusion of multiple modalities which requires all of the modalities to be available during the deployment stage, our proposed method depends only on the more accessible one; which results in the reduction of the costs regarding instrumentation equipment. The presented case study demonstrates that by the employment of the proposed method we are capable of replacing five acceleration sensors with three current sensors, while the classification accuracy is also increased by more than 1%.

One of the biggest challenges in machine learning is data collection. Training data is an important part since it determines how the model will behave. In object classification, capturing a large number of images per object and in different conditions is not always possible and can be very time-consuming and tedious. Accordingly, this work explores the creation of artificial images using a game engine to cope with limited data in the training dataset. We combine real and synthetic data to train the object classification engine, a strategy that has shown to be beneficial to increase confidence in the decisions made by the classifier, which is often critical in industrial setups. To combine real and synthetic data, we first train the classifier on a massive amount of synthetic data, and then we fine-tune it on real images. Another important result is that the amount of real images needed for fine-tuning is not very high, reaching top accuracy with just 12 or 24 images per class. This substantially reduces the requirements of capturing a great amount of real data. © 2023 by SCITEPRESS-Science and Technology Publications, Lda.

The performance versus interpretability trade-off has been well-established in the literature for many years in the context of machine learning models. This paper demonstrates its twin, namely the data-centric performance versus interpretability trade-off. In a case study of bearing fault diagnosis, we found that substituting the original acceleration signal with a demodulated version offers a higher level of interpretability, but it comes at the cost of significantly lower classification performance. We demonstrate these results on two different datasets and across four different machine learning algorithms. Our results suggest that “there is no free lunch,” i.e., the contradictory relationship between interpretability and performance should be considered earlier in the analysis process than it is typically done in the literature today; in other words, already in the preprocessing and feature extraction step. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

This thesis presents a comparison of a GPU implementation of the Conjugate Residual method as a sequence of generic library kernels against implementations ofthe method with custom kernels to expose the performance gains of a keyoptimization strategy, kernel fusion, for memory-bound operations which is to makeefficient reuse of the processed data.

For massive MIMO the iterative solver is to be employed at the linear detection stageto overcome the computational bottleneck of the matrix inversion required in theequalization process, which is 𝒪(𝑛3) for direct solvers. A detailed analysis of howone more of the Krylov subspace methods that is feasible for massive MIMO can beimplemented on a GPU as a unified kernel is given.

Further, to show that kernel fusion can improve the execution performance not onlywhen the input data is large matrices-vectors as in scientific computing but also inthe case of massive MIMO and possibly similar cases where the input data is a largenumber of small matrices-vectors that must be processed in parallel.In more details, focusing on the small number of iterations required for the solver toachieve a close enough approximation of the exact solution in the case of massiveMIMO, and the case where the number of users matches the size of a warp, twodifferent approaches that allow to fully unroll the algorithm and gradually fuse allthe separate kernels into a single, until reaching a top-down hardcodedimplementation are proposed and tested.

Targeting to overcome the algorithms computational burden which is the matrixvector product, further optimization techniques such as two ways to utilize the faston-chip memories, preloading the matrix in shared memory and preloading thevector in shared memory, are tested and proposed to achieve high efficiency andhigh parallelism.

Due to migration, terror-threats and the viral pandemic, various EU member states have re-established internal border control or even closed their borders. European Association for Biometrics (EAB), a non-profit organisation, solicited the views of its members on ways which biometric technologies and services may be used to help with re-establishing open borders within the Schengen area while at the same time mitigating any adverse effects. From the responses received, this position paper was composed to identify ideas to re-establish free travel between the member states in the Schengen area. The paper covers the contending needs for security, open borders and fundamental rights as well as legal constraints that any technological solution must consider. A range of specific technologies for direct biometric recognition alongside complementary measures are outlined. The interrelated issues of ethical and societal considerations are also highlighted. Provided a holistic approach is adopted, it may be possible to reach a more optimal trade-off with regards to open borders while maintaining a high-level of security and protection of fundamental rights. European Association for Biometrics and its members can play an important role in fostering a shared understanding of security and mobility challenges and their solutions. © 2023 The Authors. IET Biometrics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The Institution of Engineering and Technology.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides the opportunity to analyze complex transportation domains from various perspectives. Sustainability is one of the important transportation factors vital for a robust, fair, and efficient living environment and the livability of a city. This article leverages different feature engineering techniques on the New York City mobility dataset to identify the significant sustainability factors and employ the k-means clustering technique to cluster the commuters based on their transportation modes and demographics. Cluster analysis is performed based on the specified features and sustainable mode of transportation. Our cluster analysis of commuters on the New York City dataset shows that demographic information such as gender or race does not influence the sustainable mode of transportation, while the "start location"of travellers and their car access are influencing factors on sustainability. © 2022 IEEE.

We introduce an LSTM-based method for predicting compressor failures using aggregated sensory data, and evaluate it using historical information from over 1000 heavy duty vehicles during 2015 and 2016. The goal is to proactively identify trucks that will require maintenance in the near future, so that component replacement can be scheduled before the failure happens, translating into improved uptime. The problem is formulated as a classification task of whether a compressor failure will happen within the specified prediction horizon. A recurrent neural network using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architecture is employed as the prediction model, and compared against Random Forest (RF), the solution used in industrial deployment at the moment. Experimental results show that while Random Forest slightly outperforms LSTM in terms of AUC score, the predictions of LSTM stay significantly more stable over time, showing a consistent trend from healthy to faulty class. Additionally, LSTM is also better at detecting the switch from faulty class to the healthy one after a repair. We demonstrate that this stability is important for making repair decisions, especially in questionable cases, and therefore LSTM model is likely to lead to better results in practice. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Machine activity recognition is important for accurately esti- mating machine productivity and machine maintenance needs. In this paper, we present ongoing work on how to recognize activities of forklift trucks from on-board data streaming on the controller area network. We show that such recognition works across different sites. We first demon- strate the baseline classification performance of a Random Forest that uses 14 signals over 20 time steps, for a 280-dimensional input. Next, we show how a deep neural network can learn low-dimensional representa- tions that, with fine-tuning, achieve comparable accuracy. The proposed representation achieves machine activity recognition. Also, it visualizes the forklift operation over time and illustrates the relationships across different activities. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

We propose a new sequential decision-making setting, combining key aspects of two established online learning problems with bandit feedback. The optimal action to play at any given moment is contingent on an underlying changing state which is not directly observable by the agent. Each state is associated with a context distribution, possibly corrupted, allowing the agent to identify the state. Furthermore, states evolve in a Markovian fashion, providing useful information to estimate the current state via state history. In the proposed problem setting, we tackle the challenge of deciding on which of the two sources of information the agent should base its arm selection. We present an algorithm that uses a referee to dynamically combine the policies of a contextual bandit and a multi-armed bandit. We capture the time-correlation of states through iteratively learning the action-reward transition model, allowing for efficient exploration of actions. Our setting is motivated by adaptive mobile health (mHealth) interventions. Users transition through different, time-correlated, but only partially observable internal states, determining their current needs. The side information associated with each internal state might not always be reliable, and standard approaches solely rely on the context risk of incurring high regret. Similarly, some users might exhibit weaker correlations between subsequent states, leading to approaches that solely rely on state transitions risking the same. We analyze our setting and algorithm in terms of regret lower bound and upper bounds and evaluate our method on simulated medication adherence intervention data and several real-world data sets, showing improved empirical performance compared to several popular algorithms. 

Workplace injuries are common in today’s society due to a lack of adequately worn safety equipment. A system that only admits appropriately equipped personnel can be created to improve working conditions. The goal is thus to develop a system that will improve workers’ safety using a camera that will detect the usage of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). To this end, we collected and labeled appropriate data from several public sources, which have been used to train and evaluate several models based on the popular YOLOv4 object detector. Our focus, driven by a collaborating industrial partner, is to implement our system into an entry control point where workers must present themselves to obtain access to a restricted area. Combined with facial identity recognition, the system would ensure that only authorized people wearing appropriate equipment are granted access. A novelty of this work is that we increase the number of classes to five objects (hardhat, safety vest, safety gloves, safety glasses, and hearing protection), whereas most existing works only focus on one or two classes, usually hardhats or vests. The AI model developed provides good detection accuracy at a distance of 3 and 5 meters in the collaborative environment where we aim at operating (mAP of 99/89%, respectively). The small size of some objects or the potential occlusion by body parts have been identified as potential factors that are detrimental to accuracy, which we have counteracted via data augmentation and cropping of the body before applying PPE detection. © 2023 by SCITEPRESS-Science and Technology Publications, Lda.

The new advances in Vehicular Systems and Technologies have resulted in a sheer increase in the number of connected vehicles. These connected vehicles use IoT technologies to communicate operational signals with the OEMs, such as the vehicle’s speed, torque, temperature, load, RPM, etc. These signals have provided an unprecedented opportunity to adaptively monitor the status of each piece of the vehicle’s equipment and discover any possible risk of failure before it happens. This emerging field of study is called predictive maintenance (also known as condition-based maintenance) and has recently received much attention. In this paper, we apply Integrated Gradients (IG), an XAI method until now primarily used on image data, on datasets containing tabular and time-series data in the domain of predictive maintenance of trucks’ turbochargers. We evaluate how the results of IG differ, in these new settings, for various types of models. In particular, we investigate how the change of baseline can affect the outcome. Experimental results verify that IG can be applied successfully to both sequenced and non-sequenced data. Contrary to the opinion common in the literature, the gradient baseline does not affect the results of IG significantly, especially on models such as RNN, LSTM, and GRU, where the data contains time series; the effect is more visible for models like MLP with non-sequenced data. To confirm these findings, and to understand them deeper, we have also applied IG to SVM models, which gave the results that the choice of gradient baseline has a significant impact on the performance of SVM. (c) IARIA, 2023

This research is an interdisciplinary work between data scientists, innovation management researchers, and experts from a Swedish hygiene and health company. Based on this collaboration, we have developed a novel package for automatic idea detection to control and prevent healthcare-associated infections (HAI). The principal idea of this study is to use machine learning methods to extract informative ideas from social media to assist healthcare professionals in reducing the rate of HAI. Therefore, the proposed package offers a corpus of data collected from Twitter, associated expert-created labels, and software implementation of an annotation framework based on the Active Learning paradigm. We employed Transfer Learning and built a two-step deep neural network model that incrementally extracts the semantic representation of the collected text data using the BERTweet language model in the first step and classifies these representations as informative or non-informative using a multi-layer perception (MLP) in the second step. The package is AID4HAI (Automatic Idea Detection for controlling and preventing Healthcare-Associated Infections) and is made fully available (software code and the collected data) through a public GitHub repository (https://github.com/XaraKar/AID4HAI). We believe that sharing our ideas and releasing these ready-to-use tools contributes to the development of the field and inspires future research.

As an important branch of machine learning, deep learning (DL) models with multiple hidden layer structures have the ability to extract highly representative features from the input. At present, fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) and health monitoring solutions developed based on DL models have received extensive attention in academia and industry along with the rapid improvement of computing power. Therefore, this paper focuses on a comprehensive review of DL model–based FDD and health monitoring schemes in view of common problems of industrial systems. First, brief theoretical backgrounds of basic DL models are introduced. Then, related publications are discussed about the development of DL and graphical models in the industrial context. Afterwards, public data sets are summarized, which are associated with several research papers. More importantly, suggestions on DL model–based diagnosis and health monitoring solutions and future developments are given. Our work will have a positive impact on the selection and design of FDD solutions based on DL and graphical models in the future. © The Author(s) 2023.

The district heating (DH) industry is facing an important transformation towards more efficient networks that utilise significantly lower water temperatures to distribute the heat. This change requires taking advantage of new technologies, and Machine Learning (ML) is a popular direction. In the last decade, we have witnessed an extreme growth in the number of published research papers that focus on applying ML techniques to the DH domain. However, based on our experience in the field, and an extensive review of the state-of-the-art, we perceive a mismatch between the most popular research directions, such as forecasting, and the challenges faced by the DH industry. In this work, we present our findings, explain and demonstrate the key gaps between the two communities and suggest a road-map ahead towards increasing the impact of ML research in the DH industry. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

The discrepancy in the distribution of source and target domains is usually referred to as a domain shift. It is one of the reasons for the inferior performance of machine learning solutions at deployment. We illustrate that the domain shift issue is pertinent to the readings of the vehicles’ operational sensors. This is due to the fact that these measurements are collected over a period of time and are susceptible to various changes that happen in the meantime. Examples of these changes are usage pattern variations, aging of the vehicles, seasonal shifts, and driver changes. However, domain adversarial neural networks (DANN) have shown promising results to reduce the negative impact of the domain shift. The present study investigates domain adaptation (DA) in the predictive maintenance field by estimating the remaining useful life (RUL) of turbochargers. The devices are operating on a fleet of VOLVO trucks, and the information about their services is collected over four years between 2016 and 2019. The input features to the model are a set of bi-weekly collected measurements called logged vehicle data (LVD). The contributions of this paper are two-fold. First, we propose a new approach for detecting domain (covariate) shift using an autoencoder. Second, we adapt domain adversarial neural networks to the specific application of predicting turbocharger failures. Finally, we deploy a recurrent feature extraction layer in the DANN architecture to incorporate temporal aspect of the data. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the traditional approach.

Knowledge graphs have proven themselves as a robust tool in clinical applications to aid patient care and help identify treatments for new diseases. They have impacted many information retrieval systems in healthcare. In this study, we construct a disease knowledge graph using Neo4j (a knowledge graph tool) for a disease database to answer complex questions that are time-consuming and labour-intensive to be answered in the previous system. We demonstrate that new information can be inferred in a knowledge graph based on existing semantic relationships between the medical concepts and the ability to perform reasoning in the knowledge graph.

Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is a relatively new domain where new types of knowledge systems have recently emerged. It combines various modes of transportation and different kinds of data to present personalized services to travellers based on transport needs. A knowledge-based framework based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) is proposed in this paper to integrate, analyze, and process different types of mobility data. The framework includes a knowledge acquisition process to extract and structure data from various sources, including mobility experts and add new information to a knowledge base. The role of AI in this framework is to aid in automatically discovering knowledge from various data sets and recommend efficient and personalized mobility services with explanations. A scenario is also presented to demonstrate the interaction of the proposed framework’s modules.

Mobility as a Service (MaaS) combines various modes of transportation to present mobility services to travellers based on their transport needs. This paper proposes a knowledge-based framework based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to integrate various mobility data types and provide travellers with customized services. The proposed framework includes a knowledge acquisition process to extract and structure data from multiple sources of information (such as mobility experts and weather data). It also adds new information to a knowledge base and improves the quality of previously acquired knowledge. We discuss how AI can help discover knowledge from various data sources and recommend sustainable and personalized mobility services with explanations. The proposed knowledge-based AI framework is implemented using a synthetic dataset as a proof of concept. Combining different information sources to generate valuable knowledge is identified as one of the challenges in this study. Finally, explanations of the proposed decisions provide a criterion for evaluating and understanding the proposed knowledge-based AI framework. © 2023 by the authors.

In this work, we present a new single-stage method for subject agnostic face swapping and identity transfer, named FaceDancer. We have two major contributions: Adaptive Feature Fusion Attention (AFFA) and Interpreted Feature Similarity Regularization (IFSR). The AFFA module is embedded in the decoder and adaptively learns to fuse attribute features and features conditioned on identity information without requiring any additional facial segmentation process. In IFSR, we leverage the intermediate features in an identity encoder to preserve important attributes such as head pose, facial expression, lighting, and occlusion in the target face, while still transferring the identity of the source face with high fidelity. We conduct extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on various datasets and show that the proposed FaceDancer outperforms other state-of-the-art networks in terms of identityn transfer, while having significantly better pose preservation than most of the previous methods. © 2023 IEEE.

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been shown to predict poverty and development indicators from satellite images with surprising accuracy. This paper presents a first attempt at analyzing the CNNs responses in detail and explaining the basis for the predictions. The CNN model, while trained on relatively low resolution day- and night-time satellite images, is able to outperform human subjects who look at high-resolution images in ranking the Wealth Index categories. Multiple explainability experiments performed on the model indicate the importance of the sizes of the objects, pixel colors in the image, and provide a visualization of the importance of different structures in input images. A visualization is also provided of type images that maximize the network prediction of Wealth Index, which provides clues on what the CNN prediction is based on.

In urban settings, the prevalence of traffic lights often leads to fluctuations in traffic patterns and increased energy utilization among vehicles. Recognizing this challenge, this research addresses the adverse effects of traffic lights on the energy efficiency of electric vehicles (EVs) through the introduction of a Multi-Intersections-Based Eco-Approach and Departure strategy (M-EAD). This innovative strategy is designed to enhance various aspects of urban mobility, including vehicle energy efficiency, traffic flow optimization, and battery longevity, all while ensuring a satisfactory driving experience. The M-EAD strategy unfolds in two distinct stages: First, it optimizes eco-friendly green signal windows at traffic lights, with a primary focus on minimizing travel delays by solving the shortest path problem. Subsequently, it employs a receding horizon framework and leverages an iterative dynamic programming algorithm to refine speed trajectories. The overarching objective is to curtail energy consumption and reduce battery wear by identifying the optimal speed trajectory for EVs in urban environments. Furthermore, the research substantiates the real-world efficacy of this approach through on-road vehicle tests, attesting to its viability and practicality in actual road scenarios. In the proposed case, the simulation results showcase notable achievements, with energy consumption reduced by 0.92% and battery wear minimized to a mere 0.0017%. This research, driven by the pressing issue of urban traffic energy efficiency, not only presents a solution in the form of the M-EAD strategy but also contributes to the fields of sustainable urban mobility and EV performance optimization. By tackling the challenges posed by traffic lights, this work offers valuable insights and practical implications for improving the sustainability and efficiency of urban transportation systems. © 2023 by the authors.

Fires have destructive power when they break out and affect their surroundings on a devastatingly large scale. The best way to minimize their damage is to detect the fire as quickly as possible before it has a chance to grow. Accordingly, this work looks into the potential of AI to detect and recognize fires and reduce detection time using object detection on an image stream. Object detection has made giant leaps in speed and accuracy over the last six years, making real-time detection feasible. To our end, we collected and labeled appropriate data from several public sources, which have been used to train and evaluate several models based on the popular YOLOv4 object detector. Our focus, driven by a collaborating industrial partner, is to implement our system in an industrial warehouse setting, which is characterized by high ceilings. A drawback of traditional smoke detectors in this setup is that the smoke has to rise to a sufficient height. The AI models brought forward in this research managed to outperform these detectors by a significant amount of time, providing precious anticipation that could help to minimize the effects of fires further.