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The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of media and journalists in uncovering of corruption cases in Hungary. How does the Hungarian media deal with corruption cases and how do the structure of political polarization and ownership structure of Hungarian media influence this special activity of journalists? The paper consists of two parts describing the relation between the corruption and media in Hungary from two perspectives. In the first section we present four particular Hungarian corruption cases by briefly describing their background and analysing thoroughly the role of media in the outbreak of these scandals. The cases were selected in order to be able to explain the function of the Hungarian press, especially its investigative departments. The second part of the study focuses on the general nature of the Hungarian press with special emphasis on investigative journalism. The aim of this chapter is to provide insights into the Hungarian media market and its influencing factors. The cases of the first section are often quoted to make the findings more illustrative. At the end of the paper we summarize the main lessons from this analysis. The study is based on eight semi-structured interviews with leading investigative journalists and one with a media expert in Hungary. The results of the fieldwork were processed anonymously; the conversations were not recorded. We subsequently analysed the articles and documents using the Google and other applications and databases3 related to the topic. The findings related to people, organizations or news outlets that are based on publicly available sources are indicated in the footnotes.

In the following analysis we deal with only specific corruption cases within our seven-country sample for content analysis (France, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Romania, Slovakia, and the UK). Only 5,212 relevant articles dealt with such cases within the total sample (12,742). We focus here on providing a descriptive comparative analysis of the actors, types of transactions and country specifics. The second part of the analysis describes the actors involved in the corrupt transactions, while in the third section we deal with the object of exchange in corrupt transactions. The fourth section focuses on the type of transaction which is linked to the corruption. Finally, a summary of the results of our preliminary findings is provided.

Coverage of corruption in the Hungarian media was analysed for four online news portals, Magyar Nemzet Online (short name: MNO, web: mno.hu), Népszava (web: nepszava.hu) and Heti Világgazdaság (web: hvg.hu) and Origo (web: origo.hu). The first three have both online and printed versions. MNO is considered a centre-right elite/general portal, HVG may be considered a center-left, economics-focused newspaper, while Népszava is a centre-left elite/general medium. Origo does not have a precise political affiliation; it is considered here a neutral, tabloid-like portal due to its variety of entertainment-focused content, but it has a more professional journalistic style than most tabloids, especially in the case of political (domestic and international) articles. In the following section we describe the news portals separately, but refer to the typologies by political affiliation and by media typology.

In this paper we use the Hungarian Central Statistical Office's Labour Force Survey to examine the rate of Hungarian inhabitants working abroad between 1999 and 2011. We also examine the characteristics of this group. A break in trend can be observed in the fourth quarter of 2009 in the rate of Hungarians with a foreign workplace. The growth of the rate has accelerated since then. Working abroad - including commuting between countries - is more frequent in the group of men and in the age group between 20 and 30 years. Considering education, vocational school and university degree make working abroad the most likely but this effect does not apply the same way in different geographical regions. In more developed regions the effect of education is stronger and the odds of working abroad are the highest for people with university degree. In less developed regions vocational training increases the most the odds of working in another country. The effect of age also differs: while in less developed regions being above the age of 40 decreases significantly the odds of working abroad, in developed regions this effect does not apply.

In May 2018, the UK Government published an independent review of building regulations and fire safety in response to the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower. The Hackitt Review identified the need for traceability; a ‘golden thread’ preserving critical information about design intent and the as-constructed building in a proposed Digital Record (DR). This study proposes a framework for a DR for traceability of all built assets, new and existing. Three structured workshops including four working groups were held with industry practitioners and academics to collaboratively establish definitions of traceability and a DR. The key requirements of the DR were identified through development of 63 use cases. Building on traceability systems research in other industries, a framework for traceability of built assets was developed and analysed with industry. The framework, containing both information chains, supply chains and unique identification of traceable items, is outlined in this paper and its key components are discussed along with identification of areas for further research.

The way in which construction projects are managed has not changed significantly in the last decades; however, stakeholders, materials, competition, and user requirements are continuously changing. This creates a gap between the current managerial view on how construction projects are conducted and how they could be managed to increase efficiency. The construction industry could use new frameworks for action in the project and product management, and learn from the experiences of other industries. With this background in mind, some construction companies are enhancing the performance of their project teams to improve their competitiveness and increase the added value to their clients and themselves. This paper investigates the implementation of a framework from the IT sector into the construction industry: Scrum. Conducting a case study, the implementation and application of Scrum was analysed through the evaluation of its different artifacts. This research covers the following questions: Can Scrum be implemented in the design phase of the construction industry? What adaptations are needed to use Scrum to improve the design phase of construction projects? How and where could Scrum, or parts of it, be used by the design and planning departments of construction companies? The results from this study show that Scrum has great potential in the design and planning departments of construction firms. From the analysis of the applications of Scrum in the case study, tangible benefits and weaknesses of the implementation, and its different artifacts, were identified. Finally, this paper gives recommendations about the use of Scrum in the design phase and proposes an outlook to implement Scrum in other phases of construction projects., Procedia Engineering, 164, Selected papers from Creative Construction Conference 2016

Despite the fact that the value of extending Building Information Modeling (BIM) implementation through the operations and maintenance phase is simply to reduce the operations and maintenance costs associated with inadequate interoperability, facilities management information flow is neither automated nor seamless. Facility managers do not normally use BIM models data, since they claim that BIM models either do not include their information requirements, or contain a huge amount of superfluous data which makes the data exchange process tedious and overwhelming. Construction Operations Building information exchange (COBie) is developed to improve the facility data handover and to support facilities management systems. However, COBie add-in existing applications have their inherent limitation to generate all facilities management required data, particularly spare, resource and job data sheets, in which a manual data entry is still required. Through a series of interviews with industry practitioners, this paper analyses current data exchange practices as well as proposed a conceptual interoperability framework for seamless data exchange between BIM models and facilities management systems. A proposed database information system that automatically generates a rich COBie spreadsheet by linking BIM data models via the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) model to facilities management information provided by various sources. The proposed framework supplements the existing body of knowledge in facilities management domain by providing a system that facilitates seamless data transfer between BIM and facilities management systems. Facilities management organisations and owners can use this approach to decrease the redundant activity of manual data entry and focus their efforts on productive maintenance activities.

Case-based reasoning (CBR) is a methodology that is seeing increasing use to make predictions during the early phases of a project. It allows estimators to exploit existing knowledge to make predictions that are considerably better than without its use. All CBR, however, is not identical, and variations in how CBR is done can affect the accuracy of the predictions. One particular area of sensitivity is the retrieval phase, i.e. the way in which the CBR determines the closeness between the new and the existing cases. In this paper, CBR is used to make estimates of resources for construction projects, and the use of the nearest neighbor technique to identify the similarity for the retrieval phase to predict the construction material quantities (CMQs) in concrete structures is investigated. Two types of distances, i.e. 1) the City-block distance and 2) the Euclidean distance, and four different types of weights, based on regression analysis and feature counting, to account for the relative importance of the different parameters, are investigated. The four different types of weights used were 1) the adjusted unstandardized coefficients from the regression models, 2) the unadjusted unstandardized coefficients from the regression models, 3) the standardized coefficients from the regression models, and 4) equal weights (i.e., feature counting), in which the weights applied are 1/k, and k is the number of parameter being compared to determine the distance. The mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) was used to evaluate each combination investigated. It was found that for a similarity threshold of 90%, the CBR methodology using the City-block distance with the adjusted unstandardized coefficients from the regression analysis models using the transformed (LN) dataset as weights, gave the best results, with a MAPE of 8.16%. The worst results were obtained from the CBR methodology using the Euclidean distance with feature counting weights, with a MAPE of 28.40%., Procedia Engineering, 123, Selected papers from Creative Construction Conference 2015

The use of Building Information Modeling (BIM) is affecting the way in which construction projects are planned, designed, executed and operated. One of the main goals of BIM is to provide, based on a 3D model, an accurate information model in a digital format to give different project participants better tools when evaluating different options to support their decisions about the project at a given phase. With this in mind, BIM provides a suitable framework to support the decision-makings process by aggregating the necessary information at the right time, and clarifying details and existing conditions; however, the different elements required to make an optimized decision need additional consideration. To address that, this paper explores the value of metaheuristic algorithms for reaching an optimized solution. The use of metaheuristic algorithms is well known in various aspects of knowledge optimization. This paper provides an overall review of the applications of metaheuristic algorithms in BIM-based optimized decisions in the construction industry and focuses on applications to the planning of construction site layout. Based on the findings from this paper, research gaps in this area have been identified and suggestions for future research to address those gaps are suggested., Procedia Engineering, 196, Creative Construction Conference 2017, CCC 2017

Construction project managers are interested in completing their projects on time and within budget. To do that, they often develop project schedules using a set of standardized tools, such as the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT), the Critical Path Method (CPM) and bar charts. Although useful, these tools offer little help regarding the spatial context (i.e., visualization of conflicts among construction activities) as well as determining the optimal schedule with respect to time, cost and resources. The considerations of these two aspects are left to expert opinion, which can sometimes lead to unexpected conflicts during construction and, in turn, result in project delays and added costs. The main steps of the methodology presented here include 1) the determination of optimal schedules using Tabu-search algorithm that accounts for single or multiple objectives (e.g., duration, costs, resources) depending on the project requirements or project management needs, and 2) the integration of project visualization (i.e., 4D models). The visualization of the optimized schedules allows the project team to check the schedule for completeness and to ensure that sequencing and constructability requirements are satisfied. During the visualization process, further refinement of the schedule can be done. The proposed methodology is demonstrated by using it to create the schedule for a one-story steel-frame building. It is shown that the presented methodology results in an improved schedule for the example project over one that may be expected to be generated without this methodology. The best improvements that could be achieve corresponded to a 13% reduction in the project duration, 4% cost reduction, and 49% decrease in resource fluctuation., Procedia Engineering, 196, Creative Construction Conference 2017, CCC 2017

The fate of many construction projects is determined using preliminary project cost estimates. These estimates play a key role during the conceptual phase of projects; as in many cases they are the primary element used to decide their viability. The lack of information and the high levels of uncertainty during the conceptual phase, make it infeasible to have reliable building information models that could be used to generate quantity takeoffs for preliminary cost estimates (known in the industry as 5D BIM), in line with a Level 2 BIM maturity. This paper presents a way to combine artificial intelligence (case-based reasoning and neural networks), with traditional techniques (regression analysis), to develop accurate estimates of the resources needed in a project (e.g., construction material quantities). These estimates of resources can then be coupled with unit cost information to make preliminary resource-based cost estimates. The clear division between the technical and financial components of such an estimate gives improved decision support to project managers and decision makers. This enhances the tracking and control mechanisms which could be used to check the estimates prepared in subsequent project phases. The combination of case-based reasoning with regression analysis and the use of neural networks has shown an improved performance in the estimation of the amount construction material quantities. The proposed combination was used to estimate the amount of concrete, reinforcement, and structural steel required for the construction of tall-frame structures. The results show lower errors (overall mean absolute percentage error-MAPE) for the combined models (2.55%) when compared to the regression models (12.01%), neural network models (5.84%), and case-based reasoning models (9.30%)., Procedia Engineering, 164, Selected papers from Creative Construction Conference 2016

Earthquake Engineering emerged during the time from 1910 to 1930's, resulting with first building codes which included earthquake activities as loads. Seismic engineering need was triggered by devastating earthquakes in Northern California, and Messina – Italy. Since then, and especially during the last decades, earthquake engineering has increasingly advanced ever changing the norms and building codes. By now the preventive measures of earthquake risk mitigation have drastically evolved suggesting protection not only for new buildings, but also for the existing ones which make the majority of our surrounding built world. The article is the introduction into a larger research program seeking to close the huge gap between the newest advances in preventive earthquake engineering measures for existing buildings and a successful implementation of earthquake hazard mitigation policies. This article is a short overview of the latest international preventive earthquake norms and regulations for existing buildings, focusing on the positive examples of implementation and application of the same managing complex challenges by balancing technology, organization, design and economy. Successfully implemented earthquake mitigation practices for existing buildings developed after larger earthquakes are presented and compared focusing on the implementation type and execution plan.