Cities are encountering extensive deficits in infrastructure service while they are experiencing rapid technological advancements and overhauls in transportation systems. Standard bridge evaluation methods rely on visual inspections, which are infrequent and subjective, ultimately affecting the structural assessments on which maintenance plans are based. The operational behavior of a bridge must be observed more regularly and over an extended period in order to sufficiently track its condition and avoid unexpected rehabilitation. Mobile sensor networks are conducive to monitoring bridges vibrations routinely, with benefits that have been demonstrated in recent structural health monitoring (SHM) research. Though smartphone accelerometers are imperfect sensors, they can contribute valuable information to SHM, especially when aggregated, e.g., via crowdsourcing. In an application on the Harvard Bridge (Boston, MA), it is shown that acceleration data collected using smartphones in moving vehicles contained consistent and significant indicators of the first three modal frequencies of the bridge. In particular, the results became more precise when informatics from several smartphone datasets were combined. This evidence is the first to support the hypothesis that smartphone data, collected within vehicles passing over a bridge, can be used to detect several modal frequencies of the bridge. The result defines an opportunity for local governments to make partnerships that encourage the collection of low-cost bridge vibration data, which can contribute to more effective management and informed decision-making.

Signature-matching intrusion detection systems can experience significant decreases in performance when the load on the IDS-host increases. We propose a solution that off-loads some of the computation performed by the IDS to the graphics processing unit (GPU). Modern GPUs are programmable, stream-processors capable of high-performance computing that in recent years have been used in non-graphical computing tasks. The major operation in a signature-matching IDS is matching values seen operation to known black-listed values, as such, our solution implements the string-matching on the GPU. The results show that as the CPU load on the IDS host system increases, PixelSnort's performance is significantly more robust and is able to outperform conventional Snort by up to 40%