3D Analytics: Opportunities and Guidelines for Information Systems Research

Progress in sensor technologies has made three-dimensional (3D) representations of the physical world available at a large scale. Leveraging such 3D representations with analytics has the potential to advance Information Systems (IS) research in several areas. However, this novel data type has rarely been incorporated. To address this shortcoming, this article first presents two showcases of 3D analytics applications together with general modeling guidelines for 3D analytics, in order to support IS researchers in implementing research designs with 3D components. Second, the article presents several promising opportunities for 3D analytics to advance behavioral and design-oriented IS research in several contextual areas, such as healthcare IS, human-computer interaction, mobile commerce, energy informatics and others. Third, we investigate the nature of the benefits resulting from the application of 3D analytics, resulting in a list of common tasks of research projects that 3D analytics can support, regardless of the contextual application area. Based on the given showcases, modeling guidelines, research opportunities and task-related benefits, we encourage IS researchers to start their journey into this largely unexplored third spatial dimension

Spatial and Temporal Analysis of Big Dataset on PM2.5 Air Pollution in Beijing, China, 2014 to 2018

Air particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution is a critical environment problem worldwide and also in Beijing, China. We gathered five-year PM2.5 contaminate concentrations from 2014 to 2018, from the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center and China Air Quality Real-time Distribution Platform. This is a big dataset, and we collected with crawler technology from Python programming. After examining the quality of the recorded data, we determined to conduct the temporal and spatial analysis using 27 observation stations located in both urban and suburb area in the municipality of Beijing. The big dataset of five-year hourly PM2.5 concentrations was sorted to actionable datasets (Selected Datasets and Seasonal Average Selected Datasets) with the help of Python programming. Linear Regression based Fundamental Data Analysis was conducted as the first part of temporal analysis in R studio to gather the temporal patterns of five-year seasonal PM2.5 contaminant concentrations on each observation sites. As the second part of temporal analysis, the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was conducted in MATLAB to gather the patterns of variations of entire five-year PM2.5 contaminant concentration on each of the sites. Geographic Information System (GIS) was utilized to study the spatial pattern of air pollution distribution from the selected 27 observation sites during selected time periods. The results of this research are, 1) PM2.5 pollutions in winter are the most severe or the highest in each of the natural years. 2) PM2.5 pollution concentrations in Beijing were gradually decrease during 2014 to 2018. 3) In terms of a five-year time perspective, the improvements of air quality and reduction of PM2.5 contaminant appeared in all the seasons based on Fundamental Data Analysis. 4) PM2.5 contaminant concentrations in summer are significantly less than other seasons. 5) The least PM2.5 pollutant influenced area is north and northwest regions in Beijing, and the most PM2.5 pollutant influenced area is south and southeast areas in Beijing. 6) Vehicle concentration and traffic congestion is not the significant impact factor of PM2.5 pollutions in Beijing. 7) Heating supply of buildings and houses generated great contributions to the PM2.5 contaminant concentration in Beijing. While, in the background of rigorous emission reduction policy and management operations by the municipal government, contribution of heating supplies is gradually decreasing. 8) Human activities have limited contributions to the PM2.5 contaminants in Beijing. Meanwhile, type and quantity of fossil fuel energy consumptions might contribute large amount of air pollutions

Geo-Information Technology and Its Applications

Geo-information technology has been playing an ever more important role in environmental monitoring, land resource quantification and mapping, geo-disaster damage and risk assessment, urban planning and smart city development. This book focuses on the fundamental and applied research in these domains, aiming to promote exchanges and communications, share the research outcomes of scientists worldwide and to put these achievements better social use. This Special Issue collects fourteen high-quality research papers and is expected to provide a useful reference and technical support for graduate students, scientists, civil engineers and experts of governments to valorize scientific research

iCity. Transformative Research for the Livable, Intelligent, and Sustainable City

This open access book presents the exciting research results of the BMBF funded project iCity carried out at University of Applied Science Stuttgart to help cities to become more liveable, intelligent and sustainable, to become a LIScity. The research has been pursued with industry partners and NGOs from 2017 to 2020. A LIScity is increasingly digitally networked, uses resources efficiently, and implements intelligent mobility concepts. It guarantees the supply of its grid-bound infrastructure with a high proportion of renewable energy. Intelligent cities are increasingly human-centered, integrative, and flexible, thus placing the well-being of the citizens at the center of developments to increase the quality of life. The articles in this book cover research aimed to meet these criteria. The book covers research in the fields of energy (i.e. algorithms for heating and energy storage systems, simulation programs for thermal local heating supply, runtime optimization of combined heat and power (CHP), natural ventilation), mobility (i.e. charging distribution and deep learning, innovative emission-friendly mobility, routing apps, zero-emission urban logistics, augmented reality, artificial intelligence for individual route planning, mobility behavior), information platforms (i.e. 3DCity models in city planning: sunny places visualization, augmented reality for windy cities, internet of things (IoT) monitoring to visualize device performance, storing and visualizing dynamic energy data of smart cities), and buildings and city planning (i.e. sound insulation of sustainable facades and balconies, multi-camera mobile systems for inspection of tunnels, building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) as active façade elements, common space, the building envelopes potential in smart sustainable cities)

iCity. Transformative Research for the Livable, Intelligent, and Sustainable City

This open access book presents the exciting research results of the BMBF funded project iCity carried out at University of Applied Science Stuttgart to help cities to become more liveable, intelligent and sustainable, to become a LIScity. The research has been pursued with industry partners and NGOs from 2017 to 2020. A LIScity is increasingly digitally networked, uses resources efficiently, and implements intelligent mobility concepts. It guarantees the supply of its grid-bound infrastructure with a high proportion of renewable energy. Intelligent cities are increasingly human-centered, integrative, and flexible, thus placing the well-being of the citizens at the center of developments to increase the quality of life. The articles in this book cover research aimed to meet these criteria. The book covers research in the fields of energy (i.e. algorithms for heating and energy storage systems, simulation programs for thermal local heating supply, runtime optimization of combined heat and power (CHP), natural ventilation), mobility (i.e. charging distribution and deep learning, innovative emission-friendly mobility, routing apps, zero-emission urban logistics, augmented reality, artificial intelligence for individual route planning, mobility behavior), information platforms (i.e. 3DCity models in city planning: sunny places visualization, augmented reality for windy cities, internet of things (IoT) monitoring to visualize device performance, storing and visualizing dynamic energy data of smart cities), and buildings and city planning (i.e. sound insulation of sustainable facades and balconies, multi-camera mobile systems for inspection of tunnels, building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) as active façade elements, common space, the building envelopes potential in smart sustainable cities)

Recent advances in low-cost particulate matter sensor: calibration and application

Particulate matter (PM) has been monitored routinely due to its negative effects on human health and atmospheric visibility. Standard gravimetric measurements and current commercial instruments for field measurements are still expensive and laborious. The high cost of conventional instruments typically limits the number of monitoring sites, which in turn undermines the accuracy of real-time mapping of sources and hotspots of air pollutants with insufficient spatial resolution. The new trends of PM concentration measurement are personalized portable devices for individual customers and networking of large quantity sensors to meet the demand of Big Data. Therefore, low-cost PM sensors have been studied extensively due to their price advantage and compact size. These sensors have been considered as a good supplement of current monitoring sites for high spatial-temporal PM mapping. However, a large concern is the accuracy of these low-cost PM sensors. Multiple types of low-cost PM sensors and monitors were calibrated against reference instruments. All these units demonstrated high linearity against reference instruments with high R2 values for different types of aerosols over a wide range of concentration levels. The question of whether low-cost PM monitors can be considered as a substituent of conventional instruments was discussed, together with how to qualitatively describe the improvement of data quality due to calibrations. A limitation of these sensors and monitors is that their outputs depended highly on particle composition and size, resulting in as high as 10 times difference in the sensor outputs. Optical characterization of low-cost PM sensors (ensemble measurement) was conducted by combining experimental results with Mie scattering theory. The reasons for their dependence on the PM composition and size distribution were studied. To improve accuracy in estimation of mass concentration, an expression for K as a function of the geometric mean diameter, geometric standard deviation, and refractive index is proposed. To get rid of the influence of the refractive index, we propose a new design of a multi-wavelength sensor with a robust data inversion routine to estimate the PM size distribution and refractive index simultaneously. The utility of the networked system with improved sensitivity was demonstrated by deploying it in a woodworking shop. Data collected by the networked system was utilized to construct spatiotemporal PM concentration distributions using an ordinary Kriging method and an Artificial Neural Network model to elucidate particle generation and ventilation processes. Furthermore, for the outdoor environment, data reported by low-cost sensors were compared against satellite data. The remote sensing data could provide a daily calibration of these low-cost sensors. On the other hand, low-cost PM sensors could provide better accuracy to demonstrate the microenvironment

Automatic reconstruction of three-dimensional building models from dense image matching datasets

PhD ThesisThe generation of three-dimensional (3D) building models without roof geometry is currently easily automated using a building footprint and single height value. The automatic reconstruction of roof structures, however, remains challenging because of the complexity and variability in building geometry. Attempts from imagery have utilised high spatial resolution but have only reconstructed simple geometry. This research addresses the complexity of roof geometry reconstruction by developing an approach, which focuses on the extraction of corners to reconstruct 3D buildings as boundary representation models, to try overcome the limitations of planar fitting procedures, which are currently favoured. Roof geometry information was extracted from surface models, true orthophotos and photogrammetric point clouds; reconstructed at the same spatial resolution of the captured aerial imagery, with developments in pixel-to-pixel matching. Edges of roof planes were extracted by the Canny edge detector, and then refined with a workflow based on the principles of scan-line segmentation to remove false positive detection. Line tracing procedures defined the corner positions of the extracted edges. A connectivity ruleset was developed, which searches around the endpoints of unconnected lines, testing for potential connecting corners. All unconnected lines were then removed reconstruct 3D models as a closed network of connecting roof corners. Building models have been reconstructed both as block models and also with roof structures. The methodology was tested on data of Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom, with results showing corner extraction success at 75% and to within a planimetric accuracy of ±0.5 m. The methodology was then tested on data of Vaihingen, Germany, which forms part of the ISPRS 3D reconstruction benchmark. This allowed direct comparisons to be made with other methods. The results from both study areas showed similar planimetric accuracy of extracted corners. However, both sites were not as successful in the reconstruction of roof planes.Ordnance Surve