Road Estimation Using GPS Traces and Real Time Kinematic Data

Advance Driver Assistance System (ADAS) are becoming the main issue in today’s automotive industry. The new generation of ADAS aims at focusing on more details and obtaining more accuracy. To achieve this objective, the research and development parts of the automobile industry intend to utilize Global Positioning System (GPS) by integrating it with other existing tools in ADAS. There are several driving assistance systems which are served by a digital map as a primary or a secondary sensor. The traditional techniques of digital map generation are expensive and time consuming and require extensive manual effort. Therefore, having frequently updated maps is an issue. Furthermore, the existing commercial digital maps are not highly accurate. This Master thesis presents several algorithms for automatically converting raw Universal Serial Bus (USB)-GPS and Real Time Kinematic (RTK) GPS traces into a routable road network. The traces are gathered by driving 20 times on a highway. This work begins by pruning raw GPS traces using four different algorithms. The first step tries to minimize the number of outliers. After the traces are smoothed, they tend to consolidate into smooth paths. So in order to merge all 20 trips together and estimate the road network a Trace Merging algorithm is applied. Finally, a Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) curve is implemented as an approximation curve to smooth the road shape and decrease the effect of noisy data further. Since the RTK-GPS receiver provides highly accurate data, the curve resulted from its GPS data is the most sufficient road shape. Therefore, it is used as a ground truth to compare the result of each pruning algorithm based on data from USB-GPS. Lastly, the results of this work are demonstrated and a quality evaluation is done for all methods

Information Outlook, March/April 2012

Volume 16, Issue 2https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2012/1001/thumbnail.jp

Professional Counter-Strike: An Analysis of Media Objects, Esports Culture, and Gamer Representation

Esports are growing in popularity at a rapid pace worldwide. In contemporary society, individuals watch esports broadcasts as part of their normal media consuming practices. This dissertation focuses on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), which is currently the most recognized first-person shooter esport worldwide and the third most popular game across all esports genres (Irwin & Naweed, 2020). Interested in how the cultural knowledge and experience of esports and gamers who populate the scene are represented in media, I explored professional CS:GO esports broadcasts from two prominent professional leagues, ESL Pro League (EPL) and ELEAGUE. A thematic analysis of textual and audio-visual data from professional CS:GO broadcasts revealed that esports culture is a novel phenomenon, similar to sport, but situated within video games. Using traditional sports metaphors and comparisons, as well as sportscast style match coverage and gameplay reporting, EPL and ELEAGUE illustrate CS:GO as a global sport. At the same time, both leagues emphasize technicity and rely on gamer jargon to frame professional CS:GO as a hybrid mediasport, intrinsically tied to game culture. EPL and ELEAGUE utilize narratives and images to portray gamers as simultaneously geeks and jocks by highlighting players’ traditional sports backgrounds while also describing them as “natural gamers.” Finally, EPL and ELEAGUE represent gamers as young males who are mostly white, offering audiences a limited worldview that supports a dominant social, cultural, and global ideology

Philosophical Issues in Sport Science

The role and value of science within sport increases with ever greater professionalization and commercialization. Scientific and technological innovations are devised to increase performance, ensure greater accuracy of measurement and officiating, reduce risks of harm, enhance spectatorship, and raise revenues. However, such innovations inevitably come up against epistemological and metaphysical problems related to the nature of sport and physical competition. This Special Issue identifies and explores key and contemporary philosophical issues in relation to the science of sport and exercise. It is divided into three sections: 1. Scientific evidence, causation, and sport; 2. Science technology and sport officiating; and 3. Scientific influences on the construction of sport. It brings together scholars working on philosophical problems in sport to examine issues related to the values and assumptions behind sport and exercise science and key problems resulting from these and to provide recommendations for improving its practice

Information Outlook, December 2010

Volume 14, Issue 8https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2010/1007/thumbnail.jp

Improving the management of change requests in construction of large building projects in Saudi Arabia

One of the challenges faced by project managers is frequent change requests, which usually lead to changes in the scope of a project. Change has been said to be inevitable, and without change everything stagnates. However, ad hoc changes can be adverse, and in some instances cause whole projects to stagnate, or fail. Therefore, studies on the causes and effects of change requests are critical. The latest official reports about government projects in Saudi Arabia suggested that 62% experienced change in the contract, and one project had cancelled 80% of the items of the contract, which changed the project completely. The extent of this problem posed a need to study the cause of stalled projects in the Kingdom. Responding to these concerns, the aim of this research is to explore the conceptualization of change requests, and how they occur, the causes and effects of change requests and the current methods of handling change requests and how effective they are in large building projects in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Based on the exploration the research provides a comprehensive analysis of issues surrounding change requests- including cultural impacts- from the perspectives of multiple stakeholder groups, in a distinctive, under- researched context. This in turn leads to development of a conceptual framework for understanding change requests and diagnosing related problems.A qualitative approach and case study strategy was applied to study this phenomenon and to explore whether and how culture affects change requests in Saudi Arabia. Data collection was conducted by two means: Secondary data were collected from documents reporting change requests (n= 6) and change orders (n= 7) in large construction companies. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 40 stakeholders of four large government construction projects: 4 owner representatives, 15 consultants, 4 project managers and 17 department managers.The findings revealed inconsistent and confused conceptualizations of change requests, and failure to distinguish between change requests and change orders. None of the projects had standardised, formally documented change request procedures, but relied on informal communications. A variety of causes for change requests, beyond those previously documented in the literature were identified, including internal causes arising from one or other of the project stakeholders, and external causes outside the stakeholders’ control. Direct effects included time and cost overruns, while potential (indirect) effects included lowered morale and productivity, and loss of reputation. However, there could also be positive effects, such as improved quality and client satisfaction. Change requests are currently handled ad hoc as they occur. The findings also revealed the impact of Saudi culture (notably power distance and uncertainty avoidance) on project management generally, and change requests specifically.It is concluded that change request frequency could be reduced and harmful impacts minimized by engagement of all stakeholders in the project design stage, use of a standard contract such as FIDIC to clarify parties’ responsibilities and protect their rights, and use of formal documented change request procedures. However, for Saudi Arabia and other developing countries, which may be using non-standard contracts and ad hoc change request procedures, the framework proposal in this study can be used to aid consistency and clarity among stakeholders, diagnose bottlenecks and identify appropriate solutions to minimize change requests and mitigate harmful impacts on projects

Balancing Interoception and Exteroception: Vestibular and Spatial Contributions to the Bodily Self

Experiencing the body as a coherent, stable, entity involves the dynamic integration of information from several internal (i.e. interoceptive) and external (i.e. exteroceptive) sensory sources, to produce a feeling that the body is mine (sense of body ownership), that I am in control (sense of agency) and I am aware of its movements (motor awareness). However, the exact contribution of these different sensory sources to self-consciousness, as well as the context in which we experience them, is still a matter of debate. This thesis aimed to investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms of body ownership, agency and motor awareness, including interoceptive (via affective touch), proprioceptive, exteroceptive (visuo-spatial) and vestibular contributions to body representation, in both healthy subjects and brain damaged patients. To examine the role of the vestibular and interoceptive systems in body ownership, a series of studies in healthy subjects was devised, using multisensory illusions (i.e. the rubber hand illusion; RHI), that involve the integration of interoceptive and exteroceptive sensory sources, and using electrical stimulation of the vestibular system (i.e. Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation; GVS). To investigate ownership, agency and motor awareness in neuropsychological patients with disorders of ownership and/or unawareness of motor deficits, behavioural manipulation of body ownership (via a rubber hand) and visual perspective (via a mirror) were tested. Finally, to explore underlying mechanisms of awareness of one’s own performance (i.e. meta-cognition), two studies were carried out in healthy subjects using behavioural manipulations of spatial reference frames (either centred on the subject, i.e. egocentric, or world-centred, i.e. allocentric). The results of these studies indicate that the vestibular system balances vision and proprioception according to contextual relevance: when there is no tactile stimulation, visual cues are stronger than proprioceptive ones (i.e. proprioceptive drifts are greater); when touch is delivered synchronously, this effect is enhanced (even more when touch is affective rather than neutral). However, when touch is only felt but not seen, the vestibular system downregulates vision in favour of proprioception (i.e. proprioceptive drifts are smaller), whilst the opposite happens when touch is only vicariously perceived via vision. Nevertheless, when the rubber hand is positioned in a non-biomechanically possible fashion, there appears to be no difference in proprioceptive drifts in comparison with anatomically plausible positions, suggesting that such rebalancing may be more related to basic multisensory integration processes underlying body representation. In patients with disorders of the self, visual cues seem to dominate over proprioceptive ones, leading to strong feelings of ownership of a rubber hand following mere exposure to it; however, the same is not true for agency, which seems to be more susceptible to changes in the environment (i.e. presence or absence of a visual feedback following attempted movement). Moreover, manipulating visual perspective using a mirror (from 1st to 3rd) seem to lead to a temporary remission of dis-ownership but not motor unawareness, suggesting that awareness may not be influenced by online changes in visual perspectives. Finally, when judging their own performance in a visuo-proprioceptive task from an egocentric rather than an allocentric perspective, healthy subjects appear less objective prospectively rather than during the task (i.e. their belief updating is biased when judging their ability to complete a task egocentrically). In sum, the work described above adds to the evidence that the sense of self derives from a complex integration of several sensory modalities, flexibly adjusting to the environment. Following brain damage, such flexibility may be impaired, even though it can be influenced by spatial perspective. Similarly, the point of reference from which we perceive stimuli affects the way we judge our own perceptual choices. Hence, the way we represent our bodily self is a dynamic process, constantly updated by exteroceptive and interoceptive incoming stimuli, regulated by the vestibular system. These findings could provide new avenues in rehabilitating disorders of the self (such as unawareness and dis-ownership)