13,175 research outputs found
Stigmergy-based modeling to discover urban activity patterns from positioning data
Positioning data offer a remarkable source of information to analyze crowds
urban dynamics. However, discovering urban activity patterns from the emergent
behavior of crowds involves complex system modeling. An alternative approach is
to adopt computational techniques belonging to the emergent paradigm, which
enables self-organization of data and allows adaptive analysis. Specifically,
our approach is based on stigmergy. By using stigmergy each sample position is
associated with a digital pheromone deposit, which progressively evaporates and
aggregates with other deposits according to their spatiotemporal proximity.
Based on this principle, we exploit positioning data to identify high density
areas (hotspots) and characterize their activity over time. This
characterization allows the comparison of dynamics occurring in different days,
providing a similarity measure exploitable by clustering techniques. Thus, we
cluster days according to their activity behavior, discovering unexpected urban
activity patterns. As a case study, we analyze taxi traces in New York City
during 2015
Improving Image Clustering using Sparse Text and the Wisdom of the Crowds
We propose a method to improve image clustering using sparse text and the wisdom of the crowds. In particular, we present a method to fuse two different kinds of document features, image and text features, and use a common dictionary or âwisdom of the crowdsâ as the connection between the two different kinds of documents. With the proposed fusion matrix, we use topic modeling via non-negative matrix factorization to cluster documents
Socially Constrained Structural Learning for Groups Detection in Crowd
Modern crowd theories agree that collective behavior is the result of the
underlying interactions among small groups of individuals. In this work, we
propose a novel algorithm for detecting social groups in crowds by means of a
Correlation Clustering procedure on people trajectories. The affinity between
crowd members is learned through an online formulation of the Structural SVM
framework and a set of specifically designed features characterizing both their
physical and social identity, inspired by Proxemic theory, Granger causality,
DTW and Heat-maps. To adhere to sociological observations, we introduce a loss
function (G-MITRE) able to deal with the complexity of evaluating group
detection performances. We show our algorithm achieves state-of-the-art results
when relying on both ground truth trajectories and tracklets previously
extracted by available detector/tracker systems
Traffic Instabilities in Self-Organized Pedestrian Crowds
In human crowds as well as in many animal societies, local interactions among
individuals often give rise to self-organized collective organizations that
offer functional benefits to the group. For instance, flows of pedestrians
moving in opposite directions spontaneously segregate into lanes of uniform
walking directions. This phenomenon is often referred to as a smart collective
pattern, as it increases the traffic efficiency with no need of external
control. However, the functional benefits of this emergent organization have
never been experimentally measured, and the underlying behavioral mechanisms
are poorly understood. In this work, we have studied this phenomenon under
controlled laboratory conditions. We found that the traffic segregation
exhibits structural instabilities characterized by the alternation of organized
and disorganized states, where the lifetime of well-organized clusters of
pedestrians follow a stretched exponential relaxation process. Further analysis
show that the inter-pedestrian variability of comfortable walking speeds is a
key variable at the origin of the observed traffic perturbations. We show that
the collective benefit of the emerging pattern is maximized when all
pedestrians walk at the average speed of the group. In practice, however, local
interactions between slow- and fast-walking pedestrians trigger global
breakdowns of organization, which reduce the collective and the individual
payoff provided by the traffic segregation. This work is a step ahead toward
the understanding of traffic self-organization in crowds, which turns out to be
modulated by complex behavioral mechanisms that do not always maximize the
group's benefits. The quantitative understanding of crowd behaviors opens the
way for designing bottom-up management strategies bound to promote the
emergence of efficient collective behaviors in crowds.Comment: Article published in PLoS Computational biology. Freely available
here:
http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.100244
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