6,250 research outputs found
A stigmergy-based analysis of city hotspots to discover trends and anomalies in urban transportation usage
A key aspect of a sustainable urban transportation system is the
effectiveness of transportation policies. To be effective, a policy has to
consider a broad range of elements, such as pollution emission, traffic flow,
and human mobility. Due to the complexity and variability of these elements in
the urban area, to produce effective policies remains a very challenging task.
With the introduction of the smart city paradigm, a widely available amount of
data can be generated in the urban spaces. Such data can be a fundamental
source of knowledge to improve policies because they can reflect the
sustainability issues underlying the city. In this context, we propose an
approach to exploit urban positioning data based on stigmergy, a bio-inspired
mechanism providing scalar and temporal aggregation of samples. By employing
stigmergy, samples in proximity with each other are aggregated into a
functional structure called trail. The trail summarizes relevant dynamics in
data and allows matching them, providing a measure of their similarity.
Moreover, this mechanism can be specialized to unfold specific dynamics.
Specifically, we identify high-density urban areas (i.e hotspots), analyze
their activity over time, and unfold anomalies. Moreover, by matching activity
patterns, a continuous measure of the dissimilarity with respect to the typical
activity pattern is provided. This measure can be used by policy makers to
evaluate the effect of policies and change them dynamically. As a case study,
we analyze taxi trip data gathered in Manhattan from 2013 to 2015.Comment: Preprin
Distinguishing between cognitive explanations of the problem size effect in mental arithmetic via representational similarity analysis of fMRI data
Not all researchers interested in human behavior remain convinced that modern neuroimaging techniques have much to contribute to distinguishing between competing cognitive models for explaining human behavior, especially if one removes reverse inference from the table. Here, we took up this challenge in an attempt to distinguish between two competing accounts of the problem size effect (PSE), a robust finding in investigations of mathematical cognition. The PSE occurs when people solve arithmetic problems and indicates that numerically large problems are solved more slowly and erroneously than small problems. Neurocognitive explanations for the PSE can be categorized into representation-based and process-based views. Behavioral and traditional univariate neural measures have struggled to distinguish between these accounts. By contrast, a representational similarity analysis (RSA) approach with fMRI data provides competing hypotheses that can distinguish between accounts without recourse to reverse inference. To that end, our RSA (but not univariate) results provided clear evidence in favor of the representation-based over the process-based account of the PSE in multiplication; for addition, the results were less clear. Post-hoc similarity analysis distinguished still further between competing representation-based theoretical accounts. Namely, data favored the notion that individual multiplication problems are stored as individual memory traces sensitive to input frequency over a strictly magnitude-based account of memory encoding. Together, these results provide an example of how human neuroimaging evidence can directly inform cognitive-level explanations of a common behavioral phenomenon, the problem size effect. More broadly, these data may expand our understanding of calculation and memory systems in general
PATH: Person Authentication using Trace Histories
In this paper, a solution to the problem of Active Authentication using trace
histories is addressed. Specifically, the task is to perform user verification
on mobile devices using historical location traces of the user as a function of
time. Considering the movement of a human as a Markovian motion, a modified
Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based solution is proposed. The proposed method,
namely the Marginally Smoothed HMM (MSHMM), utilizes the marginal probabilities
of location and timing information of the observations to smooth-out the
emission probabilities while training. Hence, it can efficiently handle
unforeseen observations during the test phase. The verification performance of
this method is compared to a sequence matching (SM) method , a Markov
Chain-based method (MC) and an HMM with basic Laplace Smoothing (HMM-lap).
Experimental results using the location information of the UMD Active
Authentication Dataset-02 (UMDAA02) and the GeoLife dataset are presented. The
proposed MSHMM method outperforms the compared methods in terms of equal error
rate (EER). Additionally, the effects of different parameters on the proposed
method are discussed.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures. Best Paper award at IEEE UEMCON 201
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