5,997 research outputs found
Mining Urban Performance: Scale-Independent Classification of Cities Based on Individual Economic Transactions
Intensive development of urban systems creates a number of challenges for
urban planners and policy makers in order to maintain sustainable growth.
Running efficient urban policies requires meaningful urban metrics, which could
quantify important urban characteristics including various aspects of an actual
human behavior. Since a city size is known to have a major, yet often
nonlinear, impact on the human activity, it also becomes important to develop
scale-free metrics that capture qualitative city properties, beyond the effects
of scale. Recent availability of extensive datasets created by human activity
involving digital technologies creates new opportunities in this area. In this
paper we propose a novel approach of city scoring and classification based on
quantitative scale-free metrics related to economic activity of city residents,
as well as domestic and foreign visitors. It is demonstrated on the example of
Spain, but the proposed methodology is of a general character. We employ a new
source of large-scale ubiquitous data, which consists of anonymized countrywide
records of bank card transactions collected by one of the largest Spanish
banks. Different aspects of the classification reveal important properties of
Spanish cities, which significantly complement the pattern that might be
discovered with the official socioeconomic statistics.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, to be published in the proceedings of ASE
BigDataScience 2014 conferenc
Tile2Vec: Unsupervised representation learning for spatially distributed data
Geospatial analysis lacks methods like the word vector representations and
pre-trained networks that significantly boost performance across a wide range
of natural language and computer vision tasks. To fill this gap, we introduce
Tile2Vec, an unsupervised representation learning algorithm that extends the
distributional hypothesis from natural language -- words appearing in similar
contexts tend to have similar meanings -- to spatially distributed data. We
demonstrate empirically that Tile2Vec learns semantically meaningful
representations on three datasets. Our learned representations significantly
improve performance in downstream classification tasks and, similar to word
vectors, visual analogies can be obtained via simple arithmetic in the latent
space.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures in main text; 9 pages, 11 figures in appendi
Remote sensing and interdisciplinary approach for studying Dubai’s urban context and development
Outlining the different phases and features of the urban and socio-economic development of Dubai, this work is aimed at highlighting the potential of remote sensing and the interdisciplinary approach for the study of cities characterised by overwhelming growth processes. In this way Dubai represents an ideal laboratory since the processes that have been triggered in the last decades have radically modified the previous balances and layouts. Thus the image of a mirage city has been gradually diffused, a city where ambitious objectives can be achieved, targets reached that are difficult to pursue elsewhere, frenetic development processes realised, in a nevertheless increasingly delicate territorial-environmental fabric onto which such phenomena are grafted. The analysis of various remote sensed images, gathered over different periods of times, highlights a number of important aspects from the geological point of view, of the physical geography, the urban development and the direct growth in all directions, with a series of artificial islands and much publicised anthropic works
Methane Mitigation:Methods to Reduce Emissions, on the Path to the Paris Agreement
The atmospheric methane burden is increasing rapidly, contrary to pathways compatible with the goals of the 2015 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Paris Agreement. Urgent action is required to bring methane back to a pathway more in line with the Paris goals. Emission reduction from “tractable” (easier to mitigate) anthropogenic sources such as the fossil fuel industries and landfills is being much facilitated by technical advances in the past decade, which have radically improved our ability to locate, identify, quantify, and reduce emissions. Measures to reduce emissions from “intractable” (harder to mitigate) anthropogenic sources such as agriculture and biomass burning have received less attention and are also becoming more feasible, including removal from elevated-methane ambient air near to sources. The wider effort to use microbiological and dietary intervention to reduce emissions from cattle (and humans) is not addressed in detail in this essentially geophysical review. Though they cannot replace the need to reach “net-zero” emissions of CO2, significant reductions in the methane burden will ease the timescales needed to reach required CO2 reduction targets for any particular future temperature limit. There is no single magic bullet, but implementation of a wide array of mitigation and emission reduction strategies could substantially cut the global methane burden, at a cost that is relatively low compared to the parallel and necessary measures to reduce CO2, and thereby reduce the atmospheric methane burden back toward pathways consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement
Mapping road network communities for guiding disease surveillance and control strategies
Human mobility is increasing in its volume, speed and reach, leading to the
movement and introduction of pathogens through infected travelers. An
understanding of how areas are connected, the strength of these connections and
how this translates into disease spread is valuable for planning surveillance
and designing control and elimination strategies. While analyses have been
undertaken to identify and map connectivity in global air, shipping and
migration networks, such analyses have yet to be undertaken on the road
networks that carry the vast majority of travellers in low and middle income
settings. Here we present methods for identifying road connectivity
communities, as well as mapping bridge areas between communities and key
linkage routes. We apply these to Africa, and show how many highly-connected
communities straddle national borders and when integrating malaria prevalence
and population data as an example, the communities change, highlighting regions
most strongly connected to areas of high burden. The approaches and results
presented provide a flexible tool for supporting the design of disease
surveillance and control strategies through mapping areas of high connectivity
that form coherent units of intervention and key link routes between
communities for targeting surveillance.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, research pape
A regional land use survey based on remote sensing and other data: A report on a LANDSAT and computer mapping project, volume 2
The author has identified the following significant results. The project mapped land use/cover classifications from LANDSAT computer compatible tape data and combined those results with other multisource data via computer mapping/compositing techniques to analyze various land use planning/natural resource management problems. Data were analyzed on 1:24,000 scale maps at 1.1 acre resolution. LANDSAT analysis software and linkages with other computer mapping software were developed. Significant results were also achieved in training, communication, and identification of needs for developing the LANDSAT/computer mapping technologies into operational tools for use by decision makers
Urban climate and resiliency: A synthesis report of state of the art and future research directions
The Urban Climate and Resiliency-Science Working Group (i.e., The WG) was convened in the summer of 2018 to explore the scientific grand challenges related to climate resiliency of cities. The WG leveraged the presentations at the 10th International Conference on Urban Climate (ICUC10) held in New York City (NYC) on 6–10 August 2018 as input forum. ICUC10 was a collaboration between the International Association of Urban Climate, American Meteorological Society, and World Meteorological Organization. It attracted more than 600 participants from more than 50 countries, resulting in close to 700 oral and poster presentations under the common theme of “Sustainable & Resilient Urban Environments”. ICUC10 covered topics related to urban climate and weather processes with far-reaching implications to weather forecasting, climate change adaptation, air quality, health, energy, urban planning, and governance. This article provides a synthesis of the analysis of the current state of the art and of the recommendations of the WG for future research along each of the four Grand Challenges in the context of urban climate and weather resiliency; Modeling, Observations, Cyber-Informatics, and Knowledge Transfer & Applications
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