Study on behavioral impedance for route planning techniques from the pedestrian's perspective: Part I - Theoretical contextualization and taxonomy

The interest of researchers for analyzing of best routes and shortest paths allows a continuous technological advance in topological analysis techniques used in the geographic information systems for transportation. One of the topological analysis techniques is the route planning, in which the constraint management must be considered. There have been few studies where the constraint domain for pedestrian in an urban transportation system was clearly stated. Consequently, more studies need to be carried out. The aim of this paper is to provide a theoretical contextualization on identification and management of constraints to ascertain the behavioral impedance domain from the pedestrian perspective. In this part of the research the grounded theory was the research method used to develop the proposed theory. A meta-model was used to (1) define the behavioral domain structure, (2) hold the behavioral data collection and (3) verify the design of the proposed taxonomic tree. The main contribution of this article is the behavioral domain taxonomy from the pedestrian perspective, which will be used to implement a module responsible for the constraint management of an experimental application, named Router. Within this context, the proposed taxonomy could be used to model cost functions more precisely.Postprint (published version

Going Deeper with Semantics: Video Activity Interpretation using Semantic Contextualization

A deeper understanding of video activities extends beyond recognition of underlying concepts such as actions and objects: constructing deep semantic representations requires reasoning about the semantic relationships among these concepts, often beyond what is directly observed in the data. To this end, we propose an energy minimization framework that leverages large-scale commonsense knowledge bases, such as ConceptNet, to provide contextual cues to establish semantic relationships among entities directly hypothesized from video signal. We mathematically express this using the language of Grenander's canonical pattern generator theory. We show that the use of prior encoded commonsense knowledge alleviate the need for large annotated training datasets and help tackle imbalance in training through prior knowledge. Using three different publicly available datasets - Charades, Microsoft Visual Description Corpus and Breakfast Actions datasets, we show that the proposed model can generate video interpretations whose quality is better than those reported by state-of-the-art approaches, which have substantial training needs. Through extensive experiments, we show that the use of commonsense knowledge from ConceptNet allows the proposed approach to handle various challenges such as training data imbalance, weak features, and complex semantic relationships and visual scenes.Comment: Accepted to WACV 201

Study on behavioral impedance for route planning techniques from the pedestrian's perspective: some findings and considerations

The multi-disciplinary characteristics of transportation force a new design of geographic information systems, within which these characteristics are considered. In this context, geographic information systems for transportation are the result of the integration of transportation information systems and conventional geographic information systems. An interesting research area in geographic information systems for transportation is constraint management in route planning algorithms from the pedestrian s perspective. Constraint management becomes more complex when route planning takes into account an integrated public transportation network (i.e. a multimodal network). A study on the theoretical contextualization and taxonomy of a pedestrian s behavioral impedance has been developed in order to improve the constraint management from the pedestrian s perspective. This study entails strategies of travel reduction by private transport (e.g. travel by car) through switching to or substitution by alternative public transport (e.g. travel by walk, bus or rail). The grounded theory method has been used to develop the proposed taxonomy. Using the partial results of a questionnaire applied to a reduced group of people from Barcelona as a starting point, important data are being collected to define the mathematical model of the behavioral impedance domain. The goal of this paper is to provide some considerations about theoretical contextualization on identification and management of constraints regarding the behavioral impedance domain from the pedestrian s perspective within the urban public transportation context. The research project where this work is included is composed of six major phases. The first phase represents a continuous bibliographic review. The second phase was a study on sidewalks in the university zone of Barcelona. In this phase, an experimental application has been proposed and the management, map and route modules have been implemented on the ArcInfo GIS package and C++. This paper reports the partial work of the third phase, which is composed of two parts. The first part was a theoretical study on behavioral impedance for route planning techniques, in which taxonomy was proposed. The results of the second part are partially presented in this paper. The fourth (i.e. design and implementation), fifth (i.e. calibration and validation) and sixth (i.e. generalization of the results) phases are characterized by the application of the prototype regarding the multimodal network model for urban public transportation from the pedestrian s perspective. The main contribution of this article is the behavioral impedance taxonomy review from the pedestrian s perspective, which will allow designing a mathematical model and be used to implement a constraint management algorithm. Within this context, the proposed taxonomy could be used to model cost functions more precisely.Postprint (published version

From Experience to Experiments in South African Water Management: Defining the Framework

A role-playing game (RPG), KatAware, was developed in the Kat River catchment of South Africa to support the negotiation process among water users on the allocation rules of the resource. Playing the RPG with local stakeholders exhibited some regularity in the behaviour of players, particularly on their attitude of defining binding agreements. These regularities were first formalized through a model of cooperative game theory (CGT), and then, to confirm the results of the model, tested by an experimental protocol. Both the model and the protocol were based and calibrated on the results of the RPG. The progressive simplification (decontextualization) required to bring the RPG into the laboratory suggested to explore the role of context (in our case water related issues) on players’ behaviour. The objective of this paper is to illustrate the process that conducted the research team from the experience in the Kat River to the first experiments to test the hypotheses exhibited in the experience and then to analyze the influence of context on players’ behaviour. Terms and concepts are clarified in order to provide a clear research framework in this new field at the border between experiences and experiments in social sciences for commons management.