14,934 research outputs found
From Social Data Mining to Forecasting Socio-Economic Crisis
Socio-economic data mining has a great potential in terms of gaining a better
understanding of problems that our economy and society are facing, such as
financial instability, shortages of resources, or conflicts. Without
large-scale data mining, progress in these areas seems hard or impossible.
Therefore, a suitable, distributed data mining infrastructure and research
centers should be built in Europe. It also appears appropriate to build a
network of Crisis Observatories. They can be imagined as laboratories devoted
to the gathering and processing of enormous volumes of data on both natural
systems such as the Earth and its ecosystem, as well as on human
techno-socio-economic systems, so as to gain early warnings of impending
events. Reality mining provides the chance to adapt more quickly and more
accurately to changing situations. Further opportunities arise by individually
customized services, which however should be provided in a privacy-respecting
way. This requires the development of novel ICT (such as a self- organizing
Web), but most likely new legal regulations and suitable institutions as well.
As long as such regulations are lacking on a world-wide scale, it is in the
public interest that scientists explore what can be done with the huge data
available. Big data do have the potential to change or even threaten democratic
societies. The same applies to sudden and large-scale failures of ICT systems.
Therefore, dealing with data must be done with a large degree of responsibility
and care. Self-interests of individuals, companies or institutions have limits,
where the public interest is affected, and public interest is not a sufficient
justification to violate human rights of individuals. Privacy is a high good,
as confidentiality is, and damaging it would have serious side effects for
society.Comment: 65 pages, 1 figure, Visioneer White Paper, see
http://www.visioneer.ethz.c
Integrated Modeling Approach for the Transportation Disadvantaged
Transportation models have not been adequate in addressing severe long-term urban transportation problems that transportation disadvantaged groups overwhelmingly encounter, and the negative impacts of transportation on the disadvantaged have not been effectively considered in the modeling studies. Therefore this paper aims to develop a transportation modeling approach in order to understand the travel patterns of the transportation disadvantaged, and help in developing policies to solve the problems of the disadvantaged. Effectiveness of this approach is tested in a pilot study in Aydin, Turkey. After determining disadvantaged groups by a series of spatial and statistical analyses, the approach is integrated with a travel demand model. The model is run for both disadvantaged and nondisadvantaged populations to examine the differences between their travel behaviors. The findings of the pilot study reveal that almost two thirds of the population is disadvantaged, and this modeling approach could be particularly useful in disadvantage-sensitive planning studies to deploy relevant land use and transportation policies for disadvantaged groups
Priority Management for Urban Arterials. Transferability of Techniques: Methodology and Summary.
This paper describes the background and methodology employed in research funded by EPSRC to assess the effect of individual traffic control measures on urban arterials, both in isolation and in combination. The aim of the project was to test the transferability of the techniques developed in a DRIVE II project, PRIMAVERA, to a range of different types of urban corridor. Measures have been classed into three broad categories: Congestion Management, Public Transport Priority and Traffic Calming. The scope of these measures is wide, some operating at a junction level whilst others have an impact over a whole corridor. Measures from these categories are applied in a sophisticated microsimulation model of a series of hypothetical networks and four urban arterial corridors: three in Leeds and one in Leicester. The effects of the application of individual and integrated measures are assessed in terms of their efficiency, environmental and safety impacts using a form of Multi-Criteria Analysis. Travel time and other monetary costs are also taken into consideration. Whilst these results are of interest to local planners in the operation of each of the arterial corridors studied, a wider insight into the operation of urban arterials can be drawn from this study leading to more efficient control of the available road space
An Efficient Requirement-Aware Attachment Policy for Future Millimeter Wave Vehicular Networks
The automotive industry is rapidly evolving towards connected and autonomous
vehicles, whose ever more stringent data traffic requirements might exceed the
capacity of traditional technologies for vehicular networks. In this scenario,
densely deploying millimeter wave (mmWave) base stations is a promising
approach to provide very high transmission speeds to the vehicles. However,
mmWave signals suffer from high path and penetration losses which might render
the communication unreliable and discontinuous. Coexistence between mmWave and
Long Term Evolution (LTE) communication systems has therefore been considered
to guarantee increased capacity and robustness through heterogeneous
networking. Following this rationale, we face the challenge of designing fair
and efficient attachment policies in heterogeneous vehicular networks.
Traditional methods based on received signal quality criteria lack
consideration of the vehicle's individual requirements and traffic demands, and
lead to suboptimal resource allocation across the network. In this paper we
propose a Quality-of-Service (QoS) aware attachment scheme which biases the
cell selection as a function of the vehicular service requirements, preventing
the overload of transmission links. Our simulations demonstrate that the
proposed strategy significantly improves the percentage of vehicles satisfying
application requirements and delivers efficient and fair association compared
to state-of-the-art schemes.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables, accepted to the 30th IEEE Intelligent
Vehicles Symposiu
From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design
As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain
"ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in
socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a
network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run
all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback
and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the
reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying
models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy
decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of
Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but
they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of
society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The
results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into
informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis
Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources,
environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected
with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make
complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and
the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c
Smart Procurement of Naturally Generated Energy (SPONGE) for Plug-in Hybrid Electric Buses
We discuss a recently introduced ECO-driving concept known as SPONGE in the
context of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Buses (PHEB)'s.Examples are given to
illustrate the benefits of this approach to ECO-driving. Finally, distributed
algorithms to realise SPONGE are discussed, paying attention to the privacy
implications of the underlying optimisation problems.Comment: This paper is recently submitted to the IEEE Transactions on
Automation Science and Engineerin
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