Renewing Community in College Park

The Calvert School served the city of College Park for more than 50 years. Now vacant, the building still sits at the heart of the historic College Park community. Adaptively reusing this well-loved building as a community center will bring new life to the building and site and provide a much-needed center for community activities in College Park. Reusing an existing building will also help to conserve economic and environmental resources, as well as preserving a visual artifact of the history and sense of community that bind the neighborhood. This thesis explores and proposes a variety of approaches to adaptive reuse and building for community, attempting to find a design strategy that suits the building, the site, the community and the proposed program, while balancing aesthetics and functionality with cultural, historical and environmental responsibility

Evaluation of Multi-Level Cognitive Maps for Supporting Between-Floor Spatial Behavior in Complex Indoor Environments

People often become disoriented when navigating in complex, multi-level buildings. To efficiently find destinations located on different floors, navigators must refer to a globally coherent mental representation of the multi-level environment, which is termed a multi-level cognitive map. However, there is a surprising dearth of research into underlying theories of why integrating multi-level spatial knowledge into a multi-level cognitive map is so challenging and error-prone for humans. This overarching problem is the core motivation of this dissertation. We address this vexing problem in a two-pronged approach combining study of both basic and applied research questions. Of theoretical interest, we investigate questions about how multi-level built environments are learned and structured in memory. The concept of multi-level cognitive maps and a framework of multi-level cognitive map development are provided. We then conducted a set of empirical experiments to evaluate the effects of several environmental factors on users’ development of multi-level cognitive maps. The findings of these studies provide important design guidelines that can be used by architects and help to better understand the research question of why people get lost in buildings. Related to application, we investigate questions about how to design user-friendly visualization interfaces that augment users’ capability to form multi-level cognitive maps. An important finding of this dissertation is that increasing visual access with an X-ray-like visualization interface is effective for overcoming the disadvantage of limited visual access in built environments and assists the development of multi-level cognitive maps. These findings provide important human-computer interaction (HCI) guidelines for visualization techniques to be used in future indoor navigation systems. In sum, this dissertation adopts an interdisciplinary approach, combining theories from the fields of spatial cognition, information visualization, and HCI, addressing a long-standing and ubiquitous problem faced by anyone who navigates indoors: why do people get lost inside multi-level buildings. Results provide both theoretical and applied levels of knowledge generation and explanation, as well as contribute to the growing field of real-time indoor navigation systems

3D GIS modelling using ESRI's CityEngine: a case study from the University Jaume I in Castellon de la Plana Spain

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.The field of GIS has in recent years been increasingly demanding better 3d functionality and ever more resources is being spent in researching the concept. The work presented here is on the integration and use of procedural modeling language for generating a realistic 3d model of the University Jaume I in Castellón de la Plana Spain. The language used is a modified version of shape grammars combined with split grammars with the software CityEngine. The work is conducted with the use of CityEngine and is intended as a contribution to the currently active research on the use of shape grammar in GI science.The field of GIS has in recent years been increasingly demanding better 3d functionality and ever more resources is being spent in researching the concept. The work presented here is on the integration and use of procedural modeling language for generating a realistic 3d model of the University Jaume I in Castellón de la Plana Spain. The language used is a modified version of shape grammars combined with split grammars with the software CityEngine. The work is conducted with the use of CityEngine and is intended as a contribution to the currently active research on the use of shape grammar in GI science

OCR-RTPS: An OCR-based real-time positioning system for the valet parking

Obtaining the position of ego-vehicle is a crucial prerequisite for automatic control and path planning in the field of autonomous driving. Most existing positioning systems rely on GPS, RTK, or wireless signals, which are arduous to provide effective localization under weak signal conditions. This paper proposes a real-time positioning system based on the detection of the parking numbers as they are unique positioning marks in the parking lot scene. It does not only can help with the positioning with open area, but also run independently under isolation environment. The result tested on both public datasets and self-collected dataset show that the system outperforms others in both performances and applies in practice. In addition, the code and dataset will release later.Comment: 25 pages, 9 figure

Trendswatch 2013: Back to the Future

TrendsWatch 2013 highlights six trends that CFM's staff and advisors believe are highly significant to museums and their communities, based on our scanning and analysis over the past year. For each trend, we provide a brief summary, list examples of how the trend is playing out in the world, comment on the trend's significance to society and to museums specifically, and suggest ways that museums might respond. We also provide links to additional readings. TrendsWatch provides valuable background and context for your museum's planning and implementation

Convergence of Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems

This book is a collection of published articles from the Sensors Special Issue on "Convergence of Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems". It includes extended versions of the conference contributions from the 10th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Data Acquisition and Advanced Computing Systems: Technology and Applications (IDAACS’2019), Metz, France, as well as external contributions