Exploring potential of crowdsourced geographic information in studies of active travel and health: Strava data and cycling behaviour

In development of sustainable transportation and green city, policymakers encourage people to commute by cycling and walking instead of motor vehicles in cities. One the one hand, cycling and walking enables decrease in air pollution emissions. On the other hand, cycling and walking offer health benefits by increasing people’s physical activity. Earlier studies on investigating spatial patterns of active travel (cycling and walking) are limited by lacks of spatially fine-grained data. In recent years, with the development of information and communications technology, GPS-enabled devices are popular and portable. With smart phones or smart watches, people are able to record their cycling or walking GPS traces when they are moving. A large number of cyclists and pedestrians upload their GPS traces to sport social media to share their historical traces with other people. Those sport social media thus become a potential source for spatially fine-grained cycling and walking data. Very recently, Strava Metro offer aggregated cycling and walking data with high spatial granularity. Strava Metro aggregated a large amount of cycling and walking GPS traces of Strava users to streets or intersections across a city. Accordingly, as a kind of crowdsourced geographic information, the aggregated data is useful for investigating spatial patterns of cycling and walking activities, and thus is of high potential in understanding cycling or walking behavior at a large spatial scale. This study is a start of demonstrating usefulness of Strava Metro data for exploring cycling or walking patterns at a large scal

A Mobile Geo-Communication Dataset for Physiology-Aware DASH in Rural Ambulance Transport

Use of telecommunication technologies for remote, continuous monitoring of patients can enhance effectiveness of emergency ambulance care during transport from rural areas to a regional center hospital. However, the communication along the various routes in rural areas may have wide bandwidth ranges from 2G to 4G; some regions may have only lower satellite bandwidth available. Bandwidth fluctuation together with real-time communication of various clinical multimedia pose a major challenge during rural patient ambulance transport.; AB@The availability of a pre-transport route-dependent communication bandwidth database is an important resource in remote monitoring and clinical multimedia transmission in rural ambulance transport. Here, we present a geo-communication dataset from extensive profiling of 4 major US mobile carriers in Illinois, from the rural location of Hoopeston to the central referral hospital center at Urbana. In collaboration with Carle Foundation Hospital, we developed a profiler, and collected various geographical and communication traces for realistic emergency rural ambulance transport scenarios. Our dataset is to support our ongoing work of proposing "physiology-aware DASH", which is particularly useful for adaptive remote monitoring of critically ill patients in emergency rural ambulance transport. It provides insights on ensuring higher Quality of Service (QoS) for most critical clinical multimedia in response to changes in patients' physiological states and bandwidth conditions. Our dataset is available online for research community.Comment: Proceedings of the 8th ACM on Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys'17), Pages 158-163, Taipei, Taiwan, June 20 - 23, 201

Using airborne LiDAR Survey to explore historic-era archaeological landscapes of Montserrat in the eastern Caribbean

This article describes what appears to be the first archaeological application of airborne LiDAR survey to historic-era landscapes in the Caribbean archipelago, on the island of Montserrat. LiDAR is proving invaluable in extending the reach of traditional pedestrian survey into less favorable areas, such as those covered by dense neotropical forest and by ashfall from the past two decades of active eruptions by the Soufrière Hills volcano, and to sites in localities that are inaccessible on account of volcanic dangers. Emphasis is placed on two aspects of the research: first, the importance of ongoing, real-time interaction between the LiDAR analyst and the archaeological team in the field; and second, the advantages of exploiting the full potential of the three-dimensional LiDAR point cloud data for purposes of the visualization of archaeological sites and features

Using mobility information to perform a feasibility study and the evaluation of spatio-temporal energy demanded by an electric taxi fleet

Half of the global population already lives in urban areas, facing to the problem of air pollution mainly caused by the transportation system. The recently worsening of urban air quality has a direct impact on the human health. Replacing today’s internal combustion engine vehicles with electric ones in public fleets could provide a deep impact on the air quality in the cities. In this paper, real mobility information is used as decision support for the taxi fleet manager to promote the adoption of electric taxi cabs in the city of San Francisco, USA. Firstly, mobility characteristics and energy requirements of a single taxi are analyzed. Then, the results are generalized to all vehicles from the taxi fleet. An electrificability rate of the taxi fleet is generated, providing information about the number of current trips that could be performed by electric taxis without modifying the current driver mobility patterns. The analysis results reveal that 75.2% of the current taxis could be replaced by electric vehicles, considering a current standard battery capacity (24–30 kWh). This value can increase significantly (to 100%), taking into account the evolution of the price and capacity of the batteries installed in the last models of electric vehicles that are coming to the market. The economic analysis shows that the purchasing costs of an electric taxi are bigger than conventional one. However, fuel, maintenance and repair costs are much lower. Using the expected energy consumption information evaluated in this study, the total spatio-temporal demand of electric energy required to recharge the electric fleet is also calculated, allowing identifying optimal location of charging infrastructure based on realistic routing patterns. This information could also be used by the distribution system operator to identify possible reinforcement actions in the electric grid in order to promote introducing electric vehicles

Anticipatory Mobile Computing: A Survey of the State of the Art and Research Challenges

Today's mobile phones are far from mere communication devices they were ten years ago. Equipped with sophisticated sensors and advanced computing hardware, phones can be used to infer users' location, activity, social setting and more. As devices become increasingly intelligent, their capabilities evolve beyond inferring context to predicting it, and then reasoning and acting upon the predicted context. This article provides an overview of the current state of the art in mobile sensing and context prediction paving the way for full-fledged anticipatory mobile computing. We present a survey of phenomena that mobile phones can infer and predict, and offer a description of machine learning techniques used for such predictions. We then discuss proactive decision making and decision delivery via the user-device feedback loop. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of anticipatory mobile computing.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figure

Deciphering Okmok Volcano's restless years (2002-2005)

Thesis (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2015Okmok Volcano is an active island-arc shield volcano located in the central Aleutian islands of Alaska. It is defined by a 10-km-diameter caldera that formed in two cataclysmic eruptions, the most recent being ~2050 years ago. Subsequent eruptions created several cinder cones within the caldera. The youngest of these, Cone A, was the active vent from 1815 through its 1997 eruption. On July 12 2008 Okmok erupted from new vents located northwest of Cone D. Between 2001 and 2004, geodetic measurements showed caldera inflation. These studies suggested that new magma might be entering the system. In 2002, a newly installed seismic network recorded quasi-periodic ("banded") seismic tremor signals occurring at the rate of two or more episodes per hour. This tremor was a near-continuous signal from the day the seismic network was installed. Although the volcano was not erupting, it was clearly in a state of unrest. This unrest garnered considerable attention because the volcano had erupted just six years prior. The seismic tremor potentially held insight as to whether the unrest was a remnant of the 1997 eruption, or whether it signaled a possible rejuvenation of activity and the potential for eruption. To determine the root cause and implications of this remarkable seismic tremor sequence, I created a catalog of over ~17,000 tremor events recorded between 2003 and mid-2005. Tremor patterns evolved on the scale of days, but remained the dominant seismic signal. In order to facilitate the analysis of several years of data I created a MATLAB toolbox, known as "The Waveform Suite". This toolbox made it feasible for me to work with several years of digital data and forego my introductory analyses that were based on paper "helicorder" records. I first attempted to locate the tremor using the relative amplitudes of the seismograms to determine where the tremor was being created. Candidate tremor locations were constrained to a few locations along a corridor between Cone A and the caldera center. I then determined theoretical ratios between a reference station and stations nearby the candidate sources. Results suggested that the signal originated in the shallow portion of the corridor connecting the surface of Cone A to the top of the central magma chamber. This study also suggested that the source migrated along this corridor. I integrated the tremor patterns with other studies and proposed that heat and pressure from continued injections of magma were responsible for maintaining an open venting system at Cone A. The tremor resulted from the boiling of a shallow hydrothermal system in the vicinity of Cone A and volatiles potentially coming from the magma itself. The tremor catalog demonstrates that the seismic signal waned during the study period suggesting that fewer fresh volatiles entered the system, which may have allowed the pathways connecting the magma and volatiles to the surface to close up. By the time new magma entered the system in 2006, this network of pathways was closed, forcing the volatiles to seek a new exit. In hindsight, the 2003-2005 period of varied and waning seismic tremor, and the inferred end of massive open venting, may have been a pivotal era at Okmok that eventually led to the 2008 eruption