Using Data From the Web to Predict Public Transport Arrivals Under Special Events Scenarios

The Internet has become the preferred resource to announce, search, and comment about social events such as concerts, sports games, parades, demonstrations, sales, or any other public event that potentially gathers a large group of people. These planned special events often carry a potential disruptive impact to the transportation system, because they correspond to nonhabitual behavior patterns that are hard to predict and plan for. Except for very large and mega events (e.g., Olympic games, football world cup), operators seldom apply special planning measures for two major reasons: The task of manually tracking which events are happening in large cities is labor-intensive; and, even with a list of events, their impact is hard to estimate, especially when more than one event happens simultaneously. In this article, we utilize the Internet as a resource for contextual information about special events and develop a model that predicts public transport arrivals in event areas. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of this solution for practitioners, we apply off-the-shelf techniques both for Internet data collection and for the prediction model development. We demonstrate the results with a case study from the city-state of Singapore using public transport tap-in/tap-out data and local event information obtained from the Internet. Keywords: Data mining; Demand Prediction; Public Transport; Smartcard; Urban Computing; Web Minin

Modelling the behavior of human crowds as coupled active-passive dynamics of interacting particle systems

The modelling of human crowd behaviors offers many challenging questions to science in general. Specifically, the social human behavior consists of many physiological and psychological processes which are still largely unknown. To model reliably such human crowd systems with complex social interactions, stochastic tools play an important role for the setting of mathematical formulations of the problems. In this work, using the description based on an exclusion principle, we study a statistical-mechanics-based lattice gas model for active-passive population dynamics with an application to human crowd behaviors. We provide representative numerical examples for the evacuation dynamics of human crowds, where the main focus in our considerations is given to an interacting particle system of active and passive human groups. Furthermore, our numerical results show that the communication between active and passive humans strongly influences the evacuation time of the whole population even when the "faster-is-slower" phenomenon is taken into account. To provide an additional inside into the problem, a stationary state of our model is analyzed via current representations and heat map techniques. Finally, future extensions of the proposed models are discussed in the context of coupled data-driven modelling of human crowds and traffic flows, vital for the design strategies in developing intelligent transportation systems.Comment: 12 figures, 23 page

A LITERATURE STUDY ON CROWD(PEOPLE) COUNTING WITH THE HELP OF SURVEILLANCE VIDEOS

The categories of crowd counting in video falls in two broad categories: (a) ROI counting which estimates the total number of people in some regions at certain time instance (b) LOI counting which counts people who crosses a detecting line in certain time duration. The LOI counting can be developed using feature tracking techniques where the features are either tracked into trajectories and these trajectories are clustered into object tracks or based on extracting and counting crowd blobs from a temporal slice of the video. And the ROI counting can be developed using two techniques: Detection Based and Feature Based and Pixel Regression Techniques. Detection based methods detect people individually and count them. It utilizes any of the following methods:- Background Differencing, Motion and Appearance joint segmentation, Silhouette or shape matching and Standard object recognition method. Regression approaches extract the features such as foreground pixels and interest points, and vectors are formed with those features and it uses machine learning algorithms to subside the number of pedestrians or people. Some of the common features according to recent survey are edges, wavelet coefficients, and combination of large set of features. Some of the common Regressions are Linear Regression, Neural Networks, Gaussian Process Regression and Discrete Classifiers. This paper aims at presenting a decade survey on people (crowd) counting in surveillance videos

Collaborative Uploading in Heterogeneous Networks: Optimal and Adaptive Strategies

Collaborative uploading describes a type of crowdsourcing scenario in networked environments where a device utilizes multiple paths over neighboring devices to upload content to a centralized processing entity such as a cloud service. Intermediate devices may aggregate and preprocess this data stream. Such scenarios arise in the composition and aggregation of information, e.g., from smartphones or sensors. We use a queuing theoretic description of the collaborative uploading scenario, capturing the ability to split data into chunks that are then transmitted over multiple paths, and finally merged at the destination. We analyze replication and allocation strategies that control the mapping of data to paths and provide closed-form expressions that pinpoint the optimal strategy given a description of the paths' service distributions. Finally, we provide an online path-aware adaptation of the allocation strategy that uses statistical inference to sequentially minimize the expected waiting time for the uploaded data. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the adaptive approach compared to the proportional allocation and a variant of the join-the-shortest-queue allocation, especially for bursty path conditions.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, extended version of a conference paper accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 201

Deep learning in crowd counting: A survey

Counting high-density objects quickly and accurately is a popular area of research. Crowd counting has significant social and economic value and is a major focus in artificial intelligence. Despite many advancements in this field, many of them are not widely known, especially in terms of research data. The authors proposed a three-tier standardised dataset taxonomy (TSDT). The Taxonomy divides datasets into small-scale, large-scale and hyper-scale, according to different application scenarios. This theory can help researchers make more efficient use of datasets and improve the performance of AI algorithms in specific fields. Additionally, the authors proposed a new evaluation index for the clarity of the dataset: average pixel occupied by each object (APO). This new evaluation index is more suitable for evaluating the clarity of the dataset in the object counting task than the image resolution. Moreover, the authors classified the crowd counting methods from a data-driven perspective: multi-scale networks, single-column networks, multi-column networks, multi-task networks, attention networks and weak-supervised networks and introduced the classic crowd counting methods of each class. The authors classified the existing 36 datasets according to the theory of three-tier standardised dataset taxonomy and discussed and evaluated these datasets. The authors evaluated the performance of more than 100 methods in the past five years on different levels of popular datasets. Recently, progress in research on small-scale datasets has slowed down. There are few new datasets and algorithms on small-scale datasets. The studies focused on large or hyper-scale datasets appear to be reaching a saturation point. The combined use of multiple approaches began to be a major research direction. The authors discussed the theoretical and practical challenges of crowd counting from the perspective of data, algorithms and computing resources. The field of crowd counting is moving towards combining multiple methods and requires fresh, targeted datasets. Despite advancements, the field still faces challenges such as handling real-world scenarios and processing large crowds in real-time. Researchers are exploring transfer learning to overcome the limitations of small datasets. The development of effective algorithms for crowd counting remains a challenging and important task in computer vision and AI, with many opportunities for future research.BHF, AA/18/3/34220Hope Foundation for Cancer Research, RM60G0680GCRF, P202PF11;Sino‐UK Industrial Fund, RP202G0289LIAS, P202ED10, P202RE969Data Science Enhancement Fund, P202RE237Sino‐UK Education Fund, OP202006Fight for Sight, 24NN201Royal Society International Exchanges Cost Share Award, RP202G0230MRC, MC_PC_17171BBSRC, RM32G0178B