21,183 research outputs found
Great East Japan Earthquake, JR East Mitigation Successes, and Lessons for California High-Speed Rail, MTI Report 12-37
California and Japan both experience frequent seismic activity, which is often damaging to infrastructure. Seismologists have developed systems for detecting and analyzing earthquakes in real-time. JR East has developed systems to mitigate the damage to their facilities and personnel, including an early earthquake detection system, retrofitting of existing facilities for seismic safety, development of more seismically resistant designs for new facilities, and earthquake response training and exercises for staff members. These systems demonstrated their value in the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 and have been further developed based on that experience. Researchers in California are developing an earthquake early warning system for the state, and the private sector has seismic sensors in place. These technologies could contribute to the safety of the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s developing system, which could emulate the best practices demonstrated in Japan in the construction of the Los Angeles-to-San Jose segment
Catalog of selected heavy duty transport energy management models
A catalog of energy management models for heavy duty transport systems powered by diesel engines is presented. The catalog results from a literature survey, supplemented by telephone interviews and mailed questionnaires to discover the major computer models currently used in the transportation industry in the following categories: heavy duty transport systems, which consist of highway (vehicle simulation), marine (ship simulation), rail (locomotive simulation), and pipeline (pumping station simulation); and heavy duty diesel engines, which involve models that match the intake/exhaust system to the engine, fuel efficiency, emissions, combustion chamber shape, fuel injection system, heat transfer, intake/exhaust system, operating performance, and waste heat utilization devices, i.e., turbocharger, bottoming cycle
Geo-Spotting: Mining Online Location-based Services for Optimal Retail Store Placement
The problem of identifying the optimal location for a new retail store has
been the focus of past research, especially in the field of land economy, due
to its importance in the success of a business. Traditional approaches to the
problem have factored in demographics, revenue and aggregated human flow
statistics from nearby or remote areas. However, the acquisition of relevant
data is usually expensive. With the growth of location-based social networks,
fine grained data describing user mobility and popularity of places has
recently become attainable.
In this paper we study the predictive power of various machine learning
features on the popularity of retail stores in the city through the use of a
dataset collected from Foursquare in New York. The features we mine are based
on two general signals: geographic, where features are formulated according to
the types and density of nearby places, and user mobility, which includes
transitions between venues or the incoming flow of mobile users from distant
areas. Our evaluation suggests that the best performing features are common
across the three different commercial chains considered in the analysis,
although variations may exist too, as explained by heterogeneities in the way
retail facilities attract users. We also show that performance improves
significantly when combining multiple features in supervised learning
algorithms, suggesting that the retail success of a business may depend on
multiple factors.Comment: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD international conference on
Knowledge discovery and data mining, Chicago, 2013, Pages 793-80
Panoptic Segmentation
We propose and study a task we name panoptic segmentation (PS). Panoptic
segmentation unifies the typically distinct tasks of semantic segmentation
(assign a class label to each pixel) and instance segmentation (detect and
segment each object instance). The proposed task requires generating a coherent
scene segmentation that is rich and complete, an important step toward
real-world vision systems. While early work in computer vision addressed
related image/scene parsing tasks, these are not currently popular, possibly
due to lack of appropriate metrics or associated recognition challenges. To
address this, we propose a novel panoptic quality (PQ) metric that captures
performance for all classes (stuff and things) in an interpretable and unified
manner. Using the proposed metric, we perform a rigorous study of both human
and machine performance for PS on three existing datasets, revealing
interesting insights about the task. The aim of our work is to revive the
interest of the community in a more unified view of image segmentation.Comment: accepted to CVPR 201
National and international freight transport models: overview and ideas for further development
This paper contains a review of the literature on freight transport models, focussing on the types of models that have been developed since the nineties for forecasting, policy simulation and project evaluation at the national and international level. Models for production, attraction, distribution, modal split and assignment are discussed in the paper. Furthermore, the paper also includes a number of ideas for future development, especially for the regional and urban components within national freight transport models
The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding
Visual understanding of complex urban street scenes is an enabling factor for
a wide range of applications. Object detection has benefited enormously from
large-scale datasets, especially in the context of deep learning. For semantic
urban scene understanding, however, no current dataset adequately captures the
complexity of real-world urban scenes.
To address this, we introduce Cityscapes, a benchmark suite and large-scale
dataset to train and test approaches for pixel-level and instance-level
semantic labeling. Cityscapes is comprised of a large, diverse set of stereo
video sequences recorded in streets from 50 different cities. 5000 of these
images have high quality pixel-level annotations; 20000 additional images have
coarse annotations to enable methods that leverage large volumes of
weakly-labeled data. Crucially, our effort exceeds previous attempts in terms
of dataset size, annotation richness, scene variability, and complexity. Our
accompanying empirical study provides an in-depth analysis of the dataset
characteristics, as well as a performance evaluation of several
state-of-the-art approaches based on our benchmark.Comment: Includes supplemental materia
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