The Rise of Innovation Districts: A New Geography of Innovation in America

As the United States slowly emerges from the great recession, a remarkable shify is occurring in the spatial geogrpahy of innovation. For the past 50 years, the landscape of innovation has been dominated by places like Silicon Valley - suburban corridors of spatially isolated corporate campuses, accessible only by car, with little emphasis on the quality of life or on integrating work, housing, and recreation. A new complementary urban model is now emerging, giving rise to what we and others are calling "innovation districts." These districts, by our definition, are geographic areas where leading-edge anchor institutions and companies cluster and connect with start-ups, business incubators, and accelerators. They are also physically compact, transit-accessible, and technicall

GEO-C:Enabling open cities and the open city toolkit

The GEO-C doctoral programme, entitled “Geoinformatics: Enabling Open Cities”, is funded by the EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (International Training Networks (ITN), European Joint Doctorates) until December 2018, and is managed by three European universities in Germany, Portugal and Spain. 15 doctoral grantholders (Early Stage Researchers) were selected to work on specific three-year projects, all contributing to improving the notion of open cities, and specifically to an Open City Toolkit of methodologies, code, and best practice examples. Contributions include volunteered geographic information (VGI), public information displays, mobility apps to encourage green living, providing open data to immigrant populations, reducing the second-order digital divide, sensing of quality of life, proximity based privacy protection, and spatio-temporal online social media analysis. All doctoral students conducted long-term visits and were embedded in city governments and businesses, to gain experience from multiple perspectives in addition to the researcher and users’ perspective. The projects are situated within three areas: transparency, participation, and collaboration. They took mostly a bottom-up (citizen-centric) approach to (smart) open cities, rather than relying on large IT companies to create smart open cities in a top-down manner. This paper discusses the various contributions to enabling open cities, explains in some detail the Open City Toolkit, and its possible uses and impact on stakeholders. A follow-up doctoral program has been solicited and, if successful, will continue this line of research and will strengthen aspects of privacy, data provenance, and trust, in an effort to improve relations between data (e.g. news) publishers and consumers

PMU Tracker: A Visualization Platform for Epicentric Event Propagation Analysis in the Power Grid

The electrical power grid is a critical infrastructure, with disruptions in transmission having severe repercussions on daily activities, across multiple sectors. To identify, prevent, and mitigate such events, power grids are being refurbished as 'smart' systems that include the widespread deployment of GPS-enabled phasor measurement units (PMUs). PMUs provide fast, precise, and time-synchronized measurements of voltage and current, enabling real-time wide-area monitoring and control. However, the potential benefits of PMUs, for analyzing grid events like abnormal power oscillations and load fluctuations, are hindered by the fact that these sensors produce large, concurrent volumes of noisy data. In this paper, we describe working with power grid engineers to investigate how this problem can be addressed from a visual analytics perspective. As a result, we have developed PMU Tracker, an event localization tool that supports power grid operators in visually analyzing and identifying power grid events and tracking their propagation through the power grid's network. As a part of the PMU Tracker interface, we develop a novel visualization technique which we term an epicentric cluster dendrogram, which allows operators to analyze the effects of an event as it propagates outwards from a source location. We robustly validate PMU Tracker with: (1) a usage scenario demonstrating how PMU Tracker can be used to analyze anomalous grid events, and (2) case studies with power grid operators using a real-world interconnection dataset. Our results indicate that PMU Tracker effectively supports the analysis of power grid events; we also demonstrate and discuss how PMU Tracker's visual analytics approach can be generalized to other domains composed of time-varying networks with epicentric event characteristics.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, IEEE VIS 2022 Paper to appear in IEEE TVCG; conference encourages arXiv submission for accessibilit

The Repast Simulation/Modelling System for Geospatial Simulation

The use of simulation/modelling systems can simplify the implementation of agent-based models. Repast is one of the few simulation/modelling software systems that supports the integration of geospatial data especially that of vector-based geometries. This paper provides details about Repast specifically an overview, including its different development languages available to develop agent-based models. Before describing Repast’s core functionality and how models can be developed within it, specific emphasis will be placed on its ability to represent dynamics and incorporate geographical information. Once these elements of the system have been covered, a diverse list of Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) applications using Repast will be presented with particular emphasis on spatial applications utilizing Repast, in particular, those that utilize geospatial data

Join operation for semantic data enrichment of asynchronous time series data

In this paper, we present a novel framework for enriching time series data in smart cities by supplementing it with information from external sources via semantic data enrichment. Our methodology effectively merges multiple data sources into a uniform time series, while addressing difficulties such as data quality, contextual information, and time lapses. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method through a case study in Barcelona, which permitted the use of advanced analysis methods such as windowed cross-correlation and peak picking. The resulting time series data can be used to determine traffic patterns and has potential uses in other smart city sectors, such as air quality, energy efficiency, and public safety. Interactive dashboards enable stakeholders to visualize and summarize key insights and patterns.Postprint (published version

17-09 Assessing the Impact of Air Pollution on Public Health Along Transit Routes

Transportation sources account for a large proportion of the pollutants found in most urban areas. Also, transportation activity and intensity appear likely to contribute to the risk of respiratory disease occurrence. This research investigates the impacts of transportation, urban design and socioeconomic characteristics on the risk of air pollution-related respiratory diseases in two of the biggest MSAs (Metropolitan Statistical Areas) in the US, Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) and Los Angeles at the block group (BG) level, by considering the US Environmental Protection Agency’s respiratory hazard quotient (RHQ) as the dependent variable. The researchers identify thirty candidate indicators of disease risk from previous studies and use them as independent variables in the model. The study applies a three-step modeling including Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Ordinary Least Square (OLS) and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) to reach the final model. The results of this study demonstrate strong spatial correlations in the variability in both MSAs which help explain the impact of the indicators such as socioeconomic characteristics, transit access to jobs, and automobile access on the risk of respiratory diseases. The populations living in areas with higher transit access to jobs in urbanized areas and greater automobile access in more rural areas appear more prone to respiratory diseases after controlling for demographic characteristics

A Review of Trip Planning Systems.

This report reviews current information provision in all modes of transport and assesses the needs for and benefits of trip planning systems. The feasibility of trip planning systems is discussed given the current state of technology and information availability and supply. The review was stimulated by technological developments in telecommunications and information technology which are providing the possibility of a greatly enhanced quality of information to aid trip planning decisions. Amongst the conclusions reached were the following: Current information provision is considered deficient in many respects. Travellers are often unaware of alternative routes or services and many are unable to acquire adequate information from one source especially for multi-modal journeys. In addition, there is a lack of providing real time information where it is required (bus stops and train stations) and of effective interaction of static and real time information. Most of the projects, which integrate static and dynamic data, are single mode systems. Therefore there is a need for an integrated trip planning system which can inform and guide on all aspects of transport. Trip planning systems can provide assistance in trip planning (before and during the journey) using one or a number of modes of travel, taking into account travellers preferences and constraints, and effectively integrating static and dynamic data. Trip planning systems could adversely affect traffic demand as people who become aware of new opportunities might be encouraged to make more journeys. It could also affect travellers choice as a result of over-saturation of information, over-reaction to predictive information, and concentration on the same 'best' routes. However, it can be argued, based on existing evidence, that such a system can benefit travellers, and transport operators as well as the public sector responsible for executing transport policies. Travellers can benefit by obtaining adequate information to help them in making optimal decisions and reducing uncertainty and stress associated with travel. Public transport operators can benefit by making their services known to customers, leading to increased patronage. Public transport authorities can use the supply of information to execute their transport policies and exercise more control over traffic management

Digital real estate: a review of the technologies and tools transforming the industry and society

© 2023 The Author(s); Shantou University. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Real estate plays a crucial role in driving national economies. However, the process of transferring properties and engaging with various stakeholders can be hindered by a lack of adequate information, complex procedures, and excessive paperwork. The advent of digital real estate has revolutionized the industry and how stakeholders interact. The present study aims to conduct a bibliometric and systematic review of digital real estate, utilizing historical, institutional, country, and keyword analyses for the bibliometric review and Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines for the systematic review. Through thematic analysis, the study identified four key themes for transforming digital real estate: information communication technologies, data collection technologies, data networking tools, and digital decision-making systems. Additionally, the study proposes a digital real estate transformation framework that can assist stakeholders, urban planners, and decision-makers in embracing digital tools and technologies. The study concludes that digital real estate has the potential to revolutionize future urban planning and real estate development through the use of decision support systems and advanced technologies.Peer reviewe

A Framework for and Design of a Smart Academic Building Using Sensors, Citizen Participation, and Volunteered Geographic Information

Population growth and migration patterns have shown an influx of residents from rural to urban environments. To deal with the problems caused by unprecedented urban influx, cities should plan to use technology in a smart and distinctive way. Tackling at the city scale is hard. But a set of smart buildings that are interconnected by technology will lead to smarter communities which are then interconnected to create a smart city. Smart lobby, building, community, or city is distinguished by its application of integrated software, hardware, and network technologies, along with access to real-time data enabling decision-making, facilitating tracing, tracking and real-time monitoring. For this research project, the unit of study is an academic building that we want to change into a smart building. The goal is to deliver two artifacts. The first artifact is a framework designed to guide developers, while considering stakeholders and technology elements to make a smart lobby engaging for the users. The second artifact is a mobile based application allowing users to access services on smart devices. To identity the services, multiple brainstorming and discussion sessions (Service ideation) were conducted between the researcher and colleagues at Claremont Graduate University. Potential new smart ideas to be deployed were discussed as well as opportunities to transform traditional services to smart services using emerging technologies (Service re-engineering). A preliminary list of 47 ideas were identified. The final three services chosen were based on the scoring by the pre-focus group survey participants (Table 2). Services include: restroom availability—making the occupancy in a restroom COVID-19 safe by limiting the number of occupants; conference room availability—displaying available conference room/public space in real time to allow users to reserve a room using their smart device and, allow management to set and verify occupancy limits; incident reporting—enabling people to report and upload pictures of issues in the facility that require attention. The project’s design aims to make a lobby smart and interactive. The key is to start small and start by making buildings, communities, and cities smarter by using ICTs. We learn and grow from there for larger implementations to be successful

ASSESSMENT OF URBAN LAND GOVERNANCE FOR SUSTAINABLE GOVERNANCE IN ETHIOPIA

ABSTRACT Context and backgroundLand governance promotes efficient and effective land policy administration. In Ethiopia cities, as in many Sub-Saharan African cities, many land governance challenges such as informal construction of houses and land holding, lack of public awareness of land policy, and eviction of landowners from their tenure were characterized. Those problems are high, especially in Addis Ababa and Adama cities since those cities are the largest in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian government is giving attention to minimizing those problems by adopting different proclamations, decrees, regulations, and standards.Goal and Objectives:Therefore, this study assessed the current practice of land governance in the urban development and management bureau in two Ethiopian cities, Addis Ababa and Adama, by using five good governance principles.Methodology:Data was gathered by administering questionnaires. The close-ended questionnaires were distributed to 305 landowners in the study area. Additional data were collected using interviews, focus group discussions, and key informant interviews with urban land management and development office experts. Qualitative data were analysed in the form of interpretation and narrative and quantitative data were analysed using statistical software.Results:The study found out that from the five principles of good governance public participation and equality of women were somehow practiced in land governance sectors during the land-delivering process. Land governance sectors were lack transparency and accountability, inefficient performance, and ineffective service. Landowners were confused to judge their satisfaction in land governance sectors service. The study concluded that different findings were made for each of the good governance principles. The findings of this study are utilized to ensure sustainable good land governance for any land governance sector by taking corrective measurements on weak performed principles of good governance.Keywords: Ethiopia, Land Governance, Urban Land, Principles of Good Governance, Assessmen