126,019 research outputs found
The role of earth observation in an integrated deprived area mapping “system” for low-to-middle income countries
Urbanization in the global South has been accompanied by the proliferation of vast informal and marginalized urban areas that lack access to essential services and infrastructure. UN-Habitat estimates that close to a billion people currently live in these deprived and informal urban settlements, generally grouped under the term of urban slums. Two major knowledge gaps undermine the efforts to monitor progress towards the corresponding sustainable development goal (i.e., SDG 11—Sustainable Cities and Communities). First, the data available for cities worldwide is patchy and insufficient to differentiate between the diversity of urban areas with respect to their access to essential services and their specific infrastructure needs. Second, existing approaches used to map deprived areas (i.e., aggregated household data, Earth observation (EO), and community-driven data collection) are mostly siloed, and, individually, they often lack transferability and scalability and fail to include the opinions of different interest groups. In particular, EO-based-deprived area mapping approaches are mostly top-down, with very little attention given to ground information and interaction with urban communities and stakeholders. Existing top-down methods should be complemented with bottom-up approaches to produce routinely updated, accurate, and timely deprived area maps. In this review, we first assess the strengths and limitations of existing deprived area mapping methods. We then propose an Integrated Deprived Area Mapping System (IDeAMapS) framework that leverages the strengths of EO- and community-based approaches. The proposed framework offers a way forward to map deprived areas globally, routinely, and with maximum accuracy to support SDG 11 monitoring and the needs of different interest groups
PICES Press, Vol. 20, No. 2, Summer 2012
•The 2012 Inter-sessional Science Board Meeting: A Note from Science Board Chairman (pp. 1-4)
â—ľPICES Interns (p. 4)
â—ľ2012 Inter-sessional Workshop on a Roadmap for FUTURE (pp. 5-8)
◾Second Symposium on “Effects of Climate Change on the World’s Oceans” (pp. 9-13)
◾2012 Yeosu Workshop on “Framework for Ocean Observing” (pp. 14-15)
◾2012 Yeosu Workshop on “Climate Change Projections” (pp. 16-17)
◾2012 Yeosu Workshop on “Coastal Blue Carbon” (pp. 18-20)
â—ľPolar Comparisons: Summary of 2012 Yeosu Workshop (pp. 21-23)
◾2012 Yeosu Workshop on “Climate Change and Range Shifts in the Oceans" (pp. 24-27)
◾2012 Yeosu Workshop on “Beyond Dispersion” (pp. 28-30)
◾2012 Yeosu Workshop on “Public Perception of Climate Change” (pp. 31, 50)
â—ľPICES Working Group 20: Accomplishments and Legacy (pp. 32-33)
â—ľThe State of the Western North Pacific in the Second Half of 2011 (pp. 34-35)
â—ľAnother Cold Winter in the Gulf of Alaska (pp. 36-37)
â—ľThe Bering Sea: Current Status and Recent Events (pp. 38-40)
â—ľPICES/ICES 2012 Conference for Early Career Marine Scientists (pp. 41-43)
◾Completion of the PICES Seafood Safety Project – Indonesia (pp. 44-46)
â—ľOceanography Improves Salmon Forecasts (p. 47)
â—ľ2012 GEOHAB Open Science Meeting (p. 48-50)
â—ľShin-ichi Ito awarded 2011 Uda Prize (p. 50
Adapting Visual Question Answering Models for Enhancing Multimodal Community Q&A Platforms
Question categorization and expert retrieval methods have been crucial for
information organization and accessibility in community question & answering
(CQA) platforms. Research in this area, however, has dealt with only the text
modality. With the increasing multimodal nature of web content, we focus on
extending these methods for CQA questions accompanied by images. Specifically,
we leverage the success of representation learning for text and images in the
visual question answering (VQA) domain, and adapt the underlying concept and
architecture for automated category classification and expert retrieval on
image-based questions posted on Yahoo! Chiebukuro, the Japanese counterpart of
Yahoo! Answers.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to tackle the
multimodality challenge in CQA, and to adapt VQA models for tasks on a more
ecologically valid source of visual questions. Our analysis of the differences
between visual QA and community QA data drives our proposal of novel
augmentations of an attention method tailored for CQA, and use of auxiliary
tasks for learning better grounding features. Our final model markedly
outperforms the text-only and VQA model baselines for both tasks of
classification and expert retrieval on real-world multimodal CQA data.Comment: Submitted for review at CIKM 201
What's unusual in online disease outbreak news?
Background: Accurate and timely detection of public health events of
international concern is necessary to help support risk assessment and response
and save lives. Novel event-based methods that use the World Wide Web as a
signal source offer potential to extend health surveillance into areas where
traditional indicator networks are lacking. In this paper we address the issue
of systematically evaluating online health news to support automatic alerting
using daily disease-country counts text mined from real world data using
BioCaster. For 18 data sets produced by BioCaster, we compare 5 aberration
detection algorithms (EARS C2, C3, W2, F-statistic and EWMA) for performance
against expert moderated ProMED-mail postings. Results: We report sensitivity,
specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV),
mean alerts/100 days and F1, at 95% confidence interval (CI) for 287
ProMED-mail postings on 18 outbreaks across 14 countries over a 366 day period.
Results indicate that W2 had the best F1 with a slight benefit for day of week
effect over C2. In drill down analysis we indicate issues arising from the
granular choice of country-level modeling, sudden drops in reporting due to day
of week effects and reporting bias. Automatic alerting has been implemented in
BioCaster available from http://born.nii.ac.jp. Conclusions: Online health news
alerts have the potential to enhance manual analytical methods by increasing
throughput, timeliness and detection rates. Systematic evaluation of health
news aberrations is necessary to push forward our understanding of the complex
relationship between news report volumes and case numbers and to select the
best performing features and algorithms
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