Transfer Learning for Urban Landscape Clustering and Correlation with Health Indexes

Within the EU-funded Pulse project, we are implementing a data analytic platform designed to provide public health decision makers with advanced approaches to jointly analyze maps and geospatial information with health care data and air pollution measurements. In this paper we describe a component of such platform, designed to couple deep learning analysis of geospatial images of cities and some healthcare and behavioral indexes collected by the 500 cities US project, showing that, in New York City, urban landscape significantly correlates with the access to healthcare services

An Empirical Investigation of Female Entrepreneurship & Innovation Activities in Greece

The importance of entrepreneurship for economic growth has been emphasised by economic literature. The recent debate on the determinants of output growth has concentrated mainly on the role of knowledge, typically produced by a specific sector of the economy, and furthermore in the role of entrepreneurship and the implications on economic growth. Much of the recent work on economic growth can be viewed as refining the basic economic insights of classical economists. The statistical analysis is therefore very important. Nowadays there are well-organized databases, and the researcher can easily decide about the sample, rather than some years ago. Research and Development, technical change and entrepreneurship are directly related with industrial infrastructure, productivity effects and regional development. Entrepreneurship aims to reinforce the competitiveness, and to succeed the modernisation process and the convergence between firms and industries in the member states, adopting statistical techniques, using the appropriate software. This paper attempts to examine the role of entrepreneurship, and those of innovation activities (technical change, research and development and diffusion of technology) and the effects of output growth, using both a theoretical and empirical approach in a Greek case study. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to analyse the framework, the obstacles, the determinant factors using the appropriate statistical techniques and furthermore the role of female entrepreneurship in the Greek firms. It also attempts to examine the role of female entrepreneurship on innovation activities and the effects on sustainable development and in the implications on growth, economic integration, regional development and social change.

The Social Wellbeing of New York City's Neighborhoods: The Contribution of Culture and the Arts

This report presents the conceptual framework, data and methodology, and findings of a two-year study of culture and social wellbeing in New York City by SIAP with Reinvestment Fund. Building on their work in Philadelphia, the team gathered data from City agencies, borough arts councils, and cultural practitioners to develop a 10-dimension social wellbeing framework—which included construction of a cultural asset index—for every neighborhood in the five boroughs. The research was undertaken between 2014 and 2016.The social wellbeing tool enables a variety of analyses: the distribution of opportunity across the city;identification of areas with concentrated advantage, concentrated disadvantage, aswell as "diverse and struggling" neighborhoods with both strengths and challenges; and analysis of the relationship of"neighborhood cultural ecology" to other features of a healthy community

Urban land cover mapping using medium spatial resolution satellite imageries: effectiveness of Decision Tree Classifier

The study is inserted in the framework of information extraction from satellite imageries for supporting rapid mapping activities, where information need to be extracted quickly and the elimination, also if partially, of manual digitalization procedures, can be considered a great breakthrough. The main aim of this study was therefore to develop algorithms for the extraction of urban layer by means of medium spatial resolution Landsat data processing; Decision Tree classifier was investigated as classification techniques, thus it allows to extract rules that can be later applied to different scenes. In particular, the aim was to evaluate which steps to perform in order to obtain a good classification procedure, mainly focusing on processing that can be applied to images and on training set features. The training set was evaluated on the basis of the number of classes to use for its creation, together with the temporal extension of the training set and input attributes, while images were submitted to different kind of radiometric pre and post-processing. The aim was the evaluation of the best variables to set for the creation of the training set, to be used for the classifier generation. Above-mentioned variables were compared and results evaluated on the basis of reached accuracies. Data used for the validation were derived from the Digital Regional Technical Ma

Influence of Floods on Spatial Variability of Wetslums Using Geo-information Techniques: A Case Study of a Specific Human Habitat in Korail, Dhaka

A previous study by the authors found that most slum physical upgrading projects traditionally focus on basic services, elaborated with citywide data, without addressing locational and environmental aspects. However, such data tends to hide the highly heterogeneous nature of slums. Thus, this paper’s objective is to further investigate the spatial variation resulting from the influence of water on the living conditions within slums, by proposing a framework that can quantify it. This framework is used to establish the correlation between the impact of flooding denoted by a Flood Proneness Index and living conditions denoted by a Slum Living Conditions Index in Korail, Dhaka. The paper concludes that in Korail, both flooding and living conditions exhibited spatial variability, with the former seeming to have a significant influence on the latter, particularly in areas located close to or on a water body. As a result, the paper proposes to define slums which exhibit considerable correlation between flooding and living conditions as wetslums. The analysis in Korail further revealed cluster formation and as such strengthens the hypothesis of locational variability in these specific human habitats. Subsequently, wetslum areas that require resilient physical upgrading are identified thus highlighting the importance for location-specific upgrading

Cities and quality of life. Quantitative modeling of the emergence of the happiness field in urban studies

Where we live affects all aspects of our life and thus our happiness. In recent years, and now for more than half of the population of the Earth, our place of residence or activity has been increasingly transformed into an urban one. However, while the impact of happiness studies has grown in importance during the last twenty years, we note that happiness-related concepts find it difficult to penetrate the planning and design of cities, and affect the field of urban studies. In this paper, we map the temporal evolution of the fields of happiness and urban studies into dynamic networks obtained by paper keywords co-occurrence analysis. We identify the main concepts of the “urban happiness” field and their capacity to agglomerate into coherent thematic clusters. We find that while quality of life and well-being are highly interconnected with some well-defined urban categories, other happiness-related concepts, as subjective well-being or happiness itself, are located in peripheral positions where their influence is minimised. We present a one-parameter spatial network model in order to reproduce the changes in the topology of these networks. Results explain the evolution and the level of interpenetration of these two fields as a function of “conceptual” distances, mapped into Euclidean ones. In addition to other approaches (i.e., co-frequency matrix of bibliometric analysis), complex networks science appears as a valid alternative and opens the way for the systematic study of other academic fields in terms of complex evolving networks.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Early Twentieth Century Productivity Growth Dynamics: An Inquiry into the Economic History of “Our Ignorance”

A marked acceleration of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in U.S. manufacturing followed World War I. This development contributed substantially to the absolute and relative rise of the domestic economy's aggregate TFP residual, which is observed when the 'growth accounts' for the first quarter of the twentieth century are compared with those for the second half of the nineteenth century. Two visions of the dynamics of productivity growth are germane to an understanding of these developments. One emphasizes the role of forces affecting broad sections of the economy, through spillovers of knowledge and the diffusion of general purpose technologies (GPT's). The second view considers that possible sources of productivity increase are multiple and idiosyncratic. Setting aside possible measurement errors, the latter approach regards sectoral and economy-wide surges of the TFP growth to be simply the result of which carried more weight than others. Although there is room for both views in an analysis of the sources of the industrial TFP acceleration during the 1920's, we find the evidence more compelling in support of the first approach. The proximate source of the TFP surge lay in the switch from declining or stable capital productivity to a rising output-capital ratio, which occurred at this time in many branches of manufacturing, and which was not accompanied by slowed growth in labor productivity. The 1920's saw critical advances in the electrification industry, the diffusion of a GTP that brought significant fixed capital-savings. But the same era also witnessed profound transformations in the American industrial labor market, followed the stoppage of mass immigration from Europe; rising real wages provided strong impetus to changes in workforce recruitment and management practices that were underway in some branches of the economy before the War. The productivity surge reflected the confluence of these two forces. This historical study has direct relevance for policies intended to increase the rate of productivity growth. In many respects, the decade of the 1920's launched the US economy on a high-growth path that lasted until the 1970's. If we hope to return to the growth performance of that era, we would be well advised to understand how it began.

Comparative Analysis of Web of Science and Scopus on the Energy Efficiency and Climate Impact of Buildings

Although the body of scientific publications on energy efficiency and climate mitigation from buildings has been growing quickly in recent years, very few previous bibliometric analysis studies exist that analyze the literature in terms of specific content (trends or options for zero‐energy buildings) or coverage of different scientific databases. We evaluate the scientific literature published since January 2013 concerning alternative methods for improving the energy efficiency and mitigating climate impacts from buildings. We quantify and describe the literature through a bibliometric approach, comparing the databases Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. A total of 19,416 (Scopus) and 17,468 (WoS) publications are analyzed, with only 11% common documents. The literature has grown steadily during this time period, with a peak in the year 2017. Most of the publications are in English, in the area of Engineering and Energy Fuels, and from institutions from China and the USA. Strong links are observed between the most published authors and institutions worldwide. An analysis of keywords reveals that most of research focuses on technologies for heating, ventilation, and air‐conditioning, phase change materials, as well as information and communication technologies. A significantly smaller segment of the literature takes a broader perspective (greenhouse gas emissions, life cycle, and sustainable development), investigating implementation issues (policies and costs) or renewable energy (solar). Knowledge gaps are detected in the areas of behavioral changes, the circular economy, and some renewable energy sources (geothermal, biomass, small wind). We conclude that i) the contents of WoS and Scopus are radically different in the studied fields; ii) research seems to focus on technological aspects; and iii) there are weak links between research on energy and on climate mitigation and sustainability, the latter themes being misrepresented in the literature. These conclusions should be validated with further analyses of the documents identified in this study. We recommend that future research focuses on filling the above identified gaps, assessing the contents of several scientific databases, and extending energy analyses to their effects in terms of mitigation potentials.This work was funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades de España (RTI2018‐ 093849‐B‐C31), by ICREA under the ICREA Academia programme, and by the foundation SIVL

Geo-Information Technology and Its Applications

Geo-information technology has been playing an ever more important role in environmental monitoring, land resource quantification and mapping, geo-disaster damage and risk assessment, urban planning and smart city development. This book focuses on the fundamental and applied research in these domains, aiming to promote exchanges and communications, share the research outcomes of scientists worldwide and to put these achievements better social use. This Special Issue collects fourteen high-quality research papers and is expected to provide a useful reference and technical support for graduate students, scientists, civil engineers and experts of governments to valorize scientific research