Smart Urban Cities/Communities: Leveraging Information and Communication Technologies for Improving Local Public Services

CPACS Urban Research Awards Part of the mission of the College of Public Affairs and Community Service (CPACS) is to conduct research, especially as it relates to concerns of our local and statewide constituencies. CPACS has always had an urban mission, and one way that mission is served is to preform applied research relevant to urban society in general, and the Omaha metropolitan area and other Nebraska urban communities in particular. Beginning in 2014, the CPACS Dean provided funding for the projects with high relevance to current urban issues, with the potential to apply the findings to practice in Nebraska, Iowa, and beyond

Play as You Like: Timbre-enhanced Multi-modal Music Style Transfer

Style transfer of polyphonic music recordings is a challenging task when considering the modeling of diverse, imaginative, and reasonable music pieces in the style different from their original one. To achieve this, learning stable multi-modal representations for both domain-variant (i.e., style) and domain-invariant (i.e., content) information of music in an unsupervised manner is critical. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised music style transfer method without the need for parallel data. Besides, to characterize the multi-modal distribution of music pieces, we employ the Multi-modal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation (MUNIT) framework in the proposed system. This allows one to generate diverse outputs from the learned latent distributions representing contents and styles. Moreover, to better capture the granularity of sound, such as the perceptual dimensions of timbre and the nuance in instrument-specific performance, cognitively plausible features including mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), spectral difference, and spectral envelope, are combined with the widely-used mel-spectrogram into a timber-enhanced multi-channel input representation. The Relativistic average Generative Adversarial Networks (RaGAN) is also utilized to achieve fast convergence and high stability. We conduct experiments on bilateral style transfer tasks among three different genres, namely piano solo, guitar solo, and string quartet. Results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method in music style transfer with improved sound quality and in allowing users to manipulate the output

Social Media for Emergency Management (SMEM): Promoting Cross-sector Collaboration

CPACS Urban Research Awards Part of the mission of the College of Public Affairs and Community Service (CPACS) is to conduct research, especially as it relates to concerns of our local and statewide constituencies. CPACS has always had an urban mission, and one way that mission is served is to preform applied research relevant to urban society in general, and the Omaha metropolitan area and other Nebraska urban communities in particular. Beginning in 2014, the CPACS Dean provided funding for the projects with high relevance to current urban issues, with the potential to apply the findings to practice in Nebraska, Iowa, and beyond

Numerical Simulation of Epidemic Prevention and Ventilation Efficiency in Indoor Spaces with Partitions and an Air curtain

In this study, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) were used to simulate the effect of a partition and air curtain on the concentration of a pollution source in an indoor space with different ventilation configurations. First, in the partition simulation, the performances of six different ventilation configurations were compared. Based on the results obtained, air curtain simulations were then carried out. In this study, carbon dioxide was chosen as the tracer gas in all simulations, and the realizable k − ε turbulence model was selected. In the partition simulation, a front-and-back ventilation configuration with ventilation inlets/outlets near the side walls (in diagonal) showed the best performance. This configuration was adopted for the air curtain simulation so as to investigate the effect of different air inlet velocities and air curtain velocities. It was found that as the height of the partition increases, although it has a higher chance of blocking the Covid-19 virus, it lowers the ventilation efficiency, resulting in the increase of carbon dioxide concentration in the indoor space. When the partition was replaced with an air curtain, it was found that the higher the height of the air curtain, the lower the carbon dioxide concentration in the indoor space. Compared with the partition, the air curtain can reduce the carbon dioxide concentration by up to 74.6%, indicating that the introduction of the air curtain can have an improving effect on the ventilation in the indoor space