Smart Campus – My Experiences and Perspective

This paper was part of Advancing the Spatially Enable Smart Campus (2013). The Center for Spatial Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara organized and hosted a specialist meeting about the smart campus. The meeting brought together academic and industry representatives with interest in conceiving, designing, and building a smart campus. It combined “thinking big” (asking what will make campuses smarter in the future) with “acting small” (focusing on specific organizational and technological measures and their evaluation)

Symmetric Criticality for Tight Knots

We prove a version of symmetric criticality for ropelength-critical knots. Our theorem implies that a knot or link with a symmetric representative has a ropelength-critical configuration with the same symmetry. We use this to construct new examples of ropelength critical configurations for knots and links which are different from the ropelength minima for these knot and link types.Comment: This version adds references, and most importantly an acknowledgements section which should have been in the original postin

Context-Based Customization of Routing Functions for Web GIS Applications

This poster presentation features three route planning applications developed by the Florida International University GIS Center and the Geomatics program at the University of Florida, and outlines their context based differences. The first route planner has been developed for cyclists in three Florida counties, i.e. Miami Dade County, Broward County, and Palm Beach County. The second route planner computes safe pedestrian routes to schools and has been developed for Miami Dade County. The third route planner combines pre-compiled cultural/eco routes and point-to-point route planning for the City of Coral Gables. This poster highlights the differences in design (user interface) and implementation (routing options) between the three route planners as a result of a different application context and target audience

Attacks intended to seriously harm and co-occurring drug use among youth in the United States

BACKGROUND: While it is known that substance use and violence co-occur, less is understood in terms of how this relationship might vary based on the degree of youth involvement in violence. OBJECTIVES: This study sought to examine the prevalence and degree that substance use disorders (SUD) and related intrapersonal and contextual factors were associated with violent attacks. METHOD: Repeated cross-sectional data from a population-based study (National Survey on Drug Use and Health) of youth ages 12–17 (n = 216,852) in the United States between 2002 and 2013 were pooled to increase the analytic sample size. Survey multinomial regression was used to examine psychosocial and substance use differences between youth reporting episodic (1–2 times, n = 13,091; 5.84%) and repeated violent attacks (3+ times, n = 1,819; 0.83%) in contrast with youth reporting no attacks. Additional analyses examined the association of sociodemographic, intrapersonal, and contextual factors with SUD among youth reporting violent attacks. RESULTS: The prevalence of SUD among youth with no attacks was 6% compared to 22% among episodic and 36% among repeatedly violent youth. Violence-involved youth were substantially more likely to experience elevated sensation-seeking, easy drug access, and recent drug offers and less likely to benefit from religiosity and protective substance use beliefs. CONCLUSIONS/IMPORTANCE: Findings highlight the importance of distinguishing between the various gradations of violence among youth in understanding the relationship between substance use and violence, and shed light on the intrapersonal and contextual factors that can help identify violent youth at greatest risk for substance use problems

User Interface Design for Semantic Query Expansion in Geodata Repositories

Semantic query expansion is the process of supplementing a user query with additional terms that interpret and extend the user\u27s information needs. This work presents the results of an empirical study that investigates user preferences for different designs of user interfaces that provide semantic query expansion for data search from geo-data repositories. The study assesses further whether it is possible to map qualitative gradations of semantic relatedness between geographic key terms to ranges of numerical similarity values

Web Based Bicycle Trip Planning for Broward County, Florida

To promote the use of bicycle transportation mode in times of increasing urban traffic congestion, Broward County Metropolitan Planning Organization funded the development of a Web-based trip planner for cyclists. This presentation demonstrates the integration of the ArcGIS Server 9.3 environment with the ArcGIS JavaScript Extension for Google Maps API and the Google Local Search Control for Maps API. This allows the use of Google mashup GIS functionality, i.e., Google local search for selection of trip start, trip destination, and intermediate waypoints, and the integration of Google Maps base layers. The ArcGIS Network Analyst extension is used for the route search, where algorithms for fastest, safest, simplest, most scenic, and shortest routes are imbedded. This presentation also describes how attributes of the underlying network sources have been combined to facilitate the search for optimized routes