Mining Traffic Congestion Correlation between Road Segments on GPS Trajectories

Traffic congestion is a major concern in many cities around the world. Previous work mainly focuses on the prediction of congestion and analysis of traffic flows, while the congestion correlation between road segments has not been studied yet. In this paper, we propose a three-phase framework to study the congestion correlation between road segments from multiple real world data. In the first phase, we extract congestion information on each road segment from GPS trajectories of over 10,000 taxis, define congestion correlation and propose a corresponding mining algorithm to find out all the existing correlations. In the second phase, we extract various features on each pair of road segments from road network and POI data. In the last phase, the results of the first two phases are input into several classifiers to predict congestion correlation. We further analyze the important features and evaluate the results of the trained classifiers. We found some important patterns that lead to a high/low congestion correlation, and they can facilitate building various transportation applications. The proposed techniques in our framework are general, and can be applied to other pairwise correlation analysis

The utilization of Ricinus communis in the phytomanagement of heavy metal contaminated soils

Soil contamination with toxic metals is a major global concern due to their effects on plants and the ecosystem. In contaminated soils, some plant species have the ability to remediate heavy metals. Ricinus communis L., is an industrial crop plant gaining popularity in the remediation of heavy metal contaminated soils owing to its strong and deep penetrating roots aiding high metal accumulation and large biomass level. Ricinus communis can tolerate high amounts of metals by adopting different strategies, which include the production of antioxidant enzymes, subcellular localization, and exudation of organic acid. At the molecular level, R. communis can tolerate metal stress by activating stress-responsive genes. Proper selection of metal-tolerant R. communis cultivars is effective in the remediation of metal-contaminated soils, owing to their high capacity for metal tolerance. Exogenous application of mineral fertilization and the use of microbes and chelating agents increase metal solubility and availability for plant uptake in soil. Also, good agronomic practices such as co-planting of R. communis with other leguminous crops enhance R. communis growth and metal tolerance, thereby improving remediation of metal-contaminated soils. This review, therefore, critically discusses the recent approaches in using R. communis to remediate metal-contaminated soils.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author