Assessing verticalization effects on urban safety perception

We describe an experiment with the modeling of urban verticalization effects on perceived safety scores as obtained with computer vision on Google Streetview data for New York City. Preliminary results suggests that for smaller buildings (between one and seven floors), perceived safety increases with building height, but that for high-rise buildings, perceived safety decreases with increased height. We also determined that while height contributing for this relation, other zonal aspects also influences the perceived safety scores, suggesting spatial structuring also influences such scores.Comment: 2017 SIGSPATIAL Student Research Competitio

Clash of Titans – general principles of EU law: balancing and horizontal direct effect

More than 10 years after the first ruling on the horizontal effect of the principle of non-discrimination on grounds of age, in the Dansk Industri case (Court of Justice, judgment of 19 April 2016, Dansk Industri (DI), Acting on Behalf of Ajos A/S v. Estate of Karsten Eigil Rasmussen, case C-441/14 [GC]) the CJEU reiterates Mangold and Kücükdeveci. It has by now proclaimed a new form of horizontality, deriving from the combined application of two different sources of law, i.e. the directive and the general principle. According to the Court, neither the general principle of legal certainty, nor that of legitimate expectations, which can be jeopardised by the horizontal effect of non-discrimination on grounds of age, question the necessity to ensure its effectiveness. Protecting non-discrimination on grounds of age justifies not only a broader application of that principle, but also its hierarchical priority over other general principles of EU law. However, insofar as general principles equally protect other fundamental rights, some questions arise: can the judicial activism of the CJEU equally improve effectiveness and uniformity in the protection of fundamental rights within the EU? Or, as Dansk Industri suggests, does the former goal (i.e. effectiveness) necessarily affect the latter

Teaching metaheuristics in business schools

In this work we discuss some ideas and opinions related with teaching Metaheuristics in Business Schools. The main purpose of the work is to initiate a discussion and collaboration about this topic,with the final objective to improve the teaching and publicity of the area. The main topics to be discussed are the environment and focus of this teaching. We also present a SWOT analysis which lead us to the conclusion that the area of Metaheuristics only can win with the presentation and discussion of metaheuristics and related topics in Business Schools, since it consists in a excellent Decision Support tools for future potential users.Metaheuristics, Teaching Business

The crew-scheduling module in the GIST system

The public transportation is gaining importance every year basically due the population growth, environmental policies and, route and street congestion. Too able an efficient management of all the resources related to public transportation, several techniques from different areas are being applied and several projects in Transportation Planning Systems, in different countries, are being developed. In this work, we present the GIST Planning Transportation Systems, a Portuguese project involving two universities and six public transportation companies. We describe in detail one of the most relevant modules of this project, the crew-scheduling module. The crew-scheduling module is based on the application of meta-heuristics, in particular GRASP, tabu search and genetic algorithm to solve the bus-driver-scheduling problem. The metaheuristics have been successfully incorporated in the GIST Planning Transportation Systems and are actually used by several companies.Integrated transportation systems, crew scheduling, metaheuristics