Simulating Vehicle Movement and Multi-Hop Connectivity from Basic Safety Messages

The Basic Safety Message (BSM) is a standardized communication packet that is sent every tenth of a second between connected vehicles using Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC). BSMs contain data about the sending vehicle's state, such as speed, location, and the status of the turn signal. Currently, many BSM datasets are available through the connected vehicle testbeds of U.S. Department of Transportation from all over the country. However, without a proper visualization tool, it is not possible to analyze or visually get an overview of the spatio-temporal distribution of the data. With this goal, a web application has been developed which can ingest a raw BSM dataset and display a time-based simulation of vehicle movement. The simulation also displays multi-hop vehicular network connectivity over DSRC. This paper gives details about the application, including an explanation of the multi-hop partitioning algorithm used to classify the vehicles into separate network partitions. A performance analysis for the simulation is included, in which it is suggested that calculating a connectivity matrix with the multi-hop partitioning algorithm is computationally expensive for large number of vehicles

Could Cultures Determine the Course of Epidemics and Explain Waves of COVID-19?

Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19), caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, is an infectious disease that quickly became a pandemic spreading with different patterns in each country. Travel bans, lockdowns, social distancing, and non-essential business closures caused significant economic disruptions and stalled growth worldwide in the pandemic’s first year. In almost every country, public health officials forced and/or encouraged Nonpharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) such as contact tracing, social distancing, masks, and quarantine. Human behavioral decision-making regarding social isolation significantly impedes global success in containing the pandemic. This thesis focuses on human behaviors and cultures related to the decision-making of social isolation during the pandemic. Within a COVID-19 disease transmission model, we created a conceptual and deterministic model of human behavior and cultures. This study emphasizes the importance of human behavior in successful disease control strategies. Additionally, we introduce a back engineering approach to determine whether cultures are explained by the courses of COVID-19 epidemics. We used a deep learning technique based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) to predict cultures from COVID-19 courses. In this system, CNN is used for deep feature extraction with ordinary convolution and with residual blocks. Also, a novel concept is introduced that converts tabular data into an image using matrix transformation and image processing validated by identifying some well-known function. Despite having a small and novel data set, we have achieved an 80-95% accuracy, depending on the cultural measures

An Investigation into the Performance Evaluation of Connected Vehicle Applications: From Real-World Experiment to Parallel Simulation Paradigm

A novel system was developed that provides drivers lane merge advisories, using vehicle trajectories obtained through Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC). It was successfully tested on a freeway using three vehicles, then targeted for further testing, via simulation. The failure of contemporary simulators to effectively model large, complex urban transportation networks then motivated further research into distributed and parallel traffic simulation. An architecture for a closed-loop, parallel simulator was devised, using a new algorithm that accounts for boundary nodes, traffic signals, intersections, road lengths, traffic density, and counts of lanes; it partitions a sample, Tennessee road network more efficiently than tools like METIS, which increase interprocess communications (IPC) overhead by partitioning more transportation corridors. The simulator uses logarithmic accumulation to synchronize parallel simulations, further reducing IPC. Analyses suggest this eliminates up to one-third of IPC overhead incurred by a linear accumulation model

A novel image inpainting framework based on multilevel image pyramids

Image inpainting is the art of manipulating an image so that it is visually unrecognizable way. A considerable amount of research has been done in this area over the last few years. However, the state of art techniques does suffer from computational complexities and plausible results. This paper proposes a multi-level image pyramid-based image inpainting algorithm. The image inpainting algorithm starts with the coarsest level of the image pyramid and overpainting information is transferred to the subsequent levels until the bottom level gets inpainted. The search strategy used in the algorithm is based on hashing the coherent information in an image which makes the search fast and accurate. Also, the search space is constrained based on the propagated information thereby reducing the complexity of the algorithm. Compared to other inpainting methods; the proposed algorithm inpaints the target region with better plausibility and human vision conformation. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves better results as compared to other inpainting techniques

Out of Distribution Performance of State of Art Vision Model

The vision transformer (ViT) has advanced to the cutting edge in the visual recognition task. Transformers are more robust than CNN, according to the latest research. ViT's self-attention mechanism, according to the claim, makes it more robust than CNN. Even with this, we discover that these conclusions are based on unfair experimental conditions and just comparing a few models, which did not allow us to depict the entire scenario of robustness performance. In this study, we investigate the performance of 58 state-of-the-art computer vision models in a unified training setup based not only on attention and convolution mechanisms but also on neural networks based on a combination of convolution and attention mechanisms, sequence-based model, complementary search, and network-based method. Our research demonstrates that robustness depends on the training setup and model types, and performance varies based on out-of-distribution type. Our research will aid the community in better understanding and benchmarking the robustness of computer vision models

Effect of gliclazide on cardiovascular risk factors involved in split-dose streptozotocin induced neonatal rat model: a chronic study

Background: The present study aimed at evaluating the effect of gliclazide on cardiovascular risk factors involved in type 2 diabetes mellitus using n-STZ rat model on a long term basis.Methods: The diabetic model was developed using a split dose of streptozotocin (50 mg/kg) intraperitoneally on 2nd and 3rd postnatal days. The diabetic rats were treated orally with gliclazide suspension at the dose of 10 mg/kg for 90 days. Cardiovascular risk factors such as systolic blood pressure, heart rate, lipid profile, creatine kinase and lactate dehydrogenase were evaluated at regular intervals along with fasting blood glucose (FBG) and oral glucose tolerance test.Results: Gliclazide did not alter FBG however improved the impaired glucose tolerance. The gliclazide treated rats did not develop hypertension and there was a significant difference (p<0.001) at the end of treatment when compared to the diabetic group which could be due to free radical scavenging property of gliclazide. Gliclazide treatment in n-STZ model was found to be effective in preventing hypertension, creatine kinase and lactate dehydrogenase activity. Also gliclazide was found to have beneficial effects on the impaired glucose tolerance, dyslipidaemia, adiposity index and total fat pad weight.Conclusions: To improve and prevent the cardiovascular risk factors involved in Type II diabetic patients, gliclazide could be clinically beneficial