Vulnerability assessment using remote sensing: The earthquake prone megacity Istanbul, Turkey

Hazards like earthquakes are natural, disasters are not. Disasters result from the impact of a hazard on a vulnerable system or society at a specific location. The framework of vulnerability aims at a holistic concept taking physical, environmental, socio-economic and political components into account. This paper focuses on the capabilities of remote sensing to contribute up-to-date spatial information to the physical dimension of vulnerability for the complex urban system of the megacity Istanbul, Turkey. An urban land cover classification based on high resolution satellite data establishes the basis to analyse the spatial distribution of different types of buildings, the carrying capacity of the street network or the identification of open spaces. In addition, a DEM (Digital Elevation Model) enables a localization of potential landslide areas. A methodology to combine these attributes related to the physical dimension of vulnerability is presented. In this process an n-dimensional coordinate system plots the variables describing vulnerability against each other. This enables identification of the degree of vulnerability and the vulnerability-determining factors for a specific location. This assessment of vulnerability provides a broad spatial information basis for decision-makers to develop mitigation strategies

Analysis of urban sprawl at mega city Cairo, Egypt using multisensoral remote sensing data, landscape metrics and gradient analysis

This paper is intended to highlight the capabilities of synergistic usage of remote sensing, landscape metrics and gradient analysis. We aim to improve the understanding of spatial characteristics and effects of urbanization on city level. Multisensoral and multitemporal remotely sensed data sets from the Landsat and TerraSAR-X sensor enable monitoring a long time period with area-wide information on the spatial urban expansion over time. Landscape metrics aim to quantify patterns on urban footprint level complemented by gradient analysis giving insight into the spatial developing of spatial parameters from the urban center to the periphery. The results paint a characteristic picture of the emerging spatial urban patterns at mega city Cairo, Egypt since the 1970s

Integrating Remote Sensing and Social Science - The correlation of urban morphology with socioeconomic parameters

The alignment, small-scale transitions and characteristics of buildings, streets and open spaces constitute a heterogeneous urban morphology. The urban morphology is the physical reflection of a society that created it, influenced by historical, social, cultural, economic, political, demographic and natural conditions as well as their developments. Within the complex urban environment homogeneous physical patterns and sectors of similar building types, structural alignments or similar built-up densities can be localized and classified. Accordingly, it is assumed that urban societies also feature a distinctive socioeconomic urban morphology that is strongly correlated with the characteristics of a city’s physical morphology: Social groups settle spatially with one’s peer more or less segregated from other social groups according to, amongst other things, their economic status. This study focuses on the analysis, whether the static physical urban morphology correlates with socioeconomic parameters of its inhabitants – here with the example indicators income and value of property. Therefore, the study explores on the capabilities of high resolution optical satellite data (Ikonos) to classify patterns of urban morphology based on physical parameters. In addition a household questionnaire was developed to investigate on the cities socioeconomic morphology

Stateful Testing: Finding More Errors in Code and Contracts

Automated random testing has shown to be an effective approach to finding faults but still faces a major unsolved issue: how to generate test inputs diverse enough to find many faults and find them quickly. Stateful testing, the automated testing technique introduced in this article, generates new test cases that improve an existing test suite. The generated test cases are designed to violate the dynamically inferred contracts (invariants) characterizing the existing test suite. As a consequence, they are in a good position to detect new errors, and also to improve the accuracy of the inferred contracts by discovering those that are unsound. Experiments on 13 data structure classes totalling over 28,000 lines of code demonstrate the effectiveness of stateful testing in improving over the results of long sessions of random testing: stateful testing found 68.4% new errors and improved the accuracy of automatically inferred contracts to over 99%, with just a 7% time overhead.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure

Die Schweizer Forschungsinfrastruktur ortsnamen.ch

The internet platform ortsnamen.ch (or toponymes.ch in French) hosts Swiss toponymic data from scientific sources. Its main purpose, especially in the beginning, was and is to archive regional toponymic projects and publish them online. Recently the platform has added significant new data sources to its database, and it has become bilingual with its new French version. In addition to its website, ortsnamen.ch also makes its data available through web services (REST API). It has grown to be an important and dynamic supraregional research infrastructure for different scientific fields, as well as an information platform for the wider public

Derivation of population distribution for vulnerability assessment in flood-prone German cities using multisensoral remote sensing data

Against the background of massive urban development, area-wide and up-to-date spatial information is in demand. However, for many reasons this detailed information on the entire urban area is often not available or just not valid anymore. In the event of a natural hazard – e.g. a river flood – it is a crucial piece of information for relief units to have knowledge about the quantity and the distribution of the affected population. In this paper we demonstrate the abilities of remotely sensed data towards vulnerability assessment or disaster management in case of such an event. By means of very high resolution optical satellite imagery and surface information derived by airborne laser scanning, we generate a precise, three-dimensional representation of the landcover and the urban morphology. An automatic, object-oriented approach detects single buildings and derives morphological information – e.g. building size, height and shape – for a further classification of each building into various building types. Subsequently, a top-down approach is applied to distribute the total population of the city or the district on each individual building. In combination with information of potentially affected areas, the methodology is applied on two German cities to estimate potentially affected population with a high level of accurac

Upscaling of anisotropy in unsaturated Miller-similar porous media

Geological and pedological processes rarely form isotropic media as is usually assumed in transport studies. Anisotropy at the Darcy or field scale may be detected directly by measuring flow parameters or may become indirectly evident from movement and shape of solute plumes. Anisotropic behavior of a soil at one scale may, in many cases, be related to the presence of lower-scale directional structures. Miller similitude with different pore-scale geometries of the basic element is used to model macroscopic flow and transport behavior. Analytical expressions for the anisotropic conductivity tensor are derived based on the dynamic law that governs the flow problem at the pore scale. The effects of anisotropy on transport parameters are estimated by numerical modeling

Drug regulatory-compliant validation of a qPCR assay for bioanalysis studies of a cell therapy product with a special focus on matrix interferences in a wide range of organ tissues

Quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) has emerged as an important bioanalytical method for assessing the pharmacokinetics of human-cell-based medicinal products after xenotransplantation into immunodeficient mice. A particular challenge in bioanalytical qPCR studies is that the different tissues of the host organism can affect amplification efficiency and amplicon detection to varying degrees, and ignoring these matrix effects can easily cause a significant underestimation of the true number of target cells in a sample. Here, we describe the development and drug regulatory-compliant validation of a TaqMan qPCR assay for the quantification of mesenchymal stromal cells in the range of 125 to 20,000 cells/200 L lysate via the amplification of a human-specific, highly repetitive α-satellite DNA sequence of the chromosome 17 centromere region HSSATA17. An assessment of matrix effects in 14 different mouse tissues and blood revealed a wide range of spike recovery rates across the different tissue types, from 11 to 174%. Based on these observations, we propose performing systematic spike-and-recovery experiments during assay validation and correcting for the effects of the different tissue matrices on cell quantification in subsequent bioanalytical studies by multiplying the back-calculated cell number by tissue-specific factors derived from the inverse of the validated percent recovery rate

Integrating Privacy-Enhancing Technologies into the Internet Infrastructure

The AN.ON-Next project aims to integrate privacy-enhancing technologies into the internet’s infrastructure and establish them in the consumer mass market. The technologies in focus include a basis protection at internet service provider level, an improved overlay network-based protection and a concept for privacy protection in the emerging 5G mobile network. A crucial success factor will be the viable adjustment and development of standards, business models and pricing strategies for those new technologies