299 research outputs found
The Low-Carbon City Pilot Policy and Urban Land Use Efficiency:A Policy Assessment from China
Against the backdrop of severe global warming, the low-carbon city pilot policy, with carbon emission reduction as its main objective, is an important initiative for China to fulfil its international commitment to carbon emission reduction and promote a green and low-carbon development strategy. However, none of the literature has yet evaluated whether the pilot low-carbon city policy promotes urban land use efficiency as a policy effect. In view of this, this paper measures urban land use efficiency from a low-carbon perspective using a global reference super-efficiency SBM model based on data from 186 prefecture-level cities in China from 2005–2017, and subsequently constructs a difference-in-differences method to test the true impact of low-carbon city pilot policies on urban land use efficiency and carbon emissions, and uses a propensity score matching method to test its robustness. It is found that: (1) the average level of urban land use efficiency in China is low and on a downward trend; (2) overall, cities are predominantly low-efficiency cities, with only the high-efficiency cities in Guangdong Province showing spatial agglomeration; and (3) the low-carbon city pilot policy reduces carbon emissions while also negatively affecting urban land use efficiency. Accordingly, this paper puts forward corresponding policy recommendations
Urban2Vec: Incorporating Street View Imagery and POIs for Multi-Modal Urban Neighborhood Embedding
Understanding intrinsic patterns and predicting spatiotemporal
characteristics of cities require a comprehensive representation of urban
neighborhoods. Existing works relied on either inter- or intra-region
connectivities to generate neighborhood representations but failed to fully
utilize the informative yet heterogeneous data within neighborhoods. In this
work, we propose Urban2Vec, an unsupervised multi-modal framework which
incorporates both street view imagery and point-of-interest (POI) data to learn
neighborhood embeddings. Specifically, we use a convolutional neural network to
extract visual features from street view images while preserving geospatial
similarity. Furthermore, we model each POI as a bag-of-words containing its
category, rating, and review information. Analog to document embedding in
natural language processing, we establish the semantic similarity between
neighborhood ("document") and the words from its surrounding POIs in the vector
space. By jointly encoding visual, textual, and geospatial information into the
neighborhood representation, Urban2Vec can achieve performances better than
baseline models and comparable to fully-supervised methods in downstream
prediction tasks. Extensive experiments on three U.S. metropolitan areas also
demonstrate the model interpretability, generalization capability, and its
value in neighborhood similarity analysis.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on
Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-20
ABC-CNN: An Attention Based Convolutional Neural Network for Visual Question Answering
We propose a novel attention based deep learning architecture for visual
question answering task (VQA). Given an image and an image related natural
language question, VQA generates the natural language answer for the question.
Generating the correct answers requires the model's attention to focus on the
regions corresponding to the question, because different questions inquire
about the attributes of different image regions. We introduce an attention
based configurable convolutional neural network (ABC-CNN) to learn such
question-guided attention. ABC-CNN determines an attention map for an
image-question pair by convolving the image feature map with configurable
convolutional kernels derived from the question's semantics. We evaluate the
ABC-CNN architecture on three benchmark VQA datasets: Toronto COCO-QA, DAQUAR,
and VQA dataset. ABC-CNN model achieves significant improvements over
state-of-the-art methods on these datasets. The question-guided attention
generated by ABC-CNN is also shown to reflect the regions that are highly
relevant to the questions
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