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 Harford County


Reliable, Routable, and Reproducible: Collection of Pedestrian Pathways at Statewide Scale

Zhang, Yuxiang, Howe, Bill, Caspi, Anat

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

While advances in mobility technology including autonomous vehicles and multi-modal navigation systems can improve mobility equity for people with disabilities, these technologies depend crucially on accurate, standardized, and complete pedestrian path networks. Ad hoc collection efforts lead to a data record that is sparse, unreliable, and non-interoperable. This paper presents a sociotechnical methodology to collect, manage, serve, and maintain pedestrian path data at a statewide scale. Combining the automation afforded by computer-vision approaches applied to aerial imagery and existing road network data with the quality control afforded by interactive tools, we aim to produce routable pedestrian pathways for the entire State of Washington within approximately two years. We extract paths, crossings, and curb ramps at scale from aerial imagery, integrating multi-input segmentation methods with road topology data to ensure connected, routable networks. We then organize the predictions into project regions selected for their value to the public interest, where each project region is divided into intersection-scale tasks. These tasks are assigned and tracked through an interactive tool that manages concurrency, progress, feedback, and data management. We demonstrate that our automated systems outperform state-of-the-art methods in producing routable pathway networks, which then significantly reduces the time required for human vetting. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of yielding accurate, robust pedestrian pathway networks at the scale of an entire state. This paper intends to inform procedures for national-scale ADA compliance by providing pedestrian equity, safety, and accessibility, and improving urban environments for all users.


CoSD: Collaborative Stance Detection with Contrastive Heterogeneous Topic Graph Learning

Cheng, Yinghan, Zhang, Qi, Shi, Chongyang, Xiao, Liang, Hao, Shufeng, Hu, Liang

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Stance detection seeks to identify the viewpoints of individuals either in favor or against a given target or a controversial topic. Current advanced neural models for stance detection typically employ fully parametric softmax classifiers. However, these methods suffer from several limitations, including lack of explainability, insensitivity to the latent data structure, and unimodality, which greatly restrict their performance and applications. To address these challenges, we present a novel collaborative stance detection framework called (CoSD) which leverages contrastive heterogeneous topic graph learning to learn topic-aware semantics and collaborative signals among texts, topics, and stance labels for enhancing stance detection. During training, we construct a heterogeneous graph to structurally organize texts and stances through implicit topics via employing latent Dirichlet allocation. We then perform contrastive graph learning to learn heterogeneous node representations, aggregating informative multi-hop collaborative signals via an elaborate Collaboration Propagation Aggregation (CPA) module. During inference, we introduce a hybrid similarity scoring module to enable the comprehensive incorporation of topic-aware semantics and collaborative signals for stance detection. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art detection performance of CoSD, verifying the effectiveness and explainability of our collaborative framework.


Does A.I. Lead Police to Ignore Contradictory Evidence?

The New Yorker

After the bus driver ordered him to observe a rule requiring passengers to wear face masks, he approached the fare box and began arguing with her. "I hit bitches," he said, leaning over a plastic shield that the driver was sitting behind. When she pulled out her iPhone to call the police, he reached around the shield, snatched the device, and raced off. The bus driver followed the man outside, where he punched her in the face repeatedly. He then stood by the curb, laughing, as his victim wiped blood from her nose. By the time police officers canvassed the area, the assailant had fled, but the incident had been captured on surveillance cameras.