Manhattan
Informed along the road: roadway capacity driven graph convolution network for network-wide traffic prediction
Bian, Zilin, Gao, Jingqin, Ozbay, Kaan, Zuo, Fan, Zuo, Dachuan, Li, Zhenning
While deep learning has shown success in predicting traffic states, most methods treat it as a general prediction task without considering transportation aspects. Recently, graph neural networks have proven effective for this task, but few incorporate external factors that impact roadway capacity and traffic flow. This study introduces the Roadway Capacity Driven Graph Convolution Network (RCDGCN) model, which incorporates static and dynamic roadway capacity attributes in spatio-temporal settings to predict network-wide traffic states. The model was evaluated on two real-world datasets with different transportation factors: the ICM-495 highway network and an urban network in Manhattan, New York City. Results show RCDGCN outperformed baseline methods in forecasting accuracy. Analyses, including ablation experiments, weight analysis, and case studies, investigated the effect of capacity-related factors. The study demonstrates the potential of using RCDGCN for transportation system management.
NLP-enabled trajectory map-matching in urban road networks using transformer sequence-to-sequence model
Mohammadi, Sevin, Smyth, Andrew W.
Large-scale geolocation telematics data acquired from connected vehicles has the potential to significantly enhance mobility infrastructures and operational systems within smart cities. To effectively utilize this data, it is essential to accurately match the geolocation data to the road segments. However, this matching is often not trivial due to the low sampling rate and errors exacerbated by multipath effects in urban environments. Traditionally, statistical modeling techniques such as Hidden-Markov models incorporating domain knowledge into the matching process have been extensively used for map-matching tasks. However, rule-based map-matching tasks are noise-sensitive and inefficient in processing large-scale trajectory data. Deep learning techniques directly learn the relationship between observed data and road networks from the data, often without the need for hand-crafted rules or domain knowledge. This renders them an efficient approach for map-matching large-scale datasets and makes them more robust to the noise. This paper introduces a sequence-to-sequence deep-learning model, specifically the transformer-based encoder-decoder model, to perform as a surrogate for map-matching algorithms. The encoder-decoder architecture initially encodes the series of noisy GPS points into a representation that automatically captures autoregressive behavior and spatial correlations between GPS points. Subsequently, the decoder associates data points with the road network features and thus transforms these representations into a sequence of road segments. The model is trained and evaluated using GPS traces collected in Manhattan, New York. Achieving an accuracy of 76%, transformer-based encoder-decoder models extensively employed in natural language processing presented a promising performance for translating noisy GPS data to the navigated routes in urban road networks.
Visualizing Routes with AI-Discovered Street-View Patterns
Wu, Tsung Heng, Amiruzzaman, Md, Zhao, Ye, Bhati, Deepshikha, Yang, Jing
Street-level visual appearances play an important role in studying social systems, such as understanding the built environment, driving routes, and associated social and economic factors. It has not been integrated into a typical geographical visualization interface (e.g., map services) for planning driving routes. In this paper, we study this new visualization task with several new contributions. First, we experiment with a set of AI techniques and propose a solution of using semantic latent vectors for quantifying visual appearance features. Second, we calculate image similarities among a large set of street-view images and then discover spatial imagery patterns. Third, we integrate these discovered patterns into driving route planners with new visualization techniques. Finally, we present VivaRoutes, an interactive visualization prototype, to show how visualizations leveraged with these discovered patterns can help users effectively and interactively explore multiple routes. Furthermore, we conducted a user study to assess the usefulness and utility of VivaRoutes.
Aliens most likely to contact artificial intelligence before humans over likely 'kinship': Expert
UFO expert Nick Pope discuss the whistleblower claiming that the U.S. has alien crafts and remains on'Fox News @ Night.' A Harvard professor of astronomy is predicting extraterrestrials will make contact with artificial intelligence before humans, due to aliens potentially feeling a "kinship" with human technology. "My expectation from interstellar travel is that it's best done with electronic gadgets and devices rather than with biological creatures because the journey takes a long time," Harvard professor Avi Loeb said in an upcoming documentary titled "God Vs. "Even to the nearest star, it will take us 50,000 years to get there with chemical rockets. And artificial intelligence systems have that patience - and then they can remain dormant ... so that they survive the journey," he said. Space agencies across the world, including NASA and the European Space Agency, have for years been using AI technology to chart galaxies and stars and even send robots to other planets. Avi Loeb, Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, speaks during the SALT conference in Manhattan, New York City, U.S., September 14, 2022. Loeb said extraterrestrials would likely reach out to artificial intelligence before humans due to a likely "kinship." "If they visit us, of course, we can use our AI systems to interpret their AI systems.
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Pfizer Inc. is an American multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporation headquartered on 42nd Street in Manhattan, New York City. Pfizer develops and produces medicines and vaccines for immunology, oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, and neurology. The company has several blockbuster drugs or products that each generate more than US$1 billion in annual revenues.
Deceptive Decision-Making Under Uncertainty
Savas, Yagiz, Verginis, Christos K., Topcu, Ufuk
We study the design of autonomous agents that are capable of deceiving outside observers about their intentions while carrying out tasks in stochastic, complex environments. By modeling the agent's behavior as a Markov decision process, we consider a setting where the agent aims to reach one of multiple potential goals while deceiving outside observers about its true goal. We propose a novel approach to model observer predictions based on the principle of maximum entropy and to efficiently generate deceptive strategies via linear programming. The proposed approach enables the agent to exhibit a variety of tunable deceptive behaviors while ensuring the satisfaction of probabilistic constraints on the behavior. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach via comparative user studies and present a case study on the streets of Manhattan, New York, using real travel time distributions.
CVLight: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Traffic Signal Control with Connected Vehicles
Li, Wangzhi, Cai, Yaxing, Dinesha, Ujwal, Fu, Yongjie, Di, Xuan
This paper develops a reinforcement learning (RL) scheme for adaptive traffic signal control (ATSC), called "CVLight", that leverages data collected only from connected vehicles (CV). Seven types of RL models are proposed within this scheme that contain various state and reward representations, including incorporation of CV delay and green light duration into state and the usage of CV delay as reward. To further incorporate information of both CV and non-CV into CVLight, an algorithm based on actor-critic, A2C-Full, is proposed where both CV and non-CV information is used to train the critic network, while only CV information is used to update the policy network and execute optimal signal timing. These models are compared at an isolated intersection under various CV market penetration rates. A full model with the best performance (i.e., minimum average travel delay per vehicle) is then selected and applied to compare with state-of-the-art benchmarks under different levels of traffic demands, turning proportions, and dynamic traffic demands, respectively. Two case studies are performed on an isolated intersection and a corridor with three consecutive intersections located in Manhattan, New York, to further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm under real-world scenarios. Compared to other baseline models that use all vehicle information, the trained CVLight agent can efficiently control multiple intersections solely based on CV data and can achieve a similar or even greater performance when the CV penetration rate is no less than 20%.
$74,000 NYPD robot dog hits streets of Manhattan
A robot dog joined the human members of the NYPD's response to a domestic dispute inside a public housing apartment building in Manhattan. NEW YORK - Now viral videos show -- for lack of a better term -- a robot dog joining the human members of the NYPD's response to a domestic dispute inside a NYCHA building in Kips Bay, Monday. "I can't believe what I'm seeing," 344 E. 28th St. Tenant Association President Melanie Aucello said. Aucello shot one of those viral videos on her smartphone and compared the scene she witnessed to something out of a dystopian movie. "It scared me," she said.
Towards Accurate Spatiotemporal COVID-19 Risk Scores using High Resolution Real-World Mobility Data
Rambhatla, Sirisha, Zeighami, Sepanta, Shahabi, Kameron, Shahabi, Cyrus, Liu, Yan
As countries look towards re-opening of economic activities amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring public health has been challenging. While contact tracing only aims to track past activities of infected users, one path to safe reopening is to develop reliable spatiotemporal risk scores to indicate the propensity of the disease. Existing works which aim to develop risk scores either rely on compartmental model-based reproduction numbers (which assume uniform population mixing) or develop coarse-grain spatial scores based on reproduction number (R0) and macro-level density-based mobility statistics. Instead, in this paper, we develop a Hawkes process-based technique to assign relatively fine-grain spatial and temporal risk scores by leveraging high-resolution mobility data based on cell-phone originated location signals. While COVID-19 risk scores also depend on a number of factors specific to an individual, including demography and existing medical conditions, the primary mode of disease transmission is via physical proximity and contact. Therefore, we focus on developing risk scores based on location density and mobility behaviour. We demonstrate the efficacy of the developed risk scores via simulation based on real-world mobility data. Our results show that fine-grain spatiotemporal risk scores based on high-resolution mobility data can provide useful insights and facilitate safe re-opening.