Spatial Reasoning
Traffic Flow Forecasting with Spatial-Temporal Graph Diffusion Network
Zhang, Xiyue, Huang, Chao, Xu, Yong, Xia, Lianghao, Dai, Peng, Bo, Liefeng, Zhang, Junbo, Zheng, Yu
Accurate forecasting of citywide traffic flow has been playing critical role in a variety of spatial-temporal mining applications, such as intelligent traffic control and public risk assessment. While previous work has made significant efforts to learn traffic temporal dynamics and spatial dependencies, two key limitations exist in current models. First, only the neighboring spatial correlations among adjacent regions are considered in most existing methods, and the global inter-region dependency is ignored. Additionally, these methods fail to encode the complex traffic transition regularities exhibited with time-dependent and multi-resolution in nature. To tackle these challenges, we develop a new traffic prediction framework-Spatial-Temporal Graph Diffusion Network (ST-GDN). In particular, ST-GDN is a hierarchically structured graph neural architecture which learns not only the local region-wise geographical dependencies, but also the spatial semantics from a global perspective. Furthermore, a multi-scale attention network is developed to empower ST-GDN with the capability of capturing multi-level temporal dynamics. Experiments on several real-life traffic datasets demonstrate that ST-GDN outperforms different types of state-of-the-art baselines. Source codes of implementations are available at https://github.com/jill001/ST-GDN.
Global Big Data Conference
Apple has been slowly but surely creating a name for itself in the low-code/no-code movement. This July, the Cupertino-based company announced the launch of Trinity AI, a no-code platform for complex spatial datasets. Trinity enables machine learning researchers and non-AI devs to tailor complex spatiotemporal datasets to fit deep learning models. Back in 2019, Apple revealed SwiftUI, a programming language that required much less coding than the Swift language. With the release of Trinity, Apple doubles down on its effort to significantly lower the threshold for non-devs and non-ML devs.
Apple's no-code Trinity AI platform handles complex spatial datasets
The Transform Technology Summits start October 13th with Low-Code/No Code: Enabling Enterprise Agility. Apple has been slowly but surely creating a name for itself in the low-code/no-code movement. This July, the Cupertino-based company announced the launch of Trinity AI, a no-code platform for complex spatial datasets. Trinity enables machine learning researchers and non-AI devs to tailor complex spatiotemporal datasets to fit deep learning models. Back in 2019, Apple revealed SwiftUI, a programming language that required much less coding than the Swift language.
17 Best Courses to Learn Spatial Analysis in GIS +Python & R
It is simply looking at where things happen to understand why they happen there. Geospatial Data Science is the discipline that specifically focuses on the spatial component of data science. Spatial Analysis is considered as a core infrastructure of the modern tech industry and is heavily substantiated by the business transactions of world-leading companies such as Uber, Deliveroo, Apple, Google, Intel, and evidently by the motor companies such as Tesla, BMW, and Mercedes. So, these companies are bound to hire more and more Spatial Data Analysts and Geo-Spatial Scientists. Based on these business trends, we've compiled the spatial analysis courses designed by world-class educators to help beginners gain solid foundations of spatial data analysis.
Graph-Based Spatial-Temporal Convolutional Network for Vehicle Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving
Sheng, Zihao, Xu, Yunwen, Xue, Shibei, Li, Dewei
Forecasting the trajectories of neighbor vehicles is a crucial step for decision making and motion planning of autonomous vehicles. This paper proposes a graph-based spatial-temporal convolutional network (GSTCN) to predict future trajectory distributions of all neighbor vehicles using past trajectories. This network tackles the spatial interactions using a graph convolutional network (GCN), and captures the temporal features with a convolutional neural network (CNN). The spatial-temporal features are encoded and decoded by a gated recurrent unit (GRU) network to generate future trajectory distributions. Besides, we propose a weighted adjacency matrix to describe the intensities of mutual influence between vehicles, and the ablation study demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed scheme. Our network is evaluated on two real-world freeway trajectory datasets: I-80 and US-101 in the Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM).Comparisons in three aspects, including prediction errors, model sizes, and inference speeds, show that our network can achieve state-of-the-art performance.
Compute and map railway density using R
With a total of 67,956 kilometers of railways in 2020 India ranked 4th just behind the United States, China and Russia. While Indian Railways, a statutory body under the Indian Ministry of Railways, manages one of the world's largest rail networks, adjusting for the size of the country reveals that a much smaller portion of the territory is covered in railroads. Using the 2019 official subdistrict boundary data generously provided by superb GIS specialist Justin Elliot Meyers on his rich GitHub page as well as Geofabrik OpenStreetMap data for India, we'll learn how to effortlessly compute the length of railways and land area size for every Indian subdistrict polygon to arrive at railway density, measured as 1 kilometer of railway per 100 square kilometers of land area. And we'll do it programatically in R using 150 lines of code. Once you go through the code, you'll be able to apply it to other spatial lines such as roads or rivers. This code could ultimately inspire you to launch your own projects on, for example, motorway density or river length per population.
Grounding Natural Language Instructions: Can Large Language Models Capture Spatial Information?
Rozanova, Julia, Ferreira, Deborah, Dubba, Krishna, Cheng, Weiwei, Zhang, Dell, Freitas, Andre
Models designed for intelligent process automation are required to be capable of grounding user interface elements. This task of interface element grounding is centred on linking instructions in natural language to their target referents. Even though BERT and similar pre-trained language models have excelled in several NLP tasks, their use has not been widely explored for the UI grounding domain. This work concentrates on testing and probing the grounding abilities of three different transformer-based models: BERT, RoBERTa and LayoutLM. Our primary focus is on these models' spatial reasoning skills, given their importance in this domain. We observe that LayoutLM has a promising advantage for applications in this domain, even though it was created for a different original purpose (representing scanned documents): the learned spatial features appear to be transferable to the UI grounding setting, especially as they demonstrate the ability to discriminate between target directions in natural language instructions.
Talking Space: inference from spatial linguistic meanings
Wang-Mascianica, Vincent, Coecke, Bob
This paper concerns the intersection of natural language and the physical space around us in which we live, that we observe and/or imagine things within. Many important features of language have spatial connotations, for example, many prepositions (like in, next to, after, on, etc.) are fundamentally spatial. Space is also a key factor of the meanings of many words/phrases/sentences/text, and space is a, if not the key, context for referencing (e.g. pointing) and embodiment. We propose a mechanism for how space and linguistic structure can be made to interact in a matching compositional fashion. Examples include Cartesian space, subway stations, chesspieces on a chess-board, and Penrose's staircase. The starting point for our construction is the DisCoCat model of compositional natural language meaning, which we relax to accommodate physical space. We address the issue of having multiple agents/objects in a space, including the case that each agent has different capabilities with respect to that space, e.g., the specific moves each chesspiece can make, or the different velocities one may be able to reach. Once our model is in place, we show how inferences drawing from the structure of physical space can be made. We also how how linguistic model of space can interact with other such models related to our senses and/or embodiment, such as the conceptual spaces of colour, taste and smell, resulting in a rich compositional model of meaning that is close to human experience and embodiment in the world.
Region Invariant Normalizing Flows for Mobility Transfer
Gupta, Vinayak, Bedathur, Srikanta
There exists a high variability in mobility data volumes across different regions, which deteriorates the performance of spatial recommender systems that rely on region-specific data. In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning framework called REFORMD, for continuous-time location prediction for regions with sparse checkin data. Specifically, we model user-specific checkin-sequences in a region using a marked temporal point process (MTPP) with normalizing flows to learn the inter-checkin time and geo-distributions. Later, we transfer the model parameters of spatial and temporal flows trained on a data-rich origin region for the next check-in and time prediction in a target region with scarce checkin data. We capture the evolving region-specific checkin dynamics for MTPP and spatial-temporal flows by maximizing the joint likelihood of next checkin with three channels (1) checkin-category prediction, (2) checkin-time prediction, and (3) travel distance prediction. Extensive experiments on different user mobility datasets across the U.S. and Japan show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods for modeling continuous-time sequences. Moreover, we also show that REFORMD can be easily adapted for product recommendations i.e., sequences without any spatial component.
GCsT: Graph Convolutional Skeleton Transformer for Action Recognition
Bai, Ruwen, Li, Min, Meng, Bo, Li, Fengfa, Ren, Junxing, Jiang, Miao, Sun, Degang
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) achieve promising performance for skeleton-based action recognition. However, in most GCN-based methods, the spatial-temporal graph convolution is strictly restricted by the graph topology while only captures the short-term temporal context, thus lacking the flexibility of feature extraction. In this work, we present a novel architecture, named Graph Convolutional skeleton Transformer (GCsT), which addresses limitations in GCNs by introducing Transformer. Our GCsT employs all the benefits of Transformer (i.e. dynamical attention and global context) while keeps the advantages of GCNs (i.e. hierarchy and local topology structure). In GCsT, the spatial-temporal GCN forces the capture of local dependencies while Transformer dynamically extracts global spatial-temporal relationships. Furthermore, the proposed GCsT shows stronger expressive capability by adding additional information present in skeleton sequences. Incorporating the Transformer allows that information to be introduced into the model almost effortlessly. We validate the proposed GCsT by conducting extensive experiments, which achieves the state-of-the-art performance on NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120 and Northwestern-UCLA datasets.