Spatial Reasoning
Modelling Irregular Spatial Patterns using Graph Convolutional Neural Networks
The understanding of geographical reality is a process of data representation and pattern discovery. Former studies mainly adopted continuous-field models to represent spatial variables and to investigate the underlying spatial continuity/heterogeneity in the regular spatial domain. In this article, we introduce a more generalized model based on graph convolutional neural networks (GCNs) that can capture the complex parameters of spatial patterns underlying graph-structured spatial data, which generally contain both Euclidean spatial information and non-Euclidean feature information. A trainable semi-supervised prediction framework is proposed to model the spatial distribution patterns of intra-urban points of interest(POI) check-ins. This work demonstrates the feasibility of GCNs in complex geographic decision problems and provides a promising tool to analyze irregular spatial data.
predictSLUMS: A new model for identifying and predicting informal settlements and slums in cities from street intersections using machine learning
Ibrahim, Mohamed R., Titheridge, Helena, Cheng, Tao, Haworth, James
Identifying current and future informal regions within cities remains a crucial issue for policymakers and governments in developing countries. The delineation process of identifying such regions in cities requires a lot of resources. While there are various studies that identify informal settlements based on satellite image classification, relying on both supervised or unsupervised machine learning approaches, these models either require multiple input data to function or need further development with regards to precision. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for identifying and predicting informal settlements using only street intersections data, regardless of the variation of urban form, number of floors, materials used for construction or street width. With such minimal input data, we attempt to provide planners and policy-makers with a pragmatic tool that can aid in identifying informal zones in cities. The algorithm of the model is based on spatial statistics and a machine learning approach, using Multinomial Logistic Regression (MNL) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). The proposed model relies on defining informal settlements based on two ubiquitous characteristics that these regions tend to be filled in with smaller subdivided lots of housing relative to the formal areas within the local context, and the paucity of services and infrastructure within the boundary of these settlements that require relatively bigger lots. We applied the model in five major cities in Egypt and India that have spatial structures in which informality is present. These cities are Greater Cairo, Alexandria, Hurghada and Minya in Egypt, and Mumbai in India. The predictSLUMS model shows high validity and accuracy for identifying and predicting informality within the same city the model was trained on or in different ones of a similar context.
Moving Objects Analytics: Survey on Future Location & Trajectory Prediction Methods
Georgiou, Harris, Karagiorgou, Sophia, Kontoulis, Yannis, Pelekis, Nikos, Petrou, Petros, Scarlatti, David, Theodoridis, Yannis
Nowadays, huge amounts of tracking data in the mobility domain are being generated by Global Positioning System (GPS) enabled devices and collected in data repositories; tracked moving entities could be pedestrians, cars, vessels, planes, animals, robots, etc. These datasets constitute a rich source for inferring mobility patterns and characteristics for a wide spectrum of novel applications and services, from social networking applications [5][46] to aviation traffic monitoring [61][67]. During the recent years, this kind of information has attracted great interest by data scientists, both in industry and in academia, and is being used in order to extract useful knowledge about what, how and for how long the moving entities are conducting individual activities related with specific circumstances. The most challenging task is to make this information actionable, by means of exploiting historical mobility patterns in order to gauge how the moving entities may evolve in short-or long-term, whether the individual forecasted movement is typical or anomalous, whether there exists a high probability for congestion in the near future, etc. As a consequence, predictive analytics over mobility data has become increasingly important and turns out to be a'hot' field in several application domains [4][74][111]. The problem of predictive analytics over mobility data finds two broad categories of application scenarios. The first scenario involves cases where the moving entities are traced in real-time to produce analytics and compute short-term predictions, which are time-critical and need immediate response. The prediction includes either location-or trajectory-related tasks.
No Fleas On HarperDB, IoT Database Ready To 'Go Fetch' At The Edge
HarperDB was named after CEO Stephen Goldberg's dog, a five-year old adopted pup.HarperDB The so-called Internet of Things (IoT) is growing, exponentially, obviously. As an example of the machines that populate the IoT, modern aircraft are estimated to now fly with connected sensors monitoring as many as 5000 component elements per engine every second - and that's just the engines. For equipment engineers in aviation (and every other industry now digitally transforming) this means a lot of head scratching, some cool innovations and a lot of fine-grained physical tuning with a fair dose of engine grease. The same challenge also exists for information technologists supporting these systems. For software programmers and database engineers in every industry, making the IoT work means a lot of brain-aches, some super-cool innovations and a lot of fine-grained keyboard and screen based tuning, with a fair dose of'virtual' microprocessor engine grease (spoiler alert: microprocessors are built in clean room labs and rarely get oiled with lubricant).
Kepler.gl, an open source tool for mapping large-scale spatial data
Kepler.gl, a collaboration between Uber and Mapbox, allows for easier mapping of large-scale data. Using kepler.gl, a user can drag and drop a CSV or GeoJSON file into the browser, visualize it with different map layers, explore it by filtering and aggregating it, and eventually export the final visualization as a static map or an animated video. It plays nice with Mapbox if that's your jam. So far we've seen when you will die and how other people tend to die. Now let's put the two together to see how and when you will die, given your sex, race, and age.
Discovering space - Grounding spatial topology and metric regularity in a naive agent's sensorimotor experience
Alban, Alban Laflaquiere, O'Regan, J. Kevin, Gas, Bruno, Terekhov, Alexander
In line with the sensorimotor contingency theory, we investigate the problem of the perception of space from a fundamental sensorimotor perspective. Despite its pervasive nature in our perception of the world, the origin of the concept of space remains largely mysterious. For example in the context of artificial perception, this issue is usually circumvented by having engineers pre-define the spatial structure of the problem the agent has to face. We here show that the structure of space can be autonomously discovered by a naive agent in the form of sensorimotor regularities, that correspond to so called compensable sensory experiences: these are experiences that can be generated either by the agent or its environment. By detecting such compensable experiences the agent can infer the topological and metric structure of the external space in which its body is moving. We propose a theoretical description of the nature of these regularities and illustrate the approach on a simulated robotic arm equipped with an eye-like sensor, and which interacts with an object. Finally we show how these regularities can be used to build an internal representation of the sensor's external spatial configuration.
Optimal Transport for structured data
Vayer, Titouan, Chapel, Laetitia, Flamary, Rémi, Tavenard, Romain, Courty, Nicolas
Rennes, CNRS, LETG F-35000 Rennes Optimal transport has recently gained a lot of interest in the machine learning community thanks to its ability to compare probability distributions while respecting the underlying space's geometry. Wasserstein distance deals with feature information through its metric or cost function, but fails in exploiting the structural information, i.e. the specific relations existing among the components of the distribution. Recently adapted to a machine learning context, the Gromov-Wasserstein distance defines a metric well suited for comparing distributions that live in different metric spaces by exploiting their inner structural information. In this paper we propose a new optimal transport distance, called the Fused Gromov-Wasserstein distance, capable of leveraging both structural and feature information by combining both views and prove its metric properties over very general manifolds. We also define the barycenter of structured objects as their Fréchet mean, leveraging both feature and structural information. We illustrate the versatility of the method for problems where structured objects are involved, computing barycenters in graph and time series contexts. We also use this new distance for graph classification where we obtain comparable or superior results than state-of-the-art graph kernel methods and end-to-end graph CNN approach.
GIS and Spatial Analytics market to touch US$88.3 Billion by 2020!
Geography, enriched by information systems to form the Geographic Information System or GIS, is growing exponentially. A core geospatial technology, the GIS is used virtually in every field, adding value to practically every business segment and application areas. In text, the genesis of GIS platforms (solutions/software) lies in capturing, analyzing, and presenting spatial and non-spatial information as effective visualizations. In reality, the segment is much more! The segment includes fast-growth engineering, and construction project designs, 3D Modeling with spatial data.
Answer Set Programming Modulo `Space-Time'
Schultz, Carl, Bhatt, Mehul, Suchan, Jakob, Wałęga, Przemysław
We present ASP Modulo `Space-Time', a declarative representational and computational framework to perform commonsense reasoning about regions with both spatial and temporal components. Supported are capabilities for mixed qualitative-quantitative reasoning, consistency checking, and inferring compositions of space-time relations; these capabilities combine and synergise for applications in a range of AI application areas where the processing and interpretation of spatio-temporal data is crucial. The framework and resulting system is the only general KR-based method for declaratively reasoning about the dynamics of `space-time' regions as first-class objects. We present an empirical evaluation (with scalability and robustness results), and include diverse application examples involving interpretation and control tasks.
Automated Process Planning for Hybrid Manufacturing
Behandish, Morad, Nelaturi, Saigopal, de Kleer, Johan
Hybrid manufacturing (HM) technologies combine additive and subtractive manufacturing (AM/SM) capabilities, leveraging AM's strengths in fabricating complex geometries and SM's precision and quality to produce finished parts. We present a systematic approach to automated computer-aided process planning (CAPP) for HM that can identify nontrivial, qualitatively distinct, and cost-optimal combinations of AM/SM modalities. A multimodal HM process plan is represented by a finite Boolean expression of AM and SM manufacturing primitives, such that the expression evaluates to an'as-manufactured' artifact. We show that primitives that respect spatial constraints such as accessibility and collision avoidance may be constructed by solving inverse configuration space problems on the'as-designed' artifact and manufacturing instruments. The primitives generate a finite Boolean algebra (FBA) that enumerates the entire search space for planning. The FBA's canonical intersection terms (i.e., 'atoms') provide the complete domain decomposition to reframe manufacturability analysis and process planning into purely symbolic reasoning, once a subcollection of atoms is found to be interchangeable with the design target. We demonstrate the practical potency of our framework and its computational efficiency when applied to process planning of complex 3D parts with dramatically different AM and SM instruments. Keywords: 1. Introduction Hybrid Manufacturing, Process Planning, Spatial Reasoning, Additive Manufacturing, Machining Hybrid manufacturing (HM), combining the capabilities of additive and subtractive manufacturing, is the new frontier of part fabrication. While additive manufacturing (AM) continues to enable unprecedented levels of structural complexity and customization, subtractive manufacturing (SM) remains indispensable for producing highprecision, mission-critical, and reliable mechanical components with functional interfaces. Versatile'multitasking' machines with simultaneous high-axis computer numerical control (CNC) of multiple AM and SM instruments (e.g., deposition heads and cutting tools) keep emerging on the market, enabling efficient use-cases for fabrication and repair (reviewed in Section 1.1).