The ability to persist in the spacial environment is, not only in the robotic context, an essential feature. Positional knowledge is one of the most important aspects of space and a number of methods to represent these information have been developed in the in the research area of spatial cognition. The basic qualitative spatial representation and reasoning techniques are presented in this thesis and several calculi are briefly reviewed. Features and applications of qualitative calculi are summarized. A new calculus for representing and reasoning about qualitative spatial orientation and distances is being designed. It supports an arbitrary level of granularity over ternary relations of points. Ways of improving the complexity of the composition are shown and an implementation of the calculus demonstrates its capabilities. Existing qualitative spatial calculi of positional information are compared to the new approach and possibilities for future research are outlined.

Social activities play an important role in people's daily life since they interact. For recommendations based on social activities, it is vital to have not only the activity information but also individuals' social relations. Thanks to the geo-social networks and widespread use of location-aware mobile devices, massive geo-social data is now readily available for exploitation by the recommendation system. In this paper, a novel group recommendation method, called attentive geo-social group recommendation, is proposed to recommend the target user with both activity locations and a group of users that may join the activities. We present an attention mechanism to model the influence of the target user $u_T$ in candidate user groups that satisfy the social constraints. It helps to retrieve the optimal user group and activity topic candidates, as well as explains the group decision-making process. Once the user group and topics are retrieved, a novel efficient spatial query algorithm SPA-DF is employed to determine the activity location under the constraints of the given user group and activity topic candidates. The proposed method is evaluated in real-world datasets and the experimental results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms baseline methods.

Geospatial development links your data to locations on the surface of the Earth. Writing geospatial programs involves tasks such as grouping data by location, storing and analyzing large amounts of spatial information, performing complex geospatial calculations, and drawing colorful interactive maps. In order to do this well, you'll need appropriate tools and techniques, as well as a thorough understanding of geospatial concepts such as map projections, datums, and coordinate systems. This book provides an overview of the major geospatial concepts, data sources, and toolkits. It starts by showing you how to store and access spatial data using Python, how to perform a range of spatial calculations, and how to store spatial data in a database.

Machine learning techniques have been widely used in attempts to forecast several solar datasets. Most of these approaches employ supervised machine learning algorithms which are, in general, very data hungry. This hampers the attempts to forecast some of these data series, particularly the ones that depend on (relatively) recent space observations. Here we focus on an attempt to forecast the solar surface longitudinally averaged radial magnetic field distribution using a form of spatial-temporal neural networks. Given that the recording of these spatial-temporal datasets only started in 1975 and are therefore quite short, the forecasts are predictably quite modest. However, given that there is a potential physical relationship between sunspots and the magnetic field, we employ another machine learning technique called transfer learning which has recently received considerable attention in the literature. Here, this approach consists in first training the source spatial-temporal neural network on the much longer time/latitude sunspot area dataset, which starts in 1874, then transferring the trained set of layers to a target network, and continue training the latter on the magnetic field dataset. The employment of transfer learning in the field of computer vision is known to obtain a generalized set of feature filters that can be reused for other datasets and tasks. Here we obtain a similar result, whereby we first train the network on the spatial-temporal sunspot area data, then the first few layers of the neural network are able to identify the two main features of the solar cycle, i.e. the amplitude variation and the migration to the equator, and therefore can be used to train on the magnetic field dataset and forecast better than a prediction based only on the historical magnetic field data.

The blocks world is a classic toy domain that has long been used to build and test spatial reasoning systems. Despite its relative simplicity, tackling this domain in its full complexity requires the agent to exhibit a rich set of functional capabilities, ranging from vision to natural language understanding. There is currently a resurgence of interest in solving problems in such limited domains using modern techniques. In this work we tackle spatial question answering in a holistic way, using a vision system, speech input and output mediated by an animated avatar, a dialogue system that robustly interprets spatial queries, and a constraint solver that derives answers based on 3-D spatial modeling. The contributions of this work include a semantic parser that maps spatial questions into logical forms consistent with a general approach to meaning representation, a dialog manager based on a schema representation, and a constraint solver for spatial questions that provides answers in agreement with human perception. These and other components are integrated into a multi-modal human-computer interaction pipeline.

Recognizing users' strong interest in the emerging field of spatial data science, Esri is adding a new course--Spatial Data Science: The New Frontier in Analytics--to its popular lineup of massive open online courses (MOOCs). Opening in 2020, the course will explore how incorporating spatial data, tools, and methods enhances analytical and predictive models. Data scientists, GIS analysts, and others with a strong background in statistics and analytics will find the course beneficial. Attendees should plan to spend three to four hours per week on the course. Esri will award a certificate of completion to everyone who completes the MOOC.

QGIS is a user-friendly open source geographic information system (GIS) that runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows. The popularity of open source geographic information systems and QGIS in particular has been growing rapidly over the last few years. Learning QGIS Third Edition is a practical, hands-on guide updated for QGIS 2.14 that provides you with clear, step-by-step exercises to help you apply your GIS knowledge to QGIS. Through clear, practical exercises, this book will introduce you to working with QGIS quickly and painlessly. This book takes you from installing and configuring QGIS to handling spatial data to creating great maps.

QGIS is a user-friendly open source geographic information system (GIS) that runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows. The popularity of open source geographic information systems and QGIS in particular has been growing rapidly over the last few years. Learning QGIS Third Edition is a practical, hands-on guide updated for QGIS 2.14 that provides you with clear, step-by-step exercises to help you apply your GIS knowledge to QGIS. Through clear, practical exercises, this book will introduce you to working with QGIS quickly and painlessly. This book takes you from installing and configuring QGIS to handling spatial data to creating great maps.

Geocomputation with R is for people who want to analyze, visualize and model geographic data with open source software. It is based on R, a statistical programming language that has powerful data processing, visualization, and geospatial capabilities. The book equips you with the knowledge and skills to tackle a wide range of issues manifested in geographic data, including those with scientific, societal, and environmental implications. This book will interest people from many backgrounds, especially Geographic Information Systems (GIS) users interested in applying their domain-specific knowledge in a powerful open source language for data science, and R users interested in extending their skills to handle spatial data. The online version of the book is hosted at geocompr.robinlovelace.net.

New generation geostationary satellites make solar reflectance observations available at a continental scale with unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution and spectral range. Generating quality land monitoring products requires correction of the effects of atmospheric scattering and absorption, which vary in time and space according to geometry and atmospheric composition. Many atmospheric radiative transfer models, including that of Multi-Angle Implementation of Atmospheric Correction (MAIAC), are too computationally complex to be run in real time, and rely on precomputed look-up tables. Additionally, uncertainty in measurements and models for remote sensing receives insufficient attention, in part due to the difficulty of obtaining sufficient ground measurements. In this paper, we present an adaptation of Bayesian Deep Learning (BDL) to emulation of the MAIAC atmospheric correction algorithm. Emulation approaches learn a statistical model as an efficient approximation of a physical model, while machine learning methods have demonstrated performance in extracting spatial features and learning complex, nonlinear mappings. We demonstrate stable surface reflectance retrieval by emulation (R2 between MAIAC and emulator SR are 0.63, 0.75, 0.86, 0.84, 0.95, and 0.91 for Blue, Green, Red, NIR, SWIR1, and SWIR2 bands, respectively), accurate cloud detection (86\%), and well-calibrated, geolocated uncertainty estimates. Our results support BDL-based emulation as an accurate and efficient (up to 6x speedup) method for approximation atmospheric correction, where built-in uncertainty estimates stand to open new opportunities for model assessment and support informed use of SR-derived quantities in multiple domains.