In this paper, we introduce a framework and our ongoing experiments in which computers learn to enact complex temporal-spatial actions by observing humans. Our framework processes motion capture data of human subjects performing actions, and uses qualitative spatial reasoning to learn multi-level representations for these actions. Using reinforcement learning, these observed sequences are used to guide a simulated agent to perform novel actions. To evaluate, we visualize the action being performed in an embodied 3D simulation environment, which allows evaluators to judge whether the system has successfully learned the novel concepts. This approach complements other planning approaches in robotics and demonstrates a method of teaching a robotic or virtual agent to understand predicate-level distinctions in novel concepts.

Our study aims to build a machine learning model for crime prediction using geospatial features for different categories of crime. The reverse geocoding technique is applied to retrieve open street map (OSM) spatial data. This study also proposes finding hotpoints extracted from crime hotspots area found by Hierarchical Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (HDBSCAN). A spatial distance feature is then computed based on the position of different hotpoints for various types of crime and this value is used as a feature for classifiers. We test the engineered features in crime data from Royal Canadian Mounted Police of Halifax, NS. We observed a significant performance improvement in crime prediction using the new generated spatial features.

Today I'm writing this post to explain how it's possible to make geographic analysis and answer questions like: which is the richest area in my city? How many people do live in one neighborhood? You can do it combining shape files with an excel spreadsheet, let's understand it together... Then, we're gonna need one shape file and one excel spreadsheet. I'm from Brazil, and we do have a lot of open data from States and Cities.

This paper studies a challenging problem of tracking severely occluded objects in long video sequences. The proposed method reasons about the containment relations and human actions, thus infers and recovers occluded objects identities while contained or blocked by others. There are two conditions that lead to incomplete trajectories: i) Contained. The occlusion is caused by a containment relation formed between two objects, e.g., an unobserved laptop inside a backpack forms containment relation between the laptop and the backpack. ii) Blocked. The occlusion is caused by other objects blocking the view from certain locations, during which the containment relation does not change. By explicitly distinguishing these two causes of occlusions, the proposed algorithm formulates tracking problem as a network flow representation encoding containment relations and their changes. By assuming all the occlusions are not spontaneously happened but only triggered by human actions, an MAP inference is applied to jointly interpret the trajectory of an object by detection in space and human actions in time. To quantitatively evaluate our algorithm, we collect a new occluded object dataset captured by Kinect sensor, including a set of RGB-D videos and human skeletons with multiple actors, various objects, and different changes of containment relations. In the experiments, we show that the proposed method demonstrates better performance on tracking occluded objects compared with baseline methods.

Spatial understanding is a fundamental problem with wide-reaching real-world applications. The representation of spatial knowledge is often modeled with spatial templates, i.e., regions of acceptability of two objects under an explicit spatial relationship (e.g., "on," "below," etc.). In contrast with prior work that restricts spatial templates to explicit spatial prepositions (e.g., "glass on table"), here we extend this concept to implicit spatial language, i.e., those relationships (generally actions) for which the spatial arrangement of the objects is only implicitly implied (e.g., "man riding horse"). In contrast with explicit relationships, predicting spatial arrangements from implicit spatial language requires significant common sense spatial understanding. Here, we introduce the task of predicting spatial templates for two objects under a relationship, which can be seen as a spatial question-answering task with a (2D) continuous output ("where is the man w.r.t. a horse when the man is walking the horse?"). We present two simple neural-based models that leverage annotated images and structured text to learn this task. The good performance of these models reveals that spatial locations are to a large extent predictable from implicit spatial language. Crucially, the models attain similar performance in a challenging generalized setting, where the object-relation-object combinations (e.g., "man walking dog") have never been seen before. Next, we go one step further by presenting the models with unseen objects (e.g., "dog"). In this scenario, we show that leveraging word embeddings enables the models to output accurate spatial predictions, proving that the models acquire solid common sense spatial knowledge allowing for such generalization.

According to (Zhang et Though compressive community sensing can effectively al. 2014a), there are two major roles in community sensing reduce the required incentives and participants, it still aggregates - the organizer and the participants - where the former is the real-time location and sensor data from each the individual or organization that creates the sensing task, participant, so as to first identify the covered subareas, fill recruits participants and collects the sensor data, while the with collected data, and then recover the missing data for latter (i.e., participants) involve in the sensing task and provide the rest. To protect the location privacy of participants, the the sensing data. Frequently, the organizer pursues a same of group of researchers (Wang et al. 2017a; 2016b) proposed high (or even full) spatial-temporal coverage of the collected to leverage the Differential Geo-Obfuscation to replace sensor data. However incentives (e.g., monetary rewards) and each participants' real-time location with a "mock" location the threats to privacy (e.g., exposing real-time locations) are while insuring the recovery accuracy. With the Differential two major concerns that may affect the willingness of the Geo-Obfuscation, the participants' locations are expected to participants to join a community sensing task.

In real world, the regions occupied by these entities may the location of an object, involve dealing with spatial properties have holes (e.g., Store A may have a small garden in the and relations of objects. For higher precision of solutions, middle) or may be disconnected (e.g., Store A may consist if data is available, quantitative approaches can be of two parts across a small street). Moreover, the given set of employed to find metric solutions for these tasks. On the constraints may be incomplete (i.e., qualitative spatial relations other hand, for some applications (e.g., exploration of an between some spatial objects are not known) or some unknown environment), quantitative data may not always be constraints may involve disjunctions (e.g., missing child is available due to incomplete knowledge about the environment; to the south of Store A or to the north of Store B). In such and, for some applications (e.g., that involve humanrobot cases, with uncertainty or incomplete knowledge, checking interactions) sociable and understandable interactions the consistency of a given set of constraints is NPcomplete and acceptable explanations are often more desirable than (Table 1).

Human action recognition remains a difficult problem for AI. Traditional machine learning techniques can have high recognition accuracy, but they are typically black boxes whose internal models are not inspectable and whose results are not explainable. This paper describes a new pipeline for recognizing human actions from skeleton data via analogical generalization. Specifically, starting with Kinect data, we segment each human action by temporal regions where the motion is qualitatively uniform, creating a sketch graph that provides a form of qualitative representation of the behavior that is easy to visualize. Models are learned from sketch graphs via analogical generalization, which are then used for classification via analogical retrieval. The retrieval process also produces links between the new example and components of the model that provide explanations. To improve recognition accuracy, we implement dynamic feature selection to pick reasonable relational features. We show the explanation advantage of our approach by example, and results on three public datasets illustrate its utility.

Data Science is one of the hottest jobs of the 21 century with an average salary of over $120,000. This course is designed learners of all backgrounds including beginners with no programming experience to experienced programmers who would like to advance to become a spatial data scientist. I will teach you programming with R to visualize, explore, and analyze your spatial data. At the end of this course, you will be able to acquire skills spatial data analysis. Enroll now in this course and start your journey of becoming a spatial data scientist!

We introduce a new algorithm, called CDER, for supervised machine learning that merges the multi-scale geometric properties of Cover Trees with the information-theoretic properties of entropy. CDER applies to a training set of labeled pointclouds embedded in a common Euclidean space. If typical pointclouds corresponding to distinct labels tend to differ at any scale in any sub-region, CDER can identify these differences in (typically) linear time, creating a set of distributional coordinates which act as a feature extraction mechanism for supervised learning. We describe theoretical properties and implementation details of CDER, and illustrate its benefits on several synthetic examples.