Successfully predicting gentrification could have many social and commercial applications; however, real estate sales are difficult to predict because they belong to a chaotic system comprised of intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics, perceived value, and market speculation. Using New York City real estate as our subject, we combine modern techniques of data science and machine learning with traditional spatial analysis to create robust real estate prediction models for both classification and regression tasks. We compare several cutting edge machine learning algorithms across spatial, semi-spatial and non-spatial feature engineering techniques, and we empirically show that spatially-conscious machine learning models outperform non-spatial models when married with advanced prediction techniques such as feed-forward artificial neural networks and gradient boosting machine models.

Spatial-temporal prediction is a fundamental problem for constructing smart city, which is useful for tasks such as traffic control, taxi dispatching, and environmental policy making. Due to data collection mechanism, it is common to see data collection with unbalanced spatial distributions. For example, some cities may release taxi data for multiple years while others only release a few days of data; some regions may have constant water quality data monitored by sensors whereas some regions only have a small collection of water samples. In this paper, we tackle the problem of spatial-temporal prediction for the cities with only a short period of data collection. We aim to utilize the long-period data from other cities via transfer learning. Different from previous studies that transfer knowledge from one single source city to a target city, we are the first to leverage information from multiple cities to increase the stability of transfer. Specifically, our proposed model is designed as a spatial-temporal network with a meta-learning paradigm. The meta-learning paradigm learns a well-generalized initialization of the spatial-temporal network, which can be effectively adapted to target cities. In addition, a pattern-based spatial-temporal memory is designed to distill long-term temporal information (i.e., periodicity). We conduct extensive experiments on two tasks: traffic (taxi and bike) prediction and water quality prediction. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model over several competitive baseline models.

Cognitive scientists of the embodied cognition tradition have been providing evidence that a large part of our creative reasoning and problemsolving processes are carried out by means of conceptual metaphor and blending, grounded on our bodily experience with the world. In this talk I shall aim at fleshing out a mathematical model that has been proposed in the last decades for expressing and exploring conceptual metaphor and blending with greater precision than has previously been done. In particular, I shall focus on the notion of aptness of a metaphor or blend and on the validity of metaphorical entailment. Towards this end, I shall use a generalisation of the category-theoretic notion of colimit for modelling conceptual metaphor and blending in combination with the idea of reasoning at a distance as modelled in the Barwise-Seligman theory of information flow. I shall illustrate the adequacy of the proposed model with an example of creative reasoning about space and time for solving a classical brainteaser. Furthermore, I shall argue for the potential applicability of such mathematical model for ontology engineering, computational creativity, and problem-solving in general.

Traditional color images only depict color intensities in red, green and blue channels, often making object trackers fail when a target shares similar color or texture as its surrounding environment. Alternatively, material information of targets contained in a large amount of bands of hyperspectral images (HSI) is more robust to these challenging conditions. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on how HSIs can be utilized to boost object tracking from three aspects: benchmark dataset, material feature representation and material based tracking. In terms of benchmark, we construct a dataset of fully-annotated videos which contain both hyperspectral and color sequences of the same scene. We extract two types of material features from these videos. We first introduce a novel 3D spectral-spatial histogram of gradient to describe the local spectral-spatial structure in an HSI. Then an HSI is decomposed into the detailed constituent materials and associate abundances, i.e., proportions of materials at each location, to encode the underlying information on material distribution. These two types of features are embedded into correlation filters, yielding material based tracking. Experimental results on the collected benchmark dataset show the potentials and advantages of material based object tracking.

In this article a few of the qualitative spatio-temporal knowledge representation techniques developed by the constraint reasoning community within artificial intelligence are reviewed. The objective is to provide a broad exposure to any other interested group who may utilize these representations. The author has a particular interest in applying these calculi (in a broad sense) in topological data analysis, as these schemes are highly qualitative in nature.

We study the problem of jointly reasoning about language and vision through a navigation and spatial reasoning task. We introduce the Touchdown task and dataset, where an agent must first follow navigation instructions in a real-life visual urban environment to a goal position, and then identify in the observed image a location described in natural language to find a hidden object. The data contains 9,326 examples of English instructions and spatial descriptions paired with demonstrations. We perform qualitative linguistic analysis, and show that the data displays richer use of spatial reasoning compared to related resources. Empirical analysis shows the data presents an open challenge to existing methods.

Understanding and accurately predicting within-field spatial variability of crop yield play a key role in site-specific management of crop inputs such as irrigation water and fertilizer for optimized crop production. However, such a task is challenged by the complex interaction between crop growth and environmental and managerial factors, such as climate, soil conditions, tillage, and irrigation. In this paper, we present a novel Spatial-temporal Multi-Task Learning algorithms for within-field crop yield prediction in west Texas from 2001 to 2003. This algorithm integrates multiple heterogeneous data sources to learn different features simultaneously, and to aggregate spatial-temporal features by introducing a weighted regularizer to the loss functions. Our comprehensive experimental results consistently outperform the results of other conventional methods, and suggest a promising approach, which improves the landscape of crop prediction research fields.

UNSUPERVISED DEEP CLUSTERING FOR SOURCE SEPARATION: DIRECT LEARNING FROM MIXTURES USING SPATIAL INFORMATION Efthymios Tzinis ] Shrikant Venkataramani ] Paris Smaragdis ][ ] University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Computer Science [ Adobe Research ABSTRACT We present a monophonic source separation system that is trained by only observing mixtures with no ground truth separation information. We use a deep clustering approach which trains on multi-channel mixtures and learns to project spectrogram bins to source clusters that correlate with various spatial features. We show that using such a training process we can obtain separation performance that is as good as making use of ground truth separation information. Once trained, this system is capable of performing sound separation on monophonic inputs, despite having learned how to do so using multi-channel recordings. Index Terms -- Deep clustering, source separation, unsupervised learning 1. INTRODUCTION A central problem when designing source separation systems is that of defining what constitutes a source.

Big Data is an evolving term that refers to the collection and analysis of large volumes of data to identify patterns and trends, then make predictions about future outcomes. In agriculture, Big Data is not only the quantity of data--it is also an algorithm of interaction with many variables applied to research like agronomy, breeding, farming systems modeling, strategic foresight, nutrition, health, and socio-economy. "What we mean by Big Data is the linked data," says Dr. Jawoo Koo, a Spatial Data and Analytics theme leader and senior research fellow for the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). "For us, Big Data is data from multiple disciplines that links together to give us a better understanding of how agriculture works." Koo is co-pioneer of the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture and Global Coordinator for the CGIAR Consortium for Spatial Information with extensive work experience in data analysis and crop modeling.

Abstract--The extraction of geological lineaments from digital satellite data is a fundamental application in remote sensing. The location of geological lineaments such as faults and dykes are of interest for a range of applications, particularly because of their association with hydrothermal mineralization. Although a wide range of applications have utilized computer vision techniques, a standard workflow for application of these techniques to mineral exploration is lacking. We present a framework for extracting geological lineaments using computer vision techniques which is a combination of edge detection and line extraction algorithms for extracting geological lineaments using optical remote sensing data. It features ancillary computer vision techniques for reducing data dimensionality, removing noise and enhancing the expression of lineaments. We test the proposed framework on Landsat 8 data of a mineral-rich portion of the Gascoyne Province in Western Australia using different dimension reduction techniques and convolutional filters. To validate the results, the extracted lineaments are compared to our manual photointerpretation and geologically mapped structures by the Geological Survey of Western Australia (GSWA). The results show that the best correlation between our extracted geological lineaments and the GSWA geological lineament map is achieved by applying a minimum noise fraction transformation and a Laplacian filter. Application of a directional filter instead shows a stronger correlation with the output of our manual photointerpretation and known sites of hydrothermal mineralization. Hence, our framework using either filter can be used for mineral prospectivity mapping in other regions where faults are exposed and observable in optical remote sensing data. IGITAL satellite data with different spatial and spectral resolution are available for almost every locality on the Earth's land surface [1]-[5]. This enables the procurement of detailed information from surficial features and processes at different scales. Linear features are considered as one of the most important surficial features in different fields of study [6]-[8]. R. Scalzo is with the Centre for Translational Data Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia (email: richard.scalzo@sydney.edu.au). Linear features represent the expression of some degree of linearity of a single or diverse grouping of both natural and cultural features [9], [10].