The design of robotic systems is largely dictated by our purely human intuition about how we perceive the world. This intuition has been proven incorrect with regard to a number of critical issues, such as visual change blindness. In order to develop truly autonomous robots, we must step away from this intuition and let robotic agents develop their own way of perceiving. The robot should start from scratch and gradually develop perceptual notions, under no prior assumptions, exclusively by looking into its sensorimotor experience and identifying repetitive patterns and invariants. One of the most fundamental perceptual notions, space, cannot be an exception to this requirement. In this paper we look into the prerequisites for the emergence of simplified spatial notions on the basis of a robot's sensorimotor flow. We show that the notion of space as environment-independent cannot be deduced solely from exteroceptive information, which is highly variable and is mainly determined by the contents of the environment. The environment-independent definition of space can be approached by looking into the functions that link the motor commands to changes in exteroceptive inputs. In a sufficiently rich environment, the kernels of these functions correspond uniquely to the spatial configuration of the agent's exteroceptors. We simulate a redundant robotic arm with a retina installed at its end-point and show how this agent can learn the configuration space of its retina. The resulting manifold has the topology of the Cartesian product of a plane and a circle, and corresponds to the planar position and orientation of the retina.

Despite its omnipresence in robotics application, the nature of spatial knowledge and the mechanisms that underlie its emergence in autonomous agents are still poorly understood. Recent theoretical work suggests that the concept of space can be grounded by capturing invariants that space's structure induces in an agent's raw sensorimotor experience. Moreover, it is hypothesized that capturing these invariants is beneficial for a naive agent trying to predict its sensorimotor experience. Under certain exploratory conditions, spatial representations should thus emerge as a byproduct of learning to predict. We propose a simple sensorimotor predictive scheme, apply it to different agents and types of exploration, and evaluate the pertinence of this hypothesis. We show that a naive agent can capture the topology and metric regularity of its spatial configuration without any a priori knowledge, nor extraneous supervision. Space appears to be a pervasive concept in our perception of the world, and as such plays a central role in most artificial perception systems, in particular in computer vision and robotics applications. Yet its fundamental nature and the mechanisms that could lead to its emergence in an artificial system still remain poorly understood (Kant, 1998; Poincaré, 1895; Nicod, 1924). In most cases, the problem is circumvented by implementing prior knowledge in the system regarding the structure of space, and how motor and sensory information convey spatial properties (for instance through a kinematics model (Siciliano & Khatib, 2016), or a sensor model (Cadena et al., 2016)). In more recent years, and with the developments of machine learning techniques, approaches with less handengineered priors developed to solve spatial tasks ((Kahn et al., 2017; Quillen et al., 2018; Levine et al., 2018; Smolyanskiy et al., 2017) to name a few). However they tend to rule out the specificity of spatial experiences in favor of a global assessment of the agent's performance, leaving the question of the origin and structure of spatial knowledge largely open.

Machine learning methods such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are becoming an integral part of scientific research in many disciplines, spatial vector data often fail to be analyzed using these powerful learning methods because of its irregularities. With the aid of graph Fourier transform and convolution theorem, it is possible to convert the convolution as a point-wise product in Fourier domain and construct a learning architecture of CNN on graph for the analysis task of irregular spatial data. In this study, we used the classification task of building patterns as a case study to test this method, and experiments showed that this method has achieved outstanding results in identifying regular and irregular patterns, and has significantly improved in comparing with other methods.

We propose a probabilistic model for refining coarse-grained spatial data by utilizing auxiliary spatial data sets. Existing methods require that the spatial granularities of the auxiliary data sets are the same as the desired granularity of target data. The proposed model can effectively make use of auxiliary data sets with various granularities by hierarchically incorporating Gaussian processes. With the proposed model, a distribution for each auxiliary data set on the continuous space is modeled using a Gaussian process, where the representation of uncertainty considers the levels of granularity. The fine-grained target data are modeled by another Gaussian process that considers both the spatial correlation and the auxiliary data sets with their uncertainty. We integrate the Gaussian process with a spatial aggregation process that transforms the fine-grained target data into the coarse-grained target data, by which we can infer the fine-grained target Gaussian process from the coarse-grained data. Our model is designed such that the inference of model parameters based on the exact marginal likelihood is possible, in which the variables of fine-grained target and auxiliary data are analytically integrated out. Our experiments on real-world spatial data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.

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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

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.