Cooperatively utilizing both ego-vehicle and infrastructure sensor data can significantly enhance autonomous driving perception abilities. However, the uncertain temporal asynchrony and limited communication conditions can lead to fusion misalignment and constrain the exploitation of infrastructure data.

The objective of this study is to characterize inequality in infrastructure quality across urban areas. While a growing of body of literature has recognized the importance of characterizing infrastructure inequality in cities and provided quantified metrics to inform urban development plans, the majority of the existing approaches focus primarily on measuring the quantity of infrastructure, assuming that more infrastructure is better. Also, the existing research focuses primarily on index-based approaches in which the status of infrastructure provision in urban areas is determined based on assumed subjective weights. The focus on infrastructure quantity and use of indices obtained from subjective weights has hindered the ability to properly examine infrastructure inequality as it pertains to urban inequality and environmental justice considerations. Recognizing this gap, we propose a machine learning-based approach in which infrastructure features that shape environmental hazard exposure are identified and we use the weights obtained by the model to calculate an infrastructure quality provision for spatial areas of cities and accordingly, quantify the extent of inequality in infrastructure quality. The implementation of the model in five metropolitan areas in the U.S. demonstrates the capability of the proposed approach in characterizing inequality in infrastructure quality and capturing city-specific differences in the weights of infrastructure features. The results also show that areas in which low-income populations reside have lower infrastructure quality provision, suggesting the lower infrastructure quality provision as a determinant of urban disparities. Accordingly, the proposed approach can be effectively used to inform integrated urban design strategies to promote infrastructure equity and environmental justice based on data-driven and machine intelligence-based insights.

This paper examines the use of risk models to predict the timing and location of wildfires caused by electricity infrastructure. Our data include historical ignition and wire-down points triggered by grid infrastructure collected between 2015 to 2019 in Pacific Gas & Electricity territory along with various weather, vegetation, and very high resolution data on grid infrastructure including location, age, materials. With these data we explore a range of machine learning methods and strategies to manage training data imbalance. The best area under the receiver operating characteristic we obtain is 0.776 for distribution feeder ignitions and 0.824 for transmission line wire-down events, both using the histogram-based gradient boosting tree algorithm (HGB) with under-sampling. We then use these models to identify which information provides the most predictive value. After line length, we find that weather and vegetation features dominate the list of top important features for ignition or wire-down risk. Distribution ignition models show more dependence on slow-varying vegetation variables such as burn index, energy release content, and tree height, whereas transmission wire-down models rely more on primary weather variables such as wind speed and precipitation. These results point to the importance of improved vegetation modeling for feeder ignition risk models, and improved weather forecasting for transmission wire-down models. We observe that infrastructure features make small but meaningful improvements to risk model predictive power.