Enhancing Urban Data Analysis: Leveraging Graph-Based Convolutional Neural Networks for a Visual Semantic Decision Support System.

The persistent increase in the magnitude of urban data, combined with the broad range of sensors from which it derives in modern urban environments, poses issues including data integration, visualization, and optimal utilization. The successful selection of suitable locations for predetermined commercial activities and public utility services or the reuse of existing infrastructure arise as urban planning challenges to be addressed with the aid of the aforementioned data. In our previous work, we have integrated a multitude of publicly available real-world urban data in a visual semantic decision support environment, encompassing map-based data visualization with a visual query interface, while employing and comparing several classifiers for the selection of appropriate locations for establishing parking facilities. In the current work, we challenge the best representative of the previous approach, i.e., random forests, with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in combination with a graph-based representation of the urban input data, relying on the same dataset to ensure comparability of the results. This approach has been inspired by the inherent visual nature of urban data and the increased capability of CNNs to classify image-based data. The experimental results reveal an improvement in several performance indices, implying a promising potential for this specific combination in decision support for urban planning problems.

Modelling and Predictive Monitoring of Business Processes under Uncertainty with Reinforcement Learning.

The analysis of business processes based on their observed behavior recorded in event logs can be performed with process mining. This method can discover, monitor, and improve processes in various application domains. However, the process models produced by typical process discovery methods are difficult for humans to understand due to their high complexity (the so-called "spaghetti-like" process models). Moreover, these methods cannot handle uncertainty or perform predictions because of their deterministic nature. Recently, researchers have been developing predictive approaches for running business cases of processes. This paper focuses on developing a predictive business process monitoring approach using reinforcement learning (RL), which has been successful in other contexts but not yet explored in this area. The proposed approach is evaluated in the banking sector through a use case.

A Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Transportation Flow Estimation.

Accurate estimation of transportation flow is a challenging task in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Transporting data with dynamic spatial-temporal dependencies elevates transportation flow forecasting to a significant issue for operational planning, managing passenger flow, and arranging for individual travel in a smart city. The task is challenging due to the composite spatial dependency on transportation networks and the non-linear temporal dynamics with mobility conditions changing over time. To address these challenges, we propose a Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network (ST-GCRN) that learns from both the spatial stations network data and time series of historical mobility changes in order to estimate transportation flow at a future time. The model is based on Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) in order to further improve the accuracy of transportation flow estimation. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets of transportation flow, New York bike-sharing system and Hangzhou metro system, prove the effectiveness of the proposed model. Compared to the current state-of-the-art baselines, it decreases the estimation error by 98% in the metro system and 63% in the bike-sharing system.

Transportation Mode Detection Using an Optimized Long Short-Term Memory Model on Multimodal Sensor Data.

The advancement of sensing technologies coupled with the rapid progress in big data analysis has ushered in a new era in intelligent transport and smart city applications. In this context, transportation mode detection (TMD) of mobile users is a field that has gained significant traction in recent years. In this paper, we present a deep learning approach for transportation mode detection using multimodal sensor data elicited from user smartphones. The approach is based on long short-term Memory networks and Bayesian optimization of their parameters. We conducted an extensive experimental evaluation of the proposed approach, which attains very high recognition rates, against a multitude of machine learning approaches, including state-of-the-art methods. We also discuss issues regarding feature correlation and the impact of dimensionality reduction.

Using Random Forests on Real-World City Data for Urban Planning in a Visual Semantic Decision Support System.

The constantly increasing amount and availability of urban data derived from varying sources leads to an assortment of challenges that include, among others, the consolidation, visualization, and maximal exploitation prospects of the aforementioned data. A preeminent problem affecting urban planning is the appropriate choice of location to host a particular activity (either commercial or common welfare service) or the correct use of an existing building or empty space. In this paper, we propose an approach to address these challenges availed with machine learning techniques. The proposed system combines, fuses, and merges various types of data from different sources, encodes them using a novel semantic model that can capture and utilize both low-level geometric information and higher level semantic information and subsequently feeds them to the random forests classifier, as well as other supervised machine learning models for comparisons. Our experimental evaluation on multiple real-world data sets comparing the performance of several classifiers (including Feedforward Neural Networks, Support Vector Machines, Bag of Decision Trees, k-Nearest Neighbors and Naïve Bayes), indicated the superiority of Random Forests in terms of the examined performance metrics (Accuracy, Specificity, Precision, Recall, F-measure and G-mean).

Simulating how salt decay ages buildings.

Salt-based aging plays an important part in the realism of scenes featuring stone structures and monuments. A proposed model, based on physical behaviors and principles, replaces the simulation of complex physical formulations with ad hoc algorithms. It leads to plausible results, ultimately helping designers create aging patterns on affected objects.