Ubiquitous eco cities : infrastructure, technology and management

Efficient and effective urban management systems for Ubiquitous Eco Cities require having intelligent and integrated management mechanisms. This integration includes bringing together economic, socio-cultural and urban development with a well orchestrated, transparent and open decision-making system and necessary infrastructure and technologies. In Ubiquitous Eco Cities telecommunication technologies play an important role in monitoring and managing activities via wired and wireless networks. Particularly, technology convergence creates new ways in which information and telecommunication technologies are used and formed the backbone of urban management. The 21st Century is an era where information has converged, in which people are able to access a variety of services, including internet and location based services, through multi-functional devices and provides new opportunities in the management of Ubiquitous Eco Cities. This chapter discusses developments in telecommunication infrastructure and trends in convergence technologies and their implications on the management of Ubiquitous Eco Cities.

A statistical framework for natural feature representation

This paper presents a robust stochastic framework for the incorporation of visual observations into conventional estimation, data fusion, navigation and control algorithms. The representation combines Isomap, a non-linear dimensionality reduction algorithm, with expectation maximization, a statistical learning scheme. The joint probability distribution of this representation is computed offline based on existing training data. The training phase of the algorithm results in a nonlinear and non-Gaussian likelihood model of natural features conditioned on the underlying visual states. This generative model can be used online to instantiate likelihoods corresponding to observed visual features in real-time. The instantiated likelihoods are expressed as a Gaussian mixture model and are conveniently integrated within existing non-linear filtering algorithms. Example applications based on real visual data from heterogenous, unstructured environments demonstrate the versatility of the generative models.

Learning articulated motion structures with Bayesian Networks

This paper presents a general methodology for learning articulated motions that, despite having non-linear correlations, are cyclical and have a defined pattern of behavior Using conventional algorithms to extract features from images, a Bayesian classifier is applied to cluster and classify features of the moving object. Clusters are then associated in different frames and structure learning algorithms for Bayesian networks are used to recover the structure of the motion. This framework is applied to the human gait analysis and tracking but applications include any coordinated movement such as multi-robots behavior analysis.

A Bayesian approach for place recognition

This paper presents a robust place recognition algorithm for mobile robots. The framework proposed combines nonlinear dimensionality reduction, nonlinear regression under noise, and variational Bayesian learning to create consistent probabilistic representations of places from images. These generative models are learnt from a few images and used for multi-class place recognition where classification is computed from a set of feature-vectors. Recognition can be performed in near real-time and accounts for complexity such as changes in illumination, occlusions and blurring. The algorithm was tested with a mobile robot in indoor and outdoor environments with sequences of 1579 and 3820 images respectively. This framework has several potential applications such as map building, autonomous navigation, search-rescue tasks and context recognition.

Theoretical model of user acceptance : in the view of measuring success in web personalization

This paper attempts to develop a theoretical acceptance model for measuring Web personalization success. Key factors impacting Web personalization acceptance are identified from a detailed literature review. The final model is then cast in a structural equation modeling (SEM) framework comprising nineteen manifest variables, which are grouped into three focal behaviors of Web users. These variables could provide a framework for better understanding of numerous factors that contribute to the success measures of Web personalization technology. Especially, those concerning the quality of personalized features and how personalized information through personalized Website can be delivered to the user. The interrelationship between success constructs is also explained. Empirical validations of this theoretical model are expected on future research.

Remote monitoring of outdoor performance of low scale dye sensitized solar cells for nanosensors nodes

This is the first outdoor test of small-scale dye sensitized solar cells (DSC) powering a stand-alone nanosensor node. A solar cell test station (SCTS) has been developed using standard DSC to power a gas nanosensor, a radio transmitter, and the control electronics (CE) for battery charging. The station is remotely monitored through wired (Ethernet cable) or wireless connection (radio transmitter) in order to evaluate in real time the performance of the solar cells and devices under different weather conditions. The 408 cm2 active surface module produces enough energy to power a gas nanosensor and a radio transmitter during the day and part of the night. Also, by using a programmable load we keep the system working on the maximum power point (MPP) quantifying the total energy generated and stored in a battery. These experiments provide useful data for future outdoor applications such as nanosensor networks.

The geometric modelling of social frames and contexts

How do humans respond to their social context? This question is becoming increasingly urgent in a society where democracy requires that the citizens of a country help to decide upon its policy directions, and yet those citizens frequently have very little knowledge of the complex issues that these policies seek to address. Frequently, we find that humans make their decisions more with reference to their social setting, than to the arguments of scientists, academics, and policy makers. It is broadly anticipated that the agent based modelling (ABM) of human behaviour will make it possible to treat such social effects, but we take the position here that a more sophisticated treatment of context will be required in many such models. While notions such as historical context (where the past history of an agent might affect its later actions) and situational context (where the agent will choose a different action in a different situation) abound in ABM scenarios, we will discuss a case of a potentially changing context, where social effects can have a strong influence upon the perceptions of a group of subjects. In particular, we shall discuss a recently reported case where a biased worm in an election debate led to significant distortions in the reports given by participants as to who won the debate (Davis et al 2011). Thus, participants in a different social context drew different conclusions about the perceived winner of the same debate, with associated significant differences among the two groups as to who they would vote for in the coming election. We extend this example to the problem of modelling the likely electoral responses of agents in the context of the climate change debate, and discuss the notion of interference between related questions that might be asked of an agent in a social simulation that was intended to simulate their likely responses. A modelling technology which could account for such strong social contextual effects would benefit regulatory bodies which need to navigate between multiple interests and concerns, and we shall present one viable avenue for constructing such a technology. A geometric approach will be presented, where the internal state of an agent is represented in a vector space, and their social context is naturally modelled as a set of basis states that are chosen with reference to the problem space.

Trading spaces : on the lore and limitations of latent semantic analysis

Two decades after its inception, Latent Semantic Analysis(LSA) has become part and parcel of every modern introduction to Information Retrieval. For any tool that matures so quickly, it is important to check its lore and limitations, or else stagnation will set in. We focus here on the three main aspects of LSA that are well accepted, and the gist of which can be summarized as follows: (1) that LSA recovers latent semantic factors underlying the document space, (2) that such can be accomplished through lossy compression of the document space by eliminating lexical noise, and (3) that the latter can best be achieved by Singular Value Decomposition. For each aspect we performed experiments analogous to those reported in the LSA literature and compared the evidence brought to bear in each case. On the negative side, we show that the above claims about LSA are much more limited than commonly believed. Even a simple example may show that LSA does not recover the optimal semantic factors as intended in the pedagogical example used in many LSA publications. Additionally, and remarkably deviating from LSA lore, LSA does not scale up well: the larger the document space, the more unlikely that LSA recovers an optimal set of semantic factors. On the positive side, we describe new algorithms to replace LSA (and more recent alternatives as pLSA, LDA, and kernel methods) by trading its l2 space for an l1 space, thereby guaranteeing an optimal set of semantic factors. These algorithms seem to salvage the spirit of LSA as we think it was initially conceived.

The quantum inspired modelling of changing attitudes and self-organising societies

We utilise the well-developed quantum decision models known to the QI community to create a higher order social decision making model. A simple Agent Based Model (ABM) of a society of agents with changing attitudes towards a social issue is presented, where the private attitudes of individuals in the system are represented using a geometric structure inspired by quantum theory. We track the changing attitudes of the members of that society, and their resulting propensities to act, or not, in a given social context. A number of new issues surrounding this "scaling up" of quantum decision theories are discussed, as well as new directions and opportunities.

Attitudes, Ideologies and Self-Organisation : Information Load Minimisation in Multi-Agent Decision Making

Sophisticated models of human social behaviour are fast becoming highly desirable in an increasingly complex and interrelated world. Here, we propose that rather than taking established theories from the physical sciences and naively mapping them into the social world, the advanced concepts and theories of social psychology should be taken as a starting point, and used to develop a new modelling methodology. In order to illustrate how such an approach might be carried out, we attempt to model the low elaboration attitude changes of a society of agents in an evolving social context. We propose a geometric model of an agent in context, where individual agent attitudes are seen to self-organise to form ideologies, which then serve to guide further agent-based attitude changes. A computational implementation of the model is shown to exhibit a number of interesting phenomena, including a tendency for a measure of the entropy in the system to decrease, and a potential for externally guiding a population of agents towards a new desired ideology.

The Effects of Personality in a Social Context

The contextuality of changing attitudes makes them extremely difficult to model. This paper scales up Quantum Decision Theory (QDT) to a social setting, using it to model the manner in which social contexts can interact with the process of low elaboration attitude change. The elements of this extended theory are presented, along with a proof of concept computational implementation in a low dimensional subspace. This model suggests that a society's understanding of social issues will settle down into a static or frozen configuration unless that society consists of a range of individuals with varying personality types and norms.

A multi-touch notice board fostering social interaction

We report on an alternative OCGM interface for a bulletin board, where a user can pin a note or a drawing, and actually shares contents. Exploiting direct and continuous manipulations, opposite to discrete gestures, to explore containers, the proposed interface supports a more natural and immediate interaction. It manages also the presence of different simultaneous users, allowing for the creation of local multimedia contents, the connection to social networks, providing a suitable working environment for cooperative and collaborative tasks in a multi-touch setup, such as touch-tables, interactive walls or multimedia boards

Laser-radar data fusion with Gaussian Process Implicit Surfaces

This work considers the problem of building high-fidelity 3D representations of the environment from sensor data acquired by mobile robots. Multi-sensor data fusion allows for more complete and accurate representations, and for more reliable perception, especially when different sensing modalities are used. In this paper, we propose a thorough experimental analysis of the performance of 3D surface reconstruction from laser and mm-wave radar data using Gaussian Process Implicit Surfaces (GPIS), in a realistic field robotics scenario. We first analyse the performance of GPIS using raw laser data alone and raw radar data alone, respectively, with different choices of covariance matrices and different resolutions of the input data. We then evaluate and compare the performance of two different GPIS fusion approaches. The first, state-of-the-art approach directly fuses raw data from laser and radar. The alternative approach proposed in this paper first computes an initial estimate of the surface from each single source of data, and then fuses these two estimates. We show that this method outperforms the state of the art, especially in situations where the sensors react differently to the targets they perceive.