Flow In City Research Articles

Super Resolution Deduction: Inferring Fine-Grained Capacity for Urban Signal Station Deployment

With the boosting of mobile devices, wireless sensor networks, and the internet of things, abundant multi-modal data, such as GPS signal, sensor data, are produced intentionally or unintentionally, which can represent the people's active patterns, vehicle's routes, and city's flows to develop a smart city. These multi-modal data are usually transmitted and received by signal stations deployed in the city. However, reasonably choosing the signal stations' locations is still an open issue for enhancing people's life quality in the smart city. To this end, we propose the Super Resolution Deduction (SRD) model for solving the signal station selection problem. SRD first initializes the city map as a coarse-grained heat map representing the capacity of the signal stations. Then an image-based super-resolution deduction model is proposed to obtain a fine-grained signal station capacity for deploying. To be specific, we employ Dense Block to capture the spatio-temporal correlations, C-Attention to selectively enhance useful feature maps, and S-Distribution to impose structural constraints. By sharing the GPS data load with the new deployment of signal stations, we ensure the smart city's efficiency and effectiveness. Extensive experimental results on real-world dataset Changchun City demonstrate that our proposed model achieves the superior performance among the state-of-the-art baselines.

The Evolutionary Dynamics of Sentience in Cities

AbstractCities, and their component buildings and infrastructural systems, have developed rapidly in responsive and adaptive capacities. Ubiquitous computation and new informational technologies are increasingly embedded in the physical and social processes of the city. Here, Michael Weinstock identifies ‘sentience’, or the ability to be aware, as the primary driver of innovation in the urban environment; as the extended ‘nervous system’ of a city develops the potential to sense changes in the city's flows, and in its internal and external environments.