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With the extensive developments in autonomous vehicles (AV) and the increase of interest in artificial intelligence (AI), path planning is becoming a focal area of research. However, path planning is an NP-hard problem and its execution time and complexity are major concerns when searching for optimal solutions. Thus, the optimal trade-off between the shortest path and computing resources must be found. This paper introduces a path planning algorithm, tide path planning (TPP), which is inspired by the natural tide phenomenon. The idea of the gravitational attraction between the Earth and the Moon is adopted to avoid searching blocked routes and to find a shortest path. Benchmarking the performance of the proposed algorithm against rival path planning algorithms, such as A*, breadth-first search (BFS), Dijkstra, and genetic algorithms (GA), revealed that the proposed TPP algorithm succeeded in finding a shortest path while visiting the least number of cells and showed the fastest execution time under different settings of environment size and obstacle ratios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent study of property valuation literature indicated that the vast majority of researchers and academics in the field of real estate are focusing on Mass Appraisals rather than on the further development of the existing valuation methods. Researchers are using a variety of mathematical models used within the field of Machine Learning, which are applied to real estate valuations with high accuracy. On the other hand, it appears that professional valuers do not use these sophisticated models during daily practice, rather they operate using the traditional five methods. The Department of Lands and Surveys in Cyprus recently published the property values (General Valuation) for taxation purposes which were calculated by applying a hybrid model based on the Cost approach with the use of regression analysis in order to quantify the specific parameters of each property. In this paper, the authors propose a number of algorithms based on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning approaches that improve the accuracy of these results significantly. The aim of this work is to investigate the capabilities of such models and how they can be used for the mass appraisal of properties, to highlight the importance of sensitivity analysis in such models and also to increase the transparency so that automated valuation models (AVM) can be used for the day-to-day work of the valuer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acquisition of labeled data for supervised Hyperspectral Image (HSI) classification is expensive in terms of both time and costs. Moreover, manual selection and labeling are often subjective and tend to induce redundancy into the classifier. Active learning (AL) can be a suitable approach for HSI classification as it integrates data acquisition to the classifier design by ranking the unlabeled data to provide advice for the next query that has the highest training utility. However, multiclass AL techniques tend to include redundant samples into the classifier to some extent. This paper addresses such a problem by introducing an AL pipeline which preserves the most representative and spatially heterogeneous samples. The adopted strategy for sample selection utilizes fuzziness to assess the mapping between actual output and the approximated a-posteriori probabilities, computed by a marginal probability distribution based on discriminative random fields. The samples selected in each iteration are then provided to the spectral angle mapper-based objective function to reduce the inter-class redundancy. Experiments on five HSI benchmark datasets confirmed that the proposed Fuzziness and Spectral Angle Mapper (FSAM)-AL pipeline presents competitive results compared to the state-of-the-art sample selection techniques, leading to lower computational requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we applied an artificial neural network (ANN) to the short-term prediction of the Arctic sea ice concentration (SIC). The prediction was performed using encoding and decoding processes, in which a gated recurrent unit encodes sequential sea ice data, and a feed-forward neural network model decodes the encoded input data. Because of the large volume of Arctic sea ice data, the ANN predicts the future SIC of each cell individually. The limitation of these singular predictions is that they do not use information from other cells. This results in low accuracy, particularly when there are drastic changes during melting and freezing seasons. To address this issue, we present a new data scheme including global and local SIC information, where the global information is represented by sea ice statistics. We trained ANNs using different data schemes and network architectures, and then compared their performances quantitatively and visually. The results show that, compared with a data scheme that uses only local sea ice information, the newly proposed scheme leads to a significant improvement in prediction accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]