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With the rapid advancements of sensor technologies and mobile computing, Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) has emerged as a new paradigm to collect massive-scale rich trajectory data. Nomadic sensors empower people and objects with the capability of reporting and sharing observations on their state, their behavior and/or their surrounding environments. Processing and mining multi-source sensor data in MCS raise several challenges due to their multi-dimensional nature where the measured parameters (i.e., dimensions) may differ in terms of quality, variability, and time scale. We consider the context of air quality MCS and focus on the task of mining the micro-environment from the MCS data. Relating the measures to their micro-environment is crucial to interpret them and analyse the participant's exposure properly. In this paper, we focus on the problem of investigating the feasibility of recognizing the human's micro-environment in an environmental MCS scenario. We propose a novel approach for learning and predicting the micro-environment of users from their trajectories enriched with environmental data represented as multidimensional time series plus GPS tracks. We put forward a multi-view learning approach that we adapt to our context, and implement it along with other time series classification approaches. We extend the proposed approach to a hybrid method that employs trajectory segmentation to bring the best of both methods. We optimise the proposed approaches either by analysing the exact geolocation (which is privacy invasive), or simply applying some a priori rules (which is privacy friendly). The experimental results, applied to real MCS data, not only confirm the power of MCS and air quality (AQ) data in characterizing the micro-environment, but also show a moderate impact of the integration of mobility data in this recognition. Furthermore, and during the training phase, multi-view learning shows similar performance as the reference deep learning algorithm, without requiring specific hardware. However, during the application of models on new data, the deep learning algorithm fails to outperform our proposed models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) has emerged as a subfield of GIScience that uses artificial intelligence approaches and machine learning techniques for geographic knowledge discovery. The non-regularity of data structures has recently led to different variants of graph neural networks in the field of computer science, with graph convolutional neural networks being one of the most prominent that operate on non-euclidean structured data where the numbers of nodes connections vary and the nodes are unordered. These networks use graph convolution – commonly known as filters or kernels – in place of general matrix multiplication in at least one of their layers. This paper suggests spatial regression graph convolutional neural networks (SRGCNNs) as a deep learning paradigm that is capable of handling a wide range of geographical tasks where multivariate spatial data needs modeling and prediction. The feasibility of SRGCNNs lies in the feature propagation mechanisms, the spatial locality nature, and a semi-supervised training strategy. In the experiments, this paper demonstrates the operation of SRGCNNs with social media check-in data in Beijing and house price data in San Diego. The results indicate that a well-trained SRGCNN model is capable of learning from samples and performing reasonable predictions for unobserved locations. The paper also presents the effectiveness of incorporating the idea of geographically weighted regression for handling heterogeneity between locations in the model approach. Compared to conventional spatial regression approaches, SRGCNN-based models tend to generate much more accurate and stable results, especially when the sampling ratio is low. This study offers to bridge the methodological gap between graph deep learning and spatial regression analytics. The proposed idea serves as an example to illustrate how spatial analytics can be combined with state-of-the-art deep learning models, and to enlighten future research at the front of GeoAI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of GeoAI or Geospatial Artificial Intelligence has undergone rapid development since 2017. It has been widely applied to address environmental and social science problems, from understanding climate change to tracking the spread of infectious disease. A foundational task in advancing GeoAI research is the creation of open, benchmark datasets to train and evaluate the performance of GeoAI models. While a number of datasets have been published, very few have centered on the natural terrain and its landforms. To bridge this gulf, this paper introduces a first-of-its-kind benchmark dataset, GeoImageNet, which supports natural feature detection in a supervised machine-learning paradigm. A distinctive feature of this dataset is the fusion of multi-source data, including both remote sensing imagery and DEM in depicting spatial objects of interest. This multi-source dataset allows a GeoAI model to extract rich spatio-contextual information to gain stronger confidence in high-precision object detection and recognition. The image dataset is tested with a multi-source GeoAI extension against two well-known object detection models, Faster-RCNN and RetinaNet. The results demonstrate the robustness of the dataset in aiding GeoAI models to achieve convergence and the superiority of multi-source data in yielding much higher prediction accuracy than the commonly used single data source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional air quality monitoring, a critical component of sustainable development is realized through various air quality observation stations established across a region. Accurate forecasting of air quality data collected from these observation stations requires the modelling of spatial–temporal patterns in the data. Deep learning algorithms, known for their ability to capture layers of abstraction, can proficiently achieve spatial–temporal modeling. However, deterministic models that produces point forecast does not consider the underlying model uncertainty during prediction and are therefore less reliable for real-time applications. Probabilistic forecasting models that forecast prediction intervals rather than point estimates can overcome this through uncertainty quantification. The objective of the proposed study is three-fold: i) develop an efficient deterministic deep learning spatial–temporal neural network named DL-STNN for spatial–temporal air quality forecasting; ii) investigate different approaches to uncertainty quantification in deep learning models and integrate some of them, such as Monte-Carlo Dropout, Ensemble Averaging, Gaussian Process Regression, Quantile Regression, and Bayesian Inference, in tandem with DL-STNN to facilitate probabilistic forecasting; and iii) evaluate the developed deterministic and probabilistic models, using a real-world Delhi air quality dataset. The evaluation results show that, among the deterministic models, DL-STNN outperforms the baselines with 39.8% more accurate predictions and performs consistently across all seasons in Delhi. Furthermore, among the DL-STNN-based tandem models that performed probabilistic forecasting, Bayesian DL-STNN proved efficient. It does 13% more accurate point forecasting and has 20% higher suitability score than the other tandem models, indicating that Bayesian inference adapts DL-STNN more reliable for real-time applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]