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Consider the existence of six identical trees of the same species across a variety of environments. The first tree is in a wild and isolated landscape. The second is in a wilderness park. The third is in a heavily forested “tree plantation” owned by International Paper. The fourth is in the Ramble in Central Park. The fifth is in a suburban yard. The sixth is inside the six-story atrium of a Manhattan skyscraper. This paper begins with the intuition that the identical trees have different values because they exist in different environments and biological-social contexts. To understand the different evaluations of the trees we must think along a spectrum that incorporates both axiology and ontology. This thought experiment is useful in exploring arguments about both the management and the preservation of the natural world. The conclusion is that we must think along a spectrum of natural being and value to understand the dualism between humanity and nature and thereby avoid the domination of the natural environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-class geospatial object detection in high-resolution remote sensing images has significant potential in various domains such as industrial production, military warning, disaster monitoring, and urban planning. However, the traditional process of remote sensing object detection involves several time-consuming steps, including image acquisition, image download, ground processing, and object detection. These steps may not be suitable for tasks with shorter timeliness requirements, such as military warning and disaster monitoring. Additionally, the transmission of massive data from satellites to the ground is limited by bandwidth, resulting in time delays and redundant information, such as cloud coverage images. To address these challenges and achieve efficient utilization of information, this paper proposes a comprehensive on-board multi-class geospatial object detection scheme. The proposed scheme consists of several steps. Firstly, the satellite imagery is sliced, and the PID-Net (Proportional-Integral-Derivative Network) method is employed to detect and filter out cloud-covered tiles. Subsequently, our Manhattan Intersection over Union (MIOU) loss-based YOLO (You Only Look Once) v7-Tiny method is used to detect remote-sensing objects in the remaining tiles. Finally, the detection results are mapped back to the original image, and the truncated NMS (Non-Maximum Suppression) method is utilized to filter out repeated and noisy boxes. To validate the reliability of the scheme, this paper creates a new dataset called DOTA-CD (Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images-Cloud Detection). Experiments were conducted on both ground and on-board equipment using the AIR-CD dataset, DOTA dataset, and DOTA-CD dataset. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a paper on experimental studies performed in the 1940s at the University of Notre Dame accelerator laboratory to investigate radiation effects on materials and also to probe the efficiency of atmospheric cooling of the fireball created by a nuclear fission device. This was a critical question to be addressed during the early phases in the development of the Manhattan project, which was again raised in the film Oppenheimer, posing the question whether "a bomb can set the atmosphere on fire." This paper brings forth the formerly classified reaction studies performed at Notre Dame's Nuclear Science Laboratory to answer this question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the progressive development of new energy technologies, high-power lithium batteries have been widely used in ship power systems due to their high-power density and low environmental pollution, and they have gradually become one of their main propulsion energy sources. However, the large-scale deployment of lithium batteries has also brought a series of safety problems to ship operations, especially the battery internal short circuit (ISC). Battery ISC faults are very hidden and unpredictable at the initial stage and often fail to be detected in time, ultimately leading to overheating, fire or even an explosion of the ship's power system. Based on this, this paper proposes a fast and accurate method for early-stage ISC fault location and detection of lithium batteries. Initially, voltage variations across the lithium battery packs are quantified using curvilinear Manhattan distances to pinpoint faulty battery units. Subsequently, the localized characteristics of voltage variance among adjacent batteries are leveraged to detect an early-stage ISC fault. Simulation results indicate that the proposed method can quickly and accurately locate the position of 5 Ω, 10 Ω and 15 Ω ISC faulty batteries within the battery pack, as well as detect the abnormal batteries in a timely manner with considerable sensitivity and reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: With the rapid development of the medical industry and the gradual increase in people's awareness of their health, the use of the Internet for medical question and answer, to obtain more accurate medical answers. It is necessary to first calculate the similarity of the questions asked by users, which further matches professional medical answers. Improving the efficiency of online medical question and answer sessions will not only reduce the burden on doctors, but also enhance the patient's experience of online medical diagnosis. Method: This paper focuses on building a bidirectional gated recurrent unit(BiGRU) deep learning model based on Siamese network for medical interrogative similarity matching, using Word2Vec word embedding tool for word vector processing of ethnic-medical corpus, and introducing an attention mechanism and convolutional neural network. Bidirectional gated recurrent unit extracts contextual semantic information and long-distance dependency features of interrogative sentences; Similar ethnic medicine interrogatives vary in length and structure, and the key information in the interrogative is crucial to similarity identification. By introducing an attention mechanism higher weight can be given to the keywords in the question, further improving the recognition of similar words in the question. Convolutional neural network takes into account the local information of interrogative sentences and can capture local position invariance, allowing feature extraction for words of different granularity through convolutional operations; By comparing the Euclidean distance, cosine distance and Manhattan distance to calculate the spatial distance of medical interrogatives, the Manhattan distance produced the best similarity result. Result: Based on the ethnic medical question dataset constructed in this paper, the accuracy and F1-score reached 97.24% and 97.98%, which is a significant improvement compared to several other models. Conclusion: By comparing with other models, the model proposed in this paper has better performance and achieve accurate matching of similar semantic question data of ethnic medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image retrieval is the process of searching and retrieving images from a datastore based on their visual content and features. Recently, much attention has been directed towards the retrieval of irregular patterns within industrial or healthcare images by extracting features from the images, such as deep features, colour-based features, shape-based features, and local features. This has applications across a spectrum of industries, including fault inspection, disease diagnosis, and maintenance prediction. This paper proposes an image retrieval framework to search for images containing similar irregular patterns by extracting a set of morphological features (DefChars) from images. The datasets employed in this paper contain wind turbine blade images with defects, chest computerised tomography scans with COVID-19 infections, heatsink images with defects, and lake ice images. The proposed framework was evaluated with different feature extraction methods (DefChars, resized raw image, local binary pattern, and scale-invariant feature transforms) and distance metrics to determine the most efficient parameters in terms of retrieval performance across datasets. The retrieval results show that the proposed framework using the DefChars and the Manhattan distance metric achieves a mean average precision of 80% and a low standard deviation of ±0.09 across classes of irregular patterns, outperforming alternative feature–metric combinations across all datasets. Our proposed ImR framework performed better (by 8.71%) than Super Global, a state-of-the-art deep-learning-based image retrieval approach across all datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

As a novel network architecture, network function virtualization (NFV) greatly improves the flexibility and scalability of service provision. Deploying the service function chain (SFC) in an NFV environment needs to coordinate the instantiation of the virtual network function descriptor, network function embedding, and traffic steering, which also improves the complexity of the problem. Although heuristic algorithms are widely used to optimize this problem, due to the lack of complete SFC deployment solution space and digital coding scheme, the time complexity of the algorithm is difficult to meet the requirements. Therefore, this paper studies the digital coding scheme of the heuristic SFC deployment to improve time efficiency without reducing performance. Firstly, we model the SFC deployment as a 0–1 integer linear programming, considering the above factors, and then design a continuous digital solution space construction scheme based on N-Base coding (NBACO-SS) to optimize the above problems. NBACO-SS uses integer size and carry to map the complex SFC deployment to simple digital coding, evaluates the continuity of solution space through the Manhattan distance, and optimizes the continuity through the ant colony algorithm. Based on NBACO-SS, we reconstruct two heuristic algorithms to solve the SFC deployment problem. Experimental results demonstrate that NBACO-SS can improve the time efficiency by 20% without reducing the total network service traffic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IoT (Internet-of-Things)-powered devices can be exploited to connect vehicles to smart city infrastructure, allowing vehicles to share their intentions while retrieving contextual information about diverse aspects of urban viability. In this paper, we place ourselves in a transient scenario in which next-generation vehicles that are able to communicate with the surrounding infrastructure coexist with traditional vehicles with limited or absent IoT capabilities. We focus on intersection management, in particular on reusing existing traffic lights empowered by a new management system. We propose an auction-based system in which traffic lights are able to exchange contextual information with vehicles and other nearby traffic lights with the aim of reducing average waiting times at intersections and consequently overall trip times. We use bid propagation to improve standard vehicle trip times while allowing emergency vehicles to free up the way ahead without needing ad hoc system for such vehicle, only an increase in their budget. The proposed system is then tested against two baselines: the classical Fixed Time Control system currently adopted for traffic lights, and an auction strategy that does not exploit traffic light coordination. We performed a large set of experiments using the well known MATSim transport simulator on both a synthetic Manhattan map and on a map we built of an urban area located in Modena, Northern Italy. Our results show that the proposed approach performs better than the classical fixed time control system and the auction strategy that does not exploit coordination among traffic lights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In conventional point-line visual–inertial odometry systems in indoor environments, consideration of spatial position recovery and line feature classification can improve localization accuracy. In this paper, a monocular visual–inertial odometry based on structured and unstructured line features of vanishing points is proposed. First, the degeneracy phenomenon caused by a special geometric relationship between epipoles and line features is analyzed in the process of triangulation, and a degeneracy detection strategy is designed to determine the location of the epipoles. Then, considering that the vanishing point and the epipole coincide at infinity, the vanishing point feature is introduced to solve the degeneracy and direction vector optimization problem of line features. Finally, threshold constraints are used to categorize straight lines into structural and non-structural features under the Manhattan world assumption, and the vanishing point measurement model is added to the sliding window for joint optimization. Comparative tests on the EuRoC and TUM-VI public datasets validated the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: People with mental illnesses are disproportionately entangled in the criminal legal system. Historically, this involvement has resulted from minor offending, often accompanied by misdemeanor charges. In recent years, policymakers have worked to reduce the footprint of the criminal legal system. This paper seeks to better understand how misdemeanor systems intervene in the lives of people with mental illnesses. Methods: System mapping exercises were conducted with misdemeanor system stakeholders from the jurisdictions of Atlanta, Chicago, Manhattan, and Philadelphia. Narrative detail on decision-making and case processing, both generally and in relation to specific types of behavior, including trespassing, retail theft/shoplifting, and simple assault, were coded and analyzed for thematic patterns. Based on the qualitative analysis, this paper offers a conceptual diagram of contexts shaping misdemeanor system interventions among people with mental illnesses. Results: All four sites have been engaged in efforts to reduce the use of misdemeanor charges both generally and in relation to people with mental illnesses. Decision-makers across all sites experience contexts that shape how, when, and where they intervene, which are: (1) law and policy environments; (2) location of the behavior; (3) expectations of stakeholders; (4) knowledge of mental illnesses; and (5) access to community resources. Law and policy environments expand or constrain opportunities for diversion. The location of offending is relevant to who has a stake in the behavior, and what demands they have. Clinical, experiential, and system-level knowledge of mental illnesses inform a chain of decisions about what to do. The capacity to address mental health needs is contingent on access to social services, including housing. Conclusion: People making decisions along the criminal legal continuum are critical to illuminating the dynamic, inter-related contexts that facilitate and frustrate attempts to address defendants' mental health needs while balancing considerations of public safety. Multi-sector, scenario-based or case study exercises could help identify concrete ways of improving each of the contexts that surround whole-of-system decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Radiation Oncology Learning Health System (RO‐LHS) is a promising approach to improve the quality of care by integrating clinical, dosimetry, treatment delivery, research data in real‐time. This paper describes a novel set of tools to support the development of a RO‐LHS and the current challenges they can address. Methods: We present a knowledge graph‐based approach to map radiotherapy data from clinical databases to an ontology‐based data repository using FAIR concepts. This strategy ensures that the data are easily discoverable, accessible, and can be used by other clinical decision support systems. It allows for visualization, presentation, and data analyses of valuable information to identify trends and patterns in patient outcomes. We designed a search engine that utilizes ontology‐based keyword searching, synonym‐based term matching that leverages the hierarchical nature of ontologies to retrieve patient records based on parent and children classes, connects to the Bioportal database for relevant clinical attributes retrieval. To identify similar patients, a method involving text corpus creation and vector embedding models (Word2Vec, Doc2Vec, GloVe, and FastText) are employed, using cosine similarity and distance metrics. Results: The data pipeline and tool were tested with 1660 patient clinical and dosimetry records resulting in 504 180 RDF (Resource Description Framework) tuples and visualized data relationships using graph‐based representations. Patient similarity analysis using embedding models showed that the Word2Vec model had the highest mean cosine similarity, while the GloVe model exhibited more compact embeddings with lower Euclidean and Manhattan distances. Conclusions: The framework and tools described support the development of a RO‐LHS. By integrating diverse data sources and facilitating data discovery and analysis, they contribute to continuous learning and improvement in patient care. The tools enhance the quality of care by enabling the identification of cohorts, clinical decision support, and the development of clinical studies and machine learning programs in radiation oncology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the emergence of new information and communication technology, mobile‐based ridesharing services have received more attention and have improved. They offer timely and convenient service and exert an enormous influence on pollution and congestion by allowing passengers to share overlapping routes. However, ridesharing services have also been discussed and called into question by people with respect to their attractiveness, their comfort, and passenger safety. This paper proposes a ridesharing algorithm with a perceived mechanism by introducing multiple dimensions of perceived value to overall assess passengers' perceptions. The approach involved can continuously track the psychological changes in passengers during travel, capture the dynamic and comprehensive perceptions of passengers, and make real‐time adjustments on this basis. Furthermore, the proposed partition‐based parallel strategy can ensure high‐quality services and further enhance computational efficiency. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted based on the urban transportation network and the actual trip data from Manhattan to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The results show that it is important to effectively capture the passengers' perception of ridesharing services and apply them to optimization mechanisms, which will contribute to improving the perception of ride experiences and attracting potential passengers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multimedia data manipulation and forgery has never been easier than today, thanks to the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI-generated fake content, commonly called Deepfakes, have been raising new issues and concerns, but also new challenges for the research community. The Deepfake detection task has become widely addressed, but unfortunately, approaches in the literature suffer from generalization issues. In this paper, the Face Deepfake Detection and Reconstruction Challenge is described. Two different tasks were proposed to the participants: (i) creating a Deepfake detector capable of working in an "in the wild" scenario; (ii) creating a method capable of reconstructing original images from Deepfakes. Real images from CelebA and FFHQ and Deepfake images created by StarGAN, StarGAN-v2, StyleGAN, StyleGAN2, AttGAN and GDWCT were collected for the competition. The winning teams were chosen with respect to the highest classification accuracy value (Task I) and "minimum average distance to Manhattan" (Task II). Deep Learning algorithms, particularly those based on the EfficientNet architecture, achieved the best results in Task I. No winners were proclaimed for Task II. A detailed discussion of teams' proposed methods with corresponding ranking is presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The so-called Hamming distance measures the difference between two binary strings A and B. In simplified form, it measures the number of changes in A to get B. This type of distance is very useful in classical computing in applications such as error correction. It is also advantageous in quantum computing, being for example widely used in quantum machine learning. Since current quantum computers have limited resources, this type of distance is particularly attractive because it can be computed using fewer qubits and operations than other distances such as Euclidean or Manhattan distances. In this paper, two circuits for calculating Hamming distances using exclusively Clifford+T gates are presented. The aim of both circuits is to reduce the quantum cost and number of T gates needed to compute the Hamming distance. The T gate is more expensive than the other gates, so this reduction will have a significant impact on the total cost of the circuits. Furthermore, the proposed circuits are implemented using only Clifford+T gates. The circuits implemented exclusively with this group of gates are compatible with proven error detection and correction codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban street networks take many forms, from the circular streets in Black Rock City (which is built and removed every year as part of the Burning Man Festival) to the streets and avenues in the Manhattan grid. This paper compares the traits of cities with different street networks using the tools of urban economics. When both cities have commuting arteries of the same length, cities with circular streets have higher population densities unless access to these arteries is expensive and the number of arteries is large. Cities with arteries set at a 45o angle to the grid have smaller population densities under all circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A nonhomogeneous dynamic Bayesian network model, which combines the dynamic Bayesian network and the multi-change point process, solves the limitations of the dynamic Bayesian network in modeling non-stationary gene expression data to a certain extent. However, certain problems persist, such as the low network reconstruction accuracy and poor model convergence. Therefore, we propose an MD-birth move based on the Manhattan distance of the data points to increase the rationality of the multi-change point process. The underlying concept of the MD-birth move is that the direction of movement of the change point is assumed to have a larger Manhattan distance between the variance and the mean of its left and right data points. Considering the data instability characteristics, we propose a Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling method based on node-dependent particle filtering in addition to the multi-change point process. The candidate parent nodes to be sampled, which are close to the real state, are pushed to the high probability area through the particle filter, and the candidate parent node set to be sampled that is far from the real state is pushed to the low probability area and then sampled. In terms of reconstructing the gene regulatory network, the model proposed in this paper (FC-DBN) has better network reconstruction accuracy and model convergence speed than other corresponding models on the Saccharomyces cerevisiae data and RAF data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and Simple Additive Weighting (SAW) are among the most employed approaches for aggregating performances in Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM). TOPSIS and SAW are two MCDM methods based on the value function approach and are often used in combination with other MCDM methods in order to produce rankings of alternatives. In this paper, first, we analyse some common features of these two MCDM methods with a specific reference to the additive properties of the value function and to the sensitivity of the value function to trade-off weights. Based on such methodological insights, an experimental comparison of the results provided by these two aggregation methods across a computational test is performed. Specifically, similarities in rankings of alternatives produced by TOPSIS and SAW are evaluated under three different Minkowski distances (namely, the Euclidean, Manhattan and Tchebichev ones). Similarities are measured trough a set of statistical indices. Results show that TOPSIS, when used in combination with a Manhattan distance, produces rankings which are extremely similar to the ones resulting from SAW. Similarities are also Experimental results confirm that rankings produced by TOPSIS methods are closer to SAW ones when similar formal properties are satisfied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attitude estimation is central to a wide range of applications such as robotics, virtual reality and mobile smart devices. With the development of sensor technologies, these application devices are often equipped with gyroscopes and depth sensors. In this paper, we propose a novel method to fuse gyroscope and depth information for drift-free and robust attitude estimation in structured indoor applications. Our method relies on the depth information and the Manhattan world assumption to estimate the absolute orientation, which is then fused to correct the accumulated error of the gyroscope-determined attitude. We first utilize the mean shift algorithm on the unit sphere to align the surface normals from the depth measurements with the orthogonal planar structures of the Manhattan world. Therefore, the orientation estimates are drift-free and absolute with respect to the Manhattan world. We then fuse the orientation estimates with the gyroscope measurements in an error-state Kalman filter manner to further improve the attitude estimation accuracy and robustness. We validate the performance of our method on public datasets, demonstrating the robustness and accuracy of the method for attitude estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zheng, S. and Sha, J., 2020. Path optimum algorithm for container-integrated scheduling under dynamic mode in port terminals worldwide. Journal of Coastal Research, 36(4), 885–895. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. Optimizing container-integrated scheduling under dynamic mode in container ports worldwide is important during the transition of container terminals from traditional to automated management, which includes their transformation and upgrade, and it is important for the improvement of yard efficiency. Given the approach sequence and departure sequence of containers, with the objective of minimizing the number of container relocations in the process of container location selection, this problem can be described as a nondeterministic polynomial hard (NP-hard) problem. In order to obtain practical and instructive conclusions, this paper investigates both the approach and the departure problems of containers. On this basis, the simultaneous approach and departure of containers a re considered in dynamic mode, and a path optimum algorithm (POA) of container-integrated scheduling is proposed. This algorithm considers the different influences of the priority of containers, the movement of obstructive containers, and the Manhattan distance of gantry cranes on the model; moreover, it sets the promotion of container yard overall efficiency as the ultimate goal and analyzes the operation process from a more practical standpoint, in line with real-life production. Finally, this paper proposes a generic strategy for container-integrated scheduling, which provides a theoretical basis for container port operators worldwide to allocate and optimize port resources, and provides concrete guidance for operation rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main steps in the data lifecycle is to publish it for data analysts to discover hidden patterns. But, data publishing may lead to unwanted disclosure of personal information and cause privacy problems. Data anonymization techniques preserve privacy models to prevent the disclosure of individuals' private information in published data. In this paper, a distributed in-memory method is proposed on the Apache Spark framework to preserve the ℓ-diversity privacy model. This method anonymizes large-scale data in a three-phase process, which includes, seed selection, data clustering for ℓ -diversity, and finalizing phase. In this method, a hierarchical kmeans-based data clustering algorithm has been designed for data anonymization. One of the major challenges of anonymization methods is to establish a better trade-off between data utility and privacy. Therefore, for calculating the distance between records and forming more cohesive ℓdiverse-clusters, the authors have designed two Manhattan-based and Euclidean-based distance functions to satisfy the requirements of the ℓ-diversity model. Given the 100-fold speed of the Spark compared to MapReduce, the proposed method is presented using in-memory RDD programming in Apache Spark, to address the runtime, scalability, and performance in large-scale data anonymization as it exists in the previous MapReduce-based algorithms. Our method provides general knowledge to use parallel in-memory computation of Spark in big data anonymization. In experiments, this method has obtained lower information loss and loses about 1% to 2% accuracy and FMeasure criteria; therefore, it establishes a better trade-off than the state-of-the-art MapReduce-based Mondrian methods [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on 11th September, 2001, left behind 2977 dead, an altered Manhattan skyline and a changed world order marked by a formidable upsurge of global discourses pertaining to terrorism, multiculturalism, xenophobia, collective memory, and so forth. Indeed, 9/11 inhabits a discursive field of narratives/counter-narratives defying closure. Taking into cognizance this inevitability of myriad discourses, the present paper engages with the politics of the emergence of the discursively constructed Islamic Other in the post-9/11 national imaginary. Using the Foucauldian ideas of Power/Knowledge and "regime of Truth" along with Said's major premises as are found in the works Orientalism and Covering Islam, the paper attempts to debunk the idea that "innocent", neutral and objective representations in the media have been the norm. It argues that the fanatical, regressive and jehad-driven stereotype of the Islamic Other that gained visibility/ circulation/ legitimisation in the post-9/11 American socio-political culturescape had a Stateist genesis rooted in the reductive, ahistorical, Manichean binary of "us versus them" which essentially constituted the official discourse. It traces the trajectory of the Arab-American experience from initial erasure/ invisibility to hyper-visibility in the post-9/11 years, a time marked by deep fractures in the civil society where xenophobia, racial profiling and jingoistic patriotism became normalised. One way of generating resistance to such workings of power is by launching a counternarrative through the literary text. Consequently, the paper ends with a detailed engagement with two novels, one by Mohsin Hamid and another by Laila Halaby, that resist the official stereotypes/discourses while foregrounding the various registers of Othering in the post-9/11 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) has developed significantly. Coordination between vehicles can enhance driving safety and improve traffic efficiency. Due to the high dynamic characteristic of VANET, security has become one of the challenging problems. Trust of the message is a key element of security in VANET. This paper proposes a Manhattan Distance Based Trust Management model (MDBTM) in VANET environment which solves the problem in existing trust management research that considers the distance between the sending vehicle and event location. In this model, the Manhattan distance and the number of building obstacles are calculated by considering the movement relationship between the sending vehicle and event location. The Dijkstra algorithm is used to predict the path with the maximum probability, when the vehicle is driving toward the event location. The message scores are then calculated based on the Manhattan distance and the number of building obstacles. Finally, the scores are fused to determine whether to trust the message. The experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance than similar methods in terms of correct decision probability under different proportions of malicious vehicles, different numbers of vehicles, and different reference ranges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, with the development of autonomous driving technology, vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication technology that provides a wireless connection between vehicles, pedestrians, and roadside base stations has gained significant attention. Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication should provide low-latency and highly reliable services through direct communication between vehicles, improving safety. In particular, as the number of vehicles increases, efficient radio resource management becomes more important. In this paper, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based decentralized resource allocation scheme in the V2X communication network in which the radio resources are shared between the V2V and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) networks. Here, a deep Q-network (DQN) is utilized to find the resource blocks and transmit power of vehicles in the V2V network to maximize the sum rate of the V2I and V2V links while reducing the power consumption and latency of V2V links. The DQN also uses the channel state information, the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of V2I and V2V links, and the latency constraints of vehicles to find the optimal resource allocation scheme. The proposed DQN-based resource allocation scheme ensures energy-efficient transmissions that satisfy the latency constraints for V2V links while reducing the interference of the V2V network to the V2I network. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of the sum rate of the V2X network, the average power consumption of V2V links, and the average outage probability of V2V links using a case study in Manhattan with nine blocks of 3GPP TR 36.885. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme greatly reduces the transmit power of V2V links when compared to the conventional reinforcement learning-based resource allocation scheme without sacrificing the sum rate of the V2X network or the outage probability of V2V links. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Zhejiang University (Science Edition) is the property of Journal of Zhejiang University (Science Edition) Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper presents a study of equilibrium in a two-sided market for network platforms with cross externalities between buyers and sellers. The proposed model is a generalization of Armstrong's (2006) monopoly model for the case of a duopoly in a two-sided market for network platforms located on a plane. The paper solves the problem of optimal pricing and investigates the question of the optimal location of platforms in the market, provided that the heterogeneous utility of agents of both groups (buyers and sellers) is formed taking into account the Hotelling specification with the Manhattan metric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic relatedness is one of the most significant aspects of natural language processing. It has been identified as a critical technology for developing intelligent systems like Siri, Microsoft Ice, Cortana, and Xiaoai. In 2014, SemEval ranked SR as the top task. While many existing studies have focused on analyzing the entailment of single phrases, advancements in deep learning have made it possible to analyze complete sentences or texts. While the natural parallelism of membrane computing has shown promise for data processing, harnessing this potential to advance semantic relatedness remains an open problem yet to be tackled. This paper proposes a novel Siamese Manhattan LSTM-SNP approach (SiMaLSTM-SNP) for the SR problem. The approach uses a collaborative Word2vec and 10-Layer Attention strategy to represent and extract sentence pairs and a Siamese LSTM-SNP structure to calculate the hidden states of sentences. The multi-head self-attention layer identifies text associations and redistributes hidden state weights. The last hidden state is extracted, and the relatedness score is calculated using the Manhattan distance. The experiments demonstrate that SiMaLSTM-SNP outperforms 17 classical SR baselines and 7 novel approaches on the standard datasets SICK and STS in terms of mean square error performance. This indicates that SiMaLSTM-SNP can accurately capture the semantic distinction between two sentences and effectively preserve their semantic information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the pre-design stage of buildings, reliable long-term prediction of thermal loads is significant for cooling/heating system configuration and efficient operation. This paper proposes a surrogate modeling method to predict all-year hourly cooling/heating loads in high resolution for retail, hotel, and office buildings. 16 384 surrogate models are simulated in EnergyPlus to generate the load database, which contains 7 crucial building features as inputs and hourly loads as outputs. K-nearest-neighbors (KNN) is chosen as the data-driven algorithm to approximate the surrogates for load prediction. With test samples from the database, performances of five different spatial metrics for KNN are evaluated and optimized. Results show that the Manhattan distance is the optimal metric with the highest efficient hour rates of 93.57% and 97.14% for cooling and heating loads in office buildings. The method is verified by predicting the thermal loads of a given district in Shanghai, China. The mean absolute percentage errors (MAPE) are 5.26% and 6.88% for cooling/heating loads, respectively, and 5.63% for the annual thermal loads. The proposed surrogate modeling method meets the precision requirement of engineering in the building pre-design stage and achieves the fast prediction of all-year hourly thermal loads at the district level. As a data-driven approximation, it does not require as much detailed building information as the commonly used physics-based methods. And by pre-simulation of sufficient prototypical models, the method overcomes the gaps of data missing in current data-driven methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a new mixed-integer programming formulation for the maximally diverse grouping problem (MDGP) with attribute values. The MDGP is the problem of assigning items to groups such that all groups are as heterogeneous as possible. In the version with attribute values, the heterogeneity of groups is measured by the sum of pairwise absolute differences of the attribute values of the assigned items, i.e. by the Manhattan metric. The advantage of the version with attribute values is that the objective function can be reformulated such that it is linear instead of quadratic like in the standard MDGP formulation. We evaluate the new model formulation for the MDGP with attribute values in comparison with two different MDGP formulations from the literature. Our model formulation leads to substantially improved computation times and solves instances of realistic sizes (for example the assignment of students to seminars) with up to 70 items and three attributes, 50 items and five attributes, and 30 items and ten attributes to (near) optimality within half an hour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hypergraph matching has been attractive in the application of computer vision in recent years. The interference of external factors, such as squeezing, pulling, occlusion, and noise, results in the same target displaying different image characteristics under different influencing factors. After extracting the image feature point description, the traditional method directly measures the feature description using distance measurement methods such as Euclidean distance, cosine distance, and Manhattan distance, which lack a sufficient generalization ability and negatively impact the accuracy and effectiveness of matching. This paper proposes a metric-learning-based hypergraph matching (MLGM) approach that employs metric learning to express the similarity relationship between high-order image descriptors and learns a new metric function based on scene requirements and target characteristics. The experimental results show that our proposed method performs better than state-of-the-art algorithms on both synthetic and natural images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: A smart city is a potential solution to the problems caused by the unprecedented speed of urbanization. However, the increasing availability of big data is a challenge for transforming a city into a smart one. Conventional statistics and econometric methods may not work well with big data. One promising direction is to leverage advanced machine learning tools in analyzing big data about cities. In this paper, the authors propose a model to learn region embedding. The learned embedding can be used for more accurate prediction by representing discrete variables as continuous vectors that encode the meaning of a region. Design/methodology/approach: The authors use the random walk and skip-gram methods to learn embedding and update the preliminary embedding generated by graph convolutional network (GCN). The authors apply this model to a real-world dataset from Manhattan, New York, and use the learned embedding for crime event prediction. Findings: This study's results show that the proposed model can learn multi-dimensional city data more accurately. Thus, it facilitates cities to transform themselves into smarter ones that are more sustainable and efficient. Originality/value: The authors propose an embedding model that can learn multi-dimensional city data for improving predictive analytics and urban operations. This model can learn more dimensions of city data, reduce the amount of computation and leverage distributed computing for smart city development and transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reconstruction of the floorplan for a building requires the creation of a two-dimensional floorplan from a 3D model. This task is widely employed in interior design and decoration. In reality, the structures of indoor environments are complex with much clutter and occlusions, making it difficult to reconstruct a complete and accurate floorplan. It is well known that a suitable dataset is a key point to drive an effective algorithm, while existing datasets of floorplan reconstruction are synthetic and small. Without reliable accumulations of real datasets, the robustness of methods to real scene reconstruction is weakened. In this paper, we first annotate a large-scale realistic benchmark, which contains RGBD image sequences and 3D models of 80 indoor scenes with more than 10,000 square meters. We also introduce a framework for the floorplan reconstruction with mesh-based point cloud normalization. The loose-Manhattan constraint is performed in our optimization process, and the optimal floorplan is reconstructed via constraint integer programming. The experimental results on public and our own datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms FloorNet and Floor-SP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a novel and economical transportation way, ride-sharing has attracted more and more passengers and drivers to participate. How to match passengers with drivers efficiently has become a key issue. Specifically, drivers are usually heterogeneous with different costs, and they may behave strategically (e.g. reveal their private cost information untruthfully) in order to make more profits. Drivers' strategic behavior may lead to inefficient matching, which results in the loss of social welfare of ride-sharing platforms and drivers. In this paper, an incentive-compatible and efficient mechanism is proposed to solve this issue, which can match passengers with drivers and determine the payments to drivers in order to maximize social welfare while ensuring drivers reveal their cost information truthfully. Specifically, an order matching algorithm with branch and bound based route planning is designed to accelerate the matching process. Meanwhile, the payments to drivers are computed based on the second-pricing algorithm. In so doing, a second-pricing based ride-sharing mechanism (SPRM) is proposed, which satisfies incentive compatibility, individual rationality, budget balance and computational efficiency. Based on the real Manhattan taxi order data and vehicle fuel consumption data, extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed mechanism. The experimental results show that SPRM can guarantee drivers' profits and improve the ratio of drivers' participation and the ratio of served orders, and eventually achieve greater social welfare than four typical benchmark approaches, GPri, ND, mT-share and mdp. The research of this paper can provide useful insights for designing efficient ride-sharing system to maximize the social welfare of all participants in the real life. • An efficient mechanism to match orders with drivers is proposed. • A branch and bound based route planning method is used to accelerate the matching. • A second pricing based mechanism is proposed to compute the payments to drivers. • The proposed mechanism can outperform benchmark approaches in the social welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Timely and reliable information sharing among autonomous vehicles (AVs) provides a promising approach for reducing traffic congestion and improving traffic efficiency in future intelligent transportation systems. In this paper, we consider millimeter-wave (mmWave) based multi-hop vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications to facilitate ultra-reliable low-latency information sharing among AVs. We propose a novel framework for performance analysis and design of relay selection schemes in mmWave multi-hop V2V communications, while taking into account the mmWave signal propagation characteristics, road topology, and traffic conditions. In particular, considering the minimum tracking distance requirement of road traffic, the headway, i.e., the distance between adjacent AVs, is modeled as shifted-exponential distribution. Moreover, we model the communication path losses using the Manhattan distance metric in the taxicab geometry, which can more accurately capture the characteristics of mmWave signal propagation in urban grid roads than conventional Euclidean distance geometry. Based on the proposed model, we investigate the latency and reliability of mmWave multi-hop V2V communications for three widely adopted relay selection schemes, i.e., random with forward progress (RFP), most forward with fixed radius (MFR), and nearest with forward progress (NFP), respectively. Furthermore, we propose a novel relay selection scheme for joint optimization of the single-hop forward progress (FP) and single-hop latency according to the AVs’ instantaneous locations and an estimate of the residual multi-hop latency. Simulation results show that, by balancing the current single-hop latency and the residual multi-hop latency for the multi-hop V2V network, the proposed relay selection scheme significantly outperforms the MFR, NFP and RFP in both multi-hop transmission latency and reliability of mmWave V2V communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presently, many researchers and engineers have investigated autonomous driving, which has significantly influenced the revolution of artificial intelligence (AI). One of the critical challenges for autonomous driving is the inadequate precision of autonomous vehicles in detecting pedestrians, which is a major safety hazard to human beings. In this paper, a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) demonstration system with a normalization-based validity index (NbVI) has been proposed for real-time pedestrian detection. The proposed algorithm can accurately detect pedestrians by calculating the Manhattan distance between the target histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) features and real-time pedestrian HOG features. In lieu of sophisticated circuit layout and substantial training burden with neuron computation circuit, the proposed detection system with adaptive features clustering is hardware-friendly and is capable of real-time pedestrian detection using fewer training images with high detection rate (up to 99.2%). Moreover, the function execution time of pedestrian detection is shortened by 25% using FPGA acceleration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The efficient and accurate prediction of urban travel demand, which is a hot topic in intelligent transportation research, is challenging due to its complicated spatial-temporal dependencies, dynamic nature, and uneven distribution. Most existing forecasting methods merely considered the static spatial dependencies while ignoring the influence of the diversity of dynamic demand patterns and/or uneven distribution. In this paper, we propose a traffic demand forecasting framework of a hybrid dynamic graph convolutional network (HDGCN) model to deeply capture the characteristics of urban travel demand and improve prediction accuracy. In HDGCN, traffic flow similarity graphs are designed according to the dynamic nature of travel demand, and a dynamic graph sequence is generated according to time sequence. Then, the dynamic graph convolution module and the standard graph convolution module are introduced to extract the spatial features from dynamic graphs and static graphs, respectively. Finally, the spatial features of the two components are fused and combined with the gated recurrent unit (GRU) to learn the temporal features. The efficiency and accuracy of the HDGCN model in predicting urban taxi travel demand are verified by using the taxi data from Manhattan, New York City. The modeling and comparison results demonstrate that the HDGCN model can achieve stable and effective prediction for taxi travel demand compared with the state-of-the-art baseline models. The proposed model could be used for the real-time, accurate, and efficient travel demand prediction of urban taxi and other urban transportation systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a need for a probabilistic linguistic term set model for go/no-go product screening problem for new product development to meet a firm's expectation. This paper develops a novel 3-tuple linguistic distance-based model to evaluate whether an overall respondents perception meets a firm's expectation ("go") for new product development. The respondent's perception is collected by a Kansei-based survey as an interval-linguistic term. Then, an expected distance between the firm's expectation and the respondent's perception is computed by a target-based Manhattan distance measure. The expected distance is compared with a threshold to shows that what product attribute meets the firm's expectation based on customers' perceptions. A real case study of Thai-tea soy milk packaging design is provided. The proposed model is compared to the existing model to show its effectiveness and applicability. Experimental results show that the proposed model can effectively point out the inferior product attributes, which leads to redesign the product until all product concepts meet the target attributes before launching the product to the market. Thus, it can significantly reduce the risk of failure of the product in a real market. This paper has significant contributions in that it allows respondents to provide their opinions with uncertainty by providing an interval linguistic assessment, handles a bias of the heterogeneity of respondents by determining the weight of respondents, and overcomes limitations of existing models by applying target-oriented linguistic terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In large-scale projects such as hydropower and transportation, the real-time acquisition and generation of the 3D tunnel model can provide an important basis for the analysis and evaluation of the tunnel stability. The Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) technology has the advantages of low cost and strong real-time, which can greatly improve the data acquisition efficiency during tunnel excavation. Feature tracking and matching are critical processes of traditional 3D reconstruction technologies such as Structure from Motion (SfM) and SLAM. However, the complicated rock mass structures on the tunnel surface and the limited lighting environment make feature tracking and matching difficult. Manhattan SLAM is a technology integrating superpixels and Manhattan world assumptions, in which both line features and planar features can be better extracted. Rock mass discontinuities including traces and structural planes are distributed on the inner surface of tunnels, which can be extracted for feature tracking and matching. Therefore, this paper proposes a 3D reconstruction pipeline for tunnels, in which, the Manhattan SLAM algorithm is applied for camera pose parameters estimation and the sparse point cloud generation, and the Patch-based Multi-View Stereo (PMVS) is adopted for dense reconstruction. In this paper, the Azure Kinect DK sensor is used for data acquisition. Experiments are proceeded and the results show that the proposed pipeline based on Manhattan SLAM and PMVS performs good robustness and feasibility for tunnels 3D reconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we develop an account of the failure of private market-governance institutions to maintain market order by highlighting how control of their distributional function by powerful elites limits their regulatory capacity. We examine the New York Clearing House Association (NYCHA), a private market-governance institution among commercial banks in Manhattan that operated from 1853 to 1913. We find that the NYCHA, founded to achieve coordinating benefits among banks and to limit the effect of financial panics, evolved at the turn of the twentieth century into a device for large, elite market players to promote their own interests to the disadvantage of rival groups that were not members. Elites prevented the rest of the market from having equal opportunities to participate in emergency loan programs during bank panics. The elites’ control not only worsened the condition of the rest of the market by allowing non-member banks to fail; it also diminished the influence of the NYCHA and escalated market crises as bank failures spread to member banks. As a result, crises developed to an extent that exceeded the control of the NYCHA and ended up hurting even elites’ own interests. This paper suggests that institutional stability rests on a deliberate balance of interests between different market sectors and that, without such a balance, the distributional function of market-governance institutions plants the seeds of institutional destruction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents an Acoustic and Phonetic Decoding Model (APDM) for automatic recognition Standard Arab (S.A) plain (pure) and emphatic vowels sounds of continuous naturally spoken speech, using Genetic Algorithms (G.As). SA vowels were selected since they are the most difficult phonemes to recognize. We have used GAs because of their advantages in resolving complicated optimization problems and because the results are obtained more rapidly than in the classical methods. In addition, the computational cost is greatly reduced. Our Genetic APDM performs automatically and in parallel, the operation of concatenations of short-term parametric vectors during the speech continuum segmentation stage, and the classification of the acoustic segments of continuous and natural speech into different vowel classes. In order to perform our task, we have used both the Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coding (MFCC) and the Linear Prediction Coding (LPC) methods to extract vocal tract parametric coefficients from the speech signal successfully. Among a set of classifiers we have used the distance one. This paper explains how we have used the Manhattan distance as decision rule the GA evaluation to classify the discriminate parameters vectors. The analysed corpus contains hundreds of sentences composed of the all types of SA vowels in different contexts and recorded by several Algerian male and female speakers, in quite noisy environment. The Corpus phonemes were classified successfully with an overall average rate of 98.02%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current mobile augmented reality devices are often equipped with range sensors. The Microsoft HoloLens for instance is equipped with a Time-of-Flight (ToF) range camera providing coarse triangle meshes that can be used in custom applications. We suggest to use these triangle meshes for the automatic generation of indoor models that can serve as basis for augmenting their physical counterpart with location-dependent information. In this paper, we present a novel voxel-based approach for automated indoor reconstruction from unstructured three-dimensional geometries like triangle meshes. After an initial voxelisation of the input data, rooms are detected in the resulting voxel grid by segmenting connected voxel components of ceiling candidates and extruding them downwards to find floor candidates. Semantic class labels like 'Wall', 'Wall Opening', 'Interior Object' and 'Empty Interior' are then assigned to the room voxels in-between ceiling and floor by a rule-based voxel sweep algorithm. Finally, the geometry of the detected walls and their openings is refined in voxel representation. The proposed approach is not restricted to Manhattan World scenarios and does not rely on room surfaces being planar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This publication examines the history of Project Orion and NERVA nuclear engine program within the Integrated Program Plan, the technical reasons for their study, their progress, and the political reasons for their cancellation. Whether pulsed or thermal, nuclear propulsion offers the best compromise in efficiency and thrust for the propulsion of future manned missions. Project Orion was born in the mind of Stanislaw Ulam, an atomic physicist who had worked on the Manhattan project. Despite theoretical performances superior to anything conceivable even with current technologies, and despite the mobilisation of some of the most brilliant physicists of the time (Freeman Dyson), the project was killed by the Treaty banning nuclear weapon tests in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water (Moscow, 5 August 1963). The Integrated Program Plan was Wernher von Braun's proposal to the Space Task Group (STG), chaired by Vice President Spiro Agnew, for the continuation of the Apollo program. This plan envisaged a lunar base in the 1970s, and a first manned mission to Mars in the early 1980s. All of this would have been powered by nuclear-powered orbital shuttles, using NERVA, a nuclear engine tested and operational since 1968. Here again, even though it performed better than anything else in the world, even today, the project failed politically. This retrospective publication therefore aims to answer the following question: How can nuclear space programs of today and tomorrow be protected from the uncertainties of this influence? The study of propulsion systems is very often left to engineers, and political and public relations issues to politicians. However, every technology is the result of a political system, and has a strategic impact, which is a subject for social and political sciences. That's why this paper adopts an original approach crossing social sciences through the historical study of decision-making dynamics, and engineering through the study of the technical characteristics of the projects involved. This publication is based on declassified technical reports, testimonies of the personalities of the time, and a document from the archives of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. History can be the academic bridge between political and technical studies. In a context of resurgence of nuclear propulsion projects throughout the world, such an approach is now necessary both at the historical level and in terms of political decisions making. Indeed, space programs involving nuclear energy are, by nature, at the crossroads of public relations issues very specific to both space and atomic subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate and automated identification of the deceased victims with dental radiographs plays a significant role in forensic dentistry. The image processing techniques such as segmentation and feature extraction play a crucial role in image retrieval in accordance with the matching image. The raw image undergoes segmentation, feature extraction and distance-based image retrieval. The ultimate goal of the proposed work is the automated quality enhancement of the image by providing advanced enhancement techniques, segmentation techniques, feature extraction, and matching techniques. In this paper, multi-orientation local ternary pattern-based feature extraction is proposed for feature extraction. The grey level difference method (GLDM) is adopted to extract the texture and shape features that are considered for better results. The image retrieval is done by the computation of similarity score using distances such as Manhattan, Euclidean, vector cosine angle, and histogram intersection distance to obtain the optimal match from the database. The manually picked dataset of 200 images is considered for performance analysis. By extracting both the shape features and texture features, the proposed approach achieved maximum accuracy, precision, recall, F-measure, sensitivity, and specificity and lower false-positive and negative values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a meaningful and effective extension of the celebrated K-means algorithm to detect communities in feature-rich networks, due to our assumption of non-summability mode. We least-squares approximate given matrices of inter-node links and feature values, leading to a straightforward extension of the conventional K-means clustering method as an alternating minimization strategy for the criterion. This works in a two-fold space, embracing both the network nodes and features. The metric used is a weighted sum of the squared Euclidean distances in the feature and network spaces. To tackle the so-called curse of dimensionality, we extend this to a version that uses the cosine distances between entities and centers. One more version of our method is based on the Manhattan distance metric. We conduct computational experiments to test our method and compare its performances with those by competing popular algorithms at synthetic and real-world datasets. The cosine-based version of the extended K-means typically wins at the high-dimension real-world datasets. In contrast, the Manhattan-based version wins at most synthetic datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a non-coherent index modulation (IM) system in which activation patterns are characterized by multi-level block codes. We analyze performance of such a system under the maximum-likelihood (ML) receiver and when the set of activation patterns follows a multi-level code generated from asymptotically optimal alphabets. An asymptotic analysis of the pair-wise error probability (PEP) shows that the system can exploit a diversity order that is determined by the distance of the worst codeword pair in the $l_{1}$ metric, known as the Manhattan norm. We then explore the rate-diversity tradeoff for the developed non-coherent IM system as a function of the code length. Specifically, Gilbert-style bounds on the data rates for systems based on binary and ternary codes are obtained that can ensure a given diversity order. We approach the problem of packing in the $l_{1}$ metric by partitioning codes into permutation modulation codes (PMCs) and obtaining Gilbert-style bounds on PMCs. Several achievable rates for non-coherent binary and ternary IM systems, as well as a tradeoff between the information rate and codeword error probability (CEP) are also derived. Finally, simulation results are provided to corroborate the theoretical analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the senior capstone experience of the Department of Dance & Theatre at Manhattan College in Manhattan, New York. It states that the process follows specific rubrics for learning methodologies and outcomes. It notes that the process requires students to collaborate with instructors in an ongoing assessment process. It mentions that the capstone experience could be adapted and duplicated at medium-sized institutions.

We introduce the binomial line process (BLP), a novel spatial stochastic model for the characterization of streets in the statistical evaluation of wireless and vehicular networks. Existing stochastic geometry models for streets, e.g., Poisson line processes (PLP) and Manhattan line processes (MLP) lack an important aspect of city-wide street networks: streets are denser in the city center and sparse near the suburbs. Contrary to these models, the BLP restricts the generating points of the streets to a fixed radius centered at the origin of the Euclidian plane, thereby capturing the inhomogeneity of the streets with respect to the distance from the center. We derive a closed-form expression for the contact distribution of the BLP from a random location on the plane. Leveraging this, we introduce the novel Binomial line Cox process (BLCP) to emulate points on individual lines of the BLP and derive the distribution to the nearest BLCP point from an arbitrary location. Using numerical results, we highlight that the spatial configuration of the streets is remarkably distinct from the perspective of a city center user to that of a suburban user. The framework developed in this paper can be integrated with the existing models of line processes for more accurate characterization of streets in urban and suburban environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a novel visual-inertial odometry (VIO) approach that adopts structural regularity in man-made environments. Instead of using Manhattan world assumption, we use Atlanta world model to describe such regularity. An Atlanta world is a world that contains multiple local Manhattan worlds with different heading directions. Each local Manhattan world is detected on the fly, and their headings are gradually refined by the state estimator when new observations are received. With full exploration of structural lines that aligned with each local Manhattan worlds, our VIO method becomes more accurate and robust, as well as more flexible to different kinds of complex man-made environments. Through benchmark tests and real-world tests, the results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing visual-inertial systems in large-scale man-made environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]