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Spatiotemporal Event Forecasting and Analysis with Ubiquitous Urban Sensors

The study of information extraction and knowledge exploration in the urban environment is gaining popularity. Ubiquitous sensors and a plethora of statistical reports provide an immense amount of heterogeneous urban data, such as traffic data, crime activity statistics, social media messages, and street imagery. The development of methods for heterogeneous urban data-based event identification and impacts analysis for a variety of event topics and assumptions is the subject of this dissertation. A graph convolutional neural network for crime prediction, a multitask learning system for traffic incident prediction with spatiotemporal feature learning, social media-based transportation event detection, and a graph convolutional network-based cyberbullying detection algorithm are the four methods proposed. Additionally, based on the sensitivity of these urban sensor data, a comprehensive discussion on ethical issues of urban computing is presented.

This work makes the following contributions in urban perception predictions: 1) Create a preference learning system for inferring crime rankings from street view images using a bidirectional convolutional neural network (bCNN). 2) Propose a graph convolutional networkbased solution to the current urban crime perception problem; 3) Develop street view image retrieval algorithms to demonstrate real city perception.

This work also makes the following contributions in traffic incident effect analysis: 1) developing a novel machine learning system for predicting traffic incident duration using temporal features; 2) modeling traffic speed similarity among road segments using spatial connectivity in feature space; and 3) proposing a sparse feature learning method for identifying groups of temporal features at a higher level.

In transportation-related incidents detection, this work makes the following contributions: 1) creating a real-time social media-based traffic incident detection platform; 2) proposing a query expansion algorithm for traffic-related tweets; and 3) developing a text summarization tool for redundant traffic-related tweets.

Cyberbullying detection from social media platforms is one of the major focus of this work: 1) Developing an online Dynamic Query Expansion process using concatenated keyword search. 2) Formulating a graph structure of tweet embeddings and implementing a Graph Convolutional Network for fine-grained cyberbullying classification. 3) Curating a balanced multiclass cyberbullying dataset from DQE, and making it publicly available.

Additionally, this work seeks to identify ethical vulnerabilities from three primary research directions of urban computing: urban safety analysis, urban transportation analysis, and social media analysis for urban events. Visions for future improvements in the perspective of ethics are addressed. / Doctor of Philosophy / The ubiquitously deployed urban sensors such as traffic speed meters, street-view cameras, and even smartphones in everybody's pockets are generating terabytes of data every hour. How do we refine the valuable intelligence out of such explosions of urban data and information became one of the profitable questions in the field of data mining and urban computing. In this dissertation, four innovative applications are proposed to solve real-world problems with big data of the urban sensors. In addition, the foreseeable ethical vulnerabilities in the research fields of urban computing and event predictions are addressed.

The first work explores the connection between urban perception and crime inferences. StreetNet is proposed to learn crime rankings from street view images. This work presents the design of a street view images retrieval algorithm to improve the representation of urban perception. A data-driven, spatiotemporal algorithm is proposed to find unbiased label mappings between the street view images and the crime ranking records.

The second work proposes a traffic incident duration prediction model that simultaneously predicts the impact of the traffic incidents and identifies the critical groups of temporal features via a multi-task learning framework. Such functionality provided by this model is helpful for the transportation operators and first responders to judge the influences of traffic incidents.

In the third work, a social media-based traffic status monitoring system is established. The system is initiated by a transportation-related keyword generation process. A state-of-the-art tweets summarization algorithm is designed to eliminate the redundant tweets information. In addition, we show that the proposed tweets query expansion algorithm outperforms the previous methods.

The fourth work aims to investigate the viability of an automatic multiclass cyberbullying detection model that is able to classify whether a cyberbully is targeting a victim's age, ethnicity, gender, religion, or other quality. This work represents a step forward for establishing an active anti-cyberbullying presence in social media and a step forward towards a future without cyberbullying.

Finally, a discussion of the ethical issues in the urban computing community is addressed. This work seeks to identify ethical vulnerabilities from three primary research directions of urban computing: urban safety analysis, urban transportation analysis, and social media analysis for urban events. Visions for future improvements in the perspective of ethics are pointed out.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/104165
Date13 July 2021
CreatorsFu, Kaiqun
ContributorsComputer Science, Lu, Chang-Tien, Tao, Xianding, Haghighat, Alireza, Chen, Ing-Ray, Ramakrishnan, Narendran
PublisherVirginia Tech
Source SetsVirginia Tech Theses and Dissertation
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeDissertation
FormatETD, application/pdf, application/pdf
RightsIn Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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