scholarly journals Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform - supporting urban research with EO data processing, integrative data analysis and reporting

Author(s):  
Felix Bachofer ◽  
Thomas Esch ◽  
Jakub Balhar ◽  
Martin Boettcher ◽  
Enguerran Boissier ◽  
...  

<p>Urbanization is among the most relevant global trends that affects climate, environment, as well as health and socio-economic development of a majority of the global population. As such, it poses a major challenge for the current urban population and the well-being of the next generation. To understand how to take advantage of opportunities and properly mitigate to the negative impacts of this change, we need precise and up-to-date information of the urban areas. The Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform (UrbanTEP) is a collaborative system, which focuses on the processing of earth observation (EO) data and delivering multi-source information on trans-sectoral urban challenges.</p><p>The U-TEP is developed to provide end-to-end and ready-to-use solutions for a broad spectrum of users (service providers, experts and non-experts) to extract unique information/ indicators required for urban management and sustainability. Key components of the system are an open, web-based portal connected to distributed high-level computing infrastructures and providing key functionalities for</p><p>i) high-performance data access and processing,</p><p>ii) modular and generic state-of-the art pre-processing, analysis, and visualization,</p><p>iii) customized development and sharing of algorithms, products and services, and</p><p>iv) networking and communication.</p><p>The service and product portfolio provides access to the archives of Copernicus and Landsat missions, Datacube technology, DIAS processing environments, as well as premium products like the World Settlement Footprint (WSF). External service providers, as well as researchers can make use of on-demand processing of new data products and the possibility of developing and deploying new processors. The onboarding of service providers, developers and researchers is supported by the Network of Resources program of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the OCRE initiative of the European Commission.</p><p>In order to provide end-to-end solutions, the VISAT tool on UrbanTEP allows analyzing and visualizing project-related geospatial content and to develop storylines to enhance the transport of research output to customers and stakeholders effectively. Multiple visualizations (scopes) are already predefined. One available scope exemplary illustrates the exploitation of the WSF-Evolution dataset by analyzing the settlement and population development for South-East Asian countries from 1985 to 2015 in the context of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11.3.1 indicator. Other open scopes focus on urban green, functional urban areas, land-use and urban heat island modelling (e.g.).</p>

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 165-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Dudenhöffer ◽  
Christian Dormann

Abstract. The purpose of this study was to replicate the dimensions of the customer-related social stressors (CSS) concept across service jobs, to investigate their consequences for service providers’ well-being, and to examine emotional dissonance as mediator. Data of 20 studies comprising of different service jobs (N = 4,199) were integrated into a single data set and meta-analyzed. Confirmatory factor analyses and explorative principal component analysis confirmed four CSS scales: disproportionate expectations, verbal aggression, ambiguous expectations, disliked customers. These CSS scales were associated with burnout and job satisfaction. Most of the effects were partially mediated by emotional dissonance. Further analyses revealed that differences among jobs exist with regard to the factor solution. However, associations between CSS and outcomes are mainly invariant across service jobs.


Author(s):  
Sigit Arifwidodo ◽  
Orana Chandrasiri

Public Park is considered one of the essential settings for physical activity, especially in urban areas. Parks support physical activity through their accessibility, their provision to facilitate active pursuits; their capacity to provide opportunities to a wide range of users; and their semi-permanent nature. The paper explores the design intervention assessment of Benchakitti Park, which serves as the pilot project for active park and showcase during the past ISPAH 2016 conference. The objective of the paper is to understand the health and well-being benefits of an urban park in increasing PA levels of urban population and promoting a healthy and active lifestyle. Keywords: Public park; physical activity; urban landscape design; public health; SOPARC


2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-108
Author(s):  
A.F. Jităreanu ◽  
Elena Leonte ◽  
A. Chiran ◽  
Benedicta Drobotă

Abstract Advertising helps to establish a set of assumptions that the consumer will bring to all other aspects of their engagement with a given brand. Advertising provides tangible evidence of the financial credibility and competitive presence of an organization. Persuasion is becoming more important in advertising. In marketing, persuasive advertising acts to establish wants/motivations and beliefs/attitudes by helping to formulate a conception of the brand as being one which people like those in the target audience would or should prefer. Considering the changes in lifestyle and eating habits of a significant part of the population in urban areas in Romania, the paper aims to analyse how brands manage to differentiate themselves from competitors, to reposition themselves on the market and influence consumers, meeting their increasingly varied needs. Food brands on the Romanian market are trying, lately, to identify new methods of differentiation and new benefits for their buyers. Given that more and more consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about what they eat and the products’ health effects, brands struggle to highlight the fact that their products offer real benefits for the body. The advertisements have become more diversified and underline the positive effects, from the health and well - being point of view, that those foods offer (no additives and preservatives, use of natural ingredients, various vitamins and minerals or the fact that they are dietary). Advertising messages’ diversification is obvious on the Romanian market, in the context of an increasing concern of the population for the growing level of information of some major consumer segments.


Forests ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 813
Author(s):  
Hui Dang ◽  
Jing Li ◽  
Yumeng Zhang ◽  
Zixiang Zhou

Urban green spaces can provide many types of ecosystem services for residents. An imbalance in the pattern of green spaces leads to an inequality of the benefits of such spaces. Given the current situation of environmental problems and the basic geographical conditions of Xi’an City, this study evaluated and mapped four kinds of ecosystem services from the perspective of equity: biodiversity, carbon sequestration, air purification, and climate regulation. Regionalization with dynamically constrained agglomerative clustering and partitioning (REDCAP) was used to obtain the partition groups of ecosystem services. The results indicate that first, the complexity of the urban green space community is low, and the level of biodiversity needs to be improved. The dry deposition flux of particulate matter (PM2.5) decreases from north to south, and green spaces enhance the adsorption of PM2.5. Carbon sequestration in the south and east is higher than that in the north and west, respectively. The average surface temperature in green spaces is lower than that in other urban areas. Second, urban green space resources in the study area are unevenly distributed. Therefore, ecosystem services in different areas are inequitable. Finally, based on the regionalization of integrated ecosystem services, an ecosystem services cluster was developed. This included 913 grid spaces, 12 partitions, and 5 clusters, which can provide a reference for distinct levels of ecosystem services management. This can assist urban managers who can use these indicators of ecosystem service levels for planning and guiding the overall development pattern of green spaces. The benefits would be a maximization of the ecological functions of green spaces, an improvement of the sustainable development of the city, and an improvement of people’s well-being.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 193
Author(s):  
Mohamed Ben bezziane ◽  
Ahmed Korichi ◽  
Chaker Abdelaziz Kerrache ◽  
Mohamed el Amine Fekair

As a promising topic of research, Vehicular Cloud (VC) incorporates cloud computing and ad-hoc vehicular network (VANET). In VC, supplier vehicles provide their services to consumer vehicles in real-time. These services have a significant impact on the applications of internet access, storage and data. Due to the high-speed mobility of vehicles, users in consumer vehicles need a mechanism to discover services in their vicinity. Besides this, quality of service varies from one supplier vehicle to another; thus, consumer vehicles attempt to pick out the most appropriate services. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol named RSU-aided Cluster-based Vehicular Clouds protocol (RCVC), which constructs the VC using the Road Side Unit (RSU) directory and Cluster Head (CH) directory to make the resources of supplier vehicles more visible. While clusters of vehicles that move on the same road form a mobile cloud, the remaining vehicles form a different cloud on the road side unit. Furthermore, the consumption operation is achieved via the service selection method, which is managed by the CHs and RSUs based on a mathematical model to select the best services. Simulation results prove the effectiveness of our protocol in terms of service discovery and end-to-end delay, where we achieved service discovery and end-to-end delay of 3 × 10−3 s and 13 × 10−2 s, respectively. Moreover, we carried out an experimental comparison, revealing that the proposed method outperformed several states of the art protocols.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (15) ◽  
pp. 6736
Author(s):  
Ong Heo ◽  
Yeowon Yoon ◽  
Jinung Do

When underground space requires excavation in areas below the water table, the foundation system suffers from buoyancy, which leads to the uplifting of the superstructure. A deep foundation system can be used; however, in cases where a hard layer is encountered, high driving forces and corresponding noises cause civil complaints in urban areas. Micropiles can be an effective alternative option, due to their high performance despite a short installation depth. Pressurized grouting is used with a packer to induce higher interfacial properties between micropile and soil. In this study, the field performance of micropiles installed using gravitational grouting or pressure-grouted using either a geotextile packer or rubber packer was comparatively evaluated by tension and creep tests. Micropiles were installed using pressure grouting in weak and fractured zones. As results, the pressure-grouted micropiles showed more stable and stronger behaviors than ones installed using the gravitational grouting. Moreover, the pressure-grouted micropile installed using the rubber packer showed better performance than the one using the geotextile packer.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (16) ◽  
pp. 8789
Author(s):  
Giovanni Bianco ◽  
Barbara Bonvini ◽  
Stefano Bracco ◽  
Federico Delfino ◽  
Paola Laiolo ◽  
...  

As reported in the “Clean energy for all Europeans package” set by the EU, a sustainable transition from fossil fuels towards cleaner energy is necessary to improve the quality of life of citizens and the livability in cities. The exploitation of renewable sources, the improvement of energy performance in buildings and the need for cutting-edge national energy and climate plans represent important and urgent topics to be faced in order to implement the sustainability concept in urban areas. In addition, the spread of polygeneration microgrids and the recent development of energy communities enable a massive installation of renewable power plants, high-performance small-size cogeneration units, and electrical storage systems; moreover, properly designed local energy production systems make it possible to optimize the exploitation of green energy sources and reduce both energy supply costs and emissions. In the present paper, a set of key performance indicators is introduced in order to evaluate and compare different energy communities both from a technical and environmental point of view. The proposed methodology was used in order to assess and compare two sites characterized by the presence of sustainable energy infrastructures: the Savona Campus of the University of Genoa in Italy, where a polygeneration microgrid has been in operation since 2014 and new technologies will be installed in the near future, and the SPEED2030 District, an urban area near the Campus where renewable energy power plants (solar and wind), cogeneration units fed by hydrogen and storage systems are planned to be installed.


Author(s):  
Ace Dimitrievski ◽  
Sonja Filiposka ◽  
Francisco José Melero ◽  
Eftim Zdravevski ◽  
Petre Lameski ◽  
...  

Connected health is expected to introduce an improvement in providing healthcare and doctor-patient communication while at the same time reducing cost. Connected health would introduce an even more significant gap between healthcare quality for urban areas with physical proximity and better communication to providers and the portion of rural areas with numerous connectivity issues. We identify these challenges using user scenarios and propose LoRa based architecture for addressing these challenges. We focus on the energy management of battery-powered, affordable IoT devices for long-term operation, providing important information about the care receivers’ well-being. Using an external ultra-low-power timer, we extended the battery life in the order of tens of times, compared to relying on low power modes of the microcontroller.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 7555
Author(s):  
Raghu Raman ◽  
Ricardo Vinuesa ◽  
Prema Nedungadi

India is ranked fifth in the world in terms of COVID-19 publications accounting for 6.7% of the total. About 60% of the COVID-19 publications in the year 2020 are from United States, China, UK, Italy, and India. We present a bibliometric analysis of the publication trends and citation structure along with the identification of major research clusters. By performing network analysis of authors, citations, institutions, keywords, and countries, we explore semantic associations by applying visualization techniques. Our study shows lead taken by the United States, China, UK, Italy, India in COVID-19 research may be attributed to the high prevalence of COVID-19 cases in those countries witnessing the first outbreak and also due to having access to COVID-19 data, access to labs for experimental trials, immediate funding, and overall support from the govt. agencies. A large number of publications and citations from India are due to co-authored publications with countries like the United States, UK, China, and Saudi Arabia. Findings show health sciences have the highest number of publications and citations, while physical sciences and social sciences and humanities counts were low. A large proportion of publications fall into the open-access category. With India as the focus, by comparing three major pandemics—SARS, MERS, COVID-19—from a bibliometrics perspective, we observe much broader involvement of authors from multiple countries for COVID-19 studies when compared to SARS and MERS. Finally, by applying bibliometric indicators, we see an increasing number of sustainable development-related studies from the COVID-19 domain, particularly concerning the topic of good health and well-being. This study allows for a deeper understanding of how the scholarly community from a populous country like India pursued research in the midst of a major pandemic which resulted in the closure of scientific institutions for an extended time.


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