Day: December 27, 2010

Applying and Extending Sensor Web Enablement to a Telecare Sensor Network Architecture

/ Matt Artz

COMSWARE ’09 — Proceedings of the Fourth International ICST Conference on COMmunication System softWAre and middlewaRE, 2009

Gavin E. Churcher and Jeff Foley

“The standards being proposed by the Sensor Web Enablement Working Group offer methods for virtualizing sensor data into a common, self-describing format, utilizing access mechanisms based on HTTP. An external application is able to discover and access different sensor offerings, understand the data format used and even specify that it should be notified of certain conditions in the sensor data. This paper examines how an existing sensor network platform in the telecare domain can make use of these standards and in particular provides a case for a proposed extension to the publish/subscribe model, the Sensor Alert Service. Concepts taken from Complex Event Processing engines are explored in the context of this particular telecare platform, where it is shown that there are clear advantages to extending the standard.”

Spatial-temporal Understanding of Urban Scenes through Large Camera Network

/ Matt Artz

MPVA ’10: Proceedings of the 1st ACM International Workshop on Multimodal Pervasive Video Analysis, 2010

Jiejun Xu, Zefeng Ni, Carter De Leo, Thomas Kuo, and Bangalore Manjunath

“Outdoor surveillance cameras have become prevalent as part of the urban infrastructure, and provided a good data source for studying urban dynamics. In this work, we provide a spatial-temporal analysis of 8 weeks of video data collected from the large outdoor camera network at UCSB campus, which consists of 27 cameras. We first apply simple vision algorithm to extract the crowdedness information in the scene. Then we further explore the relationship between the traffic pattern observed from the cameras with activities in the nearby area using additional knowledge such as campus class schedule. Finally we investigate the potential of discovering aggregated human movement pattern by assuming a simple probabilistic model. Experiment has shown promising results using the proposed method.”

Residential Proximity to Freeways and Autism in the CHARGE Study

/ Matt Artz / 1 Comment

Environmental Health Perspectives, published online 16 December 2010

Heather E. Volk, Irva Hertz-Picciotto, Lora Delwiche, Fred Lurmann, and Rob McConnell

“Background: Little is known about environmental causes and contributing factors for autism. Basic science and epidemiological research suggest that oxidative stress and inflammation may play a role in disease development. Traffic-related air pollution, a common exposure with established effects on these pathways, contains substances found to have adverse prenatal effects.

“Objectives: To examine the association between autism and residence proximity, during pregnancy and near the time of delivery, to freeways and major roadways as a surrogate for air pollution exposure.

“Methods: Data were from 304 autism cases and 259 typically developing controls enrolled in the Childhood Autism Risks from Genetics and the Environment (CHARGE) Study. The mother’s address recorded on the birth certificate and trimester specific addresses derived from a residential history obtained by questionnaire were geo-coded and measures of distance to freeways and major roads were calculated using ArcGIS software. Logistic regression models compared residential proximity to freeways and major roads for autism cases and typically developing controls.

“Results: Adjusting for sociodemographic factors and maternal smoking, maternal residence at the time of delivery was more likely be near a freeway (≤309 meters) for cases, as compared to controls (odds ratio (OR), 1.86, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.04-3.45). Autism was also associated with residential proximity to a freeway during the third trimester (OR, 2.22, CI, 1.16-4.42). After adjustment for socio-economic and demographic characteristics, these associations were unchanged. Living near other major roads at birth was not associated with autism.

“Conclusions: Living near a freeway was associated with autism. Examination of associations with measured air pollutants is needed.”