Day: April 8, 2011

Designing Interactive Graphics for Validating and Interpreting Storm Track Model Outputs

/ Matt Artz

GeoViz: Linking Geovisualization with Spatial Analysis and Modeling, 10-11 March 2011, Hamburg, Germany

Aidan Slingsby, Jane Strachan, Jason Dykes, Jo Wood and Pier-Luigi Vidale

“We report on some initial work in which we designed interactive graphics to help climate scientists identify and extract good examples of simulated storm-tracks from a large dataset to help disseminate information to various audiences. A side-effect of this work was that the exploratory potential offered by the interactive graphics helped our climate scientist coauthors validate and interpret their data in a way that was not previously possible for them. We are extending this work to provide support for a wider range of validation and interpretative tasks, with a focus on answering questions of relevance to the insurance industry. We describe our collaborative approach, that draws on ideas from ’patchwork prototyping’ [2, 5] in which a rapid iterative process of design, implementation and testing, is used to help provide the functionality to support a set of ‘user stories’.”

Pattern Recognition in Pedestrian Movement Trajectories

/ Matt Artz

GeoViz: Linking Geovisualization with Spatial Analysis and Modeling, 10-11 March 2011, Hamburg, Germany

Colin Kuntzsch and Monika Sester

“Interpretation of pedestrian behavior in public, camera-supervised areas (e.g., train stations, sports stadiums) has become a popular research topic in the last years (see [1]). Today’s camera-based surveillance systems are often live monitored and analyzed by trained security staff members responsible for visually detecting restricted or security critical behavior of individuals or groups. Increasing security needs result in an increase of the number of cameras used for surveillance of public areas, both total as well as per responsible security staff member. Extrapolating this trend of providing a single security staff member with a continuously increasing amount of parallel video data leads to a point where the cognitive load needed to process all data exceeds human capabilities resulting in a lower overall-quality of visual inspection resulting in  lower detection rate of security critical behavior.”

The Influence of Role Models on Immigrant Self-Employment: A Spatial Analysis for Switzerland

/ Matt Artz

Quaderni – Working Paper DSE No. 745, 2010

Giuliano Guerra and Roberto Patuelli

“Theoretical and empirical research suggests a connection between the presence of role models and the emergence of entrepreneurs. Existing entrepreneurs may act as role models for self-employment candidates by providing successful examples. By explicitly considering the self-employment rates of the natives, which may influence locally the decisions of immigrants towards entrepreneurship, we develop a simple model that explains immigrant self-employment rates for a sample of 2,490 Swiss municipalities. In addition, we accommodate for the presence of spatial spillovers in the distribution of rates, and test a spatial autoregressive model which takes into account the average self-employment rates of immigrants living in nearby municipalities. Our evidence shows a significant (positive) effect of such spatial network effects, which are characterized by a quick distance decay, suggesting spatial spillovers at the household and social network level. Additionally, we show that local conditions and immigrant pool characteristics differ, with respect to self-employment choices, when examining separately urban and rural contexts.”