Engineering topics

Sims, Kelly

Publications and source records attributed to Sims, Kelly.

6 records

DOE OSTI2023

TOWARDS RAPID RESPONSE UPDATES OF POPULATIONS AT RISK

Understanding population at risks has been a focus of the LandScan program through its development of population estimates. With advancements in computer vision, deep learning technologies and access to High Performance Computing (HPC) and high resolution imagery, population estimates are now modeled at the building level. However, when those patterns are disrupted, rapid updates to population distribution estimates are needed to support humanitarian aid and response. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) recently adapted an existing deep learning building footprint extraction model in development of a scalable approach to Building Damage Assessments (BDA). This new opportunity opens the possibility of automating BDA to support rapid population distribution estimate updates for geographic areas involved in geopolitical conflicts or natural events for humanitarian aid and response or where to focus recovery efforts. In addition, incorporate social surveys to further model human behavior under conflict or other scenarios that disrupt normal patterns of life.

Urban, Marie↗

DOE OSTI2021

Accelerated Assessment of Critical Infrastructure in Aiding Recovery Efforts During Natural and Human-made Disaster

Relief and recovery from disasters (both natural and human-made) require a coordinated approach across several federal and state government agencies. In order to achieve optimal resource allocation and deployment of first responders, accurate and timely assessment of the impact and extent of destruction are the cornerstones to any recovery effort. Ideally, this knowledge should be gathered and shared within the first 0-24 hours (termed as "Acute Phase" by the U.S. CDC guideline) for informed decision-making. But achieving this poses significant challenges for the data collection and data harmonization processes, particularly when voluminous data are being generated from diverse and distributed sources during the disaster responses. To this end, this work developed a scalable and efficient workflow to dynamically collect and harmonize crowd-sourced geographic multi-modal data, and then assess critical infrastructure (CI) damaged during disaster events. We demonstrate the application of our framework with two real-world experiences in addressing post-disaster recovery efforts - for the Bahamas (Natural - due to Hurricane Dorian, 2019) and Beirut (Human-made - due to explosion caused by the ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse, 2020). We have illustrated that a coordinated effort is needed for planning as well as for execution to achieve informed decision making.

Thakur, Gautam Malviya↗

DOE OSTI2019

Modeling Building Use and Population Distribution Opportunity Using Open Geosocial Data in Urban Areas

Knowing where people are and knowing how the land in urban areas is being used is critical for assessing human mobility patterns, monitoring population health, planning for transportation services, and responding to natural disasters and emergency situations. While geophysical phenomena like land cover are more easily observed through remote sensing, social phenomena like how a city block or building is being used by the population is generally unobservable through standard remote sensing practices. Current methods and land use data by their nature are also difficult to scale to national or global levels. While land use data are often available in large cities, there are abundant data gaps globally. Furthermore, land use data can often appear relatively coarse in its spatial and semantic resolution (i.e. 1km grid cells rather than building level, and "commercial" rather than "coffee shop"). In particular, there is a need to harvest scalable data and develop methods to create global land use maps. To this end, in this work we combine building footprints and Points of Interest (POI) to estimate land use at the building level, including its mixed-use intensity. Next, we propose a method for defining semantic temporal zones referring to Morning, Day, Evening, and Night times unique to a region, based on the cumulative hourly change in the POIs' hours of operation. We then use these POIs' hours of operation to estimate non-residential population distribution opportunity and land use change over a 24-hour period. We validate our results through manual checks of randomly sampled individual buildings using multiple sources. Finally, we discuss the impact of our results on identifying population distribution opportunity and the reliability of estimating building use.

Sparks, Kevin↗

DOE OSTI2018

Dynamically-Spaced Geo-Grid Segmentation for Weighted Point Sampling on a Polygon Map Layer

Geo-grid algorithms divide a large polygon area into several smaller polygons, which are important for studying or executing a set of operations on underlying topological features of a map. The current geo-grid algorithms divide a large polygon in to a set of smaller but equal size polygons only (e.g. is ArcMaps Fishnet). The time to create a geo-grid is typically proportional to number of smaller polygons created. This raises two problems - (i) They cannot skip unwanted areas (such as water bodies, given about 71% percent of the Earth's surface is water-covered); (ii) They are incognizant to any underlying feature set that requires more deliberation. In this work, we propose a novel dynamically spaced geo-grid segmentation algorithm that overcomes these challenges and provides a computationally optimal output for borderline cases of an uneven polygon. Our method uses an underlying topological feature of population distributions, from the LandScan Global 2016 dataset, for creating grids as a function of these weighted features. We benchmark our results against available algorithms and found our approach improves geo-grid creation. Later on, we demonstrate the proposed approach is more effective in harvesting Points of Interest data from a crowd-sourced platform.

Sims, Kelly↗

DOE OSTI2018

Utilizing Geo-located Sensors and Social Media for Studying Population Dynamics and Land Classification

The ability to understand where, when, and why humans move across space and time has always been essential to research areas such as urban planning, transportation, population dynamics, and emergency preparedness and response. The increasing sources of activity data is generating novel opportunities to understand human dynamics that previously was not possible; Geo-located user generated content from mobile devices and sensors allow a level of spatial and temporal granularity that could possibly answer the reasons for human movement at a high-resolution. This work discusses a broad array of research agenda in human dynamics and land use by proposing an explicit model that assists in delineating and articulating the opportunities, challenges, and limitations of using new forms of unauthoritated data, such as social media in main-stream GIS research. We study mobile phone call volume and GPS locations to characterize human activity patterns and provide inference on land use. Later, we demonstrate the ability of geo-located social media posts to provide insight on population density estimates for special events and Points of Interest detection. The chapter underpins the need to utilize new forms of data collection mechanism as well as their use to augment our understanding of human dynamics research and future application of geographical information systems.

Thakur, Gautam Malviya↗

DOE OSTI2015

PlanetSense: A Real-time Streaming and Spatio-temporal Analytics Platform for Gathering Geo-spatial Intelligence from Open Source Data

Geospatial intelligence has traditionally relied on the use of archived and unvarying data for planning and exploration purposes. In consequence, the tools and methods that are architected to provide insight and generate projections only rely on such datasets. Albeit, if this approach has proven effective in several cases, such as land use identification and route mapping, it has severely restricted the ability of researchers to inculcate current information in their work. This approach is inadequate in scenarios requiring real-time information to act and to adjust in ever changing dynamic environments, such as evacuation and rescue missions. In this work, we propose PlanetSense, a platform for geospatial intelligence that is built to harness the existing power of archived data and add to that, the dynamics of real-time streams, seamlessly integrated with sophisticated data mining algorithms and analytics tools for generating operational intelligence on the fly. The platform has four main components – i) GeoData Cloud – a data architecture for storing and managing disparate datasets; ii) Mechanism to harvest real-time streaming data; iii) Data analytics framework; iv) Presentation and visualization through web interface and RESTful services. Using two case studies, we underpin the necessity of our platform in modeling ambient population and building occupancy at scale.

big data architecture↗