1,050 research outputs found
The Role of Relocation Policies in Urban Segregation Dynamics
No full textThis study addresses a gap in the existing literature on the Schelling segregation model by conducting a comprehensive
qualitative assessment of various relocation policies. We introduce novel Schelling models driven by different relocation
policies and analyse their impact on the convergence time and final segregation levels. Our findings demonstrate that all
policies result in segregation levels within bounds established by policies where agents relocate to maximize their happiness.
Notably, a policy ensuring the minimum improvement in agent segregation significantly reduces the model’s convergence
time. These results underscore the potential influence of relocation policies, such as those employed by online recommenders
in real estate platforms, on societal segregation dynamics. The study provides valuable insights into potential strategies for
mitigating and decelerating segregation through tailored recommendations
Enhancing Crowd Flow Prediction in Various Spatial and Temporal Granularities
No full textThe diffusion of the Internet of Things allows nowadays to sense human mobility in great detail, fostering human mobility studies and their applications in various contexts, from traffic management to public security and computational epidemiology. A mobility task that is becoming prominent is crowd flow prediction, i.e., forecasting aggregated incoming and outgoing flows in the locations of a geographic region. Although several deep learning approaches have been proposed to solve this problem, their usage is limited to specific types of spatial tessellations and cannot provide sufficient explanations of their predictions. We propose CrowdNet, a solution to crowd flow prediction based on graph convolutional networks. Compared with state-of-the-art solutions, CrowdNet can be used with regions of irregular shapes and provide meaningful explanations of the predicted crowd flows. We conduct experiments on public data varying the spatio-temporal granularity of crowd flows to show the superiority of our model with respect to existing methods, and we investigate CrowdNet’s reliability to missing or noisy input data. Our model is a step forward in the design of reliable deep learning models to predict and explain human displacements in urban environments
Imparare la musica: un laboratorio del pensare. Una ricerca-azione di Emanuele Pappalardo
No full textLa recensione porta alla luce la metodologia euristica di insegnamento musicale del docente Emanuele Pappalardo, nel suo compimento e nei risultati raggiunti. 
Linguistic Factors Affecting Moraic Duration in Spontaneous Japanese
No full textJapanese is often referred to as a mora-timed language (Ladefoged 1975): the mora has been described as the psychological prosodic unit in the spoken language, and it is the metric unit of traditional poetry (Bloch 1950). However, it is clear that mo- rae are not strictly isochronous units (Beckman 1982). Thus, experimental studies have focused on detecting compensation effects that make average mora durations more equal through the modulation of the inherent duration of the segments involved (Han 1962; Port, Al-Ani, Maeda 1980; Homma 1981; Hoequist 1983a; 1983b; Warner, Arai 2001). Kawahara (2017) used the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese to verify whether the dura- tional compensation effect within a /CV/ mora occurs in natural speech, in addition to read speech in the lab. He observed a statistically significant compensation effect of /CV/ morae, in which vowel duration tends to vary in response to the duration of the preced- ing consonant. However, as the same author has pointed out, the compensation is not absolute because there are several linguistic factors that potentially affect segments’ duration profiles. This study will support the idea that moraic isochrony does not occur in spontaneous Japanese by presenting empirical data on how linguistic factors can considerably affect variation in the average duration of morae
A Deep Gravity model for mobility flows generation
No full textThe movements of individuals within and among cities influence critical aspects of our society, such as well-being, the spreading of epidemics, and the quality of the environment. Here, the authors use deep neural networks to discover non-linear relationships between geographical variables and mobility flows
L'accento tonale del giapponese percepito da discenti italofoni: un'indagine fonetico-percettiva
No full textThe aim of this paper is to examine how Italian learners of Japanese perceive lexical pitch accent under different experimental conditions. I will start by describing the articulatory and acoustic features of Japanese pitch accent, making a comparison with Italian stress accent. Japanese prosodic system will be also analysed from a typological point of view. After describing the accentual patterns of standard Japanese, I will present the results of a longitudinal perceptual experiment conducted with 48 Italian-speaking learners of Japanese. In this experiment I examined (1) the difficulty in perception of accent for the four accentual patterns, (2) the difficulty in perception of accent of words with unvoiced vowels, long vowels, moraic nasals and long consonants, (3) the difference in perception of accent of meaningless and meaningful words, (4) the relation between the perception of accent and the informant's proficiency level
Le varietà linguistiche delle isole Ryūkyū: lingue o dialetti?
No full textIn this paper, I will discuss the question of whether the varieties spoken in the Ryūkyū archipelago should be regarded as dialects or separate languages. Since the appearance of Tōjō's pioneering work on dialect division of Japanese in 1927, Japanese dialectologists have generally regarded "Ryukyuan" as a group of dialects. However, in the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger published in 2009, UNESCO recognizes, using as sole criterion mutual intelligibility, six Ryukyuan languages, of which two are severely endangered, Yaeyama and Yonaguni, and four are classified as definitely endangered, Amami, Kunigami, Okinawa and Miyako. If, on the one hand, the status of "language" can play a crucial role in language revitalization, on the other the six languages proposed by UNESCO fail to fully satisfy the conditions of sociolinguistics, under which they could be considered as separate languages
Generating Synthetic Mobility Networks with Generative Adversarial Networks
No full textThe increasingly crucial role of human displacements in complex societal
phenomena, such as traffic congestion, segregation, and the diffusion of
epidemics, is attracting the interest of scientists from several disciplines.
In this article, we address mobility network generation, i.e., generating a
city's entire mobility network, a weighted directed graph in which nodes are
geographic locations and weighted edges represent people's movements between
those locations, thus describing the entire mobility set flows within a city.
Our solution is MoGAN, a model based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)
to generate realistic mobility networks. We conduct extensive experiments on
public datasets of bike and taxi rides to show that MoGAN outperforms the
classical Gravity and Radiation models regarding the realism of the generated
networks. Our model can be used for data augmentation and performing
simulations and what-if analysis.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures. Supplementary 9 pages and 5 figure
Mobility constraints in segregation models
No full textSince the development of the original Schelling model of urban segregation,
several enhancements have been proposed, but none have considered the impact of
mobility constraints on model dynamics. Recent studies have shown that human
mobility follows specific patterns, such as a preference for short distances
and dense locations. This paper proposes a segregation model incorporating
mobility constraints to make agents select their location based on distance and
location relevance. Our findings indicate that the mobility-constrained model
produces lower segregation levels but takes longer to converge than the
original Schelling model. We identified a few persistently unhappy agents from
the minority group who cause this prolonged convergence time and lower
segregation level as they move around the grid centre. Our study presents a
more realistic representation of how agents move in urban areas and provides a
novel and insightful approach to analyzing the impact of mobility constraints
on segregation models. We highlight the significance of incorporating mobility
constraints when policymakers design interventions to address urban
segregation
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