Public Health

The urban spatial structure represents the distribution of public and private spaces in cities and how people move within them. Although it usually evolves slowly, it can change quickly during large-scale emergency events, as well as due to urban renewal in rapidly developing countries. Here we present an approach to delineate such urban dynamics in quasi-real time through a human mobility metric, the mobility centrality index ΔKS. As a case study, we tracked the urban dynamics of eleven Spanish cities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results revealed that their structures became more...

Despite the historically documented regularity in human mobility patterns, the relaxation of spatial and temporal constraints, brought by the widespread adoption of telecommuting and e-commerce during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as a growing desire for flexible work arrangements in a post-pandemic work, indicates a potential reshaping of these patterns. In this paper, we investigate the multifaceted impacts of relaxed spatio-temporal constraints on human mobility, using well-established metrics from the travel behavior literature. Further, we introduce a novel metric for schedule...

Air pollution, specifically PM2.5, has become a significant global concern owing to its detrimental impacts on public health. Even so, the high-resolution monitoring of air pollution is still a challenge on a global scale. To cope with this, machine learning (ML) techniques have been utilized to infer the concentration of air pollutants at a fine scale. In this study, we propose DeepAir, a learning framework for estimating PM2.5 concentrations at a fine scale with sparsely distributed observations. DeepAir integrates a pre-trained convolutional neural network with the LightGBM method. This...

Increasing polarization and division are the greatest challenges to the U.S. today, because they prevent cooperation in decision making about growing problems of major consequence. The related long swing in rising individualism is assessed for how it undermines common purpose. We survey the ideological divide and how it intersects with preferred urban development patterns, negotiation styles (compromise or hard line), and diverse views on mitigations for stemming the COVID-19 pandemic.