Recently, “smart” urban infrastructure has been suggested as a strategy to mitigate social and economic risks posed by extreme weather events and to improve the sustainability of urban centers. Smart infrastructure is enabled by real-time sensing, modeling, optimization, and actuation, which permit the infrastructure to reason about the world around it and to autonomously reconfigure in order t...

Traditional approaches such as Gaussian mixture model (GMM), Otsu’s and moment preserving (MP) methods are developed for segmentation of opaque objects. For semi-opaque objects like flame and smoke the result is cluttered, due to inappropriate threshold, especially if one dominates the other. Besides, rapidly changing environments like foggy and rainy scenes increase the difficulty in foregroun...

Climate change is a reality. A warming climate will have large effects on lakes of the Boreal Shield. Our ability to forecast these effects, however, is hampered by a very incomplete understanding of the actual interactions between weather and many aspects of lake ecosystems. Climate change will affect lakes in very complex ways. Changing weather conditions will have direct effects on thermal h...

In the paper a model to predict the concentrations of particulate matter PM10, PM2.5, SO2, NO, CO and O3 for a chosen number of hours forward is proposed. The method requires historical data for a large number of points in time, particularly weather forecast data, actual weather data and pollution data. The idea is that by matching forecast data with similar forecast data in the historical data...

A better understanding of how livestock respond to weather is essential to enable farming to adapt to a changing climate. Climate change is mainly expected to impact dairy cattle through heat stress and an increase in the frequency of extreme weather events. We investigated the effects of weather on milk yield and composition (fat and protein content) in an experimental dairy herd in Scotland o...

Similar to changing lanes in an automobile in a winter storm, with change enters risk. Everyone has most likely experienced that feeling of changing lanes in bad weather where you find yourself weighing the risk vs. the benefit that the new lane provides. The same principle can be found when considering making changes to control applications and automation configurations in an industrial plant....

In this paper, we consider the problem of modeling and predicting highway accidents in the presence of randomly changing winter driving conditions. Unlike most accident prediction models in the literature, which are typically formulated in a static (e.g. regression models) or discrete time (e.g. time-series models) setting, we propose a continuoustime stochastic model to describe the relation b...

Heat waves pose serious health risks, and are expected to become more frequent, longer lasting, and more intense in the future under a changing climate. Yet, people in the UK seem to feel positive when thinking about hot weather. According to research on the affect heuristic, any positive or negative emotions evoked by potentially risky experiences may be used as cues to inform concerns about r...

There are regions of the world more vulnerable to climate change and some of those regions are also sensitive to forest fire occurrences. The way climate change interacts with the forests of the world and consequently with forest fire activity is a point of debate among the scientific community. Several features dominate the forest fires of a given region and these can be described in terms of ...