Maryam Hosseini

Maryam Hosseini, Mikey Saugstad, Fabio Miranda et al. · mit, uw

There is a lack of data on the location, condition, and accessibility of sidewalks across the world, which not only impacts where and how people travel but also fundamentally limits interactive mapping tools and urban analytics. In this paper, we describe initial work in semi-automatically building a sidewalk network topology from satellite imagery using hierarchical multi-scale attention models, inferring surface materials from street-level images using active learning-based semantic segmentation, and assessing sidewalk condition and accessibility features using Crowd+AI. We close with a call to create a database of labeled satellite and streetscape scenes for sidewalks and sidewalk accessibility issues along with standardized benchmarks.

Joao Rulff, Fabio Miranda, Maryam Hosseini et al. · mit

Noise is one of the primary quality-of-life issues in urban environments. In addition to annoyance, noise negatively impacts public health and educational performance. While low-cost sensors can be deployed to monitor ambient noise levels at high temporal resolutions, the amount of data they produce and the complexity of these data pose significant analytical challenges. One way to address these challenges is through machine listening techniques, which are used to extract features in attempts to classify the source of noise and understand temporal patterns of a city's noise situation. However, the overwhelming number of noise sources in the urban environment and the scarcity of labeled data makes it nearly impossible to create classification models with large enough vocabularies that capture the true dynamism of urban soundscapes In this paper, we first identify a set of requirements in the yet unexplored domain of urban soundscape exploration. To satisfy the requirements and tackle the identified challenges, we propose Urban Rhapsody, a framework that combines state-of-the-art audio representation, machine learning, and visual analytics to allow users to interactively create classification models, understand noise patterns of a city, and quickly retrieve and label audio excerpts in order to create a large high-precision annotated database of urban sound recordings. We demonstrate the tool's utility through case studies performed by domain experts using data generated over the five-year deployment of a one-of-a-kind sensor network in New York City.

R. J. P. Damaceno, L. Ferreira, F. Miranda et al. · mit

This paper introduces SideSeeing, a novel initiative that provides tools and datasets for assessing the built environment. We present a framework for street-level data acquisition, loading, and analysis. Using the framework, we collected a novel dataset that integrates synchronized video footaged captured from chest-mounted mobile devices with sensor data (accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, and GPS). Each data sample represents a path traversed by a user filming sidewalks near hospitals in Brazil and the USA. The dataset encompasses three hours of content covering 12 kilometers around nine hospitals, and includes 325,000 video frames with corresponding sensor data. Additionally, we present a novel 68-element taxonomy specifically created for sidewalk scene identification. SideSeeing is a step towards a suite of tools that urban experts can use to perform in-depth sidewalk accessibility evaluations. SideSeeing data and tools are publicly available at https://sites.usp.br/sideseeing/.

Maryam Hosseini, Marco Cipriano, Sedigheh Eslami et al.

Existing Open Vocabulary Detection (OVD) models exhibit a number of challenges. They often struggle with semantic consistency across diverse inputs, and are often sensitive to slight variations in input phrasing, leading to inconsistent performance. The calibration of their predictive confidence, especially in complex multi-label scenarios, remains suboptimal, frequently resulting in overconfident predictions that do not accurately reflect their context understanding. To understand these limitations, multi-label detection benchmarks are needed. A particularly challenging domain for such benchmarking is social activities. Due to the lack of multi-label benchmarks for social interactions, in this work we present ELSA: Evaluating Localization of Social Activities. ELSA draws on theoretical frameworks in urban sociology and design and uses in-the-wild street-level imagery, where the size of groups and the types of activities vary significantly. ELSA includes more than 900 manually annotated images with more than 4,300 multi-labeled bounding boxes for individual and group activities. We introduce a novel confidence score computation method NLSE and a novel Dynamic Box Aggregation (DBA) algorithm to assess semantic consistency in overlapping predictions. We report our results on the widely-used SOTA models Grounding DINO, Detic, OWL, and MDETR. Our evaluation protocol considers semantic stability and localization accuracy and further exposes the limitations of existing approaches.