Xuewen Chen

Ishan Jindal, Zhiwei Qin, Xuewen Chen et al.

In this paper, we develop a reinforcement learning (RL) based system to learn an effective policy for carpooling that maximizes transportation efficiency so that fewer cars are required to fulfill the given amount of trip demand. For this purpose, first, we develop a deep neural network model, called ST-NN (Spatio-Temporal Neural Network), to predict taxi trip time from the raw GPS trip data. Secondly, we develop a carpooling simulation environment for RL training, with the output of ST-NN and using the NYC taxi trip dataset. In order to maximize transportation efficiency and minimize traffic congestion, we choose the effective distance covered by the driver on a carpool trip as the reward. Therefore, the more effective distance a driver achieves over a trip (i.e. to satisfy more trip demand) the higher the efficiency and the less will be the traffic congestion. We compared the performance of RL learned policy to a fixed policy (which always accepts carpool) as a baseline and obtained promising results that are interpretable and demonstrate the advantage of our RL approach. We also compare the performance of ST-NN to that of state-of-the-art travel time estimation methods and observe that ST-NN significantly improves the prediction performance and is more robust to outliers.

Ishan Jindal, Tony, Qin et al.

In building intelligent transportation systems such as taxi or rideshare services, accurate prediction of travel time and distance is crucial for customer experience and resource management. Using the NYC taxi dataset, which contains taxi trips data collected from GPS-enabled taxis [23], this paper investigates the use of deep neural networks to jointly predict taxi trip time and distance. We propose a model, called ST-NN (Spatio-Temporal Neural Network), which first predicts the travel distance between an origin and a destination GPS coordinate, then combines this prediction with the time of day to predict the travel time. The beauty of ST-NN is that it uses only the raw trips data without requiring further feature engineering and provides a joint estimate of travel time and distance. We compare the performance of ST-NN to that of state-of-the-art travel time estimation methods, and we observe that the proposed approach generalizes better than state-of-the-art methods. We show that ST-NN approach significantly reduces the mean absolute error for both predicted travel time and distance, about 17% for travel time prediction. We also observe that the proposed approach is more robust to outliers present in the dataset by testing the performance of ST-NN on the datasets with and without outliers.

Tarik Alafif, Zeyad Hailat, Melih Aslan et al.

Face detection methods have relied on face datasets for training. However, existing face datasets tend to be in small scales for face learning in both constrained and unconstrained environments. In this paper, we first introduce our large-scale image datasets, Large-scale Labeled Face (LSLF) and noisy Large-scale Labeled Non-face (LSLNF). Our LSLF dataset consists of a large number of unconstrained multi-view and partially occluded faces. The faces have many variations in color and grayscale, image quality, image resolution, image illumination, image background, image illusion, human face, cartoon face, facial expression, light and severe partial facial occlusion, make up, gender, age, and race. Many of these faces are partially occluded with accessories such as tattoos, hats, glasses, sunglasses, hands, hair, beards, scarves, microphones, or other objects or persons. The LSLF dataset is currently the largest labeled face image dataset in the literature in terms of the number of labeled images and the number of individuals compared to other existing labeled face image datasets. Second, we introduce our CrowedFaces and CrowedNonFaces image datasets. The crowedFaces and CrowedNonFaces datasets include faces and non-faces images from crowed scenes. These datasets essentially aim for researchers to provide a large number of training examples with many variations for large scale face learning and face recognition tasks.