Related papers: A Canine Census to Influence Public Policy
Obesity is a complex disease and its prevalence depends on multiple factors related to the local socioeconomic, cultural and urban context of individuals. Many obesity prevention strategies and policies, however, are horizontal measures…
This paper examines civic addressing as a problem of participatory data governance. Drawing on a project developed through the U.S. Census Bureau's The Opportunity Project with engagement from FEMA, we describe the use of actionable…
Studying animal movement and distribution is of critical importance to addressing environmental challenges including invasive species, infectious diseases, climate and land-use change. Motion sensitive camera traps offer a visual sensor to…
The collection of speech data carried out in Sociolinguistics has the potential to enhance large language models due to its quality and representativeness. In this paper, we examine the ethical considerations associated with the gathering…
Being able to assess dog personality can be used to, for example, match shelter dogs with future owners, and personalize dog activities. Such an assessment typically relies on experts or psychological scales administered to dog owners, both…
Obesity is currently affecting very large portions of the global population. Effective prevention and treatment starts at the early age and requires objective knowledge of population-level behavior on the region/neighborhood scale. To this…
The number of people who decide to share their photographs publicly increases every day, consequently making available new almost real-time insights of human behavior while traveling. Rather than having this statistic once a month or…
Urbanization promotes economy, mobility, access and availability of resources, but on the other hand, generates higher levels of pollution, violence, crime, and mental distress. The health consequences of the agglomeration of people living…
Intensive development of urban systems creates a number of challenges for urban planners and policy makers in order to maintain sustainable growth. Running efficient urban policies requires meaningful urban metrics, which could quantify…
The use of video surveillance in public spaces -- both by government agencies and by private citizens -- has attracted considerable attention in recent years, particularly in light of rapid advances in face-recognition technology. But it…
Dengue is a major threat to public health in Brazil, the world's sixth biggest country by population, with over 1.5 million cases recorded in 2019 alone. Official data on dengue case counts is delivered incrementally and, for many reasons,…
Free-ranging dogs (Canis familiaris) thrive in diverse landscapes, including those heavily modified by humans. This study investigated the influence of resource availability on their spatial ecology across 52 rural and 41 urban sites,…
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of society, not only bringing health hazards, but also posing challenges to public order, governments and mental health. Moreover, it is the first one in history in which people from around the…
Crowd-sourcing is an increasingly popular tool for image analysis in animal ecology. Computer vision methods that can utilize crowd-sourced annotations can help scale up analysis further. In this work we study the potential to do so on the…
The American Community Survey (ACS) is the bedrock underpinning any analysis of the US population, urban areas included. The Census Bureau delivers the ACS data in multiple formats, yet in each the raw data is difficult to export in bulk…
Attempts to control the epidemic spread of COVID19 in the different countries often involve imposing restrictions to the mobility of citizens. Recent examples demonstrate that the effectiveness of these policies strongly depends on the…
Nowadays, it is possible to record the activity of hundreds of cells at the same time in behaving animals. However, these data are often treated and analyzed as if they consisted of many independently recorded neurons. How can neuronal…
Scientific studies investigating laws and regularities of human behavior are nowadays increasingly relying on the wealth of widely available digital information produced by human social activity. In this paper we leverage big data created…
Quantifying the population density of an urban area is a fraught issue. Measures of density are often defined differently from place to place or applied inconsistently, and arguments abound over just how much of the land surrounding a city…
Many animals emit vocal sounds which, independently from the sounds' function, embed some individually-distinctive signature. Thus the automatic recognition of individuals by sound is a potentially powerful tool for zoology and ecology…