Related papers: Sorting Out New York City's Trash Problem
Ride-sharing is a modern urban-mobility paradigm with tremendous potential in reducing congestion and pollution. Demand-aware design is a promising avenue for addressing a critical challenge in ride-sharing systems, namely joint…
The recent promotion of sustainable urban planning combined with a growing need for public interventions to improve well-being and health have led to an increased collective interest for green spaces in and around cities. In particular,…
As service robots become more and more capable of performing useful tasks for us, there is a growing need to teach robots how we expect them to carry out these tasks. However, different users typically have their own preferences, for…
This paper studies how household heterogeneity affects the level and cyclical behavior of the optimal carbon tax in a real economy. We demonstrate that an equity-efficiency trade-off arises due to income inequality and heterogeneity in the…
Modern cities are growing ecosystems that face new challenges due to the increasing population demands. One of the many problems they face nowadays is waste management, which has become a pressing issue requiring new solutions. Swarm…
In a carsharing system, a fleet of cars is distributed at stations in an urban area, customers can take and return cars at any time and station. For operating such a system in a satisfactory way, the stations have to keep a good ratio…
Various forms of sorting problems have been studied over the years. Recently, two kinds of sorting puzzle apps are popularized. In these puzzles, we are given a set of bins filled with colored units, balls or water, and some empty bins.…
The waste of electrical and electronic equipment has been increased due to the fast evolution of technology products and competition of many IT sectors. Every year millions of tons of electronic waste are thrown into the environment which…
Greenhouse gas emissions from the residential sector represent a significant fraction of global emissions. Governments and utilities have designed incentives to stimulate the adoption of decarbonization technologies such as rooftop PV and…
Rate-distortion theory-based outlier detection builds upon the rationale that a good data compression will encode outliers with unique symbols. Based on this rationale, we propose Cluster Purging, which is an extension of clustering-based…
With trends of urbanisation on the rise, providing adequate housing to individuals remains a complex issue to be addressed. Often, the slow output of relevant housing policies, coupled with quickly increasing housing costs, leaves…
Air pollution is a pernicious but increasingly rampant health problem in human populations across the globe. Varying duration of exposure to airborne pollutants can result in a plethora of health conditions, ranging from short-term…
Using a bicycle for commuting is still uncommon in US cities, although it brings many benefits to both the cyclists and to society as a whole. Cycling has the potential to reduce traffic congestion and emissions, increase mobility, and…
Standard economic theory, starting with Adam Smith's invisible hand, holds that those who trade for their own selfish motives of maximizing their private preferences may contribute more to the public wealth than those who claim altruistic…
Transportation systems can be conceptualized as an instrument of spreading people and resources over the territory, playing an important role in developing sustainable cities. The current rationale of transport provision is based on…
Over the past few decades, efforts of road traffic management and practice have predominantly focused on maximizing system efficiency and mitigating congestion from a system perspective. This efficiency-driven approach implies the equal…
In the commons, communities whose growth depends on public goods, individuals often rely on surprisingly simple strategies, or heuristics, to decide whether to contribute to the common good (at risk of exploitation by free-riders). Although…
Designing a cost-effective sensor placement plan for sewage surveillance is a crucial task because it allows cost-effective early pandemic outbreak detection as supplementation for individual testing. However, this problem is…
Urban air quality is a major concern today. Concentrations of pollutants, such as nitrogen dioxide, must be monitored to ensure that they do not exceed hazardous thresholds. For this reason, scarse reference stations, which are generally…
We study the problem of allocating scarce societal resources of different types (e.g., permanent housing, deceased donor kidneys for transplantation, ventilators) to heterogeneous allocatees on a waitlist (e.g., people experiencing…