Sky View Factor footprints for urban climate modeling

Urban morphology is an important multidimensional variable to consider in climate modeling and observations, because it significantly drives the local and micro-scale climatic variability in cities. Urban form can be described through urban canopy parameters (UCPs) that resolve the spatial heterogeneity of cities by specifying the 3-dimensional geometry, arrangement, and materials of urban features. The sky view factor (SVF) is a dimension-reduced UCP capturing 3-dimensional form through horizon limitation fractions. SVF has become a popular metric to parameterize urban morphology, but current approaches are difficult to scale up to global coverage. This study introduces a Big-Data approach to calculate SVFs for urban areas from Google Street View (GSV). 90-degree field-of-view GSV photos are retrieved and converted into hemispherical views through equiangular projection. The fisheyes are segmented into sky and non-sky pixels using image processing, and the SVF is calculated using an annulus method. Results are compared to SVFs retrieved from GSV images segmented using deep learning. SVF footprints are presented for urban areas around the world tallying 15,938,172 GSV locations. Two use cases are introduced: (1) an evaluation of a Google Earth Engine classified Local Climate Zone map for Singapore; (2) hourly sun duration maps for New York and San Francisco

Topology-Based Characterization and Visual Analysis of Feature Evolution in Large-Scale Simulations

This manuscript presents a topology-based analysis and visualization framework that enables the effective exploration of feature evolution in large-scale simulations. Such simulations pose additional challenges to the already complex task of feature tracking and visualization, since the vast number of features and the size of the simulation data make it infeasible to naively identify, track, analyze, render, store, and interact with data. The presented methodology addresses these issues via three core contributions. First, the manuscript defines a novel topological abstraction, called the Nested Tracking Graph (NTG), that records the temporal evolution of features that exhibit a nesting hierarchy, such as superlevel set components for multiple levels, or filtered features across multiple thresholds. In contrast to common tracking graphs that are only capable of describing feature evolution at one hierarchy level, NTGs effectively summarize their evolution across all hierarchy levels in one compact visualization. The second core contribution is a view-approximation oriented image database generation approach (VOIDGA) that stores, at simulation runtime, a reduced set of feature images. Instead of storing the features themselves---which is often infeasable due to bandwidth constraints---the images of these databases can be used to approximate the depicted features from any view angle within an acceptable visual error, which requires far less disk space and only introduces a neglectable overhead. The final core contribution combines these approaches into a methodology that stores in situ the least amount of information necessary to support flexible post hoc analysis utilizing NTGs and view approximation techniques

From Honest Indignation to Aged Ignorance: The Creation and Subversion of Law through Printing in the Works of William Blake

The thesis explains how William Blake saw the printed word as the main proponent of the oppressive reign of state religion. In Blake\u27s mythology, printing is an integral part of the creation and fall of mankind. I argue that while Blake saw the printed word as something that will spread aged ignorance he also knew that it was what can free mankind from it. I will support my argument by analyzing the use of printing in The Book of Urizen, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Europe: A Prophecy. I will also examine the deluge of printed material that was surging through London in the 1790s, while Blake was writing his prophecies, which caused subversion of the English church and government. I end my argument by showing how Blake used his own method of printing to make The Book of Urizen a book with no definite form, the opposite of the solid laws of God. Blake uses printing, both his own method and the knowledge he gains from the availability of new works, in order to subvert a system that was created by printing. | 42 page

Interpolation of Scientific Image Databases

This paper explores how recent convolutional neural network (CNN)-based techniques can be used to interpolate images inside scientific image databases. These databases are frequently used for the interactive visualization of large-scale simulations, where images correspond to samples of the parameter space (e.g., timesteps, isovalues, thresholds, etc.) and the visualization space (e.g., camera locations, clipping planes, etc.). These databases can be browsed post hoc along the sampling axis to emulate real-time interaction with large-scale datasets. However, the resulting databases are limited to their contained images, i.e., the sampling points. In this paper, we explore how efficiently and accurately CNN-based techniques can derive new images by interpolating database elements. We demonstrate on several real-world examples that the size of databases can be further reduced by dropping samples that can be interpolated post hoc with an acceptable error, which we measure qualitatively and quantitatively

Probabilistic Gradient-Based Extrema Tracking

Feature tracking is a common task in visualization applications, where methods based on topological data analysis (TDA) have successfully been applied in the past for feature definition as well as tracking. In this work, we focus on tracking extrema of temporal scalar fields. A family of TDA approaches address this task by establishing one-to-one correspondences between extrema based on discrete gradient vector fields. More specifically, two extrema of subsequent time steps are matched if they fall into their respective ascending and descending manifolds. However, due to this one-to-one assignment, these approaches are prone to fail where, e.g., extrema are located in regions with low gradient magnitude, or are located close to boundaries of the manifolds. Therefore, we propose a probabilistic matching that captures a larger set of possible correspondences via neighborhood sampling, or by computing the overlap of the manifolds. We illustrate the usefulness of the approach with two application cases

Sky View Factors from Synthetic Fisheye Photos for Thermal Comfort Routing—A Case Study in Phoenix, Arizona

The Sky View Factor (SVF) is a dimension-reduced representation of urban form and one of the major variables in radiation models that estimate outdoor thermal comfort. Common ways of retrieving SVFs in urban environments include capturing fisheye photographs or creating a digital 3D city or elevation model of the environment. Such techniques have previously been limited due to a lack of imagery or lack of full scale detailed models of urban areas. We developed a web based tool that automatically generates synthetic hemispherical fisheye views from Google Earth at arbitrary spatial resolution and calculates the corresponding SVFs through equiangular projection. SVF results were validated using Google Maps Street View and compared to results from other SVF calculation tools. We generated 5-meter resolution SVF maps for two neighborhoods in Phoenix, Arizona to illustrate fine-scale variations of intra-urban horizon limitations due to urban form and vegetation. To demonstrate the utility of our synthetic fisheye approach for heat stress applications, we automated a radiation model to generate outdoor thermal comfort maps for Arizona State University’s Tempe campus for a hot summer day using synthetic fisheye photos and on-site meteorological data. Model output was tested against mobile transect measurements of the six-directional radiant flux density. Based on the thermal comfort maps, we implemented a pedestrian routing algorithm that is optimized for distance and thermal comfort preferences. Our synthetic fisheye approach can help planners assess urban design and tree planting strategies to maximize thermal comfort outcomes and can support heat hazard mitigation in urban areas

Parallel Computation of Piecewise Linear Morse-Smale Segmentations

This paper presents a well-scaling parallel algorithm for the computation of Morse-Smale (MS) segmentations, including the region separators and region boundaries. The segmentation of the domain into ascending and descending manifolds, solely defined on the vertices, improves the computational time using path compression and fully segments the border region. Region boundaries and region separators are generated using a multi-label marching tetrahedra algorithm. This enables a fast and simple solution to find optimal parameter settings in preliminary exploration steps by generating an MS complex preview. It also poses a rapid option to generate a fast visual representation of the region geometries for immediate utilization. Two experiments demonstrate the performance of our approach with speedups of over an order of magnitude in comparison to two publicly available implementations. The example section shows the similarity to the MS complex, the useability of the approach, and the benefits of this method with respect to the presented datasets. We provide our implementation with the paper.Comment: Journal: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics / Submitted: 22-Jun-2022 / Accepted: 13-Mar-202

SBFT Tool Competition 2024 -- Python Test Case Generation Track

Test case generation (TCG) for Python poses distinctive challenges due to the language's dynamic nature and the absence of strict type information. Previous research has successfully explored automated unit TCG for Python, with solutions outperforming random test generation methods. Nevertheless, fundamental issues persist, hindering the practical adoption of existing test case generators. To address these challenges, we report on the organization, challenges, and results of the first edition of the Python Testing Competition. Four tools, namely UTBotPython, Klara, Hypothesis Ghostwriter, and Pynguin were executed on a benchmark set consisting of 35 Python source files sampled from 7 open-source Python projects for a time budget of 400 seconds. We considered one configuration of each tool for each test subject and evaluated the tools' effectiveness in terms of code and mutation coverage. This paper describes our methodology, the analysis of the results together with the competing tools, and the challenges faced while running the competition experiments.Comment: 4 pages, to appear in the Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Search-Based and Fuzz Testing (SBFT@ICSE 2024