The economic production and the interactive rendering of complete reconstructions of populated urban environments are technically difficult tasks. Specialized modelling tools, which exploit knowledge of the types of object being modelled by working in the application domain, can be used to create appealing virtual reconstructions quickly. At the same time, the structural information from the mo...

Autonomous flight in confined or cluttered environments such as houses or urban canyons requires high manoeuvrability, fast mapping from sensors to actuators and very limited overall system weight. Although flying animals are well capable of solving this problem, roboticists have difficulties at reproducing such capabilities. This paper describes why and how we took inspiration from flying inse...

1669 Sleep and Urban Poverty—Simonelli et al INTRODUCTION The unprecedented urban growth in the face of increasing poverty and social inequity in developing countries is posing an immense challenge for governments at all levels. Urbanization of poverty is shown mainly by the proliferation and expansion of slums.1 Such places often contain houses built using plywood, wood boards, cardboard, corr...

This paper describes a measuring procedure for the determination of shielding factors for vehicles passing through areas that have been contaminated by activity released to the atmosphere from a reactor accident. In open areas the radiation field arises from an infinite plane source. In urban areas the radiation field consists of the contribution from fallout deposited on a road and on the buil...

Traffic monitoring in urban areas is a complex issue and recent Remote Sensing technologies can play an important role in planning and monitoring the urban environment.In this studya semi-automatic object-oriented workflow was designedto detect moving vehicles and their speed from single pass WorldView-2 multispectral data.The time lag in data recording between each spectral band causes a small...

Excessive unplanned urban growth leads to many vulnerabilities and impacts on urban environments to varying degrees. However, the majority of the extant literature focuses on the problems related to location and socioeconomic conditions, rather than vulnerability processes and related environmental degradation. This paper analyzes the scope of urban vulnerabilities for five rapidly urbanizing a...

With increasing urbanization vector-borne diseases are quickly developing in cities, and urban control strategies are needed. If streets are shown to be barriers to disease vectors, city blocks could be used as a convenient and relevant spatial unit of study and control. Unfortunately, existing spatial analysis tools do not allow for assessment of the impact of an urban grid on the presence of ...

In last decades the spreading of new buildings, road infrastructures and a scattered proliferation of houses in zones outside urban areas, produced countryside urbanization with no rules, consuming soils and impoverishing the landscape. Such a phenomenon generated a huge environmental impact, diseconomies and a decrease in life quality. Although urban growth is perceived as necessary for a sust...

The health and rights of populations living in informal or slum settlements are key development issues of the twenty-first century. As of 2007, the majority of the world's population lives in urban areas. More than one billion of these people, or one in three city-dwellers, live in inadequate housing with no or a few basic resources. In Bangladesh, urban slum settlements tend to be located in l...

BACKGROUND Malaria control in Africa is most tractable in urban settlements yet most research has focused on rural settings. Elimination of malaria transmission from urban areas may require larval control strategies that complement adult mosquito control using insecticide-treated nets or houses, particularly where vectors feed outdoors. METHODS AND FINDINGS Microbial larvicide (Bacillus thuri...