For a long time as a result of accommodating car traffic, planning ideologies in the past put a low priority on public space, pedestrianism and the role of city space as a meeting place for urban dwellers. In addition, according to authors such as Jan Gehl, market forces and changing architectural perceptions began to shift the focus of planning practice from the integration of public space in ...

Nowadays is extremely important to monitor and analyze the urban environment and in particular the urban viability. The increasing availability of computational power, together with more efficient simulation algorithm allows real time modeling of even complex systems such as urban traffic. Information and simulation are at the basis of the decisional process for policy makers at global and loca...

The paper analyzes the ongoing urban transformation and delineates an underlying rationale which enables the comprehension of the current dual character of the Arab city with particular reference to the case of Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. The re-reading of city form is mainly based on the critical interpretation of the mechanisms of urban morphology in relation to both global economic imp...

Urban configurations in developing countries have become the subject of urban design, with good design promoting economic benefits. Yet, the common practice of urban design lacks a principled scientific foundation. In this respect, cognitive neuroscience could provide a unique perspective and potential foundational insights regarding how embodied cognition links configuration with movement. Alt...

OBJECTIVE We examined the connections (1) between the design of the built environment and walking, (2) between the design of the built environment and obesity, and (3) between walking and obesity and income in urban settings in China. METHODS Six neighborhoods with different built environment characteristics, located in the Chinese cities of Shanghai and Hangzhou, were studied. Data on walkin...

The increasing popularity of wireless technologies and mobile computing devices has enabled new application areas and research. One of these new areas is pervasive systems in urban environments, because urban environments are characterized by high concentration of these technologies and devices. In this paper we will show the process of pervasive system design in urban environments, using as us...

Predicting where humans look in images has gained significant popularity in recent years. In this work, we present a novel method for learning top-down visual saliency, which is well-suited to locate objects of interest in complex scenes. During training, we jointly learn a superpixel based class-specific dictionary and a Conditional Random Field (CRF). While using such a discriminative diction...

Rural hospitals play a crucial role in providing healthcare to rural Americans, a vulnerable and underserved population; however, rural hospitals have faced threats to their financial viability and many have closed as a result. This paper examines the hospital characteristics that are associated with patients choosing rural hospitals, and sheds light on the types of patients who depend on rural...

Even though physical activity and sedentary behaviour are two distinct behaviours, their interdependent relationship needs to be studied in the same environment. This study examines the influence of urban design, neighbourhood built and social environment, and household and individual factors on the interdependent relationship between objectively measured physical activity and sedentary behavio...