A spatial multi-objective land use optimization model defined by the acronym ‘NSGA-II-MOLU’ or the ‘non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II for multi-objective optimization of land use’ is proposed for searching for optimal land use scenarios which embrace multiple objectives and constraints extracted from the requirements of users, as well as providing support to the land use planning process. In this application, we took the MOLU model which was initially developed to integrate multiple objectives and coupled this with a revised version of the genetic algorithm NSGA-II which is based on specific crossover and mutation operators. The resulting NSGA-II-MOLU model is able to offer the possibility of efficiently searching over tens of thousands of solutions for trade-off sets which define non-dominated plans on the classical Pareto frontier. In this application, we chose the example of Tongzhou New Town, China, to demonstrate how the model could be employed to meet three conflicting objectives based on minimizing conversion costs, maximizing accessibility, and maximizing compatibilities between land uses. Our case study clearly shows the ability of the model to generate diversified land use planning scenarios which form the core of a land use planning support system. It also demonstrates the potential of the model to consider more complicated spatial objectives and variables with open-ended characteristics. The breakthroughs in spatial optimization that this model provides lead directly to other properties of the process in which further efficiencies in the process of optimization, more vivid visualizations, and more interactive planning support are possible. These form directions for future research.

In this research, three hedonic pricing models, including an ordinary least squares (OLS) model, a Euclidean distance–based (ED-based) geographically weighted regression (GWR) model, and a travel time–based GWR model supported by a big data set of millions of smartcard transactions, have been developed to investigate the spatial variation of Housing Development Board (HDB) public housing resale prices in Singapore. The results help identify factors that could significantly affect public housing resale prices, including the age and the floor area of the housing units, the distance to the nearest park, the distance to the central business district (CBD), and the distance to the nearest Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) station. The comparison of the three models also explicitly shows that the two GWR models perform much better than the traditional linear hedonic regression model, given the identical variables and data used in the calibration. Furthermore, the travel time–based GWR model has better model fit compared to the ED-based GWR model in the case study. This study demonstrates the potential value of the big data–based GWR model in housing research. It could also be applied to other research fields such as public health and criminal justice.

Social media datasets have been widely used in disaster assessment and management. When a disaster occurs, many users post messages in a variety of formats, e.g., image and text, on social media platforms. Useful information could be mined from these multimodal data to enable situational awareness and to support decision making during disasters. However, the multimodal data collected from social media contain a lot of irrelevant and misleading content that needs to be filtered out. Existing work has mostly used unimodal methods to classify disaster messages. In other words, these methods treated the image and textual features separately. While a few methods adopted multimodality to deal with the data, their accuracy cannot be guaranteed. This research seamlessly integrates image and text information by developing a multimodal fusion approach to identify useful disaster images collected from social media platforms. In particular, a deep learning method is used to extract the visual features from social media, and a FastText framework is then used to extract the textual features. Next, a novel data fusion model is developed to combine both visual and textual features to classify relevant disaster images. Experiments on a real-world disaster dataset, CrisisMMD, are performed, and the validation results demonstrate that the method consistently and significantly outperforms the previously published state-of-the-art work by over 3%, with a performance improvement from 84.4% to 87.6%.

Remotely sensed surface parameters, such as vegetation index, leaf area index, surface temperature, and evapotranspiration, show diverse spatial scales and temporal dynamics. Generally the spatial and temporal resolutions of remote-sensing data should match the characteristics of surface parameters under observation. These requirements sometimes cannot be provided by a single sensor due to the trade-off between spatial and temporal resolutions. Many spatial and temporal fusion (STF) methods have been proposed to derive the required data. However, the methodology suffers from disorderly development. To better inform future research, this study generalizes the existing methods from around 100 studies as spatial or temporal categories based on their physical assumptions related to spatial scales and temporal dynamics. To be specific, the assumptions are related to the scale invariance of the temporal information and temporal constancy of the spatial information. The spatial information can be contexture or spatial details. Experiments are conducted using Landsat data acquired on 13 dates in two study areas and simulated Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data. The results are presented to demonstrate the typical methods from each category. This study concludes the following. (1) Contexture methods depend heavily on how components maps (contexture) are defined. They are not recommended except when components maps can be estimated properly from observed images. (2) The spatial and temporal adaptive reflectance fusion model (STARFM) and enhanced STARFM (ESTARFM) methods belong to the temporal and spatial categories, respectively. Thus, STARFM and ESTARFM should be better applied to temporal variance – dominated and spatial variance – -dominated areas, respectively. (3) Non-linear methods, such as the sparse representation-based spatio-temporal reflectance fusion model, can successfully address land-cover changes in addition to phonological changes, thereby providing a promising option for STF problems in the future.