Smart cities and communities (SCC) constitute a new paradigm in urban development. SCC ideate a data-centered society aimed at improving efficiency by automating and optimizing activities and utilities. Information and communication technology along with Internet of Things enables data collection and with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) situation awareness can be obtained to feed the SCC actors with enriched knowledge. This paper describes AI perspectives in SCC and gives an overview of AI-based technologies used in traffic to enable road vehicle automation and smart traffic control. Perception, smart traffic control and driver modeling are described along with open research challenges and standardization to help introduce advanced driver assistance systems and automated vehicle functionality in traffic. To fully realize the potential of SCC, to create a holistic view on a city level, availability of data from different stakeholders is necessary. Further, though AI technologies provide accurate predictions and classifications, there is an ambiguity regarding the correctness of their outputs. This can make it difficult for the human operator to trust the system. Today there are no methods that can be used to match function requirements with the level of detail in data annotation in order to train an accurate model. Another challenge related to trust is explainability: models can have difficulty explaining how they came to certain conclusions, so it is difficult for humans to trust them.

In classification problems, as the number of classes increases, correctly classifying a new instance into one of them is assumed to be more challenging than making the same decision in the presence of fewer classes. The essence of the problem is that using the learning algorithm on each decision boundary individually is better than using the same learning algorithm on several of them simultaneously. However, why and when it happens is still not well-understood today. This work’s main contribution is to introduce the concept of heterogeneity of decision boundaries as an explanation of this phenomenon. Based on the definition of heterogeneity of decision boundaries, we analyze and explain the differences in the performance of state of the art approaches to solve multi-class classification. We demonstrate that as the heterogeneity increases, the performances of all approaches, except one-vs-one, decrease. We show that by correctly encoding the knowledge of the heterogeneity of decision boundaries in a decomposition of the multi-class problem, we can obtain better results than state of the art decompositions. The benefits can be an increase in classification performance or a decrease in the time it takes to train and evaluate the models. We first provide intuitions and illustrate the effects of the heterogeneity of decision boundaries using synthetic datasets and a simplistic classifier. Then, we demonstrate how a real dataset exhibits these same principles, also under realistic learning algorithms. In this setting, we devise a method to quantify the heterogeneity of different decision boundaries, and use it to decompose the multi-class problem. The results show significant improvements over state-of-the-art decompositions that do not take the heterogeneity of decision boundaries into account.

We address the problem of detecting changes in the activity of a distant gas source from the response of an array of metal oxide (MOX) gas sensors deployed in an open sampling system. The main challenge is the turbulent nature of gas dispersion and the response dynamics of the sensors. We propose a change point detection approach and evaluate it on individual gas sensors in an experimental setup where a gas source changes in intensity, compound, or mixture ratio. We also introduce an efficient sensor selection algorithm and evaluate the change point detection approach with the selected sensor array subsets.

The Concordance Index (C-index) is a commonly used metric in Survival Analysis for evaluating the performance of a prediction model. In this paper, we propose a decomposition of the C-index into a weighted harmonic mean of two quantities: one for ranking observed events versus other observed events, and the other for ranking observed events versus censored cases. This decomposition enables a finer-grained analysis of the relative strengths and weaknesses between different survival prediction methods. The usefulness of this decomposition is demonstrated through benchmark comparisons against classical models and state-of-the-art methods, together with the new variational generative neural-network-based method (SurVED) proposed in this paper. The performance of the models is assessed using four publicly available datasets with varying levels of censoring. Using the C-index decomposition and synthetic censoring, the analysis shows that deep learning models utilize the observed events more effectively than other models. This allows them to keep a stable C-index in different censoring levels. In contrast to such deep learning methods, classical machine learning models deteriorate when the censoring level decreases due to their inability to improve on ranking the events versus other events.