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Creators/Authors contains: "Zhang, Z"

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  1. Free, publicly-accessible full text available February 27, 2027
  2. Free, publicly-accessible full text available September 1, 2025
  3. Free, publicly-accessible full text available September 1, 2025
  4. Free, publicly-accessible full text available October 1, 2025
  5. Free, publicly-accessible full text available December 1, 2025
  6. Blind and low-vision (BLV) people rely on GPS-based systems for outdoor navigation. GPS's inaccuracy, however, causes them to veer off track, run into obstacles, and struggle to reach precise destinations. While prior work has made precise navigation possible indoors via hardware installations, enabling this outdoors remains a challenge. Interestingly, many outdoor environments are already instrumented with hardware such as street cameras. In this work, we explore the idea of repurposing *existing* street cameras for outdoor navigation. Our community-driven approach considers both technical and sociotechnical concerns through engagements with various stakeholders: BLV users, residents, business owners, and Community Board leadership. The resulting system, StreetNav, processes a camera's video feed using computer vision and gives BLV pedestrians real-time navigation assistance. Our evaluations show that StreetNav guides users more precisely than GPS, but its technical performance is sensitive to environmental occlusions and distance from the camera. We discuss future implications for deploying such systems at scale. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available October 13, 2025
  7. This paper presents the results of a research that created and analyzed a Multimedia dataset for building energy efficiency estimation. First a new Multimedia Building Energy Efficiency (MMBEE) dataset was created from publicly available data. This work then explored the use of the window-to-wall ratio (WWR) information from building facade images and integrated it with traditional tabular data to create new training data, in order to predict building energy efficiency measures. Finally, we discuss potential applications and future research directions in using the MMBEE dataset for building energy efficiency prediction. Throughout the paper, a number of important processes and analyses were performed, which include feature selection, data correlation analysis, WWR extraction, and comparison of deep network and random forest models in building energy efficiency estimation. From this first attempt at using the Multimedia dataset for building energy efficiency estimation, we found the performances of deep models were better than traditional models such as random forest. We also found that there was an optimal point of what features shall be used for the prediction. Nonetheless, the incorporation of the current WWR estimation results did not yield the anticipated enhancement in estimation performance. Subsequently, a comprehensive investigation was conducted to ascertain potential contributing factors, and several avenues for future research were identified to enhance the predictive utility of the WWR feature. 
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  8. This paper presents the results of a research that created and analyzed a Multimedia dataset for building energy efficiency estimation. First a new Multimedia Building Energy Efficiency (MMBEE) dataset was created from publicly available data. This work then explored the use of the window-to-wall ratio (WWR) information from building facade images and integrated it with traditional tabular data to create new training data, in order to predict building energy efficiency measures. Finally, we discuss potential applications and future research directions in using the MMBEE dataset for building energy efficiency prediction. Throughout the paper, a number of important processes and analyses were performed, which include feature selection, data correlation analysis, WWR extraction, and comparison of deep network and random forest models in building energy efficiency estimation. From this first attempt at using the Multimedia dataset for building energy efficiency estimation, we found the performances of deep models were better than traditional models such as random forest. We also found that there was an optimal point of what features shall be used for the prediction. Nonetheless, the incorporation of the current WWR estimation results did not yield the anticipated enhancement in estimation performance. Subsequently, a comprehensive investigation was conducted to ascertain potential contributing factors, and several avenues for future research were identified to enhance the predictive utility of the WWR feature. 
    more » « less