M. Mahesha Viduranga | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

AVSim -- Realistic Simulation Framework for Airborne and Vector-Borne Disease Dynamics

Computational disease modeling plays a crucial role in understanding and controlling the transmission of infectious diseases. While agent-based models (ABMs) provide detailed insights into individual dynamics, accurately replicating human motion remains challenging due to its complex, multi-factorial nature. Most existing frameworks fail to model realistic human motion, leading to oversimplified and less realistic behavior modeling. Furthermore, many current models rely on synthetic assumptions and fail to account for realistic environmental structures, transportation systems, and behavioral heterogeneity across occupation groups. To address these limitations, we introduce AVSim, an agent-based simulation framework designed to model airborne and vector-borne disease dynamics under realistic conditions. A distinguishing feature of AVSim is its ability to accurately model the dual nature of human mobility (both the destinations individuals visit and the duration of their stay) by utilizing GPS traces from real-world participants, characterized by occupation. This enables a significantly more granular and realistic representation of human movement compared to existing approaches. Furthermore, spectral clustering combined with graph-theoretic analysis is used to uncover latent behavioral patterns within occupations, enabling fine-grained modeling of agent behavior. We validate the synthetic human mobility patterns against ground-truth GPS data and demonstrate AVSim's capabilities via simulations of COVID-19 and dengue. The results highlight AVSim's capacity to trace infection pathways, identify high-risk zones, and evaluate interventions such as vaccination, quarantine, and vector control with occupational and geographic specificity.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2024

Damage Assessment after Natural Disasters with UAVs: Semantic Feature Extraction using Deep Learning

Unmanned aerial vehicle-assisted disaster recovery missions have been promoted recently due to their reliability and flexibility. Machine learning algorithms running onboard significantly enhance the utility of UAVs by enabling real-time data processing and efficient decision-making, despite being in a resource-constrained environment. However, the limited bandwidth and intermittent connectivity make transmitting the outputs to ground stations challenging. This paper proposes a novel semantic extractor that can be adopted into any machine learning downstream task for identifying the critical data required for decision-making. The semantic extractor can be executed onboard which results in a reduction of data that needs to be transmitted to ground stations. We test the proposed architecture together with the semantic extractor on two publicly available datasets, FloodNet and RescueNet, for two downstream tasks: visual question answering and disaster damage level classification. Our experimental results demonstrate the proposed method maintains high accuracy across different downstream tasks while significantly reducing the volume of transmitted data, highlighting the effectiveness of our semantic extractor in capturing task-specific salient information.

cs.CV↗