Road map

Abstract: In recent years the policy focus has increased for maternal newborn and child health (MNCH) in Africa The African Union now has three regional strategies in various stages of development: Road Map for reduction of maternal and newborn mortality (2004); Child Survival Framework (2005); Maputo Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Plan of Action (2006) Each of these policy frameworks allow for national government adaptation and implementation in country with support from partners under the principles of the Paris declaration on aid effectiveness - "One plan One coordinating mechanism One monitoring and evaluation mechanism" Already 35 countries have started the process of a national Road Map which was initiated through the MNCH Task Force in 2004 These policy frameworks represent a great advance but they are only the first step on the road to lives saved through increased coverage of essential interventions The time is short - there are only nine years left before the 2015 target for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Africa can and must accelerate progress (excerpt)

Abstract: The proposed social media crisis mapping platform for natural disasters uses locations from gazetteer, street map, and volunteered geographic information (VGI) sources for areas at risk of disaster and matches them to geoparsed real-time tweet data streams. The authors use statistical analysis to generate real-time crisis maps. Geoparsing results are benchmarked against existing published work and evaluated across multilingual datasets. Two case studies compare five-day tweet crisis maps to official post-event impact assessment from the US National Geospatial Agency (NGA), compiled from verified satellite and aerial imagery sources.

Abstract: This paper presents a method for automatically converting raw GPS traces from everyday vehicles into a routable road network. The method begins by smoothing raw GPS traces using a novel aggregation technique. This technique pulls together traces that belong on the same road in response to simulated potential energy wells created around each trace. After the traces are moved in response to the potential fields, they tend to coalesce into smooth paths. To help adjust the parameters of the constituent potential fields, we present a theoretical analysis of the behavior of our algorithm on a few different road configurations. With the resulting smooth traces, we apply a custom clustering algorithm to create a graph of nodes and edges representing the road network. We show how this network can be used to plan reasonable driving routes, much like consumer-oriented mapping Web sites. We demonstrate our algorithms using real GPS data collected on public roads, and we evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on public roads, and we evaluate the effectiveness of our approach by comparing the route planning results suggested by our generated graph to a commercial route planner.