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Strategy 2015-2020 and Beyond
The Netherlands eScience Center is a young center with a clear role in the Dutch landscape as set out in this document. We collaborate with all research disciplines and balance distributing our efforts among trailblazers, to be at the forefront, and disciplines where the use of advanced computer and data science is starting to emerge. We develop a limited number of core technological competences where we can have a broad impact on research practices. The value of eScience, fostering multidisciplinary research and capitalizing on capabilities offered by rapidly evolving ICT infrastructure and related sciences, is acknowledged in the recent ‘Wetenschapsvisie 2025’ of the Dutch cabinet. It calls for strengthening e-infrastructure and eScience. With our approach we contribute to the spirit of this vision and hope to contribute to the developing national research agenda as well.
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Article
Simulating the extreme 2013/2014 winter in a future climate
How would the spell of extreme weather observed over North America and western Europeduring the 2013/2014 winter manifest itself in a warmer climate? Here a forced sensitivity method isused to calculate optimal model tendency perturbations which result in a simulation which has its upperatmospheric circulation shifted in the direction of the January 2014 jet stream pattern. When applied toa simulation run under present-day conditions the main features of the observations of this event arereproduced, such as the more zonal position and increased strength of the midlatitude North Atlantic stormtrack, the anomalous temperature pattern over North America, and the excessive precipitation in parts ofEurope. When this method is applied to a future warmer climate, the North Atlantic storm track changesto a more zonal orientation, but its strength does not see the significant increase that is obtained in thepresent-day simulations. Despite southward advection of polar air into northeastern America, which hasalso occurred during the 2013/2014 winter, the associated drop in temperature is less in the future climatecompared to the present-day climate because of Arctic amplification. The less steep drop in temperaturesover northeastern America leads to a smaller land-sea temperature contrast, less baroclinic instability, anda reduced increase of midlatitude storminess. While one may expect the future increased atmosphericmoisture content to augment the net precipitation, for this specific event, this effect is counterbalanced bythe dynamics, leading to a similar net increase in precipitation in the future simulations compared to thepresent day
Rasmijn, L. M., van der Schrier, G., Barkmeijer, J., Sterl, A., & Hazeleger, W. (2016). Simulating the extreme 2013/2014 winter in a future climate: SIMULATING THE EXTREME 2013/2014 WINTER. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 121(10), 5680–5698.
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Article
Urban Finescale Forecasting Reveals Weather Conditions with Unprecedented Detail
Urban landscapes impact the lives of urban dwellers by influencing local weather conditions. However, weather forecasting down to the street and neighborhood scale has been beyond the capabilities of numerical weather prediction (NWP) despite the fact that observational systems are now able to monitor urban climate at these scales. In this study, weather forecasts at intra-urban scales were achieved by exploiting recent advances in topographic element mapping and aerial photography as well as looking at detailed mappings of soil characteristics and urban morphological properties, which were subsequently incorporated into a specifically adapted Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model. The urban weather forecasting system (UFS) was applied to the Amsterdam, Netherlands, metropolitan area during the summer of 2015, where it produced forecasts for the city down to the neighborhood level (a few hundred meters). Comparing these forecasts to the dense network of urban weather station observations within the Amsterdam metropolitan region showed that the forecasting system successfully determined the impact of urban morphological characteristics and urban spatial structure on local temperatures, including the cooling effect of large water bodies on local urban temperatures. The forecasting system has important practical applications for end users such as public health agencies, local governments, and energy companies. It appears that the forecasting system enables forecasts of events on a neighborhood level where human thermal comfort indices exceeded risk thresholds during warm weather episodes. These results prove that worldwide urban weather forecasting is within reach of NWP, provided that appropriate data and computing resources become available to ensure timely and efficient forecasts
Ronda, R. J., Steeneveld, G. J., Heusinkveld, B. G., Attema, J. J., & Holtslag, A. A. M. (2017). Urban fine-scale forecasting reveals weather conditions with unprecedented detail. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
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Article
Accelerometer assessed moderate-to-vigorous physical activity and successful ageing
Physical activity is key for successful ageing, but questions remain regarding the optimal physical activity pattern. We examined the cross-sectional association between physical activity and successful ageing using data on 3,749 participants (age range = 60–83years) of the Whitehall II study. The participants underwent a clinical assessment, completed a 20-item physical activity questionnaire, and wore a wrist-mounted accelerometer for 9 days. Successful ageing was defined as good cognitive, motor, and respiratory functioning, along with absence of disability, mental health problems, and major chronic diseases. Time spent in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) episodes assessed by accelerometer was classified as “short” (1–9.59 minutes) and “long” (≥10 minutes) bouts. Linear multivariate regression showed that successful agers (N = 789) reported 3.79 (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.39–6.19) minutes more daily MVPA than other participants. Accelerometer data showed this difference to be 3.40 (95% CI:2.44–4.35) minutes for MVPA undertaken in short bouts, 4.16 (95% CI:3.11–5.20) minutes for long bouts, and 7.55 (95% CI:5.86–9.24) minutes for all MVPA bouts lasting 1 minute or more. Multivariate logistic regressions showed that participants undertaking ≥150 minutes of MVPA per week were more likely to be successful agers with both self-reported (Odd Ratio (OR) = 1.29,95% (CI):1.09–1.53) and accelerometer data (length bout ≥1 minute:OR = 1.92, 95%CI:1.60–2.30). Successful agers practice more MVPA, having both more short and long bouts, than non-successful agers.
Menai, M., van Hees, V. T., Elbaz, A., Kivimaki, M., Singh-Manoux, A., & Sabia, S. (2017). Accelerometer assessed moderate-to-vigorous physical activity and successful ageing: results from the Whitehall II study. Scientific Reports, 8, 45772.
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Article
GRaSP: Grounded Representation and Source Perspective
When people or organizations provide information, they make choices regarding what they include and how they represent it. These two aspects combined (the content and the stance) represent a perspective. Investigating perspectives can provide useful insights into the reliability of information, changes in viewpoints over time, shared beliefs among social or political groups and contrasts with other groups, etc. This paper introduces GRaSP, a generic framework for modeling perspectives and their sources.
CLTL and Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Fokkens, A., Vossen, P., Rospocher, M., Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy, Netherlands eScience Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. (2017). GRaSP: Grounded Representation and Source Perspective. In Proceedings of the Workshop Knowledge Resources for the Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities (pp. 19–25). Incoma Ltd. Shoumen, Bulgaria.
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Article
Active Learning for Classifying Political Tweets
We examine methods for improving models for automatically labeling social media data. In particular we evaluate active learning: a method for selecting candidate training data whose labeling the classification model would benefit most of. We show that this approach requires careful experiment design, when it is combined with language modeling.
Tjong Kim Sang, E., Esteve del Valle, M., Kruitbosch, H., & Broersma, M. (2018). Active Learning for Classifying Political Tweets. International Science and General Applications, 1(March), 60–67.
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Article
Essential Means for Urban Computing
This article provides an overview of the specifications of web-based computing platforms for urban data analytics and computational urban planning practice. There are currently a variety of tools and platforms that can be used in urban computing practices, including scientific computing languages, interactive web languages, data sharing platforms and still many desktop computing environments, e.g., GIS software applications. We have reviewed a list of technologies considering their potential and applicability in urban planning and urban data analytics. This review is not only based on the technical factors such as capabilities of the programming languages but also the ease of developing and sharing complex data processing workflows. The arena of web-based computing platforms is currently under rapid development and is too volatile to be predictable; therefore, in this article we focus on the specification of the requirements and potentials from an urban planning point of view rather than speculating about the fate of computing platforms or programming languages. The article presents a list of promising computing technologies, a technical specification of the essential data models and operators for geo-spatial data processing, and mathematical models for an ideal urban computing platform.
Nourian, P., Martinez-Ortiz, C., & Ohori, K. A. (2018). Essential Means for Urban Computing: Specification of Web-Based Computing Platforms for Urban Planning, a Hitchhiker’s Guide. Urban Planning, 3(1), 47.
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Article
Do not blame it on the algorithm
In the debate about filter bubbles caused by algorithmic news recommendation, the conceptualization of the two core concepts in this debate, diversity and algorithms, has received little attention in social scientific research. This paper examines the effect of multiple recommender systems on different diversity dimensions. To this end, it maps different values that diversity can serve, and a respective set of criteria that characterizes a diverse information offer in this particular conception of diversity. We make use of a data set of simulated article recommendations based on actual content of one of the major Dutch broadsheet newspapers and its users (N=21,973 articles, N=500 users). We find that all of the recommendation logics under study proved to lead to a rather diverse set of recommendations that are on par with human editors and that basing recommendations on user histories can substantially increase topic diversity within a recommendation set.
Möller, J., Trilling, D., Helberger, N., & van Es, B. (2018). Do not blame it on the algorithm: an empirical assessment of multiple recommender systems and their impact on content diversity. Information, Communication & Society, 21(7), 959–977.