Background: Maintaining an up-to-date record of the number, type, location, and condition of high-quantity low-cost roadway assets such as traffic signs is critical to transportation inventory management systems. While, databases such as Google Street View contain street-level images of all traffic signs and are updated regularly, their potential for creating an inventory databases has not been fully explored. The key benefit of such databases is that once traffic signs are detected, their geographic coordinates can also be derived and visualized within the same platform. Methods: By leveraging Google Street View images, this paper presents a new system for creating inventories of traffic signs. Using computer vision method, traffic signs are detected and classified into four categories of regulatory, warning, stop, and yield signs by processing images extracted from Google Street View API. Considering the discriminative classification scores from all images that see a sign, the most probable location of each traffic sign is derived and shown on the Google Maps using a dynamic heat map. A data card containing information about location and type of each detected traffic sign is also created. Finally, several data mining interfaces are introduced that allow for better management of the traffic sign inventories.

We developed a decision support system to model, analyze, and improve market adoption of Dell's SupportAssist program. SupportAssist is a proactive and preventive support service capability that can monitor system operations data from all connected Dell devices around the world and predict impending failures in those devices. Performance of such data-intensive services is highly interconnected with market adoption: service performance depends on the richness of the customer database, which is influenced by customer adoption that in turn depends on customer satisfaction and service performance-a reinforcing feedback loop. We developed the SupportAssist adoption model (SAAM). SAAM utilizes various data sources and modeling techniques, particularly system dynamics, to analyze market response under different strategies. Dell anticipates improving market adoption of SupportAssist and revenue from support services, as results of using this analytical tool.

As a lot of communication and media consumption moves online, people may be exposed to a wider population and more diverse opinions. However, individuals may act differently when faced with opinions far removed from their own. Moreover, changes in the frequency of visits, posting, and other forms of expression could lead to narrowing of the opinions that each person observes, as well as changes in the customer base for online platforms. Despite increasing research on the rise and fall of online social media outlets, user activity in response to exposure to others' opinions has received little attention. In this study, we first introduce a method that maps opinions of individuals and their generated content on a multi-dimensional space by factorizing an individual-object interaction (e.g., user-news rating) matrix. Using data on 6,151 users interacting with 287,327 pieces of content over 21 months on a social media platform we estimate changes in individuals' activities in response to interaction with content expressing a variety of opinions. We find that individuals increase their online activities when interacting with content close to their own opinions, and interacting with extreme opinions may decrease their activities. Finally, developing an agent-based simulation model, we study the effect of the estimated mechanisms on the future success of a simulated platform.

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