In an era increasingly affected by natural and human-caused disasters, the role of social media in disaster communication has become ever more critical. Despite substantial research on social media use during crises, a significant gap remains in detecting crisis-related misinformation. Detecting deviations in information is fundamental for identifying and curbing the spread of misinformation. This study introduces a novel Information Switching Pattern Model to identify dynamic shifts in perspectives among users who mention each other in crisisrelated narratives on social media. These shifts serve as evidence of crisis misinformation affecting user-mention network interactions. The study utilizes advanced natural language processing, network science, and census data to analyze geotagged tweets related to compound disaster events in Oklahoma in 2022. The impact of misinformation is revealed by distinct engagement patterns among various user types, such as bots, private organizations, non-profits, government agencies, and news media throughout different disaster stages. These patterns show how different disasters influence public sentiment, highlight the heightened vulnerability of mobile home communities, and underscore the importance of education and transportation access in crisis response. Understanding these engagement patterns is crucial for detecting misinformation and leveraging social media as an effective tool for risk communication during disasters

Roadway reconfiguration is a crucial aspect of transportation planning, aiming to enhance traffic flow, reduce congestion, and improve overall road network performance with existing infrastructure and resources. This paper presents a novel decision support framework integrating metaheuristic optimization, traffic simulation, and machine learning model to rank various roadway configurations for better traffic network performance. The proposed framework incorporates a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) approach, combining input from generated scenarios during the genetic algorithm (GA) optimization process. By utilizing data from optimization, the model identifies total betweenness centrality (TBC), system travel time (STT), and total link traffic flow (TLTF) as the most influential decision variables. Utilizing graph theory, the framework models the transportation network topology and applies network metrics alongside dynamic user equilibrium traffic assignment to evaluate the impact of each roadway configuration on overall network performance. The ranking of roadway configurations is achieved through machine learning algorithms, specifically the Random Forest Regression (RFR) model, to determine the combined effect of each criterion (TBC, STT, TLTF). This network-based analysis ensures that the selected configurations are not only optimal for individual roadway segments but also enhance system-level efficiency. The increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters and other disruptive events highlight the need for resilient transportation networks. By integrating MCDA, the RFR model, network and traffic flow metrics, the proposed framework empowers transportation planners to make informed and data-driven decisions. This leads to more sustainable, efficient, and resilient roadway configurations, ultimately improving transportation network performance.

Even though the traffic systems in developed countries have been analyzed rigorously and operated efficiently, the same does not generally hold for developing countries due to inadequate planning, design, and operations of their transportation systems. Because of inherent differences between internal infrastructures, the strategies deployed in developed countries may not be amenable to developing ones. Besides, developing countries’ traffic systems are not well-studied in the literature to the best of our knowledge. For example, it is yet to explore how a developed country’s lane-based traffic flow would perform in the context of a developing country, which generally experiences non-lane-based traffic. As such, by using our newly developed traffic simulator ‘RoadBird,’ we investigate outcomes of both lane-based and non-lane-based traffic from the contexts of both developing and developed countries. To do so, we run simulations over real road topologies (extracted from the GIS maps of major cities such as Dhaka, Miami, and Riyadh), considering different scenarios such as lane-based or non-lane-based flows, homogeneous or heterogeneous traffic, with or without pedestrians, etc. We also incorporate various car-following and lane-changing models to mimic traffic behaviors and investigate their performances. While the lane changing dilemma remains an open research question, our experimental evidence indicates: 1) lane-based approaches will not necessarily perform better in the case of currently-adopted non-lane-based scenarios, and 2) non-lane-based strategies may benefit system performance in lane-based scenarios while having heavy mixed traffic. Nonetheless, we reveal several new insights for on-road experiences both in developing and developed countries.

Inefficient traffic signal control system is one of the most important causes of traffic congestion in the cities of developing countries such as Bangladesh, India, Kenya, etc. This can be mitigated by adopting a decentralized traffic-responsive signal system, where vehicle detection is performed on the road through different image-based deep learning architectures amenable to limited-resource embedded platforms as available in developing countries. Deep learning architectures currently available in this regard demand high computational resources to achieve higher inference speed and better accuracy. Besides, the few existing limited-resource deep learning architectural alternatives neither attain higher inference speed nor substantial accuracy due to not overcoming the inherent limitations. To this extent, in this study, we propose a novel limited-resource deep learning architecture, namely DhakaNet, for real-time vehicle detection in on-road (street-view) traffic images. Our proposed architecture leverages enhancing Cross-Stage Partial Network and Path Aggregation Network to build the backbone and head networks, respectively. Besides, we develop a novel multi-scale attention module to extract multi-scale meaningful features from the images, where the developed multi-scale attention module boosts the detection accuracy at the cost of small overhead. Rigorous experimental evaluation of our proposed DhakaNet over three benchmark street-view traffic datasets such as DhakaAI, IITM-HeTra-A, and IITM-HeTra-B shows up to 51% faster inference speed at a similar accuracy, or up to 13% higher accuracy at a similar inference speed compared to other state-of-the-art limited-resource deep learning architectural alternatives.