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Frequent flooding seriously affects people’s safety and economic construction, and assessing the inundation probability can help to strengthen the capacity of emergency management of floods. There are currently two general means of flood sensing: physical and social. Remote sensing data feature high reliability but are often unavailable in disasters caused by persistent heavy rainfall. Social media is characterized by high timeliness and a large data volume but has high redundancy and low reliability. The existing studies have primarily relied on physical sensing data and have not fully exploited the potential of social media data. This paper combines traditional physical sensing data with social media and proposes an integrated physical and social sensing (IPS) method to estimate the probability distribution of flood inundation. Taking the “7·20” Henan rainstorm in 2021 and the study area of Xinxiang, China, as a case study, more than 60,000 messages and 1900 images about this occurrence were acquired from the Weibo platform. Taking filtered water depth points with their geographic location and water depth information as the main input, the inverse distance attenuation function was used to calculate the inundation potential layer of the whole image. Then, the Gaussian kernel was used to weight the physical sensing data based on each water depth point, and finally, the submergence probability layer of the whole image was enhanced. In the validation of the results using radar and social media points, accuracies of 88.77% and 75% were obtained by setting up a threshold classification, demonstrating the effectiveness and usefulness of the method. The significance of this study lies in obtaining discrete social media flood points and achieving space-continuous flood inundation probability mapping, providing decision-making support for urban flood diagnosis and mitigation.

Advancements in robotic surgery help to improve the endoluminal diagnosis and treatment with minimally invasive or non-invasive intervention in a precise and safe manner. Miniaturized probe-based sensors can be used to obtain information about endoluminal anatomy, and they can be integrated with medical robots to augment the convenience of robotic operations. The tremendous benefit of having this physiological information during the intervention has led to the development of a variety of in vivo sensing technologies over the past decades. In this paper, we review the probe-based sensing techniques for the in vivo physical and biochemical sensing in China in recent years, especially on in vivo force sensing, temperature sensing, optical coherence tomography/photoacoustic/ultrasound imaging, chemical sensing, and biomarker sensing.

Physical information sensed by various sensors in a cyber-physical system should be collected for further operation. In many applications, data aggregation should take reliability and delay into consideration. To address these problems, a novel Tiered Structure Routing-based Delay-Aware and Reliable Data Aggregation scheme named TSR-DARDA for spherical physical objects is proposed. By dividing the spherical network constructed by dispersed sensor nodes into circular tiers with specifically designed widths and cells, TSTR-DARDA tries to enable as many nodes as possible to transmit data simultaneously. In order to ensure transmission reliability, lost packets are retransmitted. Moreover, to minimize the latency while maintaining reliability for data collection, in-network aggregation and broadcast techniques are adopted to deal with the transmission between data collecting nodes in the outer layer and their parent data collecting nodes in the inner layer. Thus, the optimization problem is transformed to minimize the delay under reliability constraints by controlling the system parameters. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, we have conducted extensive theoretical analysis and comparisons to evaluate the performance of TSR-DARDA. The analysis and simulations show that TSR-DARDA leads to lower delay with reliability satisfaction.