# Emerging Industry for Promoting Human Performance and Health: Opportunities and Challenges
## 3 Air Pollution Analysis for Mitigating Environmental Threats  
The urbanization and industrialization processes in human history have inevitably exacerbated the scale of pollution in both quantity and area. The mass of PM\({}_{2.5}\) (particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter \(\leq\)2.5 \(\upmu\)m) generated from natural and anthropogenic activities drifts into the air and even infiltrates into buildings. Many studies have shown the significant relationships between ambient PM\({}_{2.5}\) concentrations and human illness, such as respiratory diseases, cardiovascular diseases, and cancers. The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that ambient PM\({}_{2.5}\) emissions were estimated to cause 4.2 million premature deaths worldwide in 2019 ([[https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ambient-](https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ambient-)]([https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ambient-](https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ambient-))(outdoor)-air-quality-and-health, accessed on 26 May 2024). In addition to the impact on human lives, PM\({}_{2.5}\) concentrations spoil the natural environment, leading to climate change, atmospheric visibility, and plant species mortality. In order to reach an equilibrium between socioeconomic development and environmental sustainability, several core actions to facilitate the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ([[https://www.un.org/sustainableddevelopment/blog/2015/08](https://www.un.org/sustainableddevelopment/blog/2015/08)]([https://www.un.org/sustainableddevelopment/blog/2015/08](https://www.un.org/sustainableddevelopment/blog/2015/08)), accessed on 26 May 2024), such as sustainable cities and communities, responsible consumption and production, and climate action, have taken place around the globe. The essential foundations for the success of these core actions are advanced technologies for developing green production, clean energy, and new ways of social interaction. In 2019, a new technology, termed computational sustainability, emerged. It aims to build an ecosystem of socioeconomic activities, natural species, and environmental conservation for a sustainable future by applying computational approaches. With the recent rapid advance of artificial intelligence, computational sustainability is a promising solution. We chose two articles that proposed computational sustainability approaches for spatiotemporal analysis and forecasting of PM\({}_{2.5}\) concentration. The paper, authored by [PERSON], presented a novel spatiotemporal analysis framework for air pollution episode association in Puli, Taiwan [3]. The innovations in this paper rely on the use of video processing techniques that have never been applied to air pollution analytics. There is a great analogy between the episodes of PM\({}_{2.5}\) concentration properties and the shots of video scenes. The studied field is resolved into a mesh of grids. The monitored PM\({}_{2.5}\) hourly concentration at a grid is considered its gray intensity, such that a PM\({}_{2.5}\) image is obtained every hour, which collectively generates a PM\({}_{2.5}\) video for a time span. By applying the shot boundary detection technique, the PM\({}_{2.5}\) video is segmented into pollution episodes. Each episode corresponds to particular PM\({}_{2.5}\) properties, such as pollution concentration, transportation, scattering, and diminishing, in different spatiotemporal ways. The authors then applied clustering algorithms to group similar episodes, but appearing in different spatiotemporal spaces, in the same class. The experimental results manifest that the episodes contained in the same class have quasi-homogeneous patterns but appear at different times in a year. This means that some particular patterns of pollution activities appear many times in this region, which may have relations with local weather, terrains, and anthropogenic activities that are worthy of study in the future.