CEE 200 Seminar: Urban Spatiotemporal Flux

Speaker: Neda (Madi) Mohammadi, PhD
Affiliation: Georgia Institute of Technology

UCLA Civil & Environmental Engineering Department
C&EE 200 Section 1 Seminar
Structural, Geotechnical and Civil Engineering Materials
Urban Spatiotemporal Flux
Neda (Madi) Mohammadi, PhD
City Infrastructure Analytics Director & Postdoctoral Fellow
Georgia Institute of Technology
The global consequences of rapid urbanization include the generation of complex interdependencies between human and infrastructure systems that will inevitably be substantially different from those governing the performance of today’s cities. Our understanding of these complexities clearly needs to evolve just as rapidly or the problems will be shifted to new ones before we can reach enhanced capabilities in the decision making and management of city infrastructure. In this talk, I will discuss how complex interdependencies in human dynamics (e.g., mobility, energy use, the diffusion of communications, and crisis response) operate in relation to urban infrastructure systems (e.g., urban building energy systems) as they fluctuate over time in space and across various scales to investigate emerging properties of adaptive-disruptive interactions. I will explore the impact of spatiotemporal fluctuations in human mobility and energy use in two cities, Greater London in the UK and the City of Chicago, to examine how individuals’ location-based activities influence patterns in energy use across building types (i.e., residential and commercial buildings), and unravel how Recurrent Mobility can be a conduit for diffusion of energy efficiency in cities. I will further uncover the fundamentals of human-infrastructure dynamics integrated with cyberinfrastructure-enabled technologies such as VR/AR and IoT to create Smart City Digital Twins, parallel virtual versions of the real urban systems that are capable of capturing the spatial and temporal aspects of human-infrastructure interactions, through network and game theoretic-based models. An environment containing both real and dynamically predicted spatiotemporal data creates exciting opportunities for real data analysis, as well as testing ‘what if ‘ scenarios to contextualize the way urban population interacts, moves, consumes resources, and transfers information and influence in time and space. This enhanced approach to knowledge discovery from both multidimensional urban data analytics and exploration through visualization in immersive experiences beyond numerical models will greatly inform our decision making to redefine—and possibly transform—the sustainability, resilience, and quality of urban life.
Where: Engineering VI – Cohen Room 134A
When: Friday, January 24, 2020, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Neda Madi is a researcher in the area of city infrastructure systems with a focus on human-infrastructure interactivity. In her research, she primarily explores the complexities of evolving human-infrastructure interactions in time and space—what she terms Urban Spatiotemporal Flux—across the reality-virtuality continuum. Her scholarship spans from theoretical foundations in modeling and analytics to practical applications that integrate cyberinfrastructure-enabled technologies to explain and predict how urban sustainability, resilience, and transformation emerge from adaptive-disruptive interplay of human-infrastructure interactions. This is the primary focus of the recent projects on which she is the principal investigator; Towards Citizen-Centric City Infrastructure IoT, and Harnessing IoT to VR-Enable Smart City Digital Twins. She holds a PhD in Civil Engineering from Virginia Tech, where she studied the dynamic interrelationships between space-time fluctuations of human mobility and energy use in cities. She is co-guest editor of the ASCE Journal of Management in Engineering’s special collection on “Engineering Smarter Cities with Smart City Digital Twins”, and is co-chair of the “Smart City Digital Twins” at the HICSS Decision Analytics & Service Science Track. Dr. Madi is an Alumni Leadership Fellow, recipient of the CEE Future Faculty Fellowship and the Energy Systems for Sustainable Communities SLS Fellowship at Georgia Tech, and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering, and the City Infrastructure Analytics Director at the Network Dynamics Lab.

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Jan 24, 2020
11:00 am - 12:00 pm

Location:
Cohen Room 134, Engineering VI Building
404 Westwood Blvd Los Angeles California 90095
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