The large-scale introduction of water reuse into an existing water supply system is a complex socio-technical process. Consumers drive the success of water reuse programs through adoption, and infrastructure designs affect adoption patterns. This research develops a modeling framework to capture the feedbacks among consumer adoption and infrastructure expansion. Two theories are applied and compared…

The World Economic Forum contends that we are in the midst of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. The revolution is characterized by “a ubiquitous and mobile internet, by smaller, cheaper, and more powerful sensors, and by artificial intelligence and machine learning.” It is manifest in an "Internet of Things” that's expected to connect 50 billion devices,…

Environmental justice and sustainability are two critical, but often separate initiatives undertaken by NGOs, planners, government agencies, and grassroots groups. This presentation includes three cases in which environmental justice concerns confuse conventional discourses of sustainability (soil lead and urban gardens, home foreclosure and vacant lot reuse, and legacy pollution and waterfront development). Collectively, these works…

Expert-based science is widely on the decline when it comes to computing- and data-based inference worldwide for land- and seascapes as well as the atmosphere. The status of associated biodiversity and its conservation is equally in a crisis-state. In this presentation I will show how open access to data -including citizen science - has provided…

The usual views of air traffic — a single plane in the sky, several planes on approach, even the route map in the back of the in-flight magazine — are deceptive. The truth is that air traffic (and its counterpart, maritime traffic) is a big, messy, complex, ever-evolving morass where this morning’s anomaly is this…

As the planet continues to warm, many decision makers are grappling with how best to adapt to our changing climate. But for these decision makers, the most advanced global climate models are also perceived as being too ‘wrong’ to be useful for planning and adaptation. In response, an explosion of higher resolution ‘downscaled’ climate models have emerged…

Synthetic populations are geospatially explicit representations of households and persons. RTI’s nationwide synthetic populations are derived from American Community Survey (ACS) demographic estimates and ACS Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS). These synthetic populations match household spatial distributions at 100M grid cell resolution and household demographic distributions at the census block group resolution. Synthetic populations are…

Combining GPS units with accelerometers is becoming a common method of objectively assessing adult physical activity locations. However, few best practices have been proposed for designing these studies. Using accelerometer and GPS data collected from over 200 adults in five cities, 10+ minute bouts of physical activity were given location codes with a Google Maps-based…

The combination of physical and biological sounds that form the ambient acoustic environment is increasingly recognized as a fundamental element of habitats. Marine soundscapes are known to influence key ecological processes such as reproduction, larval recruitment and trophic interactions, and there is increasing interest in the use of passive acoustic monitoring as a non-destructive habitat…

Originally developed in the fields of architecture and urban design, space syntax is a concept and method used to describe and analyze patterns of space at both the building and urban levels. In particular, space syntax helps us understand the role of spatial configuration within buildings and cities in people’s experiences and use of these…