Ganguly Team Awarded Funds to Develop Urban Visualization and Data Analysis Toolkit
Industry partner Kitware, a software development company who is collaborating with CEE Distinguished Professor Auroop Ganguly and his research team, was awarded $1.6 million in DOE Phase II SBIR funds for the development of an Urban Visualization and Data Analysis Toolkit to address urban climate change threats. The Northeastern team will develop translational quantitative methods for the analysis of interconnected infrastructure systems.
Industry partner Kitware, a technical software development company who is collaborating with CEE Distinguished Professor Auroop Ganguly and his research team, was awarded $1.6 million in Small Business Innovation Research funds from the DOE for Phase II development of an Urban Visualization and Data Analysis Toolkit.
UVDA is a software solution to address urban climate change threats by allowing users to visualize the effects of climate change on real-life city structures and develop adaptive solutions to maintain functionality and build increasingly weather-withstanding lifeline systems.
Climate change is leading to the intensification of rainfall and storms. As urban infrastructures like drainage systems and subways struggle to accommodate the increased precipitation, flooding is becoming more common.
The project summary states, “Urban planners need better tools to access and analyze diverse data, including weather, climate, infrastructure networks, and in-situ sensors. UVDAT presents a novel software solution, offering analysis-ready data, resilience models, and neighborhood-scale visualizations, enabling robust and socially just solutions.”
UVDAT will focus on the city of Boston and use the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority transit system as a specific example of a lifeline infrastructure, Ganguly says.
Ganguly defines a lifeline infrastructure as a built system that is fundamental to the safe and socially just operation of human life in a city. Other examples of lifeline infrastructures include hospitals, electric power, and water systems. As climate change inevitably changes our ways of life, our infrastructure must adapt as well.
“Overall, we will try to get an understanding of what climate change means in the context of urban flooding in Boston and what the impacts of flooding are on the subway system,” says Ganguly.
The project contains two broad components: visualization and data analytics. The focus of the Northeastern team will be on developing translational quantitative methods for the analysis of interconnected infrastructure systems. Kitware will focus on visualization and making data accessible to users.
Of $1.6 million in SBIR funds for the project, $475,000 will go to the Northeastern analysis side.
“PhD student Jack Watson, Post-MS data scientist August Posch, and Technical Operations Manager Robyn Anderson have been instrumental in us winning this project,” says Ganguly of his Northeastern project team.
The goal is to create software and data products with a front end and a back end, Ganguly says. The back end will include machine-learning AI systems to enable climate downscaling, climate models, climate-related observations, and an understanding of climate physics and engineering structures. This will be primarily developed by Northeastern and disseminated to Kitware.
The front end will provide interactive visualizations to users for real-life scenario analysis, answering questions like, “What areas might get flooded? What chance is there that the city will lose access to certain systems in the next decade? What if we made this infrastructure more robust—how much are we reducing chances of flooding, losing functionality, and losing accessibility?” This will be developed by Kitware jointly with Northeastern.
This broad line of research has also been, and indeed continues to be, synergistically funded by the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Homeland Security.
Phase II funding establishes that Phase I resulted in a successful proof of concept for UVDAT. The DOE award will allow Kitware and Ganguly’s team at the Sustainability and Data Sciences Laboratory (SDS Lab) and AI for Climate and Sustainability (AI4CaS) to continue the research and developmental efforts further.