Coca-Cola, a neighbor to Georgia Tech since 1920, expects to sell a building and adjacent land in a transaction valued at $31.3 million. The company chose to work directly with Georgia Tech on the planned transaction, reflecting the long-standing relationship between the two organizations and a shared commitment to Atlanta’s continued growth and innovation.

The expected sale includes a two-story brick building, part of Coca-Cola’s holdings since 1988, and an adjoining two-acre park along North Avenue. 

“This strategic addition to our core campus will support our growth in enrollment and research activity for years to come,” said Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera. “I appreciate our long relationship with The Coca-Cola Company that allowed us to pursue this opportunity as we continue to invest in our campus, our neighborhood, and Atlanta’s innovation ecosystem.”  

James Quincey, Coca-Cola’s executive chair and Georgia Tech’s 2020 Commencement speaker, said the company wanted the property to continue contributing to Atlanta’s innovation ecosystem.

“When we decided this space was no longer needed for our corporate campus, our goal was to work with Georgia Tech, as this site offers a great opportunity for them to expand,” Quincey said. “Coca-Cola has a long legacy of involvement and partnership with Georgia Tech, and we are excited to see them redevelop this important area in Atlanta.”

Georgia Tech will evaluate how the property can best support academic, research, and student needs as part of its long-term campus planning efforts. The acquisition represents a strategic step in ensuring Georgia Tech has the space needed to educate future leaders and advance research that strengthens Georgia’s economy.

About Georgia Tech

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is one of the top public research universities in the U.S., developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees, as well as professional development and K-12 programs for fostering success at every stage of life. Its more than 56,000 undergraduate and graduate students represent 54 U.S. states and territories and more than 146 countries. They study at the main campus in Atlanta, at instructional sites around the world, and through distance and online learning.

As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

About The Coca-Cola Company

The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE: KO) is a total beverage company with products sold in more than 200 countries and territories. Our company’s purpose is to refresh the world and make a difference. We sell multiple billion-dollar brands across several beverage categories worldwide. Our portfolio of sparkling soft drink brands includes Coca-Cola, Sprite, and Fanta. Our water, sports, coffee, and tea brands include Dasani, smartwater, vitaminwater, Topo Chico, BODYARMOR, Powerade, Costa, Georgia, Fuze Tea, Gold Peak, and Ayataka. Our juice, value-added dairy, and plant-based beverage brands include Minute Maid, Simply, innocent, Del Valle, fairlife, and Santa Clara. We’re constantly transforming our portfolio, from reducing sugar in our drinks to bringing innovative new products to market. We seek to positively impact people’s lives, communities, and the planet through water replenishment, packaging recycling, sustainable sourcing practices, and carbon emissions reductions across our value chain. Together with our bottling partners, we employ more than 700,000 people, helping bring economic opportunity to local communities worldwide. Learn more at www.coca-colacompany.com and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

In the International Disaster Reconnaissance (IDR) course, students now use Filio, a platform built by School of Computing Instruction Senior Lecturer Max Mahdi Roozbahani, to capture immersive 360° media, photos, and video that transform real disaster sites in India and Nepal into living digital classrooms. 

Offered by the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and taught by IDR director and Regents’ Professor David Frost, the course pairs traditional fieldwork with Roozbahani’s expertise in immersive technology and data-driven learning, transforming on-the-ground observations into reusable, interactive educational resources. 

How Computing Can Capture Data 

Disasters are not only physical events; they are also information events, Roozbahani says. Effective response and long-term resilience depend on the ability to observe, record, and communicate critical data under pressure. Georgia Tech’s IDR course pairs structured on-campus preparation with international field experiences, enabling students to study the cascading effects of major disasters, including how local building practices, governance, and culture shape damage and recovery. 

“When students step into a disaster zone, they learn quickly that resilience is a systems problem: physical, social, and informational. Our job in computing is to help them capture and reason about that system responsibly,” Roozbahani said. 

Learning from the 2025 Himalayas Expedition 

During spring break last year, the cohort traveled along the Teesta River corridor in Sikkim, India. The region is shaped by steep terrain, fast-moving water, and critical infrastructure in narrow valleys. 

The visit followed the October 2023 glacial lake outburst flood from South Lhonak Lake, which destroyed the Teesta III hydropower dam and impacted downstream towns, including Dikchu and Rangpo. Field stops across India included Lachung, Chungthang, Dikchu, Rangpo, Gangtok, and New Delhi. 

Students explored both upstream and downstream consequences. 

Upstream, the team examined how steep terrain and river confinement amplify flood forces, creating cascading risks for infrastructure. Using Filio’s interactive 360° media, students captured conditions in Lachung and Chungthang, allowing viewers to explore the landscape through a 360° photo and 360° video that reveal how topography and river dynamics intensify disaster impacts. 

They studied community-scale effects downstream, including damaged buildings, disrupted access, and prolonged recovery timelines. 

Rangpo offered a glimpse of recovery in motion, with materials staged for rebuilding bridges and roads essential to commerce and emergency response.

Atlanta is consistently ranked among the top cities for congestion, but new projects and a commitment to improving transportation on campus and in the city have earned Georgia Tech several honors and a reputation as a transportation infrastructure leader.  

Georgia Tech researchers say HPC and artificial intelligence (AI) advances this year are poised to improve how people power their homes, design safer buildings, and travel through cities.

According to Qi Tang, scientists will take progressive steps toward cleaner, sustainable energy through nuclear fusion in 2026. 

“I am very hopeful about the role of advanced computing and AI in making fusion a clean energy source,” said Tang, an assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE). 

“Fusion systems involve many interconnected processes happening across different scales. Modern simulations, combined with data-driven methods, allow us to bring these pieces together into a unified picture.”

Tang’s research connects HPC and machine learning with fusion energy and plasma physics. This year, Tang is continuing work on large-scale nuclear fusion models.

Only a few experimental fusion reactors exist worldwide compared to more than 400 nuclear fission reactors. Tang’s work supports a broader effort to turn fusion from a promising idea into a practical energy source.

Nuclear fusion occurs in plasma, the fourth state of matter, where gas is heated to millions of degrees. In this extreme state, electrons are stripped from atoms, creating a hot soup of fast-moving ions and free electrons. In plasma, hydrogen atoms overcome their natural electrical repulsion, collide, and fuse together. This releases energy that can power cities and homes.

Computers interpret extreme temperatures, densities, pressures, and plasma particle motion as massive datasets. Tang works to assimilate these data types from computer models and real-world experiments.

To do this, he and other researchers rely on machine learning approaches to analyze data across models and experiments more quickly and to produce more accurate predictions. Over time, this will allow scientists to test and improve fusion reactor designs toward commercial use. 

Beyond energy and nuclear engineering, Umar Khayaz sees broader impacts for HPC in 2026.

“HPC is the need of the day in every field of engineering sciences, physics, biology, and economics,” said Khayaz, a CSE Ph.D. student in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. 

“HPC is important enough to say that we need to employ resources to also solve social problems.”

Khayaz studies dynamic fracture and phase-field modeling. These areas explore how materials break under sudden, rapid loads. 

Like nuclear fusion, Khayaz says dynamic fracture problems are complex and data-intensive. In 2026, he expects to see more computing resources and computational capabilities devoted to understanding these problems and other emerging civil engineering challenges.

CSE Ph.D. student Yiqiao (Ahren) Jin sees a similar relationship between infrastructure and self-driving vehicles. He believes AI will innovate this area in 2026.

At Georgia Tech, Jin develops efficient multimodal AI systems. An autonomous vehicle is a multimodal system that uses camera video, laser sensors, language instructions, and other inputs to navigate city streets under changing scenarios like traffic and weather patterns.

Jin says multimodal research will move beyond performance benchmarks this year. This shift will lead to computer systems that can reason despite uncertainty and explain their decisions. In result, engineers will redefine how they evaluate and deploy autonomous systems in safety-critical settings.

“Many foundational problems in perception, multimodal reasoning, and agent coordination are being actively addressed in 2026. These advances enable a transition from isolated autonomous systems to safer, coordinated autonomous vehicle fleets,” Jin said. 

“As these systems scale, they have the potential to fundamentally improve transportation safety and efficiency.”

Some were still alive, but most of the birds were dead. They were all too easy to find.

“I knew birds hit buildings, but I didn’t know much more about the issue at that time, and I was surprised how easily I just found birds,” Betuel said.

Birds flying into windows aren’t isolated events. Environmentalists estimate between 365 million and one billion birds die each year from colliding with structures in the U.S.  

“That statistic is hard for most people to comprehend,” Betuel said. “When you think about the millions of homes we have and these high-rise buildings, and if each one is killing a few a year, that number can get big pretty quick.”

Betuel is the executive director of Birds Georgia, a nonprofit affiliate of the Audubon network that leads bird conservation efforts in Georgia. For 10 years, volunteers from the organization have combed Atlanta’s streets, collecting bird specimens.

Birds Georgia launched Project Safe Flight in 2015 to reduce bird building-collision mortality through data collection. Through legislation, the group aims to make building construction bird-friendly and reduce light pollution.

Environmentalists who study the issue have ranked Atlanta, which sits squarely on a migration route, as the fourth-most dangerous city for birds during fall migration. It is the ninth-most dangerous city during spring migration.

The number of bird deaths from collisions in Atlanta and across the state remains unknown. However, new data tools developed by student researchers in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech are helping Birds Georgia get a clearer picture of the issue.

“We’ve been working with different folks at Georgia Tech for years now, but it’s really picked up lately,” Betuel said. “There’s a lot of momentum and interest on campus to try to make the city safer for birds.”

Pushing for Policy

Ashley Boone, a Ph.D. student in human-centered computing in Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, has led the student effort to help Birds Georgia organize its data. 

Boone said organizing data and knowing how to use it is critical to spark conversations about adopting legislation.

“We often see a gap between data collection and data advocacy,” she said. “Birds Georgia has done an amazing job of tracking collisions in Atlanta over the last 10 years. My goal is to understand the role technology can play in making data useful for policy change.”

User-interface tools designed by computer science undergraduate students James Kemerait and Ian Wood have ramped up that process. One tool converts data input into visualizations optimized for social media, while another consolidates the data collected by volunteers and external sources.

Boone said the desired legislation would mirror policies implemented by New York City. Those policies require the use of bird-safe materials — like window film with patterned designs that break up reflections — in new buildings and buildings undergoing significant renovations. 

What Can Residents Do?

Residents, whose homes account for about 40% of bird collision deaths in the U.S., can also make an impact.

“Households are an underexamined cause of bird collisions,” Boone said. “We focus on the big buildings because it’s easier to convince one manager of a large building to use bird-safe materials, and it’s easier for a policy to address a commercial building. But the sheer volume of residential buildings in the U.S. has a tremendous impact on the number of collisions.”

Steps that homeowners can take include:

• Buying bird-safe film or making do-it-yourself versions of it to put on windows.
• Placing attractive objects like birdhouses and birdfeeders very close or very far away from windows.
• Turning off lights after 9 p.m. on the busiest migration nights of the year.

Betuel said millions of birds can fly over Atlanta on a single night during migration, and they are attracted to the city lights.

“They’ll come into urban centers and collide with an illuminated building, or maybe they overnight somewhere that isn’t safe,” he said. “The next day, they’re surrounded by glass, and birds don’t understand reflection.”

Residents can visit the Birds Georgia website to sign up for the Lights Out Pledge. Those who sign up will receive a text on the 10 busiest migratory nights of the year, and they will be asked to turn their lights off early.

The tools provided by Georgia Tech gave Birds Georgia insight into the number of bird species affected by collisions — more than 140, according to Betuel.

Betuel said that when the organization reaches an estimate of bird collisions, he hopes the number will raise alarms and turn people’s attention to the ecological impact. 

“All these birds being lost results in fewer birds to eat pest insects, fewer birds to pollinate flowers, fewer birds to disperse seeds — all the ecological functions that we need, that they’re doing in the background that most people aren’t keen to,” he said. “If this decline in bird life continues to happen, at some point, there will be issues with our ecosystems functioning as they always have.”

The assessment, funded by the city’s Tree Recompense Fund, uses advanced remote sensing tools such as WorldView-2 satellite data and a random forest classification model to categorize land into three land cover types. These include tree canopy, non-tree vegetation (grass, shrubs, and low lying vegetation) and non-vegetation (water, pervious surface). The methodology delivers a detailed spatial picture of land cover across the city.

“This is simply a tool in their planning arsenal,” said Anthony Giarrusso, who has led every canopy study since 2008. “Before they did any of this work in 2008, everything was anecdotal. It was reactionary.”

The new study is not advocacy — it’s information. Giarrusso emphasized that while researchers stay neutral in the politics of urban growth and conservation, their work equips city leaders with science-based knowledge to make more effective zoning and planning decisions.

In addition to mapping existing conditions, the Georgia Tech team developed the Potential Planting Index (PPI), a scalable tool that identifies where tree planting is physically possible based on current land cover. The tool quantifies the difference between tree canopy and non-tree vegetation, indicating zones with restoration potential.

Another key insight is the challenge of interpreting canopy change without understanding land use patterns. “It gives you a false sense of stability if you don’t understand the underlying land use,” said Giarrusso. “You might see canopy regrowth on paper, but that land could be cleared again tomorrow.” He explained that this false signal is particularly common in stalled development sites: “We saw a lot of properties where trees had regrown after initial clearing, but it was temporary and monoculture, low quality canopy. Several of those areas were cleared again for construction later.”

Giarrusso pointed to these “loss-gain-loss” cycles as one of the more misleading aspects of tree canopy analysis without strong land use context. “Some of them were pipe farms — land cleared for development with infrastructure like water and sewer lines installed, but then construction never happened. So trees grow back, and you get a canopy gain that doesn’t last and is nowhere near the quality of the trees originally cleared.”

He stressed that policymakers need to consider the permanence of canopy when using the data. “If it’s just going to be cleared again in two years, it’s not really a gain. That’s why long-term tracking and land use analysis together are so important.”

The city has incorporated these tools into broader planning efforts, including zoning reform and tree ordinance revisions. The research supports recommendations such as restricting full lot clearing in certain zoning categories and adjusting setback or lot coverage limits to better preserve existing canopy.

Giarrusso underscored the urgency of protecting larger, intact forested tracts. “If you can see it from space and it’s still forest — save it,” he said. “Once it’s cleared, you don’t get it back.”

311 systems allow residents to report potholes, broken fire hydrants, and other municipal issues. In recent years, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to provide 311 services to community residents has boomed across city and state governments. This includes an artificial virtual assistant (AVA) developed by third-party vendors for the City of Atlanta in 2023.

Through survey data, researchers from Tech’s School of Interactive Computing found that many residents are generally positive about 311 chatbots. In addition to eliminating long wait times over the phone, they also offer residents quick answers to permit applications, waste collection, and other frequently asked questions.

However, the study, which was conducted in Atlanta, indicates that 311 chatbots could be causing residents to feel isolated from public officials and less aware of what’s happening in their community.

Jieyu Zhou, a Ph.D. student in the School of IC, said it doesn’t have to be that way.

Uniting Communities

Zhou and her advisor, Assistant Professor Christopher MacLellan, published a paper at the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) Conference that focuses on improving public service chatbot design and amplifying their civic impact. They collaborated with Professor Carl DiSalvo, Associate Professor Lynn Dombrowski, and graduate students Rui Shen and Yue You.

Zhou said 311 chatbots have the potential to be agents that drive community organization and improve quality of life.

“Current chatbots risk isolating users in their own experience,” Zhou said. “In the 311 system, people tend to report their own individual issues but lose a sense of what is happening in their broader community. 

“People are very positive about these tools, but I think there’s an opportunity as we envision what civic chatbots could be. It’s important for us to emphasize that social element — engaging people within the community and connecting them with government representatives, community organizers, and other community members.”

Zhou and MacLellan said 311 chatbots can leave users wondering if others in their communities share their concerns.

“If people are at a town hall meeting, they can get a sense of whether the problems they are experiencing are shared by others,” Zhou said. “We can’t do that with a chatbot. It’s like an isolated room, and we’re trying to open the doors and the windows.”

Adding a Human Touch

In their paper, the researchers note that one of the biggest criticisms of 311 chatbots is they can’t replace interpersonal interaction.

Unlike chatbots, people working in local government offices are likely to:

• Have direct knowledge of issues
• Provide appropriate referrals
• Empathize with the resident’s concerns

MacLellan said residents are likely to grow frustrated with a chatbot when reporting issues that require this level of contextual knowledge.

One person in the researchers’ survey noted that the chatbot they used didn’t understand that their report was about a sidewalk issue, not a street issue.

“Explaining such a situation to a human representative is straightforward,” MacLellan said. “However, when the issue being raised does not fall within any of the categories the chatbot is built to address, it often misinterprets the query and offers information that isn’t helpful.”

The researchers offer some design suggestions that can help chatbots foster community engagement and improve community well-being:

• Escalation. Regarding the sidewalk report, the chatbot did not offer a way to escalate the query to a human who could resolve it. Zhou said that this is a feature that chatbots should have but often lack.
• Transparency. Chatbots could provide details about recent and frequently reported community issues. They should inform users early in the call process about known problems to help avoid an overload of user complaints.
• Education. Chatbots can keep users updated about what’s happening in their communities.
• Collective action. Chatbots can help communities organize and gather ideas to address challenges and solve problems.

“Government agencies may focus mainly on fixing individual issues,” Zhou said, “But recognizing community-level patterns can inspire collective creativity. For example, one participant suggested that if many people report a broken swing at a playground, it could spark an initiative to design a new playground together—going far beyond just fixing it.”

These are just a few examples of things, the researchers argue, that 311 services were originally designed to achieve.

“Communities were already collaborating on identifying and reporting issues,” Zhou said. “These chatbots should reflect the original intentions and collaboration practices of the communities they serve.

“Our research suggests we can increase the positive impact of civic chatbots by including social aspects within the design of the system, connecting people, and building a community view.”

Georgia Tech researchers say the new policy marks a major step forward in climate adaptation, especially for heat-vulnerable communities, and could help position Atlanta as a national leader in urban resilience.

How Cool Roofs Can Help Hotlanta 

”On any given summer afternoon, temperatures in Atlanta’s intown neighborhoods can be as much as 15 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in the city’s most forested areas,” said Brian Stone, professor in the School of City and Regional Planning and associate director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Urban Resilience and Analytics.

That spike is partly due to the urban heat island effect — a phenomenon driven by heat-trapping materials like concrete, asphalt, and dark rooftops, combined with the loss of trees and natural landscapes. The impacts are not just uncomfortable — they’re dangerous. Extreme heat is now one of the deadliest forms of weather in the U.S., with disproportionate effects on low-income communities, elderly residents, and those without access to air conditioning.

According to Patrick Kastner, assistant professor in the School of Architecture, rooftops are key contributors. “A major driver [of heat buildup] is dark, heat-absorbing material that stores solar energy during the day and then re-radiates it at night. If you look at a satellite image, for most of the day rooftops have more exposure to the sun than building facades — so the material choice there matters a lot.”

The Power of Reflective Roofs — and Trees

Stone and his students conducted modeling that found that widespread adoption of cool roofs across Atlanta could lower summer afternoon temperatures by more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit in many neighborhoods. That’s comparable to findings in other global cities like London, where cool roofs have reduced average temperatures by up to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F).

But cool roofs are only one part of a broader urban cooling strategy. In the same study, Stone’s team showed that planting trees in just half of Atlanta’s available planting zones could yield an even more dramatic effect, reducing temperatures by 4 F or more in some areas.

“Cool roofs are highly effective, but pairing them with increased urban tree cover would multiply the benefits, especially for neighborhoods currently lacking shade,” Stone said.

Equity and Energy Impacts

Atlanta’s ordinance requires cool roofing materials on new commercial construction and when existing commercial roofs are replaced. While that may sound like a technical design tweak, Stone emphasized its equity implications.

“Residents in South and West Atlanta, where tree canopy is sparse, and energy costs take up a larger share of household income, stand to gain the most,” Stone said. “When a cool roof is installed as part of a required roof replacement, those households will see meaningful reductions in cooling costs month after month.”

Kastner added that cool roofs could ease pressure on the electrical grid, lowering peak energy demand required for cooling during extreme heat and possibly reduce the risk of outages.

Durability, Maintenance, and Design Trade-offs

Stone noted that cool roofs tend to extend the life of roofing materials by limiting thermal degradation. However, he and Kastner also flagged some trade-offs.

For example, highly reflective coatings can create glare, especially on sloped roofs near neighboring buildings. The ordinance accounts for this by setting different standards for flat and pitched roofs. Maintenance is another consideration: over time, reflective coatings may degrade or become dirty, requiring periodic cleaning to maintain performance.

“Aesthetics and material compatibility may also challenge adoption when it comes to historic buildings or for roofs already outfitted with solar panels,” Kastner said. “But advancements in roofing technology, including high-performance materials that aren’t plain white, offer more flexible options than ever before.”

A Cool Roof Policy With National Impact

While cities like New York and Chicago have implemented cool roof programs for over a decade, Atlanta’s proposed ordinance is one of the most comprehensive in the country — applying to all roof types, not just flat industrial ones.

“Atlanta is steadily emerging as one of the most climate-resilient cities in the U.S.,” said Stone, pointing to the city’s urban forest and growing network of floodable parks as complementary resilience strategies. “Adding a best-in-class cool roofing ordinance to that portfolio is a bold step forward.”

And it could spark innovation across the region.

“Georgia Tech is uniquely positioned to help advance climate-resilient design,” Kastner said. “From research on advanced coatings to urban planning tools that target the most heat-vulnerable areas, we’re bringing science and policy together to shape cooler, healthier cities.”

Before these futuristic aircraft can take off, Georgia Tech researchers say there’s serious work to do — in the air, on the ground, and in policy.

Why Now? The Technology Is Catching Up

“The same battery and automation technologies we’re using in electric ground vehicles are now being scaled for aircraft,” said Laurie Garrow, professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and co-director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Urban and Regional Air Mobility. “We’re also seeing improvements in distributed propulsion and composite materials that make these aircraft lighter, quieter, and more efficient.”

Garrow cautions that widespread commercial service is years away. “We may see high-profile demonstrations soon, maybe even at global events like the Olympics, but aviation certification is a rigorous process. It takes time to earn public trust.”

Safety, Regulation, and Public Acceptance

The promise of AAM depends on more than aircraft design — it also requires new safety frameworks and public confidence.

“We’ll need to define what I call ‘roads in the sky’ — safe corridors where these aircraft can operate alongside traditional air traffic,” Garrow said. “And we’ll need to ensure certification standards, air traffic control, and pilot training evolve alongside technology.” 

Understanding how these vehicles interact with complex urban environments is essential to safe operation. Marilyn Smith, David Sloan Lews Professor in the School of Aerospace Engineering and director of the Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence, leads research on modeling and simulation to prepare aircraft for real-world conditions.

Her lab is developing real-time simulations that factor in turbulence, wind shear, and other transient effects. “These predictions are not trivial,” Smith said. “We need fast, physics-based models that can run in near-real time to inform both design and regulation. There are significant and abrupt variations in the atmosphere that must be accounted for, both for passenger vehicles and smaller delivery drones.”

Smith’s team is also integrating artificial intelligence to improve speed and accuracy in certification — but always under expert oversight. “AI can accelerate our work,” she said. “Without the knowledge of domain experts, machine learning can generate misleading results, and that’s unacceptable when safety is on the line.”

Infrastructure, Airspace, and the Urban Puzzle

Even the most advanced aircraft cannot operate without new infrastructure on the ground and in the sky. 

Vertiports are needed to allow aircraft to take off and land vertically. Also required are “charging systems and robust fire safety protocols for high-energy batteries,” Garrow said. “And perhaps most critically, we need ‘rules of the road in the sky’ to manage air traffic around existing airports.”

Atlanta could offer a unique advantage. “The runways at Hartsfield-Jackson run east to west, while most of the metro population centers are north and south,” Garrow noted. “That natural separation could make it easier to integrate vertical takeoff and landing operations.”

Alex Oettl, professor in the Scheller College of Business, cautions that AAM’s benefits could concentrate in major hubs without inclusive planning. “Improved connectivity will raise productivity in ‘superstar cities,’ but we’ll need new strategies if we want to ensure smaller communities aren’t left behind,” he said.

China’s Head Start and What It Means for the U.S.

Oettl notes that China has surged ahead in AAM thanks to coordinated government action, flexible regulations, and significant infrastructure investment.

“In contrast, the U.S. and Europe face more stringent certification requirements,” Oettl said. “That slows deployment but ideally ensures stronger safety standards. It’s a tradeoff between innovation speed and risk management.”

Cities and companies that move first into AAM could shape standards and attract investment — but they also shoulder more risk. “There’s a danger of technological lock-in or stranded assets if early systems don’t scale or demand falls short,” Oettl said. “We’ve seen parallels before, like the scooter boom that left cities with thousands of idle vehicles.”

Looking Ahead: The Urban Sky 

For now, AAM remains on the horizon — visible but not yet within reach. Coordinated efforts between government, industry, and academia will determine how quickly it moves from prototype to daily reality.

“Georgia has been proactive in attracting aviation manufacturing,” Garrow said. “Coupled with our state’s infrastructure and Georgia Tech’s research ecosystem, we’re well positioned to lead.”

She added, “In aviation, we like to say we crawl, we walk, we run. These technologies are coming, but safely integrating them into our skies will take time, teamwork, and trust.”

With a keen eye and a passion for geography, Radu Casapu, a graduate student in the School of City and Regional Planning, won the 2025 GeoGuessr World Championship in Copenhagen, Denmark.

PEMBROKE, GA — For more than two decades, Ray Butler has run Butler’s Tire & Lube in the heart of Pembroke. He’s seen the town evolve, shrink, and now, rapidly grow — all during the time of his life as a local here. 

“Science Square Labs marks a pivotal step forward for Georgia Tech and for Atlanta’s growing life sciences ecosystem. We’re not only accelerating our research and innovation — we’re building powerful momentum across the region,” said Ángel Cabrera, president of Georgia Tech. “Our labs moving to this space will attract top talent and drive medical innovation. The move sets the stage for transformative discoveries, and we hope others will join us to continue Atlanta’s evolution into a global hub for medical breakthroughs.” 

This move comes as Georgia Tech saw a 46% increase in research awards from 2018 to 2024, evidence of the Institute’s fast-growing impact. By adding these labs, Atlanta strengthens its position on the national stage for advanced tech and life sciences innovation.  

Why It Matters 

• Saving lives: From early cancer detection and more innovative immune therapies to healing damaged tissues and managing chronic diseases, the research that will be conducted at Science Square tackles health issues millions face.
• Fueling a tech hub: By combining research powerhouses like Georgia Tech and Emory with next-gen laboratory facilities, Atlanta is building the brainpower and resources to compete with national tech centers.
• Economic growth: Science Square is helping attract top researchers, startups, and funding — bringing jobs, investment, and opportunities to Georgia. Most recently, Duracell announced they are moving their research and development headquarters to Science Square. 

Research for Real Life 

Ph.D. student Phillip Si and Assistant Professor Peng Chen developed Latent-EnSF, a technique that improves how ML models assimilate data to make predictions.

In experiments predicting medium-range weather forecasting and shallow water wave propagation, Latent-EnSF demonstrated higher accuracy, faster convergence, and greater efficiency than existing methods for sparse data assimilation.

“We are currently involved in an NSF-funded project aimed at providing real-time information on extreme flooding events in Pinellas County, Florida,” said Si, who studies computational science and engineering (CSE). 

“We're actively working on integrating Latent-EnSF into the system, which will facilitate accurate and synchronized modeling of natural disasters. This initiative aims to enhance community preparedness and safety measures in response to flooding risks.” 

Latent-EnSF outperformed three comparable models in assimilation speed, accuracy, and efficiency in shallow water wave propagation experiments. These tests show models can make better and faster predictions of coastal flood waves, tides, and tsunamis. 

In experiments on medium-range weather forecasting, Latent-EnSF surpassed the same three control models in accuracy, convergence, and time. Additionally, this test demonstrated Latent-EnSF's scalability compared to other methods.

These promising results support using ML models to simulate climate, weather, and other complex systems.

Traditionally, such studies require employment of large, energy-intensive supercomputers. However, advances like Latent-EnSF are making smaller, more efficient ML models feasible for these purposes.

The Georgia Tech team mentioned this comparison in its paper. It takes hours for the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts computer to run its simulations. Conversely, the ML model FourCastNet calculated the same forecast in seconds.

“Resolution, complexity, and data-diversity will continue to increase into the future,” said Chen, an assistant professor in the School of CSE. 

“To keep pace with this trend, we believe that ML models and ML-based data assimilation methods will become indispensable for studying large-scale complex systems.”

Data assimilation is the process by which models continuously ingest new, real-world data to update predictions. This data is often sparse, meaning it is limited, incomplete, or unevenly distributed over time. 

Latent-EnSF builds on the Ensemble Filter Scores (EnSF) model developed by Florida State University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers. 

EnSF’s strength is that it assimilates data with many features and unpredictable relationships between data points. However, integrating sparse data leads to lost information and knowledge gaps in the model. Also, such large models may stop learning entirely from small amounts of sparse data.

The Georgia Tech researchers employ two variational autoencoders (VAEs) in Latent-EnSF to help ML models integrate and use real-world data. The VAEs encode sparse data and predictive models together in the same space to assimilate data more accurately and efficiently.

Integrating models with new methods, like Latent-EnSF, accelerates data assimilation. Producing accurate predictions more quickly during real-world crises could save lives and property for communities.

[Related: University of South Florida Researchers Track Flooding in Coastal Communities During Hurricanes Helene and Milton]

To share Latent-EnSF to the broader research community, Chen and Si presented their paper at the SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE25). The Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) organized CSE25, held March 3-7 in Fort Worth, Texas.

Chen was one of ten School of CSE faculty members who presented research at CSE25, representing one-third of the School’s faculty body. Latent-EnSF was one of 15 papers by School of CSE authors and one of 23 Georgia Tech papers presented at the conference.

The pair will also present Latent-EnSF at the upcoming International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025). Occurring April 24-28 in Singapore, ICLR is one of the world’s most prestigious conferences dedicated to artificial intelligence research.

“We hope to bring attention to experts and domain scientists the exciting area of ML-based data assimilation by presenting our paper,” Chen said. “Our work offers a new solution to address some of the key shortcomings in the area for broader applications.”

As the Los Angeles fires quickly spread starting Jan. 7, with wind gusts approaching 100 mph, scientists observed a 110-fold rise in airborne lead levels. This spike had receded by Jan. 11.  

With the recent and rapid growth of distributed renewable technologies — wind, solar, and hydropower, and storage assets like batteries — a team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology is reimagining the planning paradigm for electric power infrastructure. The hope is to help shape new models that are better suited to community needs and include input and decision-making at the local level.

As envisioned, the Georgia Energyshed (G-SHED) will analyze the benefits, costs, and effects of various electricity generation, distribution, and usage-and-demand scenarios via use-case tests and modeling. That data will then be used to inform policy decisions at the local level and the implementation of new ideas for the 11-county metro Atlanta area as defined by the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC).

“What’s unique about this proposal is we’re using this funding to explore a new planning mechanism that would really listen to the voices of these communities around their energy matrix,” said Richard Simmons, director of research and studies at Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute. Simmons is the project's principal investigator.

Announced on November 2, the energyshed award is part of the federal agency’s push to encourage a regional approach to understanding local energy demands and needs — and the best solutions to solve them tailored to those communities. Through its Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, the DOE funding is part of a wider strategy to help communities understand the impacts and benefits of consuming energy that they generate locally.

“The idea is not only to better include these communities in the conversation, but demonstrate that they can realize more local benefits from their and input and decisions.”

Leading the initiative is the Energy, Policy, and Innovation Center (EPICenter). An arm of the Strategic Energy Institute, EPICenter is tasked with marrying innovation with energy technology and policy; contributing to sound recommendations for the Southeast through unbiased research and analysis.

“This grant is ideally suited for the mission of the EPICenter, which really tries to take leading energy technology and apply it in a local context that is mindful of the economic and social implications,” Simmons said.

The Georgia Tech team also includes researchers from the School of Public Policy, the School of City and Regional Planning, and the College of Engineering.

To conduct the work, Georgia Tech is collaborating with key partners: the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC), which has engaged in similar planning and modeling processes for regional water and transportation usage and trends; and the Southface Institute, a sustainability non-profit with extensive experience in outreach, and community engagement research. Another nonprofit, the Partnership for Southern Equity, has also provided a letter endorsing the initiative.

A New Approach to Resource Management
The G-SHED idea is modeled after the watershed concept, which takes a regional, solutions-based approach to address water demand and usage at the community level. Much like watersheds, where water collection, processing, distribution, use, and discharge is determined at the community level, Simmons said the idea is to explore how a similar approach can be valid for planning and infrastructure related to energy systems, such as electricity.

“There do appear to be some critical advantages by looking at local generation, consumption and even storage of renewable energy,” said Simmons. “That might help not only meet the needs of the local populace, but it could have conversion efficiency benefits and have more direct impact on both the economic and environmental wellness of the area.”

While individual people and organizations already make energy-related decisions — consumers buying electric vehicles or developers erecting green or sustainable office buildings, for example — there’s greater impact when broadened to the community or regional level, said Joe Hagerman, EPICenter director.

“So, when decisions are made, they are being made at a community level and capture a more representative local understanding. That information can be shared both upstream and downstream to the utilities, planners, and policymakers,” Hagerman said. “We’re hoping to create a tool that will help people make those decisions in a more holistic way, rather than making it all individually.”

Ensuring All Voices Are Heard
A key component of the G-SHED effort is to ensure all communities are included in the regional energy planning and decision-making processes.

Marilyn Brown, Regents’ Professor and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy, has conducted pioneering work on energy burdens in the Southeast.

“The goal is balanced growth and shared prosperity in the Atlanta metropolitan area by helping local communities and neighborhoods,” Brown said. 

The Southface Institute and ARC will leverage novel socio-technical tools developed by Georgia Tech to assess ways metro Atlanta can ensure all residents benefit from the transition to a cleaner and more sustainable energy economy. The team will survey community groups about energy use and service options, access to rate plans, ease of understanding electric bills, and familiarity with community energy options. Then, they will build an online toolkit to address these needs and help them learn how to use it.

“Focusing on that aspect is critical to the overall project’s success because rising energy and utility costs fall disproportionately on those who can least afford them and yet have limited influence in the decision making,” said Chandra Farley, the city of Atlanta’s chief sustainability officer.

Nationally, Atlanta is 4th highest in median energy burden levels (behind Memphis, New Orleans, and Birmingham, respectively) and 3rd highest among low-income household populations.

“Evaluating energy needs at the local and metro area level with direct input from the communities who have typically had no voice in energy decision making is an important tool in energy planning,” Farley said. “The work that Georgia Tech is leading on energysheds will support community-informed energy planning and reinforce our efforts in the city of Atlanta to address energy affordability and advance access to the benefits of renewable energy projects leading to healthier communities and economic empowerment.”

At the same time, Columbus was named a Smart 20 award winner by Smart Cities Connect for the Digital Twin River Safety Project. That award will be presented in May.

“These accolades are a testament to the Partnership’s pivotal role in developing, nurturing, steering, and funding these projects from conception to triumphant completion,” said Debra Lam, the Partnership’s director. The Partnership is comprised of several private and public sector entities and is supported by Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute.

The Warner Robins project to develop and test a Citizen Safety Digital Twin for Community Resilience integrated a dynamic license plate reader solution with police department investigation practices to help lower crime rates in the community. Working with researchers from Georgia Tech and Middle Georgia State University, the Warner Robins Police Department used historical crime data to determine the optimal location and direction to place license plate reader cameras. During the six-month pilot phase of the project, the data helped recover 27 stolen vehicles and solve three major crimes — a shooting and two homicides.

“It’s one of the best investments I think we can make as a city because it brings the peace of mind of safe streets, safe communities, safe shopping experience. The fact that we have our flock cameras in different areas in our city with the smart technology to expand the footprint of our police department helps us solve crime and also helps deter crime, which is even more beneficial.” Warner Robins Mayor LaRhonda Patrick said.

The Woodstock project dates back to 2020, when the city worked with the Partnership on a master plan and smart corridor study to help alleviate the traffic and lack of parking in the city, following a doubling of the population since 2010.

In that first part of the project, the city collected data from GridSmart installations, which document minute-by-minute traffic and turning movements. In the second phase, interns from the Partnership examined the data to find ways to integrate it with previously collected traffic volume flows to show historical patterns. The goal is to determine the best way to amalgamate the data for use in making smart decisions about new transportation projects.

“Woodstock is honored to be among this diverse list of communities, and we are proud to represent the state of Georgia with fellow honoree Warner Robins,” said Mayor Michael Caldwell. “The city of Woodstock is committed to improving its citizens’ quality of life through smart technology programs. From transportation systems to innovative infrastructure technology, the city has been boldly pursuing the initiatives of its Smart Master Plan since 2020.”

The Columbus project’s goal is to make the world’s longest manmade urban whitewater course safer for swimmers and boaters. Scheduled and unscheduled dam releases have caused flooding, limited time for evacuations, and drownings. A digital twin created for the river allowed Georgia Tech and Columbus State University researchers to collaborate and develop technology that can predict changing water levels, detect humans in the water, and alert authorities.

“I think to win the award is awesome, but the impetus was to promote river safety and provide real-time SMART solutions that save lives,” said James Forrest Toelle, Ph.D., information technology director for Columbus consolidated government, and the project manager for the digital twin project. “None of it would have been possible without the tremendous partnership with Georgia Tech, the Partnership, and our local fire department.”

It was an incredibly valuable opportunity to develop public safety Digital Twins together with collaborators in Columbus and Warner Robins, said John Taylor, Frederick Law Olmsted Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, “It is particularly rewarding to see the research being implemented to help save lives and reduce crimes in real communities. These smart community awards are important recognition of the forward thinking vision and dedication to public safety of these communities.”

These three international wins follow the selection of Valdosta as a finalist in the 2021 World Smart Cities Awards in the Mobility Category for its Traffic Monitoring and Communication System to Improved Safety, Connectivity, and Efficiency project that has reduced the time it takes for first responders to travel the city.

“These projects exemplify the transformative power of technology and community engagement in creating safer, more enjoyable, and more resilient communities,” Lam said. “This remarkable success rate is a clear indicator of our role in nurturing a vibrant ecosystem for innovations—placing Georgia firmly on the map for smart cities.”

The U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure held a roundtable on artificial intelligence (AI) in infrastructure and transportation on April 16, 2024 where Partnership Executive Director Debra Lam was invited to speak and share how the organization is leveraging AI as a tool to bring innovative solutions in the transit space.

Lam also sat down with U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, the committee's ranking member, for Q&A session on how AI can help drive innovation in transportation forward.

Below are Lam's prepared remarks for the hearing:

Good morning, Chairman Graves, Ranking Member Larsen and distinguished members of the House Transportation Committee. It's an honor to be here today to discuss the transformative potential of AI in Transportation.

My name is Debra Lam and I lead the Partnership for Inclusive Innovation based out of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Our mission is to catalyze and invest in innovative solutions that drive shared economic prosperity through public-private collaborations. Since 2020, the Partnership's work has deployed millions in financial and social capital and catalyzed hundreds of projects with local governments, corporates, universities, startups, and nonprofits. The projects have created new businesses, increased jobs, and deployed hundreds of technologies and innovations.

In the realm of AI and transportation, we are guided by three core principles:

• Community-centered problem solving: We believe in starting with the challenges faced by communities themselves, who best understand their needs. However, complex issues like transportation and infrastructure require a collective approach. This is why we form robust public-private partnerships, combining the expertise of multidisciplinary research teams to find the most effective tech-based solutions tailored to community goals. Whether it is AI or other future, unknown technology, it should be seen as one of many tools that is centered on solving community problems.
• Innovation for all: We stand by the idea that every community, regardless of its size or location, can be a hub of innovation. Our objective is to democratize access to technology and foster an understanding of innovations like AI. This empowers communities to not just utilize technology but to refine and advance it.
• A holistic view of transportation: Transportation is the lifeline connecting housing and employment. We are dedicated to ensuring that accessible and affordable transportation, especially with the integration of AI and other advanced technologies, is not a hurdle but a support system for securing employment and accessing homes.

Now, let me illustrate how these principles come alive in one of our projects:

Through a U.S. Dept. of Transportation SMART grant, the Chatham Area Transit Authority, with Georgia Tech researchers, is improving transit services in historically underserved neighborhoods. Piloting an On-Demand Multi-model Transit System (ODMTS) powered by AI, riders, including paratransit riders can use a mobile application to summon prompt and efficient transit service.

The AI-driven algorithm behind the service not only learns and evolves from increased usage but also guides the existing, professional drivers along the safest and most expedient routes. The project utilizes union operators and trains early career professionals as operators and maintenance personnel from the local colleges. Additionally, we are improving algorithms to optimize electric vehicle charging to increase operational efficiency and energy conservation.

This project stands as a testament to our approach, showcasing AI as a powerful ally in elevating and integrating transportation services to meet the needs of all communities.

I look forward to delving into these topics with you today.

Thank you for your attention and for supporting this vital work.

Researchers from the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) created the Large Pre-Trained Time-Series Model (LPTM) framework. LPTM is a single foundational model that completes forecasting tasks across a broad range of domains. 

Along with performing as well or better than models purpose-built for their applications, LPTM requires 40% less data and 50% less training time than current baselines. In some cases, LPTM can be deployed without any training data.

The key to LPTM is that it is pre-trained on datasets from different industries like healthcare, transportation, and energy. The Georgia Tech group created an adaptive segmentation module to make effective use of these vastly different datasets.

The Georgia Tech researchers will present LPTM in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, at the 2024 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024). NeurIPS is one of the world’s most prestigious conferences on artificial intelligence (AI) and ML research.

“The foundational model paradigm started with text and image, but people haven’t explored time-series tasks yet because those were considered too diverse across domains,” said B. Aditya Prakash, one of LPTM’s developers. 

“Our work is a pioneer in this new area of exploration where only few attempts have been made so far.”

[MICROSITE: Georgia Tech at NeurIPS 2024]

Foundational models are trained with data from different fields, making them powerful tools when assigned tasks. Foundational models drive GPT, DALL-E, and other popular generative AI platforms used today. LPTM is different though because it is geared toward time-series, not text and image generation.  

The Georgia Tech researchers trained LPTM on data ranging from epidemics, macroeconomics, power consumption, traffic and transportation, stock markets, and human motion and behavioral datasets.

After training, the group pitted LPTM against 17 other models to make forecasts as close to nine real-case benchmarks. LPTM performed the best on five datasets and placed second on the other four.

The nine benchmarks contained data from real-world collections. These included the spread of influenza in the U.S. and Japan, electricity, traffic, and taxi demand in New York, and financial markets.   

The competitor models were purpose-built for their fields. While each model performed well on one or two benchmarks closest to its designed purpose, the models ranked in the middle or bottom on others.

In another experiment, the Georgia Tech group tested LPTM against seven baseline models on the same nine benchmarks in zero-shot forecasting tasks. Zero-shot means the model is used out of the box and not given any specific guidance during training. LPTM outperformed every model across all benchmarks in this trial.

LPTM performed consistently as a top-runner on all nine benchmarks, demonstrating the model’s potential to achieve superior forecasting results across multiple applications with less and resources.

“Our model also goes beyond forecasting and helps accomplish other tasks,” said Prakash, an associate professor in the School of CSE. 

“Classification is a useful time-series task that allows us to understand the nature of the time-series and label whether that time-series is something we understand or is new.”

One reason traditional models are custom-built to their purpose is that fields differ in reporting frequency and trends. 

For example, epidemic data is often reported weekly and goes through seasonal peaks with occasional outbreaks. Economic data is captured quarterly and typically remains consistent and monotone over time. 

LPTM’s adaptive segmentation module allows it to overcome these timing differences across datasets. When LPTM receives a dataset, the module breaks data into segments of different sizes. Then, it scores all possible ways to segment data and chooses the easiest segment from which to learn useful patterns.

LPTM’s performance, enhanced through the innovation of adaptive segmentation, earned the model acceptance to NeurIPS 2024 for presentation. NeurIPS is one of three primary international conferences on high-impact research in AI and ML. NeurIPS 2024 occurs Dec. 10-15.

Ph.D. student Harshavardhan Kamarthi partnered with Prakash, his advisor, on LPTM. The duo are among the 162 Georgia Tech researchers presenting over 80 papers at the conference. 

Prakash is one of 46 Georgia Tech faculty with research accepted at NeurIPS 2024. Nine School of CSE faculty members, nearly one-third of the body, are authors or co-authors of 17 papers accepted at the conference. 

Along with sharing their research at NeurIPS 2024, Prakash and Kamarthi released an open-source library of foundational time-series modules that data scientists can use in their applications.

“Given the interest in AI from all walks of life, including business, social, and research and development sectors, a lot of work has been done and thousands of strong papers are submitted to the main AI conferences,” Prakash said. 

“Acceptance of our paper speaks to the quality of the work and its potential to advance foundational methodology, and we hope to share that with a larger audience.”

These are details autonomous flying vehicles would need to know to function safely. However, few aerial image datasets exist that can adequately train the computer vision algorithms that would pilot these vehicles.

That’s why Georgia Tech researchers created a new benchmark dataset of computer-generated aerial images.

Judy Hoffman, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, worked with students in her lab to create SKYSCENES. The dataset contains over 33,000 aerial images of cities curated from a computer simulation program.

Hoffman said sufficient training datasets could unlock the potential of autonomous flying vehicles. Constructing those datasets is a challenge the computer vision research community has been working for years to overcome.

“You can’t crowdsource it the same way you would standard internet images,” Hoffman said. “Trying to collect it manually would be very slow and expensive — akin to what the self-driving industry is doing driving around vehicles, but now you’re talking about drones flying around. 

“We must fix those problems to have models that work reliably and safely for flying vehicles.”

Many existing datasets aren’t annotated well enough for algorithms to distinguish objects in the image. For example, the algorithms may not recognize the surface of a building from the surface of a street.

Working with Hoffman, Ph.D. student Sahil Khose tried a new approach — constructing a synthetic image data set from a ground-view, open-source simulator known as CARLA.

CARLA was originally designed to provide ground-view simulation for self-driving vehicles. It creates an open-world virtual reality that allows users to drive around in computer-generated cities.

Khose and his collaborators adjusted CARLA’s interface to support aerial views that mimic views one might get from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). 

What's the Forecast?

The team also created new virtual scenarios to mimic the real world by accounting for changes in weather, times of day, various altitudes, and population per city. The algorithms will struggle to recognize the objects in the frame consistently unless those details are incorporated into the training data.

“CARLA’s flexibility offers a wide range of environmental configurations, and we take several important considerations into account while curating SKYSCENES images from CARLA,” Khose said. “Those include strategies for obtaining diverse synthetic data, embedding real-world irregularities, avoiding correlated images, addressing skewed class representations, and reproducing precise viewpoints.”

SKYSCENES is not the largest dataset of aerial images to be released, but a paper co-authored by Khose shows that it performs better than existing models. 

Khose said models trained on this dataset exhibit strong generalization to real-world scenarios, and integration with real-world data enhances their performance. The dataset also controls variability, which is essential to perform various tasks.

“This dataset drives advancements in multi-view learning, domain adaptation, and multimodal approaches, with major implications for applications like urban planning, disaster response, and autonomous drone navigation,” Khose said. “We hope to bridge the gap for synthetic-to-real adaptation and generalization for aerial images.”

Seeing the Whole Picture

For algorithms, generalization is the ability to perform tasks based on new data that expands beyond the specific examples on which they were trained.

“If you have 200 images, and you train a model on those images, they’ll do well at recognizing what you want them to recognize in that closed-world initial setting,” Hoffman said. “But if we were to take aerial vehicles and fly them around cities at various times of the day or in other weather conditions, they would start to fail.”

That’s why Khose designed algorithms to enhance the quality of the curated images.

“These images are captured from 100 meters above ground, which means the objects appear small and are challenging to recognize,” he said. “We focused on developing algorithms specifically designed to address this.”

Those algorithms elevate the ability of ML models to recognize small objects, improving their performance in navigating new environments.

“Our annotations help the models capture a more comprehensive understanding of the entire scene — where the roads are, where the buildings are, and know they are buildings and not just an obstacle in the way,” Hoffman said. “It gives a richer set of information when planning a flight.

“To work safely, many autonomous flight plans might require a map given to them beforehand. If you have successful vision systems that understand exactly what the obstacles in the real world are, you could navigate in previously unseen environments.”

For more information about Georgia Tech Research at ECCV 2024, click here.

Led by a team of University of Alaska Fairbanks and Georgia Tech researchers that includes School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Professor Rodney Weber, the researchers' latest findings are published in Science Advances. 

In the study, the team leveraged state-of-the-art thermodynamic tools used in global air quality models, with an aim to better understand how reducing the amount of primary sulfate in the atmosphere might affect sub-zero air quality conditions.

The project stems from the 2022 Alaskan Layered Pollution and Chemical Analysis project, or ALPACA, an international project funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and European sources. It is part of an international air quality effort called Pollution in the Arctic: Climate Environment and Societies.

Read the full story in the University of Alaska Fairbanks newsroom.

The increase would bring the regional population to 7.9 million, but to accommodate that growth, Georgia Tech experts say improvements in the housing, transportation, and labor markets must be made.  
 

Housing 

The five-county core around Atlanta — Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, DeKalb, and Clayton — will account for nearly half of the new residents and continues to grow. Gregory Randolph, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of City and Regional Planning, says the region must start by reexamining its approach to urbanism as new census data shows Atlanta has become the sixth most-populated metro area in the country.  

"For the second half of the 20th century, little of the population growth in metro Atlanta was happening in the City of Atlanta, but that has changed over the past two decades. With the urban core growing, we have an opportunity. to pursue a different kind of urban form that is higher density and more walkable. A lot of the recent growth in Atlanta is adding density without necessarily improving the quality of urbanism.”  

He explains that, especially in downtown Atlanta, retrofitting existing properties will play a key role in transforming neighborhoods through the replacement of "lower-value infrastructure," such as surface parking lots, with higher-density housing. In a post-pandemic environment, the conversion of office space to mixed-use properties is emerging as a strategy in urban areas like Atlanta.   

A 2023 report identified the need for 391,878 housing units within the five-county core at the current population level. Mike Dobbins, professor of the practice in the School of City and Regional Planning, credits efforts made by the mayor's office and nonprofit organizations such as the Urban Land Institute to increase availability.  

"We're living in a situation where housing values are too high because big money investors are bidding up real estate prices throughout the region. Even nationally, it's double the rate of wage increases. The biggest question is how can we bring down housing costs,” he said.  

Randolph and Dobbins agree that addressing Atlanta’s housing needs is more complicated than simply adding supply.  

“Our priority must be building housing that is affordable to low- and middle-income households, and in a way that promotes mixed-income, walkable neighborhoods with equitable, car-free access to amenities like parks, schools, and community-serving retail,” Randolph said.  

Labor 

Along with population growth, the region will add an estimated 856,000 jobs, with significant gains in healthcare, technology, and waste management. To maintain a labor force that can fill the jobs of the future, Dobbins stresses that continued investment in K-12 education, especially in traditionally underserved communities, is vital to accommodate new growth and overcome existing challenges of inequity. 

Atlanta has the highest income inequality in the nation. According to the Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative, the average white family’s median income is $83,722 compared to $28,105 for Black families and $43,110 for Latino families. That gap widens when examining wealth, which for white households is 46 times higher than that of Black households in Atlanta.   

The ARC study notes that "virtually all the net growth will come from racial and ethnic minority groups.” Randolph points to policy as a necessary tool in improving workforce development for current and future residents to support equitable and inclusive growth across the region. He adds that institutions like Georgia Tech can play a role in expanding access to the advanced degrees often needed to fill the jobs created by the city’s emerging status as a technology hub, with an emphasis on ensuring access to these degrees among historically disadvantaged groups in the city. 

Transportation 

The other 900,000 projected new residents will reside among the remaining 16 counties in the Atlanta region. The ARC predicts the most rapid growth in Forsyth, Barrow, Paulding, Cherokee, Walton, and Coweta, and the need for affordable housing will extend to the surrounding counties, as will the need to travel throughout the region.  

Ryan Gravel, the Georgia Tech alumnus and mind behind the Atlanta BeltLine, says transit improvements are needed to ensure each county is connected to Atlanta’s city center.  
 
“We haven't made a substantial new transit investment since 2000,” he said. “Meanwhile, the region has grown substantially since then. We haven't been laying the foundation for that future growth, which means it will come in ways that we don't want: more traffic, more congestion, and more inequities in communities of color.”  

Gravel, founder of the consulting firm Sixpitch, rejects adding lanes to existing highways, saying that strategic improvements to MARTA — the rail system constructed in 1979 — will reduce traffic while allowing residents to live outside of the five-county core.  

“As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago,” he said. “The second-best time is now. We didn’t do it 20 years ago, but we could start now.”   

In his 2024 State of the City address, Dickens announced plans to construct a new MARTA rail station on the Southside at the Murphy Crossing redevelopment project site, connecting the system to Beltline for the first time. The mayor revealed preliminary plans to add three infill MARTA stations throughout the city, however, specific locations were not announced.  

Plans to add a portion of the light-rail system around the BetlLine are currently under review, with construction on the Streetcar East expansion project — extending Atlanta Streetcar service from downtown Atlanta to Ponce de Leon Avenue — projected to begin construction in 2025 and begin service in 2029. In 2025, the MARTA Rapid Summerhill project will begin service from downtown to Capitol Gateway, Summerhill, Peoplestown, and the BeltLine through dedicated bus lanes with transit signal priority to bypass traffic. 

 

A “Beloved Community”   

The Atlanta region’s transformation will not happen overnight, but anchor institutions like Georgia Tech can contribute along the way. Randolph sees current plans to revitalize portions of the city’s Westside as an example of how neighborhoods can be revitalized for current residents while simultaneously building with future growth in mind.  

“It’s important that we continue to play a positive role in not just physically developing the Westside but also thinking about how we can strengthen the economy of Westside neighborhoods through our own procurement and purchasing practices. It's an example of how Georgia Tech, as an engine of economic development, can play a positive role in propelling that growth while ensuring that the growth is inclusive.” Randolph said.  

The solutions to the ARC’s projected growth will not be cheap or easily attained, but as Gravel points out, it’s an opportunity for Atlanta to honor its past as it marches toward its future, aspiring to Martin Luther King Jr.’s idea of the beloved community.  

“The prosperity of the metropolitan region stands on the shoulders of the Civil Rights Movement,” he said. “If that's who we are when we're at our best, then we should use that as a model for how we move forward. How we accommodate that future change should be based on decisions to ensure that this place is a place for everyone.” 

But this whitewater also presents a life-threatening problem.

A dam upstream can increase water levels within minutes, and those who aren’t familiar with the area can be surprised and swept away by rushing water. Civic leaders have put up warning signs, and sirens blare when water levels are rising, but despite the many warnings, there are water rescues and even drownings at this area of the river every year.

“Growing up around here, you’re always told, ‘Don’t get in that river. That river will suck you under. You don’t get in there,’” says Jeremy Miles, assistant IT director for the city of Columbus. “But now on a pretty day, you’ll see a lot of people in the river and beside the river. It’s a new fad. And we also have this great whitewater course, so it’s an attraction that brings people from all over.”

For emergency responders, getting a precise location when someone is in danger is critical to favorable outcomes, and those in Columbus emergency circles say that is difficult on the river.

“We will have an emergency on the river, and we’ll have the wrong location given to us, and what happens is we’ll bring the wrong piece of equipment or find out it’s in another part of the river,” says Deputy Chief Daniel Macon of Columbus Fire & EMS.

This can waste precious seconds during an emergency, which is why Georgia Tech researchers wanted to find a solution.

“After a year and a half of effort,” said John Taylor, Frederick Law Olmsted Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, “we’ve created a system that can identify people who might be in trouble on the river and give rescue workers precise information that will allow them to get people out of harm’s way or get them out of the water if they’ve fallen in.”

Cameras mounted on a bridge over the river send a constant signal of activity below. A computer algorithm that’s part of the smart river safety digital twin scans the images, identifying people and placement. Using data from other monitoring devices, the system will predict when rising water will put people in danger. The system sends alerts with precise information on location, and emergency responders immediately know what to do and, more importantly, where they need to do it.

A yellow alert lets responders know someone is in a danger zone. An orange alert means someone is in a danger zone, and water levels are rising quickly. A red alert tells crews that someone is in the water with no boat or kayak nearby and is at risk of drowning.

During a test with Swiftwater/Flood Search and Rescue Team members in October, researchers and city leaders were able to see the system in action.

Neda Mohammadi, another Georgia Tech researcher and project lead from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering says, “We’ve been testing the system live and in real time, and it’s really rewarding to see that it’s working and that what we’ve anticipated really took place.”

The work is part of Partnership for Inclusive Innovation, a public-private initiative based out of Georgia Tech that catalyzes innovation for shared economic prosperity. It invests in projects that join researchers with communities to provide advanced technologies to build local capacity and improve the human condition.

Columbus firefighter Captain Stephen Funk says, “It means time. It means a matter of life and death. And it means having the right people in the right place.”

While she didn't realize how much time she'd spend at Tech after arriving as a transfer student, Stone knew instantly that she had found a home here.  

"I remember driving up to Georgia Tech and just being wowed by the beauty of the campus and its history and feeling like this place was special,” she said. “This green urban campus in the middle of a city has so much to offer. I kept coming back for the quality of the education, and I love to see how the campus has gotten more beautiful, advanced, and innovative by improving upon itself." 

Among the transformative projects completed during Stone's time on campus is The Kendeda Building for Innovative and Sustainable Design — a building she had a hand in designing as a member of the project team. 

"It's such an honor as a student to be able to put my own thumbprint on this campus that has given me so much. I'm so proud of the outcome and that it can be used as an example, as a learning lab, and an educational opportunity to show this is what sustainability looks like," she said. 

As construction crews continue their work on the early stages of Tech Square Phase 3, Stone sees another dream project come to fruition, having worked on the concept phase of the high-rise towers. The Scheller and George Towers will add more than 400,000 square feet of new space for research and collaboration and, to Stone, signify an ongoing commitment to the Institute putting its mission statement into action. 

"There is something so ambitious and beautiful about this project, continuing to connect a green, urban campus to these dense buildings that are reaching up and stating to the skyline, 'We are Georgia Tech,'" she said of the towers, which are expected to be completed in 2026.  

Stone has seen the campus grow through the years alongside her growing family, which now includes three kids. After completing her first degree, she and her husband, Lorrin, welcomed their first two children. When she returned to Tech to pursue a master's degree in architecture, her children were there to lend a helping hand.  

"I was hauling them to student meetings, and they were meeting me in the studio between classes. They have been on campus more times than they recognize, and they are just growing as this campus grows. They have watched me do homework, they have been a part of my group assignments and group calls, and I feel it's only fitting that they are here at Commencement at the final moment with me," she said.  

That teamwork played a key role in Stone's final semester of her master's program in 2020, when her backyard became her lab due to the pandemic.  

"I built my model for my final project with my son and my daughter breaking bricks and gluing them to the side of a facade," said Stone, who was pregnant with the couple's third child at the time. "I got to bring in small hands to help with projects and explain to them what I was doing and why I was doing it in a way that they don't normally get to see. We learned a lot during the pandemic, but that's what we do at Georgia Tech. We innovate, we learn, we adapt." 

Intrigued by the intersection of architecture and business, Stone was drawn to the Scheller College of Business, where she will receive her MBA, bringing an end to her educational journey with her family at her side. After taking time to enjoy the holidays and complete a Half Ironman triathlon, Stone will be teaching an architecture course at Kennesaw State University in the spring. 

The system is being piloted in Warner Robins, Georgia. It uses artificial intelligence to sift through years of historical crime data to predict where future crimes are likely to happen, and by placing cameras that can read license plates in those areas, a three-month test period shows the community has been able to prevent some of those crimes.

“The fact that we have our cameras in different areas in our city, that smart technology expands the footprint of our police department which helps us solve crime and also helps deter crime, which is even more beneficial,” said Warner Robins Mayor LaRhonda Patrick.

For cities and counties with limited resources, it’s a tool that could bring more impact with the money and equipment that is already being used to reduce crime.

Georgia Tech’s John Taylor, a professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, says, “When we were brought in, there was a general belief that crimes were really occurring in certain parts of the city, but as we looked at the crimes from week to week, we saw that they're actually moving around the city.”

The work is part of Georgia Tech’s Partnership for Inclusive Innovation, a public-private initiative that catalyzes innovation for shared economic prosperity. It invests in projects that join researchers with communities to bring advanced technologies to build local capacity and improve the human condition.

Over the three months, researchers saw a reduction in crimes such as assault and burglary. Georgia Tech is helping the city deploy a more equitable solution in using cameras to fight crime and helping extend the city’s budget and its police officers’ work to make their community safer.

With Tech leading the way, a new USG study finds that the system contributed a total of $20.1 billion to Georgia’s economy, up nearly $800 million from FY 2021.

“Georgia Tech is proud to be a public institution of the state of Georgia and to contribute to its prosperous economy,” said Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera. “Collectively, this report underscores the value of our state’s higher education system. We will continue to do our part to produce the talent, innovation, and economic development that drives our state forward.”

In the past fiscal year, USG accounted for 159,034 full- and part-time jobs –– the same employment impact statewide as Georgia’s top five employers combined. Tech directly supported 9,617 on-campus jobs in FY 2022 and an additional 20,666 jobs that exist due to institution-related spending.

The study, conducted by the Selig Center for Economic Growth, finds that each job created by USG generates two additional jobs in local communities.

In FY 2022, Tech received $375 million in state appropriations, providing a twelvefold return on investment to the state.

The USG study finds that graduates in the past fiscal year, including the 9,952 Tech graduates, will earn on average over $1 million more in their lifetime than they would have without their college degrees. The 71,731 total graduates are predicted to accumulate combined lifetime earnings of $183 billion.

“USG’s 26 public colleges and universities, individually and collectively, make a significant economic impact across the state, helping to put Georgians to work while spending money in local communities and helping their regional economies support Georgia’s growth,” USG Chancellor Sonny Perdue said. “At the same time, our graduates are the real winners with this million-dollar deal. We’re focused on continuing to help all our students be successful as they use their degrees to prepare themselves for their future prosperity.”

The full economic impact report and lifetime earnings reports are available on USG’s website.

In a digital age, an endless amount of data is available at the tap of a screen. That accessibility allows Doug Sims to keep all 482 of Infrastructure and Sustainability's (I&S) maps up to date for the Georgia Tech community.

Sims arrived at Tech in 2008 as a utility analyst. With a background in civil engineering and the keen eye of a land surveyor, he began identifying ways to streamline operations using a geographic information system (GIS). At the time, Sims explained that GIS was seldom used outside of tax assessors’ offices, but he recognized its ability to connect lines on a page to valuable data.

"If you're looking at a line for a pipe, you can click on the pipe and see that it's a 10-inch pipe, and you can see what it carries, what it's used for, and where it goes," Sims said.

Over the past 25 years, Sims noted how GIS has exponentially evolved to map out entire countries. Georgia Tech is often described as a city within a city, and with the help of GIS, that presents an opportunity for the department to get a better lay of the land.

"We have our own electrical distribution system. We have our district energy for the chilled water and the steam managed by I&S. When you look at how GIS is normally used, it's normally looking at larger scales. So, once you start shrinking it to a relatively small area like the Tech campus, it changes how you look at things as they become much more detailed,” he said.

Now the senior systems support engineer for Infrastructure and Sustainability, Sims' foresight to increase GIS application was a catalyst for the data sets that exist today. In his role, Sims continues to search for ways to capture additional data points and recognizes that the communal nature of a campus setting can provide opportunities for instantaneous collaboration.

"It's a big paradigm shift. It's putting power in the hands of the people where they can make the changes immediately. Whether I'm sitting on campus or 50 miles away, I can make a change. They can hit refresh and see that change immediately. It's changing how we think about and use that data every day," he said.

A recent project, working alongside the recycling and zero waste department, invited students to identify the location of all trash cans and recycling bins on campus. Sims' creation allowed participants to use their phones to pinpoint locations that were added to the map, which has since been used for additional analysis of the Institute's sustainability efforts.

The ability to connect with data instantaneously has helped Sims and his staff, which recently added a new team member –– a Tech alumna who worked with the department as an undergraduate –– to expedite work orders across campus. The first widespread application of GIS mapping empowers members of the Tech community to report landscaping requests to I&S by marking the exact location of the issue, sending photos and any other relevant information directly to an organized dashboard for review. Sims hopes to expand this service to additional services in the coming years.

Keeping campus informed and operating at its most efficient is a point of personal pride for Sims, and, wielding what he calls the “GIS hammer,” he hopes to be a springboard to assist other departments using GIS.

"If people want to map something or see what we have, get in touch with me, and let's see if there's a solution we can provide to you," he said. "I'm here to come up with an answer that makes their day easier, makes their job easier, and provides data for other people to share around campus."

Sims laments that while he does get the rare request for printed maps, they are often already outdated while they’re still warm from the printer due to the speed at which data changes at Tech.

A new study from Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering looks closer at using overhead cable line (OCL) technology to power trucks, evaluating if they are wise environmental and economical choices.

For some countries, including the United States as a whole, Sweden and Germany, the team suggests OCL technology is ideal. It’s also beneficial at the state level for New York, Washington, and Georgia. But for other areas, it shouldn’t be implemented until the region’s electric grid is cleaner.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Both Voelker and Vorpahl work for Karma Automotive, a luxury electric vehicle manufacturer based in California. Beginning with their time at Tech, they've never let gender bias stop them from pursuing their passion.

"It's math," Vorpahl, a visualization and digital design modeler at Karma, said. "You either get the question right, or you get the question wrong. I think that attitude really helps when you get into a professional environment. It teaches you to have tougher skin where if you are the best for that job, you will get the job. That's what Georgia Tech instilled."

Vorpahl grew up in the industry watching her family operate what is now the oldest independently owned Mercedes-Benz dealer in metro Atlanta after her grandfather, an engine designer for the German automaker, came to America and opened the shop in 1967. She arrived at Georgia Tech unsure if she'd follow in her family's footsteps, but ultimately, she landed an internship at Daimler, the nation's largest commercial vehicle manufacturer.

While other interns came in with a background in automotive design, Vorpahl’s willingness to learn and tireless work ethic landed her a full-time job as the only woman in the company's design studio.

During her three years at Daimler before accepting her position at Karma in 2022, she'd occasionally make the drive from Portland, Oregon, back to Georgia. Along the way, she crossed paths with truckers, who often expressed surprise that Vorpahl was among those behind the scenes designing their rigs. She often heard questions like “Why do you work there?” or “How did you end up there?”

And her response was simple. "Women like cars, too.” 

That rang true through Voelker's childhood as well. When the senior director of program management for Karma arrived in Atlanta for her first year at Georgia Tech, she knew she'd found a place that could help her turn an aptitude for math and science, and a fervor for cars, into a career.

"Best move I ever made," Voelker said on her decision to enroll at Tech, although it wasn't just the Institute's stellar reputation that lured her from her home state of New Hampshire. "I visited campus in February. There was 6 feet of snow on the ground and then I came to Atlanta, and the flowers were blooming."

After changing her major from mechanical engineering to industrial design, Voelker got her foot in the door through an internship with Masterack, a commercial cargo vehicle equipment manufacturer based in Atlanta. She attended Tech at a time when women made up around 27% of the undergraduate population, so when she entered the workforce, she wasn't fazed. "It never bothered me. I have always felt like I fit right in, especially when it's the right school, the right class, or the right company where everybody appreciates learning from each other and working together towards a common goal," she said.

In fact, her experience on North Avenue taught her to always keep learning and never give up, a piece of advice she now passes along to other women entering the industry.

"Don’t be afraid to give your opinion in meetings, speak up and use all of the knowledge that you've learned over the years toward whatever project you're working on," said Voelker, who worked her way up the ladder at Masterack for 18 years before seeking a new challenge at Karma. “That's one thing that I haven't backed down on. If I have a strong opinion about something, I have no fear of saying it.”

Vorpahl and Voelker each commended Karma for their dedication to promoting hard-working women and a culture that fosters diversity — a principle that Vorpahl especially values after completing two study abroad programs at the University of Singapore and the University of Strathclyde.

“One of the biggest advantages was seeing how people from different countries approach design and how different schools approach design. You don’t want a bunch of people who all think exactly the same way. Otherwise, we’d all be driving around in the exact same vehicle,” she said.

Leading Karma’s commercial vehicle product line, Voelker noted that she has continued to see more women in leadership positions and at industry conferences, and she hopes that momentum carries over to the next generation. Highlighting the importance of igniting both young girls’ and boys' interest in STEM, Voelker recently spoke to a local second grade class to share her experiences.

"I've been really fortunate to have had some great mentors over my career, so I love to pay it forward to the younger generation," she said. "They were so excited, and I hope that stays with them and excites them to learn more about engineering."

In addition to providing an example to young women of how to succeed in a competitive industry, Vorpahl also hopes to share the technical aspects of what she's learned in the field with her alma mater and offer future graduates a roadmap to a career in automotive design.

"The students would thrive in this industry because it is so nitpicky, and Tech minds would just love it," she said. "There's not really a direct path from the Georgia Tech studios into car studios, so I'm hoping that I can show them that path."

Voelker and Vorpahl are bonded by their employer and their alma mater, but it’s their shared passion for seeing their hard work hit the pavement that continues to drive them.  

Events throughout the month allow students, faculty, and staff to familiarize themselves with sustainability efforts being put forward by the Institute and practices they can incorporate into their daily routines.

The global theme for Earth Day 2023 — the 53rd iteration of the event — and Tech’s month-long rendition is “invest in our planet.”

“The Earth Month lineup highlights the numerous ways that community members can embrace this theme,’” said Abby Bower, sustainability program support coordinator. “Today, the planet faces daunting challenges, but we all have the opportunity to pitch in to solve them. Georgia Tech has many great organizations, departments, and individuals dedicating their time and resources to making a better world, and we are excited to highlight them all month long.”

During Earth Month, you can participate in service opportunities, attend educational events, weigh in on ways Georgia Tech can meet our climate goals, and more.

Tech Beautification Day

April 1, 8:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m., The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design

The kickoff event for Earth Month, organized by the undergraduate Student Government Association and Georgia Tech Greek Week, will see hundreds of volunteers completing projects all over campus. After a welcome breakfast, groups of eight to 10 will be assigned a task with the goal of keeping the Georgia Tech campus as picturesque as ever. With assistance from Georgia Tech Landscaping, projects include planting flowers, trees, and shrubs; pulling weeds; and spreading pine straw. A primary goal of this year’s event is to plant 200 native azaleas.

For registration and additional information, click here.

Earth Day Clothing Swap at The Kendeda Revolving Closet

April 3 -7, 9 a.m. – 4 p.m., Basement of The Kendeda Building

Sustainable fashion is a pillar of this year’s global event. According to earthday.org, 87% of the 150 billion garments produced by the fashion industry each year eventually end up in landfills, and just 1% of discarded clothing is recycled. This weeklong event is a chance to donate gently used, clean clothes and recycle torn clothes and textiles.

Earth Day Bird Walk

April 5, 8:30 a.m. – 10 a.m., The Kendeda Building

The 400-acre Tech campus is home to diverse wildlife populations, including many species of birds. Learn more about the region’s birds from an expert guide during the Bird Walk organized by The Kendeda Building and Georgia Audubon Society. The reintroduction of native plants around Kendeda has created a habitat for birds, and the adjoining EcoCommons is part of a wildlife sanctuary certified by the Georgia Audubon, making Tech the first main campus in the state to receive the designation.

For registration and additional information, click here.

Southern Energy Conference

April 7, 9:30 a.m. – 2 p.m., Bill Moore Student Success Center

With the theme of “building blocks for a zero-carbon future,” the Energy Club will host the conference featuring keynote speakers, company demos, and panels discussing the technology and economics behind the future of the energy sector. Students are invited to compete in the Energy Research Poster Competition with cash prizes on the line.

For registration and additional information, click here.

EcoReps Earth Month Celebration

April 11, 1 – 3 p.m., West Village Dining Commons

Hosted by the 2022-23 EcoReps, this event is a celebration of all things sustainability in Housing and Residence Life, highlighting recent successes such as the Energy Competition, the ECGO app, and its growing composting program.

For additional information, click here.

Earth Month Bike Ride

April 11, 4:30 – 6 p.m., Meet on the Front Lawn of the Campus Recreation Center (CRC)

Hosted by the CRC, the leisurely 7-mile, no-drop ride promotes an alternate form of transportation and a healthy lifestyle. The ride will begin with a welcome from noted bike enthusiast President Ángel Cabrera and provide an overview of infrastructure projects that are making campus increasingly rider-friendly from Institute Landscape Architect Jason Gregory.

Registration and completion of a waiver are required. Riders are strongly encouraged to wear a helmet. Tech students, faculty, and staff can get a free helmet by completing the online Ride Smart Bike/Scooter Safety class.

For registration information, click here.

Propel ATL City Cycling Class - Georgia Tech Community

April 13, 4 – 5 p.m.

Propel Atlanta invites the Georgia Tech community to learn the rules of cycling during this instructional group ride. Participants will practice skills in a safe and supportive environment.

After getting the hang of the basics with a few drills, the 45-minute ride of 3 to 4 gentle miles will begin. Riders will experience Atlanta’s existing bicycle facilities, such as two-directional protected and single-directional bike lanes and sharrows, and learn to ride safely on streets without bike lanes by exercising their legal right to “take the lane.”

For registration information, click here.

Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems Seminar Series: Anjali Thomas

April 13, 3 – 4 p.m., Economic Development Building (BBISS Suite 118)/Online

In the first of two seminars in this series, Anjali Thomas, associate professor and director of the Nunn School Program in Global Development, explores how “bureaucratic hurdles and identity politics shape water access in urban India.”

For additional information, click here.

Earth Day Org Fair and Celebration

April 18, 11 a.m. – 1 p.m., The Kendeda Building

Student organizations, academic departments, and groups around Atlanta will have tables set up in The Kendeda Building atrium and patio to promote a sustainable and environmentally conscious community. Enjoy free King of Pops, and bring a t-shirt, tote bag, or other item to be screen-printed with Earth Day designs. The Office of Sustainability will also have recovered shirts that can be used.

For additional information, click here.

Climate Action Plan Student Engagement Workshop

April 20, 5 – 6 p.m., Room 102, Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons

With a goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2050, Georgia Tech is developing and implementing a comprehensive, cross-cutting Climate Action Plan. Students are invited to learn more about the plan and offer their thoughts on how the Institute can meet its climate goals during this engaging workshop hosted by the Office of Sustainability.

For additional information, click here.

Community Garden Ribbon Cutting

April 21, 2 – 3 p.m., Community Garden (Instructional Center Lawn)

Located along the Experiential Walkway, this event invites the Georgia Tech community to check out the newly renovated Community Garden and learn how to get involved.

For additional information, click here. 

Film Screening: Making Pandemics at the Global Media Fest

April 23, 2 – 5 p.m., John Lewis Student Center

The French department in the School of Modern Languages will host a screening of Making Pandemics, a film that “seeks to understand the causes of this epidemic of pandemics” over the past four decades. The screening is free and open to the public.

Following the film, a panel of guest speakers will discuss its findings.

For more information, click here.

Sustainable-X Hangout

April 26, 3 – 4 p.m., Center for Sustainable Business Suite/Online

A partnership between the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business and CREATE-X, Sustainable-X is a Sustainability Next Institute Strategic Plan project. With events occurring on the fourth Wednesday of every month, this session will examine social and environmental entrepreneurship and how to access resources for projects.

Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems: Jenny McGuire

April 27, 3 – 4 p.m., Economic Development Building (BBISS Suite 118)/Online

Continuing the series hosted by the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, Jenny McGuire, an associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, will host a seminar focused on “conserving the fabric of life given the complexities of global change.”

 For additional information, click here.

Explore the Earth Month calendar for a comprehensive event lineup and updates. Campus groups, departments, and organizations interested in adding their sustainability-focused event to the Earth Month Calendar can submit this form or email Abby Bower. 

With historic investments from major players in the EV space, including Rivian, Kia, and Hyundai, the state of Georgia is uniquely positioned to serve as a leader in this effort. As the state's leading research institute, Georgia Tech is on the cutting edge of the movement. 

The transportation sector is the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the U.S. at nearly 30%, with passenger vehicles accounting for around 80% of the sector's total output1 as of 2019. Electric vehicles are widely regarded as a budding solution to reduce emissions, but even as both demand and production continue to increase, EVs currently account for around 1% of the cars on America's roadways. 

From the supply chain to the infrastructure needed to support alternative-fuel vehicles alongside consumer hesitancy, achieving the goals set by both the public and private sectors — including the Biden Administration's target of EVs making up at least 50% of new car sales by 2030 — will not be easy. Through research and development, policy, and collaboration, Tech experts are working toward finding solutions that will serve as catalysts during this transitionary period for the environment and the way Americans drive.

Check out the full story. 

During the 30-minute panel session, Garrow led the discussion on examining the new ways data and technology are helping create a more connected, efficient, and sustainable journey for modern airline passengers. The panelists were able to highlight how their companies are tracking information across the entire passenger journey, highlighting ways that they are adopting sophisticated data collection and analysis to make real-time operational decisions and improve the experience for customers across the globe.

United Airlines spotlighted its ConnectionSaver tool, which sends travelers messages with directions to the gate for their connecting flight, information about expected travel time between the two gates, and will even hold the flight for a few minutes.

Garrow also asked how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are being used to improve technologies and make flying a smoother and more enjoyable process for passengers. Among the many initiatives mentioned, Enel-Réhel from Collins Aerospace spoke on that company’s ongoing efforts to develop and improve the technology used for predictive maintenance monitoring for aircraft to prevent unexpected maintenance issues. 

To close out the discussion, Garrow asked the panelists what’s next and how they see technology playing a role. Each panelist responded by emphasizing the importance of data collection, AI, and machine learning. 

Garrow expressed her appreciation for being invited to the panel saying, “It’s important as a woman [in] engineering to be featured at conferences like these.” She noted that there is an underrepresentation of women in aviation and emphasized the ongoing efforts to change that. 

Garrow is a professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and is the first woman and the first academic to serve as president in the Airline Group of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies’ 60-year history. In her role as co-director for the Center for Urban and Regional Air Mobility, she has conducted research in advanced air mobility that has focused on understanding demand for these new modes of transportation.

Heat waves around the world have dashed records, threatened public health, and buckled infrastructure, in what Georgia Tech researchers say are signs of the climate crisis' impact on day-to-day weather.

“This is a stronger heat wave than it used to be,” says Georgia Tech heat expert Zachary Handlos in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “But, really, the concern is that these are expected to happen more frequently as the globe warms and atmosphere warms. So, that means everything is warmer in general.”

According to data from U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers, more than 700 people nationwide died from heat-related causes annually from 2004 to 2018. Some research suggests that the death toll will rise in the coming years as climate change makes extreme heat more common, Handlos adds.

“It’s like the frog in a boiling pot analogy,” said School of Economics Assistant Professor Casey Wichman. “It may have been cooler five to 10 years ago, but since those temperature fluctuations changed, it seems each year we seem to break new records and have more extreme records.”

While everyone is susceptible to the health effects of heat, some people are at much greater risk than others. Experts at Tech explain that there’s a clear divide broken up differentially along socio-economic lines.

“Climate change is the greatest threat in human history, and underserved populations are the most at dire risk when it comes to the calamities of the climate crisis,” said Tarek Rakha, assistant professor and director of the High Performance Building Lab. 

“More than a quarter percent of the disabled community live below the poverty line,” said Senior Research Engineer Maureen Linden from Georgia Tech’s Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation. “So there are more people with disabilities who are living in less resourced environments who wouldn’t be able to afford air conditioning, which makes them more susceptible to extreme heat.”

In crowded areas such as downtown cities and underserved communities, the buildings tend to be older and not equipped to effectively provide the temporary relief the residents need on high temperature days, Rakha adds. This also leads to many blackouts and brownouts in such areas.

Rolling blackouts and brownouts have affected major cities in many states including Texas and California, leaving many vulnerable to high temperatures over 100 degrees.

Linden points out that such heat-related emergencies also cause problems for the most vulnerable. Those who are unable to regulate their body temperature or rely on specialized equipment are at a critical risk due to the inability to access power and lifesaving power-dependent equipment.

People with mobility issues face their own difficulty reaching cooling centers either due to distance or the struggle to access areas for relief. This is also something that affects members of the homeless community who may be unable to find adequate shelter, says Wichman.

Those on land are not the only ones vulnerable to the heat. Handlos notes that sea creatures in the ocean are also highly vulnerable to the extreme heat affecting the temperatures and acidity of the water.

“The prime examples of this are in the Great Barrier Reefs,” Handlos said. “The high levels of CO₂ concentration in the water affects the shells of creatures and gradually erodes them over time.”

So what steps are there to prepare for extreme heat or to find relief from sweltering temperatures? Although it may seem daunting to find a solution, Georgia Tech’s experts say small changes can lead to immediate relief for now.   

Certain mitigating measures such as spending more time indoors and altering times engaging in recreational activities, including running and cycling, can help people avoid the risk of heat exhaustion and heat stroke, says Wichman. Wearing lightweight clothing, taking cool showers or baths, and staying hydrated are also helpful tips for day-to-day activities.

Additionally, accessible communication and services geared toward the disabled community are vital for relief efforts, Linden said. Making sure communications from the National Weather Service are accessible to all, allowing for proper disaster preparation, could help ease the high mortality rates in natural disasters.   

Ultimately, Tech experts stress that policies need to be put in place to ensure the population can survive extreme temperatures in the foreseeable future. 

“It’s a long-term project, but the outcomes of policies for climate change and extreme heat have shown to be positive in these cases,” said Wichman.

Experts in This Story

Zachary Handlos

Maureen Linden

Tarek Rakha

Casey Wichman

Dhongde's paper, written with co-author Robert Haveman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is her latest in a series of work on the topic and the first to break down multidimensional poverty on a state-by-state level over more than a decade. 

"This is important because there was much variation across states in how the Great Recession and the following recovery affected the multidimensional poor," Dhongde said. "Now we can apply those lessons to Covid recovery efforts to help ensure the policies are as effective as possible and reaching the people who need it the most." 

Geographic and demographic breakdown 

Analyzing data from 2008 to 2019, the researchers found that multidimensional poverty increased across the United States during the Great Recession from 2008 to 2010 and gradually declined through 2019.  

The analysis showed that poverty among adults aged 18 to 65 was most widespread in the South and West. At the peak of the Great Recession in 2010, 20% of adults in Florida — more than two million people, according to census reports — were experiencing at least two measures of deprivation. In Texas, 22% of adults, totaling nearly 3.5 million people, were multidimensionally poor. However, the highest rate of multidimensional poverty was in California, where more than 5.5 million adults — nearly one in every four — were multidimensionally poor in 2010. 

In the North, New York stood out as an exception with a high rate of multidimensional poverty. At the same time, states such as Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Vermont had some of the lowest multidimensional poverty rates, at  5% to 6% of the population. 

According to the researchers, the high multidimensional poverty rate in California, Texas, and Florida is partially explained by their large Hispanic populations. Hispanics living in the United States are significantly more likely to experience two or more measures of poverty than other demographic groups, Dhongde and Haveman found. On average, they wrote, white people in the United States had the lowest multidimensional poverty rate at 10.4 percent, Black people and Asians had moderate rates at 14.8 and 16.5 percent, respectively, and Hispanics experienced the highest multidimensional poverty rates at 34.7 percent. 

Little overlap with income deprivation 

Surprisingly, the researchers found that having an income below the poverty line and experiencing multidimensional poverty (living with at least two of the six alternative deprivations) did not significantly overlap. According to the research, 13% of adults were multidimensional poor, and about 12.5% were income poor. However, there was a small overlap between the two groups; only 5.5% were both income poor and multidimensional poor. 

Of the six deprivations studied, most multidimensional poor lacked health insurance and a high school education. They also faced a severe housing cost burden. “This underscores our argument that income poverty often fails to capture deprivation in other dimensions affecting the quality of life,” Dhongde and Haveman wrote.  

Less surprisingly, “among individuals who were not income poor, deprivation was highest when individuals had incomes just above the poverty threshold,” the researchers found. They recommend expanding policies to help individuals living just above the poverty line as well as those below it to help reduce multidimensional poverty in the U.S. 

Translating these lessons to Covid-19 

The researchers also noted that immigrants were four times more likely to be multidimensionally poor than those born in the United States, and that multidimensional poverty rates were highest among children and young adults, single-parent families, and immigrants. Dhongde and Haveman speculate that these population groups are also the most likely to be socially and economically affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. 

“In coming years, as the country recovers from the pandemic, it will be even more important to monitor multidimensional poverty in conjunction with income poverty in order to get a better idea of the impact on the quality of life experienced by a country’s population,” they wrote.   

Spatial and Temporal Trends in Multidimensional Poverty in the United States over the Last Decade was published in Social Indicators Research: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-022-02902-z.  

The article is the latest in Dhongde's body of literature on the topic, which includes studies on multidimensional poverty during the Covid pandemic, during the Great Recession, among senior citizens, and across racial and ethnic groups. Her work has been featured on NPR, in US News and World Report, Public Health Post, How Stuff Works, and many other outlets. 

That’s the vision of the Tokyo Smart City Studio, using GPS and other location data to track trends in human behavior. The studio is part of the Eco Urban Lab, directed by Perry Yang. In the Studio, Georgia Tech designers are changing the way we plan cities.

According to Yang, designers need to know, “how urban form accommodates flows of all kinds, including information, energy, and human movements, and how patterns of flows are mapped through physical configurations that change over time.” Using advanced analytics on a massive pool of data, designers can see how people choose to use a space. Then, they can make decisions based on real behavior rather than theoretical models or small surveys, Yang said.

Projects from the Studio recently drew Esri’s attention for their advanced use of geographic analytics. As part of the studio, students used large-scale location data to model traffic flows in different segments of Tokyo. 

Esri is best known as the company that developed GIS (geographic information system) software which is widely used by city and regional planners. Esri's blog covers innovative use of geospatial data. 

To date, the Studio has delivered smart-city proposals for three different Tokyo neighborhoods: Urawa-Misono in 2017, Kyojima in 2018-2019, and Shinagawa in 2020. Yang said this year’s project will involve the Nihonbashi district, home of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and a historic origin of Tokyo’s modern urban culture.

Tokyo is one of the busiest, most populous cities in the world, and as such, it’s difficult to create sustainable, healthy environments, said Yang. His studio focuses on global collaboration to solve the problems facing cities like Tokyo.

For the Nihonbashi district, the Studio is collaborating with the Department of Urban Engineering at the University of Tokyo; the Global Carbon Project; the National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan; and the Mitsui Fudosan University of Tokyo Laboratory.

Thanks to the diversity of ideas that this collaboration generates, the Tokyo Smart City Studio proposals aren’t purely theoretical. Students work on real neighborhood needs identified by the local government, using real on-site data gathered and processed by groundbreaking methods. Massive amounts of data require AI techniques and algorithms to process some of them.

Design Makes Cities Smart

Unlike a smartphone or a smart home, a smart city is measured by more than its Internet connection or its automation. A city is smart because its design is based on data about flows of people, resources, energy, and information. “Empowered by new tools and technologies, cities are now far more designable than ever before. Future urban design and development are to be data-driven," Yang said. 

"Cities are becoming more interactive and situation-driven and have to be more responsive, adaptable, and resilient to future conditions.”

Only in the past few years have smartphones, GPS, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices made real data on a city-wide scale available. These new technologies may enable good planning that is driven by social, institutional, and physical contexts, Yang said.

Students Predict Mobility Using AI Techniques

But new data and a new design philosophy require new methods of design, which haven’t been created yet.  To meet this challenge, Yang’s students use AI techniques to create models of behavior.

An early test in Urawa-Misono used Tokyo traffic data. The model was “trained” using existing traffic data. Designers then check the model to see if correctly predicts congestion points. If it works, that suggests the model can be used to estimate the impact of design changes on traffic flow.

Methods like this allow designers to move mobility analytics into the design phase. Mobility is key in the urban environment, but mobility studies usually aren’t done until we envision how future urban spaces are shaped through design.

“Mobility research during these studios developed test processes to better integrate mobility metrics with design decisions,” Yang said.

The following studio in Kyojima expanded the role of deep learning techniques. Georgia Tech students participated in street experiments in Tokyo by carrying vital sensors to measure data such as  heart beat, temperature, humidity, UV, pressure and acceleration of human movement, to understand human perception and their connections to urban street environments. Students created a rapid automatic assessment of sequential urban experiences: basically, how pleasant a person would experience walking down a street.

The resulting article, Computing Sequential Experience of an Urban Street using Deep Learning Technique, led by Helen Chen, a Ph.D. student in the School of City and Regional Planning, was presented at the 2019 International Conference of Urban Informatics.

Both the Urawa-Misono and Kyojima studio projects made mobility analysis and feedback part of the design phase, yielding designs better supporting resilience, sustainability, and community health.

Using Social Media to Check Risk of Heat Stress

In Tokyo, studio planners expanded mobility studies to include public health. Tokyo officials were concerned that heat waves would pose a risk to the 2020 Olympic crowds.

To address this, researchers used a combination of GPS and social networking service information to track people’s motion and response to heat “in near real-time [and] in high spatial resolution,” said Yang.

Students used thermal images from a helicopter to find hot zones. GPS data showed pedestrian exposure to those hot zones. The combination of heat and pedestrian exposure allowed prediction of risky areas.

In collaboration with partners in Japan, researchers searched geotagged twitter data for terms related to heat discomfort. They found a high correlation between the predicted risk zones and areas where people complained about heat.

Both the prediction of heat risk and the use of social media to check the prediction are new methods developed in the Studio.

She recently realized city layouts (where the buildings are, how public transportation works, even where sidewalks are placed) affect romantic couples.

Andris’s study, “Romantic Relationships and the Built Environment,” has been published in the Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability. The study was co-authored by Seolha Lee (MCRP '21).

Urban planners strive to design cities that support community needs. Andris took an unconventional approach to discovering these needs by examining the behavior of couples, rather than individuals.

“We've always wanted to look at how people behave in the built environment and the way they behave with other people may be different than the way they behave by themselves.”

Another traditional approach to urban planning looks at community-level social life, but Andris said this level of analysis doesn’t catch the perspective of individuals engaging in joint activities.

Andris surveyed 124 individuals who are in relationships, specifically seeking information about where couples spend time together, the characteristics of those places, and how areas support romantic relationships.

Restaurants were the top feature respondents liked, with recreation and outdoor spaces following, Andris said. Through the survey, Andris could distinguish types of outdoor activities that were more popular for couples.

“We thought it was interesting that the nearby mountain was really popular because people wanted to go hiking together,” Andris said. A nearby golf course and a skiing mountain were much less popular despite being easier to access.

The study indicated respondents who did not live together value walking paths and streetlights for safer travel between homes. Mapping geographic relationship links can guide planners towards new paths, lights, or transit, said Andris.

“Changes in the built environment can affect the quality of personal relationships.”

“Built environment” refers not only to buildings, but also to other constructed features like sidewalks and roads, Andris said. “A forest or glacier would not be the built environment, even though it is still the environment.”

An environment that is more conducive to personal relationships can support the well-being of its occupants.

“It's nice to be able to see people that you like, and it's nice to have activities to do with somebody so you can leave the house,” said Andris. “So having a social life where you have events with people and activities can help increase your well-being and decrease feelings of loneliness and isolation.”

The city can do more to support relationships. Something like a sidewalk is not just a physical health or transportation thing, it’s also an interpersonal thing, Andris said.

“Just getting to leave your house and go for a walk with your significant other seems to be a really big important thing and [planners] have only focused on that in terms of health before.”

Andris believes that the personal relationship is an overlooked but promising unit of analysis for designing the built environment.

“Romantic ties have their own voice and needs,” Andris said. “By examining relationships as a vantage point for serving the needs of locals and visitors, planners can play an active role in the success of romance and happy, healthy couples in their areas.”

Urban planners are thinking about how to build for romance, Andris said. “The idea of a ‘great date night’ used to mean a night on the town (although today it may evoke something cozy at home due to the pandemic). But are towns built for this?

“We find that certain Points of Interest (POIs) in the city are especially exciting for couples. We found that restaurants and the outdoors were especially well-suited for dates and spending time together. We saw that recreational activities are also more popular than we thought. Other aspects of our cities are still important, like museums, libraries and nightclubs, but these weren't mentioned as often for couples.”

“The big picture is that urban planners can support romance by building the facilities/amenities that couples enjoy.”

Andris is the director of the Friendly Cities Lab at Georgia Tech. The lab’s goal is data-driven love for community, and the study focus is interpersonal relationships in geographic space, Andris said.

Following from her research of how the built environment can impact relationships, Andris will be a guest editor along with University of Zurich's Ross Purves for a special issue of Computational Urban Science later this year. The issue will show how individuals, social networks, and community members interact with places.

Clio Andris & Seolha Lee (2021) Romantic relationships and the built environment: a case study of a U.S. college town, Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, DOI: 10.1080/17549175.2021.2005117

We sat down with three Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business faculty experts in operations management: Vinod Singhal, Charles W. Brady Chair; Manpreet Hora, associate professor; and Ravi Subramanian, professor. The discussion centered around overarching causes, financial ramifications, and multi-pronged approaches to mitigate the impact of supply chain disruptions in the coming months and year. 

1. What caused the supply chain and logistical issues to arise? What effect did Covid-19 play in all of this? Did the influx of stimulus checks and the extension of additional aid to U.S. citizens (rent deferment, etc.) affect the purchase of goods enough to cause the current situation?

All three experts agree there are several factors on both the supply side and the demand side of the supply chain, and logistical challenges that companies and customers are currently facing.

On the supply side, there are issues in global supply chains that are beyond the control of individual companies. A significant one is the congestion at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in the U.S. Nearly 40 percent of imports into the U.S. flow through these two ports. There are stranded containers that have not been unloaded due to labor shortages, limited unloading capacity, and warehouse space constraints.

For example, a CBS news report on November 11, 2021, indicated that at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, about 80 ships carrying more than half a million containers were waiting to unload. Clearing this backlog will take some time. Another related issue that has added to the congestion is the growing number of empty containers that are sitting on ports to be returned back to exporters.

The congestion at ports is being further exacerbated by trucker shortages that could pose a more persistent and long-term challenge for supply chains.

“Moving products from ports to distribution centers, manufacturing plants, and further downstream to retailers was already a concern for many companies even before the pandemic. Now the combination of port congestion and trucker shortage is further delaying the process of bringing products to the right place at the right time,” said Hora.

Shortages of critical components, such as semiconductor chips, have created additional delays for a range of industries. Shutdowns in chip production during the early stages of the pandemic, coupled with increased demand for products such as computers, smartphones, and automobiles has resulted in fierce competition for acquiring chips across industries. For example, the professors noted that during the initial period of the Covid-19 pandemic, semiconductor companies prioritized chip manufacturing to meet the increasing demand for consumer electronics. This, in turn, diverted supply away from automotive production, resulting in substantial delays in cars rolling off assembly lines

The pandemic either amplified the above-mentioned supply chain and logistical issues or brought in unexpected new ones. It necessitated the closure of borders at the national level, and of plants and warehouses at the company level. These closures, in the initial months of the pandemic, followed by new requirements such as social distancing during the opening of facilities affected and slowed down production, warehousing, distribution, and transportation of products.

On the demand side, explained Subramanian, two phenomena occurred that have led to a surge in demand for goods that were already in short supply.

First, during the pandemic, many people were working from home. This curtailed spending on travel, vacations, and demand for experiential goods and services. People had more disposable income, which they diverted to consumer products that were already in short supply.

Second, the global economy and the US, in particular have been turbocharged by trillions of dollars in stimulus during the pandemic. This stimulus, while necessary to deal with the hardships during the pandemic, enhanced the surge in demand for products.

2. Why are some retailers able to deliver goods without an issue?

“Many large retailers, including Walmart Inc., Home Depot Inc., and Target Corp., do not seem to have supply chain and product shortage issues like their counterparts, because they ordered and took delivery of goods earlier than usual this year. They have not only built-up inventories but have enhanced their inventory management practices. Some retailers have also chartered their own ships to counteract delays in transportation,” said Singhal.

They have also moved the unloading of their goods from the ports on the west coast to other ports in the U.S. that are less congested. These retailers have used their clout and deep pockets to get suppliers and logistics companies to prioritize their orders. Their far-flung supply chain networks can identify and work with several suppliers to find options to source items that are out of stock.

3. What are the financial ramifications to the U.S. and to the world for this supply chain issue?

The professors note that large companies have used their clout to deal with the current supply chain issues. Although their costs of procuring supplies have increased, they may be able to pass on some of the cost increase to customers. Some of these companies may see an increase in total sales and total profits in nominal terms although they may experience thinner profit margins. The stock market seems to have incorporated these factors in the valuations and the rising stock market suggests that large companies are expected to do fine financially. For example, the Dow Jones Index has jumped 18 percent this year, S&P 500 is up 25 percent, and Nasdaq has risen 24 percent.

The financial ramifications to smaller retailers and manufacturing firms may be quite negative. As Subramanian explained, these firms do not have the clout and financial resources to work around the supply issues.  Often their sales during the holiday season are critically dependent on receiving a container or two of goods from overseas suppliers. Given the long and uncertain transportation and delivery times, and the high cost of transportation, many small firms may not be able to receive supplies in time for the holiday season and may be left holding unsold inventory or unfinished products. Overall, small firms may take a big hit from the current supply chain issues.

4. Are there any additional issues that consumers may face that they may not be aware of? How will the shortage of goods to retailers affect consumers shopping during the holidays? Is there anything individual consumers can do to help solve the problem?

Consumers can do certain things so that they are not disappointed, said the panel. They should start shopping earlier, expect to pay closer to full price on many products, and not wait for promotions or discounts to make their purchases. They will need to be flexible in their shopping habits and look for substitute products if their desired products are not available. Consumers may also want to prioritize their shopping decisions – for example, ensuring they have the gifts for young children who expect Santa to deliver irrespective of supply chain issues! Likewise, for older parents and relatives, for whom the holiday season is a very special time.  For others, they may want to consider giving gift cards.

5. When do you think this issue will be resolved and how?

“Supply chains getting back to normal will be contingent upon the nature of the underlying supply chain issues. Shipping and retail executives indicate that they expect the West Coast port backlogs to clear in early 2022, when the Lunar New Year shuts many factories for a week in February, thus slowing output and shipments from Asia,” said Singhal.  However, chip shortages may last until 2022 or even extend into 2023. Many chip manufacturers have announced plans to significantly increase their level of capital expenditure but bringing new capacity online can take several years.

This storm of collective issues has brought the importance of supply chain resilience to the forefront. Companies emerging from the pandemic are revisiting or will have to revisit their past approaches to managing supply chains.

Having flexibility and slack in supply chains has been a persistent strategy for several companies but this strategy will now need to be more holistic. For example, companies will need to re-think where to source their critical and irreplaceable components. Companies are already deliberating to not only near-shore suppliers of their critical components but also expand this supply base. This may also entail carrying more inventory of such components to meet demand variability and hedge against supply chain disruptions. Another development is manufacturers vertically integrating to design and produce critical components in-house.

Even before the pandemic, companies were investing in technology to digitize their supply chains. This long-term imperative will be prioritized even more as companies aspire for more transparency and traceability of products in their supply chains. Moreover, advanced automation in manufacturing plants and warehousing could ease some of the pain of labor shortages.

“Despite the current supply chain issues, we believe that supply chains will remain global and complex, but there will be renewed thinking in companies to recognize that Black Swan events such as the Covid-19 pandemic can create a multitude of interrelated and cascading supply chain issues that have serious financial implications. And companies will need to blend flexibility, adaptability, and efficiency to develop capabilities to mitigate impacts and remain resilient during such supply chain disruptions,” stated Hora.

A recent nationwide cohort study published in Nature Communications has found that long-term exposure to air pollution may increase the risks for developing dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

The study was led by researchers at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, in collaboration with assistant professor Pengfei Liu and professor Rodney Weber of Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health was also involved in the study, which is the first nationwide analysis of the links between key criteria air pollutants — including fine particulate (PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), and ozone (O₃) — and neurodegeneration incidence in the United States Medicare population.

"The results point to traffic emissions as a main culprit," says Weber. "Whether the PM2.5 specimens that cause the neurodegeneration are from vehicle tail pipes or from tire and brake wear is important to determine. It not only affects mitigation strategies, but the conversion to electric vehicles in the future may or may not help to mitigate this hazard."

Of the pollutants analyzed, exposures to PM2.5 and NO₂ showed the greatest risk for incidence of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease (AD), with effects being the strongest for PM2.5. Putting these findings into context, the national average PM2.5 is around 7 micrograms per cubic meter of air (µg/m³). In looking at larger cities, like Houston and Los Angeles, annual levels in 2020 were above 10 µg/m³.

The study’s findings indicate that air pollution differences like these, of 3 µg/m³, would lead to a predicted 7% increase in AD between more polluted and less polluted cities. Despite variations in the level of PM2.5 from city to city, the authors note that no safe levels actually exist when it comes to the risk of PM2.5 on neurodegeneration incidence.

“We observed a very strong signal between PM2.5 exposure and increased risks of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease,” says Liuhua Shi, assistant professor at Rollins and co-lead author on the paper. “To better inform policy for targeted source-specific regulations, it is important to further investigate the relative contributions of various PM2.5 components to these conditions, which we are planning to do next.”

Additional findings showed that NO₂ was also associated with increases in incidences of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Exposure to O₃ did not show an increase in incidence.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) current air quality standards for fine particle pollution is 12 µg/m3. However, according to these findings, that may not be nearly low enough.

“We still found strong effects on the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease down to 4 µg/m³, and the effect was even stronger between 4 and 8 than it was above 8 µg/m³,” says Joel Schwartz, professor of environmental epidemiology at the Harvard Chan School, and a co-author on the paper.

The researchers utilized Medicare data from 2000-2018 for the study. “It provided a very rich database, with 2 million cases of dementia and 800,000 cases of AD in our population of 12 million Medicare patients,” says Kyle Steenland, professor at Rollins and a co-lead author on the paper.

“This study suggests that air pollution might serve as a risk factor for dementia and Alzheimer’s disease,” says Liu, a co-author on the paper. “However, this risk could be potentially mitigated if we further reduce the emissions of hazardous air pollutants.”

This project was supported by the National Institute on Aging (NIA/NIH R01 AG074357), the HERCULES Center P30 ES019776, and the Goizueta Alzheimer's Disease Research Center of Emory University (P50 AG025688). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-27049-2

The Partnership is a public-private organization charged with positioning the state of Georgia as the tech capital of the East Coast. Launched in 2020, it is supported with funding from the State, private industry, strategic partners, and the Georgia Institute of Technology, which also provides administrative oversight.

In 2020, Valdosta officials deployed its Georgia Smart Communities Challenge grant, along with community research support, to pilot a smart traffic management system designed to connect all 128 city traffic signals. The effort also included systems enhancements at traffic signals and the traffic control operations center, and the installation of communications responders in 10 fire trucks.

“We are so proud of our city engineering department staff who have worked diligently over the past year to advance our Traffic Management Center capabilities with deployment of the TravelSafely application and signal pre-emption for fire vehicles,” said Valdosta Mayor Scott James Matheson. “This was an incredible the opportunity for the city to partner with Valdosta State University and Georgia Tech to provide hands-on experience to students, too.”

The systems enhancements allowed the city to test new signal timings from a recent study. They also allowed officials to implement an Emergency Vehicle Signal Pre-Emption protocol via installed equipment on the firetrucks. Additionally, the city implemented a smart phone application, TravelSafely, which notifies users of upcoming signal changes, approaching emergency vehicles, and other traffic safety measures. 

Valdosta hosted community outreach and training workshops about these new smart traffic systems to encourage residents to utilize the available technology. During the pilot implementation phase, the city evaluated the effects of the new system on its traffic operations and the behavior of the traveling public by comparing before and after patterns and travel times. 

“This project is transforming Valdosta into a smart and connected city. We are committed to creating and sustaining a smart, effective traffic control system which will result in improved traffic flow, road safety, and reduction in the number of traffic accidents,” said Valdosta City Manager Mark Barber.

Georgia Tech and Valdosta State researchers actively participated in all engineering and research aspects, including data collection, and methods for statistical data analysis. The research team includes Baabak Ashuri, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and students Heung Jin Oh and Shiqin Zeng. It also includes Valdosta State professors Barry Hojjatie and Jia Lu, and student David Yoo. The team developed models related to studies of other emergency vehicles and school buses in the city’s connected vehicle system. Leveraging this project, Valdosta State began a new concentration within its School of Engineering focused on traffic management.

"As an undergraduate student, this project was a great opportunity for me to experience real-life work, meet new people, and work with a wonderful team, including faculty and fellow interns,” said David Yoo, a Valdosta State junior and a project intern. “I am extremely grateful for my first valuable internship experience, and I am confident that this experience will help me take a big step forward to my next goals."

To be named a finalist for such an internationally acclaimed and highly competitive award is an indication of the variety of smart community focused projects being deployed and the level of innovation and impact occurring statewide, said Debra Lam, the Partnership’s executive director.

“Our work in Valdosta underscores our mission to promote innovation and serve as a conduit for helping to implement great ideas across the state for real impact,” Lam said. “The successes that we’re seeing in Valdosta serve as a blueprint for other cities in Georgia that are facing similar challenges. We’re extremely proud of the results we’ve seen in Valdosta and honored that this work is resonating around the world.”

World Smart Cities Award finalists are selected by the Smart City Expo World Congress, a leading international summit on cities and smart urban solutions. Award winners will be announced During the Smart City Expo’s three-day summit scheduled for Nov. 16-18, 2021. The City of Atlanta won the award in this same category in 2018 for its North Avenue Smart Corridor Project.

Entries came from 46 countries, and Valdosta was the only U.S. representative in the Mobility Category and one of five American entries in the group of 34 finalists.

To register to stream the Smart City Expo World Congress, including the awards ceremony, please visit: https://www.tomorrow.city/a/scewcdigital2021.

How will travel plans be affected by supply chain disruptions?

Supply chain issues affect air travel in many ways. Most significantly, airlines are now focused on realigning their workforce. During the pandemic, many airlines laid off flight crews, and ramping back up to meet increasing demand is not a quick or simple process. This process includes meeting regulatory requirements in place to get pilots ready to operate aircraft and get back on flight schedules. Garrow urges travelers to plan their trips early, noting that “airlines are working hard to meet demand.”

Airlines continue to see the impacts of Covid-19.

Covid-19 has greatly affected the way consumers plan for travel. “Before the pandemic, scheduling was slightly more predictable, with most people booking flights four to six weeks in advance,” Garrow explained. “Travelers are now booking flights much closer to their departure date to account for travel restrictions and monitoring Covid-19 trends.” This gives airlines less time to plan and react to unexpected demand patterns. Demand uncertainty makes it difficult for carriers to align their supply chain and can lead to an increase in flight cancellations.

Tips for travelers this season: expect higher fares and plan your flights early. 

Labor shortages and staffing issues can also affect travel this season — particularly the day-of experiences. Many airports have closed their long-term parking lots, car rentals are much more limited and expensive, and TSA wait times will likely be longer during this holiday season. It is important that consumers plan ahead and arrive at the airport early.

Professor Laurie Garrow is co-director of the Center for Urban and Regional Air Mobility at Georgia Tech. She is an expert in aviation, travel behavior, data analytics, and discrete choice modeling. In Fall 2020, she was elected to a second term as president of the Airline Group of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies.

The initiative is designed to address one of the region’s most pressing needs towards realizing the benefits of electric transportation, namely greater coordination and collaboration among key stakeholders. It will also tackle regional market challenges, such as electric vehicle (EV) charging and infrastructure gaps, accessibility, EV model availability and cost, policy guidance, and consumer awareness, while unlocking untapped opportunities for economic development, job growth, enhanced energy security, and environmental sustainability.

“SETRI’s ability to convene and partner with experts around a common table is one of the most promising aspects of the coalition,” said Rich Simmons, principal research engineer and director at Georgia Tech’s Energy Policy Innovation Center (EPICenter), and part of the steering committee that conceived SETRI. “We believe this is the first time that such a cross-cutting set of stakeholders have agreed to collaborate around major EV opportunities for the Southeast. While focused closely on regional gaps and opportunities, SETRI can also serve as an important model for other regions.”

The Southeast is not only emerging as a hub for EV manufacturing investment and job creation; it’s well positioned to accelerate EV deployment across a diverse set of applications, including fleets. The region accounts for 18% of the nation’s population, while capturing over 28% of America’s EV manufacturing investment, and a significant share of direct and supply chain jobs across a range of EV markets, including light duty vehicles, busses, and medium and heavy-duty trucks.

“The Southeast has significant potential to realize the many economic, social, and environmental benefits of transportation electrification,” said Tom Ashley, vice president of Policy & Market Development at Greenlots, a member of the Shell Group. “Indeed, the region is already benefiting from good jobs manufacturing electric vehicles and supporting the electric vehicle supply chain. Greenlots is pleased to join SETRI’s founding members to accelerate electrification in the region to ensure these benefits are fully realized. Together, we can enable an emission-free future in the Southeast.”

However, the Southeast is lagging the nation in EV sales and charging station deployment, accounting for just 10% of national EV sales and 13% of EV chargers deployed. The region is also significantly underrepresented in utility and government funding for transportation electrification: the Southeast accounts for approximately 1% of utility investment and 4% of government funding nationwide. Given the region’s abundant, affordable, and increasingly clean electric power, and an expanding manufacturing supply chain for EVs, the Southeast has much to gain from transportation electrification.  

Nearly 60 public and private organizations are founding signatories to SETRI’s Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) aimed at accelerating the benefits of electric transportation for the region. This coalition includes charging companies, utilities, automakers, public officials, city planners, non-profit organizations, and universities and other research institutions. The coalition will leverage the expertise and resources needed to help state leaders navigate the transition to electric mobility.

“As a Georgia-based manufacturer of EV school buses, Blue Bird is excited to be part of SETRI,” said Trevor Rudderham, Blue Bird senior vice president, Electrification. “We look forward to collaborating with a diverse set of regional partners to help further EV adoption throughout the Southeast.”

The SETRI coalition welcomes the participation of additional organizations in the Southeast electrification transportation ecosystem. Entities interested in signing the MOU can do so at any time, and participation in the coalition is not restricted to signatories.

Read the full press release here.
Visit Southeastev.org for more information.
See the full list of signatories here.

Today, Georgia Tech received two National Science Foundation (NSF) Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes awards, totaling $40 million. A third award for $20 million was granted to the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA), with Georgia Tech serving as one of the leading academic institutions.

“It is essential that we bring together our best minds to ensure that AI delivers on its promise to create a more prosperous, sustainable, safe, and fair future for everyone,” said Ángel Cabrera, president of Georgia Tech. “These NSF awards recognize Georgia Tech’s vast expertise in machine learning and AI and will help us further develop our resources and amplify our impact in these crucial fields.”

Chaouki T. Abdallah, executive vice president for Research at Georgia Tech, concurred, citing major efforts under development to help create a more robust and inclusive future of AI, both on campus and beyond.

“We are incredibly grateful to the NSF for their investment and excited for the opportunities made possible because of this research,” he said. “At Tech, our mission is to advance technology and improve the human condition, catalyzing research that matters. We invested in a unified approach to interdisciplinary research aligned with industry relevance and societal impact, and these awards demonstrate a clear return on that strategy.”

Collectively, NSF made a $220 million investment in 11 new NSF-led Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes.

“I am delighted to announce the establishment of new NSF National AI Research Institutes as we look to expand into all 50 states,” said National Science Foundation Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. “These Institutes are hubs for academia, industry, and government to accelerate discovery and innovation in AI. Inspiring talent and ideas everywhere in this important area will lead to new capabilities that improve our lives, from medicine to entertainment to transportation and cybersecurity, and position us in the vanguard of competitiveness and prosperity.”

Led by NSF, and in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Google, Amazon, Intel, and Accenture, the National AI Research Institutes will act as connections in a broader nationwide network to pursue transformational advances in a range of economic sectors, and science and engineering fields — from food system security to next-generation edge networks. In addition to Georgia Tech and GRA, the University of California San Diego, Duke University, Iowa State University, North Carolina State University, The Ohio State University, and University of Washington are the lead universities included in the 11 AI Institutes.

The AI Institutes at Georgia Tech

The three newly established Institutes will address societal challenges, including home care for aging adults; energy, logistics, and supply chains; sustainability; the widening gap in job opportunities; and changing needs in workforce development.

NSF AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups (AI-CARING) will seek to create a vibrant discipline focused on personalized, collaborative AI systems that will improve quality of care for the aging. The systems will learn individual models of human behavior and how they change over time and use that knowledge to better collaborate and communicate in caregiving environments. Led by Sonia Chernova, associate professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech, the AI systems will help a growing population of older adults sustain independence, improve quality of life, and increase effectiveness of care coordination across the care network.

“The AI-CARING Institute builds on our existing strengths in AI and in technology for aging. It will create not only novel solutions, but a new generation of researchers focused on the interaction between the two,” said Charles Isbell, dean and John P. Imlay Jr. Chair in the College of Computing. “Our aim is to build cutting-edge technologies that improve the lives of everyone, and I can’t think of a better example than AI-CARING.”

NSF AI Institute for Advances in Optimization (AI4Opt) will revolutionize decision-making on a large scale – fusing AI and mathematical optimization into intelligent systems that will achieve breakthroughs that neither field can achieve independently. Additionally, it will create pathways from high school to undergraduate and graduate education and workforce development training for AI in engineering that will empower a generation of underrepresented students and teachers to join the AI revolution. Led by Pascal Van Hentenryck, A. Russell Chandler III chair and professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, AI4Opt will tackle use cases in energy, resilience and sustainability, supply chains, and circuit design and control.

“AI4Opt, with its focus on AI and optimization, will create new pathways for novel tools that allow better engineering applications to benefit society,” said Raheem Beyah, dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering and Southern Company Chair. “This will allow engineers to build higher quality materials, more efficient renewable resources, new computing systems, and more, while also reinforcing the field as a career path for diverse students. The new institute complements the College’s commitment to the integration of AI in engineering disciplines.”

NSF AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education (ALOE) will lead the country and the world in the development of novel AI theories and techniques for enhancing the quality of adult online education, making this mode of learning comparable to that of in-person education in STEM disciplines. Together with partners in the technical college systems and educational technology sector, ALOE will advance online learning using virtual assistants to make education more available, affordable, achievable, and ultimately more equitable. This Institute is led by the GRA, with support from Georgia Tech and the University System of Georgia (USG). Ashok Goel, professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, will serve as executive director.  

“Online education for adults has enormous implications for tomorrow’s workforce,” said Myk Garn, a GRA senior advisor, assistant vice chancellor for New Models of Learning at the USG, and ALOE’s principal investigator. “Yet, serious questions remain about the quality of online learning and how best to teach adults online. Artificial intelligence offers a powerful technology for dramatically improving the quality of online learning and adult education.”

The Future of AI at Georgia Tech

Georgia Tech is poised to strategically reimagine the future of AI. Currently, 66% of Georgia Tech undergraduate computer science students have an academic concentration in Intelligence, focusing on the top-to-bottom computational models of intelligence. The College of Computing’s recently launched Ph.D. program in machine learning pulls from faculty in all six colleges across the Institute, and many new courses are being developed that teach AI as a tool for science and engineering. Georgia Tech is exploring the potential creation of a school or college of AI within the next five years, further building on its expansive AI and machine learning footprint. The NSF AI Institutes awards will enable all AI-related academic programs to scale and further differentiate Georgia Tech as a leader in AI education.   

Additionally, the awards will expand and complement ongoing AI research efforts at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). In the last fiscal year, GTRI received millions of dollars in research awards from the Department of Defense and other sponsors for AI-affiliated research, and currently, many GTRI researchers are focused on AI-affiliated projects.

“As part of Georgia Tech, GTRI will greatly benefit from the advances in AI that will be achieved as a result of these NSF-funded Institutes, helping us further excel in our aim to deliver leading-edge AI research that benefits national security,” said Mark Whorton, GTRI’s chief technology officer. “GTRI is one of the nation’s leading institutes of applied research for national security specifically because of our deep engagement and close affiliation with the academic units of Georgia Tech. AI is a tool we use in conducting larger research objectives, and we believe strongly that these AI Institutes will enable GTRI to put more research into practice.”

“Georgia Tech has for decades now been pursuing new AI technologies, and now leads the way in AI that is responsible to the needs of the humans who use it,” Isbell said. “We have also worked hard to expand access to AI, especially for underrepresented groups. These Institutes will build on that history, expanding both our ability to create new technologies and to train the next generation of innovators. I look forward to watching them grow and develop.”

About the Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students, representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

About the National Science Foundation

The U.S. National Science Foundation propels the nation forward by advancing fundamental research in all fields of science and engineering. NSF supports research and people by providing facilities, instruments, and funding to support their ingenuity and sustain the U.S. as a global leader in research and innovation. With a fiscal year 2021 budget of $8.5 billion, NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 colleges, universities, and institutions. Each year, NSF receives more than 40,000 competitive proposals and makes about 11,000 new awards. Those awards include support for cooperative research with industry, Arctic and Antarctic research and operations, and U.S. participation in international scientific efforts.

About the Georgia Research Alliance


The Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) helps Georgia’s university scientists do more research and start more companies. By expanding research and entrepreneurship capacity at public and private universities, GRA grows the Georgia economy by driving more investment in the state, developing a high-tech workforce, and strengthening Georgia’s reputation for innovation. For 30 years, GRA has worked in partnership with the University System of Georgia and the Georgia Department of Economic Development to create the companies and jobs of Georgia’s future. Visit GRA.org for more information.

Contact: Georgia Parmelee | georgia.parmelee@gatech.edu | 404.281.7818

In the immediate aftermath, relief agencies rush in survival supplies like water, food, medicine, and blankets. But instead of prioritizing and maintaining the relief supply chains, a transition to restoring a place’s normal supply infrastructure could help more people more quickly. That’s the first recommendation from over 125 pages of case studies and analyses, issued by an eight-member National Academies committee that included Pinar Keskinocak, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the director of its Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems.

Hurricanes can kill many victims by drowning, and in their wake, mangled homes and roads, contaminated water, and shortages of everything compound suffering. Restoring supply lines, primarily of the private sector, would accelerate recovery, according to the report, but relief efforts can unintentionally conflict with that.

“Relief supply chains inevitably compete with regular supply chains, given limited resources, such as transportation. If the focus is primarily on pushing relief supply rather than restoring infrastructure and supply chains to normalcy, we may unwittingly delay recovery and prolong the aftermath,” said Keskinocak, who is William W. George Chair and Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

Researchers on the ground

In 2017, in the wakes of hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, the last of which killed over 3,000 people, FEMA assigned the National Academies to make recommendations on improving relief response. Keskinocak and her colleagues traveled to the storm-damaged sites to collect information for their report.

“We spoke to stakeholders in affected areas – local governments, businesses, health systems, and more. We learned about the impact of storms on their community, what their participation was in the response process, and what went well and not so well,” Keskinocak said.

Challenges in the coordination of resource allocation, especially in logistics, have caused hindrances to recovery. This led to the report’s other major recommendations.

“Areas where hurricanes may strike need to get a good understanding of how supply chains work under normal conditions along with their vulnerabilities, or weak links, so they can be proactive in strengthening supply,” Keskinocak said.

Public-private collaboration

Disaster preparedness requires collaboration between government, relief agencies, and the private sector, all compiling and sharing this understanding together. All sectors would benefit from educational programs on supply chain dynamics and from sharing public-private partnership best practices.

“After a big storm strikes, it is typically not possible for any one entity to handle it all alone,” Keskinocak said. “Organizations such as FEMA could play the role of a convener to ensure various organizations collaborate, coordinate, and share information well ahead of time and in the aftermath.”

The report recommends increasing focus on preparedness over post-disaster response toward preparedness, as this could help alleviate situations in which FEMA marshals ample supplies but then finds that the supplies are not needed or cannot be effectively distributed to those in need.

“I have the utmost respect for what FEMA does because they have to work under the most difficult circumstances, and these conditions may put them into binds that are out of their control,” Keskinocak said. “More preparedness on the ground could help get FEMA, local governments, private sector, and non-governmental relief agencies to achieve synergies for saving lives and alleviate suffering."

Read the news release by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine here.

Also read: Tweaking vaccine distribution could save many more lives in flu season and pandemics

Writer & Media Representative: Ben Brumfield (404-272-2780), email: ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu

Georgia Institute of Technology

Now researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are highlighting another effect from animals raised for food and the humans who eat them:  the waste they all leave behind.

In a paper published November 13 in Nature Sustainability, the research team put forth what they believe is the first global estimate of annual recoverable human and animal fecal biomass. In 2014, the most recent year with data, the number was 4.3 billion tons and growing, and waste from livestock outweighed that from humans five to one at the country level.

“Exposure to both human and animal waste represent a threat to public health, particularly in low-income areas of the world that may not have resources to implement the best management and sanitation practices,” said Joe Brown, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “But estimating the amount of recoverable feces in the world also highlights the enormous potential from a resource perspective.”

Metals, phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium are all among the resources that could be recovered from human and animal waste. The researchers pointed to an earlier analysis that estimated the value of recoverable metals alone reaches $13 million a year from the waste of one million people.

The researchers looked at data from 2003 to 2014 as well as projections through 2030. The study combined global animal population data from the United Nations, human population data from the World Bank as well as earlier research on animal-specific estimates of fecal production.

From 2003 to 2014, the amount of waste biomatter produced grew annually by more than 57 million tons as both human and livestock populations grew. The researchers estimated that by 2030, the total amount of global fecal biomass produced each year would reach at least five billion tons, with livestock waste outweighing that from humans six to one at the country level.

“This paper demonstrates that building more latrines in developing parts of the world isn’t going to solve all of our waste management problems,” Brown said. “Animal waste has the potential to negatively impact health in many of the same ways as with human waste, from spreading enteric infections to hurting growth and cognitive development of the humans exposed.”

While chickens were the most plentiful livestock globally, cattle, with their larger body mass, produced the most fecal waste on the planet. As a result, countries with high numbers of cattle, such as those in the Americas, produced the most waste by mass.

The researchers estimated that by 2030, the planet’s total annual fecal and urinary biomass could contain as much as 100 million tons of phosphorus, 30 million tons of potassium, 18 million tons of calcium, and 5.5 million tons of magnesium, to name a few recoverable materials.

While much of the attention on reducing disease transmission has focused through the decades on pathogens associated with human waste, much less attention has been given to animal waste, the researchers wrote, despite livestock accounting for 80 percent of the global fecal biomass generated.

“Ultimately, shining a light on the amount of waste that we produce is the first step toward shaping policies and regional planning geared toward maximizing public health and resource recovery,” Brown said. “This is an area where there’s a huge need for attention and investment – to help develop next-generation waste management innovations, for both large-scale and small-scale animal husbandry operations, that will enable us to maximize human health and meet the global demand for natural resources.”

The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

CITATION: David M. Berendes, Patricia J. Yang, Amanda Lai, David Hu and Joe Brown, “Estimation of global recoverable human and animal faecal biomass,” (Nature Sustainability, November 13, 2018) http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0167-0

The collaboration, announced Sept. 5, will allow Georgia Tech’s Smart Cities and Inclusive Innovation initiative to offer seed funding from Delta for projects across campus. Researchers will test their ideas and technologies in Curiosity Lab’s living laboratory in Peachtree Corners.

“This is a wonderful example of industry-university-local government coming together to advance innovative solutions to the built environment and mobility,” said Debra Lam, managing director for Smart Cities and Inclusive Innovation at Georgia Tech. “Providing access to such infrastructure will help our researchers test new technologies and further our mission of serving our community through innovation.”

The backbone of the partnership is Curiosity Lab’s 1.5-mile autonomous vehicle test track. Owned by the city, it has 5G mobile data connectivity, smart infrastructure like connected traffic lights, a dedicated fiber-optic data network, and an operations center where researchers can track data from all the connected devices and sensors on the track. The track is set in a commercial office park in Peachtree Corners, just northeast of Atlanta, and allows interaction with people and vehicles going about their daily lives.

“Our 5G-enabled living laboratory will give Georgia Tech researchers the opportunity to push the frontier of emerging technology in a real-world setting that is almost impossible to replicate in a closed lab,” said Betsy Plattenburg, executive director of Curiosity Lab at Peachtree Corners. “Curiosity Lab also will provide those researchers an opportunity to collaborate with other industry leaders and focus their research on immediate challenges and results.”

While it might seem counterintuitive for Delta to be interested in cars, especially the driverless variety, the advances that emerge from this partnership could benefit customers and employees, according to Delta Chief Operating Officer Gil West.

“Driving the leading edge of emerging technology means Delta can help shape how industry adopts it,” West said. “Autonomous vehicle technology is one of those innovations we see as having the potential to improve employee safety, the customer experience and operational performance, and this partnership will help us explore all of those possibilities.”

As autonomous vehicle research advances across the world, Delta sees potential applications for autonomous cars, trucks or buses at airports and beyond. For example, autonomous vehicles could help customers make tight connections across an airport, deliver delayed baggage to customers, or transport aircraft parts to airports.

West said this collaboration is an important part of the global airline’s strategy to invest in solutions that empower customers and employees, reduce the stresses of travel, and redefine the future of flying.

The collaboration builds on Georgia Tech’s autonomous mobility and infrastructure work, which spans the Georgia Tech Research Institute, the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, the Office of Parking and Transportation Services, and Smart Cities and Inclusive Innovation.

Flashback to July 2019, the dawn of autonomous vehicles and other connected cars, and physicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Multiscale Systems, Inc. have applied physics in a new study to simulate what it would take for future hackers to wreak exactly this widespread havoc by randomly stranding these cars. The researchers want to expand the current discussion on automotive cybersecurity, which mainly focuses on hacks that could crash one car or run over one pedestrian, to include potential mass mayhem.

They warn that even with increasingly tighter cyber defenses, the amount of data breached has soared in the past four years, but objects becoming hackable can convert the rising cyber threat into a potential physical menace.

“Unlike most of the data breaches we hear about, hacked cars have physical consequences,” said Peter Yunker, who co-led the study and is an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics.

It may not be that hard for state, terroristic, or mischievous actors to commandeer parts of the internet of things, including cars.

“With cars, one of the worrying things is that currently there is effectively one central computing system, and a lot runs through it. You don’t necessarily have separate systems to run your car and run your satellite radio. If you can get into one, you may be able to get into the other,” said Jesse Silverberg of Multiscale Systems, Inc., who co-led the study with Yunker 

Freezing traffic solid

In simulations of hacking internet-connected cars, the researchers froze traffic in Manhattan nearly solid, and it would not even take that to wreak havoc. Here are their results, and the numbers are conservative for reasons mentioned below.

“Randomly stalling 20 percent of cars during rush hour would mean total traffic freeze. At 20 percent, the city has been broken up into small islands, where you may be able to inch around a few blocks, but no one would be able to move across town,” said David Yanni, a graduate research assistant in Yunker’s lab.

Not all cars on the road would have to be connected, just enough for hackers to stall 20 percent of all cars on the road. For example, if 40 percent of all cars on the road were connected, hacking half would suffice.

Hacking 10 percent of all cars at rush hour would debilitate traffic enough to prevent emergency vehicles from expediently cutting through traffic that is inching along citywide. The same thing would happen with a 20 percent hack during intermediate daytime traffic.

The researchers’ results appear in the journal Physical Review E on July 20, 2019. The study is not embargoed.

^{[Ready for graduate school? Here's how to apply to Georgia Tech.]} 

It could take less

For the city to be safe, hacking damage would have to be below that. In other cities, things could be worse.

“Manhattan has a nice grid, and that makes traffic more efficient. Looking at cities without large grids like Atlanta, Boston, or Los Angeles, and we think hackers could do worse harm because a grid makes you more robust with redundancies to get to the same places down many different routes,” Yunker said.

The researchers left out factors that would likely worsen hacking damage, thus a real-world hack may require stalling even fewer cars to shut down Manhattan.

“I want to emphasize that we only considered static situations – if roads are blocked or not blocked. In many cases, blocked roads spill over traffic into other roads, which we also did not include. If we were to factor in these other things, the number of cars you’d have to stall would likely drop down significantly,” Yunker said.

The researchers also did not factor in ensuing public panic nor car occupants becoming pedestrians that would further block streets or cause accidents. Nor did they consider hacks that would target cars at locations that maximize trouble.

They also stress that they are not cybersecurity experts, nor are they saying anything about the likelihood of someone carrying out such a hack. They simply want to give security experts a calculable idea of the scale of a hack that would shut a city down.

The researchers do have some general ideas of how to reduce the potential damage.

“Split up the digital network influencing the cars to make it impossible to access too many cars through one network,” said lead author Skanka Vivek, a postdoctoral researcher in Yunker’s lab. “If you could also make sure that cars next to each other can’t be hacked at the same time that would decrease the risk of them blocking off traffic together.”

Traffic jams as physics

Yunker researches in soft matter physics, which looks at how constituent parts – in this case, connected cars – act as one whole physical phenomenon. The research team analyzed the movements of cars on streets with varying numbers of lanes, including how they get around stalled vehicles and found they could apply a physics approach to what they observed.

“Whether traffic is halted or not can be explained by classic percolation theory used in many different fields of physics and mathematics,” Yunker said.

Percolation theory is often used in materials science to determine if a desirable quality like a specific rigidity will spread throughout a material to make the final product uniformly stable. In this case, stalled cars spread to make formerly flowing streets rigid and stuck.

The shut streets would be only those in which hacked cars have cut off all lanes or in which they have become hindrances that other cars can’t maneuver around and do not include streets where hacked cars still allow traffic flow.

The researchers chose Manhattan for their simulations because a lot of data was available on that city’s traffic patterns.

Also READ: Georgia Tech's cybersecurity researchers tackle the internet of things 

The study was coauthored by Skanda Vivek and David Yanni of Georgia Tech and Jesse Silverberg of Multiscale Systems, Inc. Any findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the authors.

Writer & Media Representative: Ben Brumfield (404-660-1408), email: ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu

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The funding will continue support for the South Big Data Innovation Hub, an organization that helps 16 Southern States and the District of Columbia identify and utilize data science and engineering to address critical societal needs. One of four NSF-supported regional data hubs in the U.S., the South Big Data Hub is managed by the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

"The Big Data Hubs provide a connective tissue for the data science ecosystem across sectors and domains,” said Renata Rawlings-Goss, the Hub’s executive director. “I am deeply pleased by NSF's recommitment to the growth of the South Hub and our community. Over the last three years, we have made great strides within our priority areas and are looking to broaden that reach in the next four years.”

The NSF-supported data hubs play four key roles: (1) Accelerating public-private partnerships that break down barriers between industry, academia and government, (2) Growing R&D communities that connect data scientists with domain scientists and practitioners, (3) Facilitating data sharing and shared cyber infrastructure and services, and (4) Building data science capacity for education and workforce development.

“There is a global shortage of data science and analytics talent that is threatening the future of innovation,” added Rawlings-Goss “By working across sectors, the South Hub joins in creating solutions to increase the capacity of universities and industry to work on pressing problems for our region and for the world.”

Priorities for the hubs are determined regionally to bring together collaborators that include academics, community leaders, local and state government executives, regional businesses, national laboratories and others, explained Srinivas Aluru, principal investigator for the Hub, which was launched in 2015 and won the 2019 Georgia Tech Outstanding Achievement in Research Development Award.

“We want to collaborate to help solve regional problems using the resources of the Hub,” explained Aluru, who is also co-executive director of the Institute for Data Engineering and Science at Georgia Tech. “We are addressing truly regional issues that affect more than one state and more than one set of collaborators. These are challenges that can only be addressed by bringing these groups together.”

The south region is pursuing five major big data priorities:

• Health and Disparities: High impact applications of data science in precision medicine, health analytics, and health disparities. “If you look at the health outcomes, they differ by ethnic groups. Trying to understand and address these health disparities is one of our big data challenges,” Aluru said.
• Smart Cities and Communities: Collection and integration of data on infrastructure, sensors, and behavior to design efficient use of resources and services, and to achieve a higher quality, affordable lifestyle, as well as concrete applications of analytics and machine learning to improve the nation’s energy production and smart grid.
• Advanced Materials and Manufacturing: Access to data infrastructure for creating new materials for advanced manufacturing in every state. “Manufacturing is very important to the Southeast, and we plan to workwith the state manufacturing extension partnerships in different states, trying to inject big data techniques into materials science and manufacturing to shorten the deployment cycle,” Aluru added.
• Environment and Coastal Hazards: Prevention and enhanced response to natural and human-induced environmental hazards. Southern states are disproportionately affected by hurricanes on the both the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. Understanding these threats and how best to protect people and property is critical.
• Social Cybersecurity: Best practices across sectors to forecast cyber-mediated changes in human behavior to ensure private, secure and ethical data sharing, reporting and use. “In modern times the virtual world is a force in and of itself; we want to support transparency in how it can change interactions and social outcomes,” said Rawlings-Goss.

The new NSF award includes seed funding designed to evaluate the feasibility of new big data projects. Part of a hub-and-spoke system, the seed money should help create new spokes to address specific data issues identified by collaborators.

“Developing innovative, effective solutions to grand challenges requires linking scientists and engineers with local communities,” said Jim Kurose, Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the NSF. “The Big Data Hubs provide the glue to achieve those links, bringing together teams of data science researchers with cities, municipalities and anchor institutions.”

Ultimately, the goal is to harness the synergy of the collaborators to address issues that require the use of data science and engineering techniques.

“By catalyzing partnerships that integrate academic researchers into the fabric of communities across the U.S., we can accelerate and deepen the impact of basic research on a range of societal issues, from water management to efficient transportation systems,” said Beth Plale, one of the NSF program directors managing the Big Data Hubs awards.

The South Big Data Hub was funded through the National Science Foundation’s Big Data Science & Engineering Program, Awards 1550305 and 1550291. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu).

Writer: John Toon

Despite casting serious doubt on dozens of theoretical papers that have pursued “elastodynamic” cloaking, the new study’s authors from the Georgia Institute of Technology don’t think civil engineers should completely give up on it, just on the idea of an ideal cloak. Limited cloaking could still add a degree of protection to structures, particularly against some stress waves common in earthquakes.

“With cloaking, there is this expectation that if you get any kind of stress wave from any kind of direction, a cloak should be able to hide the object from it. We now see that it is not possible,” said principal investigator Arash Yavari, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “But for a large class of disturbances, namely the in-plane disturbances, you could probably design a good cloak.”

In an earthquake, in-plane disturbances are seismic waves that track along flatter and broader -- or planar -- paths through the surface of the Earth.

Yavari and coauthor Ashkan Golgoon, a graduate research assistant studying with Yavari, published their study in the journal Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis, a leading journal on theoretical solid mechanics, on May 16, 2019. The research was funded by the Army Research Office.

Here's what the dream of cloaking for stress waves looks like, some theoretical errors the researchers say have errantly perpetuated that dream and what to do now that the bubble has burst.

The dream cloak

The theoretical dream of elastodynamic cloaking to steer stress waves past a structure like it isn’t even there has a lot in common with the dream of an invisibility cloak, which would bend light — electromagnetic waves — around an object then point it out the other side.

The light waves hitting the viewer’s eye would reveal what is behind the object but not the object itself. In elastodynamic cloaking, the waves are not electromagnetic but mechanical, moving through the ground. Hypothetically, cloaking the object would completely isolate it from the waves.

In a scenario to protect, say, a nuclear reactor from any stress waves traveling through the ground, whether from a natural or human-made calamity, ideally, civil engineers might lower the base of the reactor into a hole below the surface of the ground. They would build a protective cylinder or a half-spherical underground bowl around it with special materials to steer the stress waves around the circle.

There are dreams, then there are the study’s findings.

“We proved that the shape of the cloak does not matter, whether spherical or cylindrical, you can’t completely cloak,” Yavari said.

^{[Thinking about grad school? Here's how to apply to Georgia Tech.]}

The erroneous analogy

A lot of theory and math from electromagnetic (light) cloaking has been transferred onto elastodynamic cloaking research, and some of the former appears to have thrown a wrench into the latter.

“Many times, analogies from other fields are useful, but elasticity adds multiple physical factors that you don’t have in electromagnetism,” Yavari said. “For example, the balance of angular momentum is being violated in much of the research literature.

Angular momentum is a property of mass in rotational motion, and it is resistant to changes. Many people have experienced angular momentum by tilting a spinning gyroscope and watching it stubbornly move down an unexpected path.

Although it’s a wave, light is photons, which have no mass. Stress waves, on the other hand, travel through matter — specifically, solid matter as opposed to liquid or gas — and that adds pivotal dynamics to the equation.

Those dynamics also affect that hole that hides the object. Without it, the stress waves travel pretty uniformly through a medium, but with it, stresses concentrate around the hole and mess up the neat geometry of the wave patterns.

The Roman cloak?

What to do? Cloak anyway. If the ideal solution does not exist, make an imperfect one.

“The math says that cloaking is not possible in the strict sense. When you understand that, you don’t waste time,” Yavari said. “You formulate problems that optimize with what you do know around targeted stresses or loads you want to protect against.”

Engineers could protect against important earthquake stresses if they use materials that have been specifically pre-stressed, have certain elastic properties and distribution of densities that are detailed in the study. A real-life cloak can fall short of an ideal and still be great.

“If instead of 100 percent of the wave energy I only feel 10 or 20 percent, it’s a huge deal because engineering is not a pursuit of absolute ideals,” Yavari said.

Even the ancient Romans, notoriously math-phobic, appear to have inadvertently built seismic cloaks in their design of amphitheaters, according to a report in MIT Technology Review. Their resemblance to modern experimental cloaking devices may have helped preserve them for 2,000 years in seismically active regions.

The new study also examined a popular idea in civil engineering that building with a family of materials that have a microstructure making them “Cosserat solids” might allow for perfect cloaking. The authors concluded that this also can’t work. The study did not consider so-called metamaterials, which have received attention for rerouting in particular light waves.

Also READ: The Kendeda "living building" will generate its own electricity and extract its water from the air.

This research was supported by the Army Research Office (grants ARO W911NF-16-1-0064 and ARO W911NF-18-1-0003. Any findings, conclusions or recommendations are those of the authors and not necessarily of the Army Research Office.

Writer and Media Representative:

Ben Brumfield (404-660-1408)

Georgia Institute of Technology
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Email: ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu

Georgia Tech leads the pilot Georgia Smart Communities Challenge, which supports one-year projects to develop and implement smart design solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing the state. 

The four selected localities were chosen from a pool of applicants statewide.The cities of Albany and Chamblee and the counties of Chatham and Gwinnett are focusing on pilot projects to improve local housing investments, address traffic and transportation challenges, and develop more targeted flooding forecasts of storms and sea level rise along Georgia’s coast. 

A local government coordinates each project. But community and neighborhood groups, industry, and others are crucial collaborators. A Georgia Tech researcher conducts studies and provides guidance in pursuit of each project’s goals, supported by graduate and undergraduate students.

Each community has received $50,000 in grants and $25,000 from Georgia Tech in research support. Communities also raised matched funds. Georgia Power is the lead sponsor, with additional financial support from the Atlanta Regional Commission. The work began in September 2018 and will continue through September 2019. 

Students are engaged through the research projects but also through two additional summer programs. The Georgia Smart Community Corps is a full-time, paid summer fellowship for Georgia Tech students to become part of the project team. It is a joint collaboration with the Strategic Energy Institute, Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain, Center for Career Discovery and Development, and the Student Government Association. 

The Georgia Tech Civic Data Science Program, led by Ellen Zegura and Christopher Le Dantec, competitively recruits students nationally to come to the Atlanta campus for the summer and work in smaller teams with the Georgia Smart community on data analytics. 

And the competition will soon begin for the next group of communities, to be announced in June.

“We define ‘smart development’ as the integration and application of technologies to improve the quality of life,” said Debra Lam, managing director of Smart Cities and Inclusive Innovation at Georgia Tech. These advanced tools can be intelligent infrastructures, information, and communication technologies, Internet of Things devices, and other computational or digital systems, such as data centers and portals, web and smartphone applications, and automated digital services.

“There is a misconception that smart community innovations always must start in a major city and trickle down to smaller places,” said Lam. “But innovations can trickle up as well. They can be developed more quickly in smaller communities because you have all stakeholders in the room — the mayor and city manager, public agencies, community and neighborhood groups, industry and business. A next step will be to spread what’s learned from these smart development projects to other Georgia communities and beyond.”  

Smart Sea Level Tools for Emergency Planning and Response

Climate change is driving sea levels higher, increasing flooding events during coastal storms and extreme high tides in Chatham County. But the county has only one official water level gauge, located at Fort Pulaski. The Georgia coast, however, is a complex environment where rising water impacts can vary dramatically from place to place. 

“Some neighborhoods are flooding more frequently now, while in other neighborhoods not far away the flooding is more modest or erratic, depending on which way the wind is blowing, how much rain falls, and many other factors,” said Russell Clark, Georgia Tech senior research scientist in the College of Computing. 

That’s why residents want more targeted flood warnings and forecasts. 

Chatham County is using its Smart Communities support to partner with Georgia Tech researchers to develop a sensor network partnered with data analytics for more accurate, localized flooding forecasts for improved emergency planning and response. 

“Coastal communities are desperate for solutions,” said Kim Cobb, the project’s faculty leader, Georgia Power Chair, and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “Through many partnerships, Georgia Tech can design strategies to help communities adapt to climate change and sea level rise. We see this pilot as only the first step of a multi-year effort to advance real solutions with different combinations of partners, expertise, and funding.”  

Local high school students are helping to build and install a new batch of 30 sensors that will soon augment the 12 units already deployed. The sensor network will transmit data to computer models for analysis and prediction of storm strength and flooding.

The Smart Sea Level Sensor Project is a partnership among Chatham Emergency Management Agency officials, City of Savannah officials, and Georgia Tech scientists and engineers. The pilot project’s data could be used to plan more resilient bridge, road, and water treatment infrastructure. The sensors could be adapted later to collect other environmental monitoring data, including rainfall and water quality parameters. 

“Residents are excited to see that localized sensor data will be visible for them,” said Clark. “We hear a lot of ‘thank you for doing this in my neighborhood.’”

Emanuele Di Lorenzo, professor of ocean and climate dynamics, will integrate sensor data into models for predictive flood-risk assessments specifically for the Chatham County coast. David Frost, Elizabeth and Bill Higginbotham Professor of civil engineering, will provide resilience planning tools for community leaders.

Residents can offer their input during a May 16 showcase for the project sponsored by the Georgia Smart Communities Program. On smartphones and iPads, Georgia Tech undergraduates will guide residents through web-based visualizations of flood-risk scenarios for different coastal locations with augmented reality tools. 

“We continue to look for community feedback, which is so important,” said Cobb. “There will be many more opportunities for local community members, students, and educators to get involved.”

Albany Housing Data Initiative

Why do public investments in housing and infrastructure fail to revitalize some blighted neighborhoods? Albany, a city in the southwest corner of the state, is drawing on Georgia Smart support and guidance to develop and evaluate an automated housing registry that could help answer this question. 

“As is the case in many communities, housing has fallen into disrepair in some Albany neighborhoods,” said Omar Isaac Asensio, assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy and principal investigator for the Albany project. “Abandoned or uninhabitable properties have been purchased and cleaned up. But the community says, ‘We're spending a lot of money on revitalization, but because data are siloed in different city departments and are not easily accessible, it’s hard for us to really quantify the benefits of these investments.’ In an effort to promote transparency, the city wants to integrate and analyze Albany’s housing data, which would help the community answer questions about the effectiveness of various policies or programs designed to help neighborhoods.”

For example, the Community Home Investment Program (CHIP) assists low- and moderate- income households with up to $25,000 in home repairs that affect the health or safety of those residing in the home. Eligible repairs include costly items such as roof replacement, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, and other energy efficiency measures. Today there is no way to link housing investment information with energy performance data in the city. As a result, the data needed to evaluate the effectiveness of housing programs are inaccessible, not just to the public.

Asensio’s team is collaborating with the city to bring together multiple databases to map housing address information as well as 10 years’ worth of utility records held by the city. Additional information from other city departments, including transit, code enforcement data, crime data, and other open data is part of the overall initiative, and will be added later. 

“Under the leadership of Steven Carter, Albany’s chief information officer, we’ve already made strides on data collection, aggregation, and curation,” he said. “Now an open-data portal needs to be built, and data from more departments will be integrated into one place.” Using record linkage and statistical algorithms, the Georgia Tech team will create maps to visualize locations of blight and housing investments and tell the hidden stories behind the data, backed by rigorous analysis.

Albany is hosting participatory design workshops for the public and others to develop priorities about the initiatives that can be run through the portal and ArcGIS Hub in collaboration with Georgia Tech’s Christopher Le Dantec and Debra Lam. Project partners include Dougherty County, the city’s Department of Community and Economic Development, and the nonprofit Fight Albany Blight.

“We need input from both the public and private sectors about what’s important to them because ultimately this process is meant to benefit communities,” Asensio said. The open-data portal will evolve with new data that the city adds over time, helping officials to do their jobs, improving fiscal efficiency and enhancing transparency throughout city government. 

Urban policy scientists are often stymied by lack of access to data. “The Albany initiative allows researchers access to granular data about public investment and performance needed for rigorous policy and program evaluation,” he said. “This project could provide a blueprint to other cities to open up and visualize city data in collaboration with the academic research community, the public, government, and industry. Albany’s experience will be indispensable for other communities in our state, putting the city on the map for developing the latest analytical tools on open data.”

Connected Vehicle Technology Master Plan

Suburban Gwinnett County, northeast of Atlanta, has experienced sprawling growth and increasingly heavy traffic in recent decades. County leaders, looking for solutions, took note of Atlanta’s North Avenue Smart Corridor and similar high-tech projects around the country. Smart technologies can improve traffic flow and driver safety when vehicles share real-time locations with each other and with traffic signals. High-tech sensors on vehicles and roadways tell connected vehicles when to maneuver to avoid collisions, reducing crashes and traffic snarls on suburban arteries.

Now Gwinnett County is partnering with Georgia Smart in a project to engage multiple stakeholders across the state to set the standard for application of connected vehicle technology that can improve mobility and traffic safety.

The county aims to develop and implement a master plan for autonomous real-time data sharing among connected vehicle applications, signals, and other roadway sensors. The Peachtree Industrial Boulevard Corridor has been chosen as the pilot smart corridor for technology deployment, which is scheduled to begin later in 2019. 

First, though, the county needs accurate baseline data about current traffic patterns. 

“We’ve had access to high-fidelity traffic signal data, but data from vehicles on the road are very sparse,” said Angshuman Guin, the project’s faculty leader and senior research engineer in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. 

“We were only getting a location point for emergency response vehicles every five minutes, but we need GPS points every second to understand the bottlenecks in traffic, as well as where and why the vehicles are losing time on the roadway during an emergency response.” He is collaborating with the county fire chief to outfit 15 fire department vehicles with Georgia Tech-designed sensor packages. 

“We are using the fire department data to know exactly where and how long the delays are for emergency response vehicles — and compare those data to signal data. Was a delay associated with the signal being red? Or was it associated with traffic alone? This study is only possible because of our collaboration with the county, the fire department, and the other partners involved. We would not be able to gather the data we need without them.”  

Guin will help the county assess the benefits of Connected Vehicle applications such as Emergency Vehicle Preemption, which help responders reach emergency scenes more quickly and safely. He will also simulate traffic operations and apply safety analyses across all systems.

“We are helping the county develop strategies, leveraging connected vehicle technology, for extending the benefits of preemption by implementing anticipatory queue flush operations at intersections to reduce the delays experienced by emergency vehicles, and to also improve safety at intersections,” he said.

Gwinnett County and Georgia Tech are collaborating on the project with the Georgia Department of Transportation and the cities of Berkeley Lake, Duluth, Norcross, and Suwanee. 

Most connected-vehicle pilot efforts focus on interstates or high-density business districts. But many commuters and other drivers in the Atlanta metro spend more miles on suburban roadways than in the city. 

Suburban arterials are typically more challenging for smart communications technologies. Heavily traveled suburban roads with higher operating speeds and irregularly spaced intersections make driving more complex and dangerous. That’s why the suburban Gwinnett County corridor could form the backbone of the Connected Vehicle Technology Master Plan to improve driving experience with connected vehicle technology across city and county lines throughout the state. 

Chamblee Shared Autonomous Vehicle Study 

The city of Chamblee is attracting young people and others who seek a walkable, lively urban experience without the steep rents of Atlanta’s popular, higher-density neighborhoods. The Chamblee MARTA rail station in suburban DeKalb County has been a crucial drawing card for commuters relocating to apartments in the city’s redeveloping core. 

Chamblee has succeeded in redeveloping properties near MARTA with urban apartments and new restaurants. “Now the city wants to expand local transit opportunities to link the MARTA station to other nearby neighborhoods, some with redevelopment projects already underway,” said Ellen Dunham-Jones, director of the Georgia Tech urban design program.

Chamblee is using Georgia Smart funding to partner with a Georgia Tech team, led by Dunham-Jones, to study how improving urban design and passenger experiences can help build ridership for an experimental mode of transportation — the shared autonomous vehicle. 

Chamblee anticipates operating an autonomous shuttle along a mile of Peachtree Road with five stops for 10 hours a day, seven days a week. A second phase could extend the shuttle east to Assembly Yards, a mixed-use development under construction in Doraville. At first, the shuttle would operate semi-autonomously with an onboard attendant in case of emergencies.

The Georgia Tech team is developing a set of recommendations for the city and a best practices manual to improve the user experience of getting to, waiting for, and riding on autonomous shuttle buses. How might they expand walkability throughout Chamblee and build social capital? Can bus stops serve as community infrastructure? The guide could be applied in other communities in Georgia and around the country. 

Dunham-Jones and Ph.D. student Zachary Lancaster studied 18 autonomous shuttle projects in pilot stages worldwide, the great majority of which operate on private streets or in office parks. They interviewed industry experts, visited pilot projects, and surveyed potential passengers of Chamblee’s shuttle. 

The autonomous shuttle experience must be appealing to compete with other transit options including private cars, electric scooters, and ride-share services. 

“Once the shuttle is operating, it’s important to have a data management plan that allows for feedback from users,” she said. “That will help the city improve the shuttle system by learning more about how people respond to it.”

The pilot project will also develop an operations plan for the shuttle and conduct preliminary engineering while engaging the community through public meetings, city strolls, and other events. Other city partners include the City of Doraville, Stantec, MARTA, and the Assembly Community Improvement District.

Introducing small autonomous transit vehicles to city streets could eventually transform how people get around.  

“With autonomous shared vehicles, you could replace the typical big bus that comes once an hour with four or five small shuttles along the same route arriving every 10 minutes, and that would be a game changer for encouraging more people to use transit,” she said.

Concluding the Projects and Next Steps

As the inaugural Georgia Smart projects draw to a close in September, the team with support from the Strategic Energy Institute will produce a Georgia Smart Community Playbook. Distilling best practices and findings for all communities, the playbook is being developed by Christopher Le Dantec, associate professor in the Digital Media program in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. 

The playbook will include a data guide. 

“The guide prompts communities to answer a number of questions about data they found useful in their projects,” says Le Dantec. “Where did these data come from? What are the data standards? What are the data’s limitations? What might another community do with similar data and where can it go for help?” 

Each project concludes in September with a local public event to explain how the community pursued its goals, gained results, and made plans for the future. Each cohort, then, provides a road map for the next one. 

But projects supported by Georgia Smart won’t necessarily come to an end after one year. They may evolve with new sources of funding.  

“Georgia Tech scientists and engineers have become part of the local team,” said Lam. “Many of the researchers want to continue engaging in this work, expanding the pilot projects with new grants and other opportunities.”

Georgia Smart is supported by the Georgia Power Company and the Atlanta Regional Commission, the lead sponsors, as well as the Association County Commissioners of Georgia, Georgia Chamber, Georgia Department of Community Affairs, Georgia Department of Economic Development, Georgia Municipal Association, Georgia Planning Association, Global City Teams Challenge, Metro Atlanta Chamber, and Technology Association of Georgia. 

For more information about Georgia Smart, visit www.smartcities.gatech.edu/georgia-smart.

The links below have additional information (in PDF format) on each project:

• Chatham County
• Albany
• Chamblee
• Gwinnett County

Research News

Georgia Institute of Technology

177 North Avenue

Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0181  USA

Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu).

Writer: John Tibbetts

The Smart City Expo World Congress awarded the project its Mobility Award. Georgia Tech serves as the research partner for this Atlanta initiative. 

“This corridor is becoming the most connected one in the state of Georgia, serving as a living lab for active, multi-modal traffic management through technology deployment and data analytics. Smart technology solutions applied here are improving roadway and public safety, mobility and the environment,” according to the news release announcing the award. 

In August 2017, the City of Atlanta announced an expanded research project with the Institute for the North Avenue project. It involves multiple Smart City technology components designed to: facilitate and promote safety for pedestrian and bicycle traffic; use the latest technology-adaptive traffic signals for a safer, more efficient flow of bus and vehicular traffic in real time conditions; and prioritize fire engines and ambulances traveling along the corridor on emergency response calls.

Georgia Tech has partnered with the City since 2015 to design, implement and study Smart City initiatives. 

Georgia Tech leads several initiatives to bring together industry and public agencies to help local governments implement smart development. The strategies developed serve as models that could be implemented across Georgia and the country. 

The Georgia Smart Communities Challenge provides seed funding and access to a Georgia Tech research team to develop and implement smart design solutions to tackle big challenges such as housing, traffic congestion, sea level rise and shared autonomous vehicles.