Urban Risk Lab's proposal receives inaugural MCSC Seed Award

June 1, 2022

The MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC) is a cross-institute effort to accelerate research and implementation of large-scale, cross-sector, real-world solutions addressing global climate and sustainability (C&S) challenges. In its first-ever 2022 MCSC Seed Awards program, MCSC selected 20 projects from all five of MIT’s schools.

In collaboration with Prof. Nicholas de Monchaux, this project aims to develop new ways to assimilate bottom-up knowledge in otherwise top-down climate preparedness and response efforts. Through collaborative, community-level data collection, coordination, and planning this toolkit will help foster a culture of consensual, inclusive policy-making around difficult choices such as relocation in the face of exacerbating climate-change impacts.

"Preparing for a New World of Weather and Climate Extremes" is selected as a flagship project for MIT climate grand challenge

April 15, 2022

MIT Climate Grand Challenge is an initiative to deliver high-impact climate solutions. In the first round, 27 teams as finalists from a field of nearly 100 initial proposals. “Preparing for a New World of Weather and Climate Extremes,” a project led by Professor Paul O’Gorman, Associate Professor Miho Mazereeuw, and Professor Kerry Emanuel, was among the five of the most promising proposals that are selected as multi-year flagship projects.

Climate change intensifies extreme weather and climate events, such as the unprecedented heatwave in western North America in 2021 and rainfall from Hurricane Harvey in 2017. These devastating events are becoming more intense globally. Still, we do not adequately know the changing risks for specific regions and communities or how changing extremes will affect the broader use of wind, solar, and hydroelectric energy that is needed to limit future greenhouse gas emissions. This research will address these critical knowledge gaps by improving the science and prediction of extremes and their effects on our energy systems. Based on the improved projections of extremes, This research will build a scalable toolkit, initially focused on cities in the United States and Africa, for communities and stakeholders to prepare and adapt. Our team brings together experts in climate science, engineering, design, and machine learning at MIT with external partners to provide the most significant benefit to communities, municipalities, and industry.

REACT AI: Partnering with Japanese Cities to automate real-time disaster triage.

March 1, 2022

Timely and detailed information is critical during a disaster. With mainstreaming of social-media-based civic voluntarism during disasters, disaster managers often find themselves in a situation where they get overwhelmed by information streaming in through various channels. Real-time Emergency Assessment, Coordination, & Triage (REACT) AI is a research project aimed to automate the triage of this incoming image and text information and help disaster managers focus on areas that need the most attention. By working directly with Emergency Operations Centers in Japanese cities, this project closely integrates non-government and community-led organizations in disaster response, strengthening long-term resilience planning.  

We are also conducting workshops with domain experts and disaster responders to understand the human factors affecting AI outputs and improve labeling criteria for training datasets. These workshops aimed to create tasks and labels consistent with the city’s protocol, are more objective for labelers, and are structured to help make operational decisions based on REACT output. In addition to piloting this model in real-life disaster drills, resulting datasets and underlying methodology will be open-sourced, helping drive the real-world impact of this project.

The project is supported by Google.org and undertaken in partnership with the University of Tsukuba, and Mercy Corps.

Porosity Map: Using MIT campus as a living lab for climate-change resilience through citizen science

October 3, 2021

The MIT campus sits on reclaimed land, originally tidal flats. Since reclamation, both the city and the campus have grown at a rapid pace during the past 100 years. With sea-level rise, increased precipitation, and the associated risk of increasing storm surges it is vital to assess the flood vulnerability of the MIT campus. 

Through this project, we developed a chatbot-based tool that can be used on any mobile phone. This tool will allow for data collection for the whole campus through a group effort with students. This exercise will involve MIT students in an important experiment that also increases their awareness of flood issues and their own stewardship on campus.  Working over three days, members of the Porosity hunt catalogued openings in dozens of buildings across campus to better support flood mapping and resiliency planning at MIT

Read more at MIT News