Situated on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean, the US Pacific Northwest Region and Japan face significant earthquake risks from similar geophysical conditions. The Pacific Northwest is considered overdue for a Cascadia Subduction Zone 8.0–9.2 magnitude megaquake. When it happens, the estimated direct fatalities for Oregon and Washington states are up to 10,000, with economic losses of more than $80 billion. For the comparably sized region of Japan facing a Nankai megathrust earthquake, estimated fatalities are 80,000–323,000 lives and about $900 billion in economic loss. In the immediate aftermath of a megaquake, most of the disaster response agencies and personnel, if not all, will be overwhelmed and many neighborhoods in the region will need to rely on themselves to maintain essential activities for a prolonged period. To support these essential activities, communications will need to be robust enough to function under highly uncertain circumstances, and to enable real-time and reliable information sharing for efficient resource allocation and matching. This proposal represents the US portion of a planning grant for a collaboration with researchers from multiple Japanese Universities as part of the NSF/JST collaboration for the Smart and Connected Community Program.

This planning grant builds the capacity of a partnership of engineers and planners on both sides of the Pacific Ocean (Seattle area and Japan) to developing these critically needed communications and information-sharing technologies. The joint team will partner with three communities in Washington State and the city of Nagoya in Japan, to ensure that initial technical prototype ideas have real, place-specific relevance and applicability. Focus groups and community workshops will identify specific community needs, values, resources and concerns, and provide a feedback loop for evaluating the prototypes. It is expected that by working with these communities, the technological tools to be developed will be socially integrated, not only helping communities to address the critical need to prepare for a possible mega-earthquake but also to enhance resilience in the face of a wide range of life uncertainties and disruptions, and to improve communities’ daily quality of life.

This activity is in response to NSF Dear Colleague Letter Supporting Transition of Research into Cities through the US ASEAN ((Association of Southeast Asian Nations Cities) Smart Cities Partnership in collaboration with NSF and the US State Department. Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) will be partnering with University Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN) at Kuala Lumpur (KL), Malaysia, to develop renewable energy sources for bike lanes in KL. Kuala Lumpur is the largest city in Malaysia, and it is home to approximately 1.808 million people. The city has an 11 km long dedicated bicycle lane to reduce traffic congestion. The partnership between PVAMU and UNITEN will accelerate innovation in bike lane energy technologies. The vision of the project is to develop composite power generating cells that will generate power when bikes are ridden on the power generating cells. The energy will be harvested from composite power generating cells and will be laid on the bike lanes. The harvested energy will be used for emergency lamps along the bikeways to give more safety to the bikers or provide electric power for electronic signs installed alongside the bikeways. In addition, the harvested energy will be used for charging gadgets and provide purified water for bikers or pedestrians. The multi-sourced energy system will have applications in supplying power for (i) rainwater purification through reverse osmosis systems, (ii) emergency lights, and (iii) charging stations in the bike lanes in the city of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The system will be initially tested at PVAMU and will then be integrated with UNITEN and piloted in Kuala Lumpur. The project will have a huge impact on the green lifestyle of the people at Kuala Lumpur. Moreover, the research matured in this project may be suitable for use in other ASEAN cities as well as many cities and towns in the United States to provide renewable energy sources for their bike lanes.

The main goals of the project are: (i) develop a composite power generating cells that generate power under pressure, (ii) design charge collection electronic circuits to store the generated power, (iii) fabricate an integrated pad system with power generating cells, charge collection circuits, battery storage, and paint, (iv) install and test the integrated pad system at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The activity will leverage research at Prairie View A&M and UNITEN. To enable the use in bike lanes, thin-film PZT cells with optimized thickness will be developed. The energy and thickness of the film will be determined for each type of nanomaterial of the PZT cell. Experiments will be conducted to determine cells’ edge-to-edge distances, total energy output, the thickness of the PZT, and time responses of energy accumulation. A microcontroller-based energy monitoring system will manage the energy production and consumption for mobile charging applications. The cells will be configured with a matrix of paint strips on bike lanes. In addition to the composite power generating cells, solar panels will be combined in various places throughout the bike lanes to the energy-collection-rail, thus creating the sustainable multi-sourced energy system for the bike lanes. Various experiments will be performed to optimize the energy process from the bike lane. The design will be tested at PVAMU and then integrated into a bike lane infrastructure in Kuala Lumpur. The PVAMU and UNITEN team will be collaborating with city planning personnel to validate the concept and support evaluation as part of KL smart city activities.
 

Food deserts, generally defined as areas in which it is difficult to buy an affordable, high-quality fresh food, are not exclusive to urban or rural areas, but more indicative of under-served communities, low-income households, and minority neighborhoods. Food deserts are not only a health issue but also a community development and equity issue. Access to safe and nutritious food is a fundamental individual right. This project aims to address the food desert problem in Greater Richmond area, by engaging a wide range of food access-related stakeholders and utilizing the power of data analytics and advanced smart technologies to achieve sustainable food access program, leading to higher levels of quality of life and health for the city citizens.

Utilizing smart technologies to improve food access for a large segment of the community is not a straightforward task. There are many questions to be answered in order to realize the potential of these technologies, including: (1) what are the data needed to better understand and help address the food desert problem. (2) What are the social and economic impacts of food deserts? (3) What are the main factors contributing to limited food access in certain geographical areas? (4) What are the technologies and cyber-infrastructure that can help address the food access problem? (5) How to encourage micro-businesses to help tackle limited food accessibility? (6) How to present food desert data efficiently to help in decision-making?

This planning project will assemble a core group of scientists in engineering, life sciences, social work and government policy colleges to engage with community leaders and stakeholders, to identify through both quantitative and qualitative assessment the key challenges to sustainable food access in Richmond and its adjoining communities, and create the knowledge and tools for community-based sustainable food access program. This will be achieved by (1) developing a fundamental understanding of challenges facing communities due to food desert problem, (2) developing a better understanding of the factors contributing to food access problem, (3) recognizing various types of data collection in communities for addressing food access challenge, (4) deriving data-analytics techniques that can help identify effective solutions and evaluate their impacts, and (5) facilitate customized sensing, data-management, cyber-infrastructure and smart technologies solutions to develop a robust program for sustainable food access. The proposed plan will offer a research and development model that can be extended to other cities and communities.
 

Seniors (i.e., adults aged 65+) are the most rapidly growing segment of the U.S. population and have an increased risk of social isolation due to changes in lifestyle and physical health. Social connectedness, which involves establishing, sustaining, and increasing the quality of social relationships, is key to preventing or mitigating social isolation. Technology can foster social connectedness through online services and mobile applications. However, several factors, including lack of technological skills and awareness, accessibility issues, and privacy concerns may limit seniors’ use of technology-enabled services and resources, creating a generational digital divide that may contribute to social isolation. The Smart Social Connector (SSC) project addresses social isolation due to age-related barriers by creating informed strategies for seniors to learn and adopt technology and aligning resources with community needs. As such, this project promotes meaningful social connectedness among seniors that creates a sense of belonging within their community, advancing their health and welfare. Specifically, the SSC project provides a foundation for reconnecting senior residents in El Paso, Texas, a majority-Hispanic bicultural community with a growing senior demographic. This interdisciplinary, collaborative project has the potential to shift attitudes and behaviors toward seniors by restoring their visibility, value, and equitable participation in their community. With the involvement of students who are primarily from underrepresented groups, the SCC project contributes to broadening participation and preparing the next generation of professionals who possess the technical skills and knowledge required to address societal problems, specifically those relevant to senior populations.

In a strategic partnership among The University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso Community College, and the City of El Paso, the project is driven by integrative and interdisciplinary research among social sciences (i.e., anthropology and cognitive psychology); computer science; engineering (i.e., systems engineering and civil engineering); and scholarship of engagement (i.e., awareness and education). The SSC goal is to develop and sustain social connectedness of seniors to improve their quality of life through the intersection of technology, community engagement, and social sciences. In collaboration with community stakeholders, this community-based participatory research project has two main objectives: (i) advance knowledge on the systemic and behavioral factors that increase social connectedness and bridge the generational digital divide in seniors; and (ii) increase social and technological connectedness for seniors through Smart City solutions. The research team will utilize a variety of methods and instruments, including assessments of computer self-efficacy and cognitive ability, team-performance measurements, virtual/physical social-network analysis, and user-centered iterative design and testing of Smart City solutions. The SSC will involve the creation of a human and technological infrastructure, including a Living Lab environment, to support service delivery and the iterative development and piloting of Smart City solutions that integrate people, technology, and information. The SSC project will support seniors in strengthening their social connectedness, increasing their technology self-efficacy, and contributing to their community. The outcomes and lessons learned from the SCC project have the potential to be applied in other cities that need to address the generational digital divide to improve seniors’ quality of life.
 

High concentrations of energy use from fossil fuels can lead to poor air quality, resulting in adverse health effects as well as economic consequences. A prime example is found where large numbers of idling vehicles congregate (e.g., schools and hospital drop-off/pick-up zones), leading to microclimates of unhealthy air. Workers, such as valet parking attendants, can spend their entire workday in these microenvironments, and children passing through these zones can experience up to 60% higher levels of pollution than adults, because of their height. These vehicle-caused, poor-air-quality microclimates offer a compelling opportunity for communities to engage with emerging technologies to take ownership of their air and the behaviors that impact its quality. This project sociotechnical approach, called SmartAir, will synergistically integrate dynamic air-quality information with social-norm feedback to positively influence decisions that affect the well-being of vulnerable individuals working in or passing through polluted microenvironments. The feedback approach for decreasing idling mirrors the feedback provided by digital speed displays, which has been shown to positively influence driver behavior (reduced speeding) and thus reduce health-impacts of that behavior (reduced traffic accidents). The proposed pilot demonstrations will take place in Northern Utah, a region that periodically experiences the poorest air quality in the country. The project SmartAir employs a comprehensive community engagement approach — from the development of the sensing and display technologies to cocreation of culturally sensitive messaging, cooperatively conducted pilot studies, and efficacy evaluation.

SmartAir will produce novel technological and behavioral-science developments. First, this project will develop wearable, calibrated, low-cost air quality sensing nodes that will support members of smart and connected communities to minimize pollution exposure. Second, this project will enable the rapid integration of sensor measurements with local meteorological information and data-screening algorithms to dynamically provide feedback to individuals about idling behavior and to workers that seek to minimize pollution exposure. Third, the SmartAir system will be integrated into behavior-change experiments and the co-creation of community-crafted messaging to influence individual choices. Comprehensive involvement of the community partners will be critical to co-develop and pilot solutions to address poor air quality and ultimately ensure a highly scalable and sustainable system. The broader impacts of this work are multifold, including the following. SmartAir will serve as a framework for closing the loop between air quality measurements and individual decision making. It will also help drive institutional decisions that reduce worker pollutant exposure and improve worker performance, career longevity, and job satisfaction. Anonymized data will be made available to support numerous personal and community-driven needs, such as health-effects studies, anti-idling campaigns, school drop-off policies, and urban/traffic planning. Additionally, this project will have a substantial outreach effort that involves community members in message crafting, data collection, and interpretation.
 

This project is a Smart and Connected Communities award. The community is part of Evanston, Illinois and is composed of the lead partners described below:

- EvanSTEM which is a in-school/out of school time (OST) program to improve access and engagement for students in Evanston who have underperformed or been underrepresented in STEM.

- McGaw YMCA which consists of 12,000 families serving 20,000 individuals and supporting technology and makerspace activities (MetaMedia) in a safe community atmosphere.

- Office of Community Education Partnerships (OCEP) at Northwestern University which provides support for the university and community to collaborate on research, teaching, and service initiatives.

This partnership will develop a new approach to learning engagement through the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) interests of all young people in Evanston. This project is entitled Interests for All (I4All) and builds upon existing research results of the two Principal Investigators (PIs) and previous partnerships between the lead partners (EvanSTEM and MetaMedia had OCEP as a founding partner). I4All also brings together Evanston school districts, OST prividers, the city, and Evanston's Northwestern University as participants.

In particular the project builds on PI Pinkard's Cities of Learning project and co-PI Stevens' FUSE Studios project. Both of these projects have explicit goals to broaden participation in STEAM pursuits, a goal that is significantly advanced through I4All. In this project, I4All infrastructure will be evaluated using quantitative metrics that will tell the researchers whether and to what degree Evanston youth are finding and developing their STEAM interests and whether the I4All infrastructure supports a significantly more equitable distribution of opportunities to youth. The researchers will also conduct in depth qualitative case studies of youth interest development. These longitudinal studies will complement the quantitative metrics of participation and give measures that will be used in informing changes in I4All as part of the PIs Design Based Implementation Research approach. The artifacts produced in I4All include FUSE studio projects, software infrastructure to guide the students through OST and in-school activities and to provide to the students actionable information as to logistics for participation in I4All activities, and data that will be available to all stakeholders to evaluate the effectiveness of I4All. Additionally, this research has the potential to provide for scaling this model to different communities, leveraging the OST network in one community to begin to offer professional development more widely throughout the school districts and as an exemplar for other districts. These research results could also affect strategies and policies created by local school officials and community organizations regarding how to work together to create local learning environments to create an ecosystem where formal and informal learning spaces support and reinforce STEAM knowledge.
 

This Smart and Connected Community (SCC) project will partner with two rural communities to develop STEMports, an innovative Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) learning game for workforce development. The game's activities will take players on localized Augmented Reality (AR) missions to both engage in STEM learning challenges and discover emerging STEM careers in their community, specifically highlighting innovations in the fields of sustainable agriculture and aquaculture, forest products, and renewable energy. Community Advisory Teams (CATs) and co-design teams, including youth, representatives from the targeted emerging STEM economies, and decision-makers will partner with project staff to co-design STEMports that reflect the interests, cultural contexts, and envisioned STEM industries of the future for each community.

The project will: (a) design and pilot an AR game for community STEM workforce development; (b) develop and adapt a community engagement process that optimizes community networking for co-designing the gaming application and online community; and (c) advance a scalable process for wider applications of STEMports. This project is a collaboration between the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance and the Field Day Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to both build and research the co-designing of a SCC based within an AR environment. The project will contribute knowledge to the informal STEM learning, community development, and education technology fields in four major ways:

Deepening the understanding of how innovative technological tools support rural community STEM knowledge building as well as STEM identity and workforce interest.

Identifying design principles for co-designing the STEMports community related to the technological design process.

Developing social network approaches and analytics to better understand the social dimensions and community connections fostered by the STEMport community.

Understanding how participants' online and offline interactions with individuals and experiences builds networks and knowledge within a SCC.

With the scaling of use by an ever-growing community of players, STEMports will provide a new AR-based genre of public participation in STEM and collective decision making. The research findings will add to the emerging literature on community-wide education, innovative education technologies, informal STEM learning (especially place-based learning and STEM ecosystems), and participatory design research.

Project website is: mmsa.org/stemports

Smart services are deeply embedded in modern cities aiming to enhance various aspects of citizens' lives, including safety, wellness, and quality of life. Examples include intelligent traffic control and air quality control. Given these services, monitoring a city's safety and performance collectively is crucial, yet also challenging due to many potential conflicts among the number increasing of services deployed. Researchers have accumulated abundant knowledge on how to design these services independently. However, underlying expected or unexpected couplings among services due to complex interactions of social and physical activities are under-explored, which leads to potential service conflicts. Developing approaches of reducing conflicts is essential for ensuring social inclusion and equity of city services because when conflicts occur, their impacts are likely to be concentrated in some sub-communities (e.g., specific geographic locations, specific user groups like patients with respiratory illness, etc.) meaning that some citizens will experience lower quality services than others due to the diversity. Put differently, service conflicts contribute to a digital divide in service provision.

The key intellectual merit of the proposed project is the development of a socially aware conflict management theory and its deployment for smart cities, consisting of 5 sequential components as follows. (1) a novel, template-based requirements specification component/tool that integrates social and technical requirements to formally define a conflict; (2) a social diversity aware detection approach that utilizes machine learning and conflict correlations to detect conflicts in practice; (3) a multi-objective yet equity-centric resolution method that accounts for socially acceptable trade-offs, behavioral models, and control theory to resolve existing conflicts; (4) a participant-based conflict prevention solution that employs Game Theory and Reinforcement Learning in a scalable, decentralize fashion to prevent future conflicts; (5) a social intervention approach based on education outreach and professional training to disseminate the proposed technology to empower the community. The real-world implementation of this theory by working with the city partners in Newark NJ will show its effectiveness and broader impacts on a diverse set of stakeholders of conflict management from city operators, to service providers, to average citizens.

The goal of this project is to further the ability of cities and communities to deploy technology that saves lives through safer transportation systems. The approach is to create open source analytics solutions to enable novel transportation applications that utilize data from low-cost video sensors. Video data are processed using edge computing (inexpensive computing hardware that performs analysis without storing significant amounts of data) in order to reduce the amount of data stored. Social dimensions of the research project emerge from the deep research partnership between the City and the University, with the goal to provide replicable and near-term social impacts. The project aligns with the Vision Zero concept to reduce traffic fatalities, with programs that are based on education, enforcement and design. By understanding the risk profile of an intersection through automated detection of near miss events, communities will be able to proactively design and alter streets and intersections to be safer.

The goal of designing a smart city, when addressing the technical challenges at the intersection, street and system levels, has several research components. (i) Development of new algorithms for multi-target tracking: The problems of occlusion, temporal assignment of features to objects and target motion will be jointly formulated. (ii) Integrated optimization and simulation for signal control: We formulate the problem of estimating signal control parameters (offsets, phasing etc.) in a network as one of global optimization. (iii) Real-time reinforcement learning is a natural choice when online machine learning meets real world feedback from the City. Our ability to obtain and analyze continuous-time data at the network level will provide insights on how conflict points and patterns can change through the network. This is expected to impact decisions in traffic management, smart city planning and safety.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

The National Science Foundation supports a wide variety of valuable technical and social civic innovation through its CIVIC Innovation Challenge and Smart and Connected Communities. While many of these
projects have significant and long-lasting impact in multiple smart and connected communities, others fail to make the translation into sustainable and scalable community best practices. This EAGER will employ a multi-stage process to identify the combinations of factors which underlie successful translation as well as those factors which can be barriers. This EAGER will also explore specific steps, interventions, and resources which can propel more projects to sustainable, scalable, and long-term success. An important part of this research is connecting individual projects with what may be appropriate ideas, approaches,
and resources, and documenting the outcomes. We may discover that some issues we identify really aren’t that important, aren’t attractive to the project teams, or don’t have the intended impact. However,
US Ignite is starting with a strong track record of coaching successful technological and social adoption of smart and connected community practices across more than fifty communities over the past decade.
During the EAGER process, US Ignite will also work closely with the existing Smart and Connected Communities Virtual Organization, the CIVIC Innovation Challenge team, and the NSF S&CC team. The
results of this EAGER will be documented publicly and made available to the wider set of academic partners, community partners, industry partners (including startups), government partners, and the press.
US Ignite will work with the NSF and its Smart and Connected Community and CIVIC Innovation Challenge research projects to pilot pathways to deploy these technology and policy projects into larger-
scale and multi-city sustainable deployments. US Ignite will analyze existing NSF-funded research projects in S&CC and CIVIC to determine suitability for sustainable and successful deployment in multiple communities. Deployment may be accomplished through a number of pathways such as spinning out the technology to a startup (with or without the original investigators), making the technology and/or
data available as open source for others to use, protecting the intellectual property so that it’s valuable to a committed industry partner or industry alliance, through implementation by governments or nonprofits, or other pathways. Some of the pathways will leverage partners already providing these services (e.g., I-CORPS, university tech transfer organizations, and One Million Cups). Ability to positively impact
equity, inclusiveness of diverse populations, community engagement, and civic trust will be important components.