Uncontrolled wildfires are among the most destructive natural hazards. They threaten lives, infrastructure, and ecosystems. A critical but understudied driver of their spread is the ember, a burning particle that detaches from the main fire; travels with the wind; and ignites spot fires far ahead of the main fire line. Because ember behavior is difficult to observe during actual fires, it remains poorly understood and underrepresented in operational fire models.

Communities in the Southern Great Plains are increasingly affected by winter ice storms. These pose serious yet often overlooked risks to urban environments and produce freezing rain that accumulates on trees. The resulting ice burden leads to tree failure and falls, widespread vegetation breakage, blocked roads, power outages, and damage to homes and infrastructure. While residents of the area are familiar with tornado and severe thunderstorm preparedness, there is less awareness and readiness concerning the cascading impacts of ice storms, particularly in urban areas.

U.S. households spent on average 5.6% of their income on energy, with 40% of energy losses through the envelope. Homes with deteriorated insulation and aging structure face disproportionately high energy costs. Retrofitting and weatherization are key strategies for enhancing building performance and resilience against environmental stress. However, traditional energy audits and retrofitting methods are labor-intensive, costly, and often inaccessible to the populations who need them most.

Gun violence and the reckless use of firearms have become a pervasive and growing problem in the United States that has only been exacerbated by easy access to firearms, and an increasing mistrust of law enforcement that often inhibits reporting by the community. This project seeks to build a community-based acoustic gunshot alert system for detecting and localizing gunshots using a distributed network of inexpensive acoustic sensors and pilot it in a community in Austin, Texas.

This Smart and Connected Communities (SCC) Civic Innovation Challenge (CIVIC) project is focused on increasing resilience of North Slope Alaskan Arctic coastal communities threatened by increased coastal erosion, flooding, and ground subsidence as a result a rapidly warming Arctic, changes that are threatening property and infrastructure and impacting food security and community well being. The project creates high spatial-resolution, reliable, hazard risk-assessment, forecasting, decision-support tools that can be used for disaster management and community planning.

Autonomous driving, aided by machine learning (ML), has the potential to improve safety and efficiency while reducing road congestion. However, today's autonomous vehicles (AVs) struggle under arbitrary conditions due to the complexity and variety of scenarios encountered in practice. Meanwhile, increasingly advanced driver-assist systems with partial AV capabilities have been deployed without standardized testing and certification requirements, in particular with regard to computational aspects. This work aims to fill this gap.

This Smart and Connected Communities (S&CC) development project supports research that aims to enhance access to fresh, nutritious food in urban areas by designing integrated supply-side, community-driven freight systems and urban agriculture models that scale into economically viable urban food logistics networks. This initiative aims to establish urban agriculture as a vital component of infrastructure, enhancing the availability of food for everyone.

Agriculture is under increasing pressure from shifting weather patterns, more frequent flooding, and temperature extremes that threaten traditional crops and rural livelihoods. This project explores a promising alternative: introducing rice farming to the region. Rice is naturally suited to wetter conditions and offers a way for farmers to diversify their operations while strengthening their resilience. By establishing two regional rice hubs and a research and development site, the project supports a sustainable and community-centered approach to growing rice in temperate areas.

The objective of this Smart & Connected Communities - Development Grants (SCC-DG) project is to support research on co-design of bike networks that are safe, connected, and aligned with local needs. Cities struggle to design bikeways that balance technical constraints, safety considerations, lived realities, and aspirations of their citizens. This project explores how advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) bridge the gap by integrating community input directly into the design process.

The objective of this Civic Innovation Challenge (CIVIC) project is to support research on prototyping, deploying, and testing data-driven analytics to improve efficiency, availability, and affordability of carshare services. The Cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota launched the EV Spot Network in collaboration with HOURCAR, the largest nonprofit carshare provider in the US. The EV Spot Network provides publicly owned electric vehicle carshare and chargers. The service is projected to grow significantly over the next three years.