SCC-IRG JST: Multimodal Data Analytics and Integration for Effective COVID-19, Pandemics and Compound Disaster Response and Management
Lead PI:
Shu-Ching Chen
Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in huge amounts of confirmed cases and deaths both in the United States and globally. The nation experienced grave repercussions to citizens’ lives, health, and the economy. Due to its high contagiousness, policies such as quarantine and lockdowns were put in place to slow the virus’ rapid spread. Some major challenges are identifying vulnerable communities to provide immediate help and determining policies that are effective in slowing down the spread with minimal adverse effects on people’s livelihood, mental health, and the economy. This project aims to develop tools that can locate communities in crisis, identify their problems and demands, and predict pandemic transmission trends and impacts in diverse communities based on mobility and social media data. The developed tools and technologies are critical for effective disaster management and pandemic recovery. Furthermore, pandemic and other natural disasters’ co-occurrence is even more challenging given that mass evacuation and sheltering processes may cause a spike in cases of transmissible pandemic diseases. This project will develop new technologies that can aid emergency managers under a pandemic scenario based upon our previously developed tools for natural disaster management.

The proposed research provides potential solutions to solve crucial disaster information management challenges for COVID-19, future pandemics, and compound disasters while leveraging the team's previous work. Furthermore, the proposed techniques will help better understand the disaster situation to assist the preparation and recovery for a broad range of communities, including minority and low-income populations. This project will also have the potential to have societal and economic impacts by providing the most accurate information on pandemics and compound disasters to prevent unexpected losses. The developed solutions could be later expanded for other disaster and information management. This project fosters collaboration between the Florida International University (FIU) and the University of Tokyo, as well as institutions across the public and private sectors (including the cities of Miami-Dade, Florida, and Tokyo, Japan), to develop advanced techniques for effective emergency response and management for COVID-19, future pandemic, and compound disasters. This work’s broader impact is aligned with the national goal of building smart and connected communities by developing innovative disaster information exchange and analysis tools with real-life data. In addition, FIU is one of the nation’s leading minority-serving research universities and ranks first in awarding undergraduate and graduate degrees to Hispanic students. The research findings of this project will be disseminated through workshops, publications, and presentations.

This project is a joint collaboration between the National Science Foundation and the Japan Science and Technology Agency.

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.

Shu-Ching Chen
Dr. Shu-Ching Chen is the inaugural Executive Director of Data Science and Analytics Innovation Center (dSAIC). dSAIC is a multi-university center and based at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC). He provides the expertise and leadership to ensure the Center’s overarching aspiration to become Missouri’s hub for innovative research and expertise in data science, analytics, data protection (cybersecurity), artificial intelligence, and machine learning solving critical societal problems, being a state-of-the-art resource for industry and the UM universities, producing a skilled workforce to meet growing industry demands and spurring economic development becomes a reality. Dr. Chen has received many research grants from NSF, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), National Institute of Health (NIH), Department of Energy (DOE), Army Research Office (ARO), Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Florida Office of Insurance Regulation, Florida Department of Transportation, IBM, and Microsoft. Dr. Chen was named a 2011 recipient of the ACM Distinguished Scientist Award. He received the best paper awards from 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia and 2016 IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration. He also received the best student paper award from 2022 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval. He received the 2019 Service Award from IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Committee on Multimedia Computing. He was awarded the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC) Society's Outstanding Contribution Award in 2005 and was the co-recipient of the IEEE Most Active SMC Technical Committee Award in 2006. He is a fellow of IEEE, AAAS, AAIA, and SIRI.
Performance Period: 10/01/2022 - 03/31/2025
Institution: University of Missouri-Kansas City
Award Number: 2301552
Understanding the Technical and Social Challenges and Opportunities of Physically and Digitally Augmented Community Gardens
Lead PI:
Lining Yao
Abstract

This NSF Smart and Connected Community (S&CC) planning grant will explore the concept of the "meta-garden", which is a physically and digitally augmented community garden aimed at addressing challenges associated with traditional community gardens. Community gardens have the potential to provide numerous benefits, but often face limitations such as scarce resources, limited access, lack of persistent engagement, and other challenges. The significance of this research lies in its potential to seamlessly connect physical and virtual community gardens, and enhance their experiences and values by overcoming spatial and resource limitations. Extending a physical garden into a virtual one could potentially overcome space and resource limitations. Virtual gardens may also provide new and engaging platforms to enable people to connect, share, learn, and even generate revenue. Being able to remotely monitor and manage physical gardens via a virtual platform may also provide more scheduling flexibility for residents who are pressured to fulfill other time-demanding duties, or during extreme events such as lockdowns due to pandemics. This innovative approach benefits society by addressing challenges facing traditional community gardens and expanding their potential in terms of community learning, engagement, and well-being.

The research endeavors to identify design opportunities and potential social benefits of the meta-garden through participatory design workshops, develop a technical strategy, and create functional prototypes for physical and virtual augmentations of a community garden. Moreover, it aims to conduct pilot tests with community partners and summarize design guidelines for future implementation. On the technical front, the research involves mapping out relevant functional features, formulating technical development strategies, developing preliminary functional prototypes, and evaluating system performance. These processes are informed by specific research questions targeting technical aspects such as key technical features, approaches for augmentation, technical gaps, challenges, and potential solutions. From a social perspective, the research employs a research-through-design approach involving participatory design workshops, semi-structured interviews, and reflective thematic analysis. These methods are guided by questions that explore the social benefits and challenges of the meta-garden concept and how it can enhance community experiences. Collectively, these endeavors serve to explore how meta-gardens, facilitated by this planning grant, could redefine community gardens to be more inclusive, accessible, and impactful. The potential for these mixed-reality gardens may even stretch beyond the community garden context, with possibilities for enhancing agricultural management, environmental quality monitoring, urban and rural planning, and more.

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.

Lining Yao
Lining Yao is an Associate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science, directing the Morphing Matter Lab. Morphing Matter lab develops materials, tools, and applications of adaptive, dynamic and intelligent morphing matter from nano to macro scales. Research often combines material science, computational fabrication and creative design practices. Lining and her lab work anti-disciplinarily, publishing and exhibiting across science, engineering, design and art. Lining gained her PhD at MIT Media Lab, where she combined biological and engineering approaches to develop physical materials with dynamic and tunable properties including shape, color, stiffness, texture and density. Beyond her teaching and research at HCII in the School of Computer Science, Lining is also an adjunct professor of Mechanical Engineering, supervising undergraduate and graduate students across the College of Engineering. Her lab is currently accepting applications for Postdocs, PhDs, research scientists, visiting researchers and internship positions.
Performance Period: 08/01/2023 - 07/31/2024
Institution: Carnegie-Mellon University
Award Number: 2327014
Towards A User-Centered and Equity-Aware Micromobility Sharing Co-Design Network to Interact with A Distressed Municipality
Lead PI:
Suining He
Co-Pi:
Abstract

The objective of this Smart and Connected Communities Planning Grant (SCC-PG) project is to explore the use of micromobility resources as an affordable and flexible micro-mobility solution to connect riders with employment and other life-essential needs. It envisions a dockless electric scooter sharing program that helps alleviate mobility inequality prevalent in distressed neighborhoods of Hartford, Connecticut. Key research questions are 1) how low-income riders have been served by existing resources and infrastructures; and 2) how these riders would respond to the new interactive, user-centered program. The team proposes conducting big mobility data analysis and engages both current and potential electric scooter riders, service providers, government policymakers, and other stakeholders to form a community-driven planning roundtable. The project outcomes are applicable to other emerging micromobility systems and similar municipalities at various scales and locations. Students from underrepresented groups are recruited and trained.

This project reveals essential geospatial, infrastructural, socioeconomic, and policy factors to inform the design and distribution of micromobility resources. Through a case study in Hartford, Connecticut, the research team works with the service provider, civic partners, and rider community to gather their inputs on and co-design an equity-aware micromobility sharing program. The findings and techniques support the deployment of future micromobility systems in low-resourced or marginalized communities with mobility challenges.

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.

Suining He
Suining He is currently working as the Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) (now the School of Computing), the College of Engineering, the University of Connecticut (UConn) since 09/2019. He is also an affiliated faculty member at the Connecticut Advanced Computing Center (CACC), the Connecticut Transportation Institute (CTI), the UConn Eversource Energy Center, the UConn Engineering for Human Rights Initiative (EHRI) across School of Engineering (SoE) and Human Rights Institute (HRI), and UConn Sustainable Global Cities Initiative (SGCI). He is the Founding Director of the UConn's Ubiquitous and Urban Computing Lab. Before joining UConn, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Real-Time Computing Lab (RTCL), at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI during 11/2016 -- 08/2019. Prior to that, he also worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Multimedia Technology Research Center (MTrec), Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the Hong Kong University of Science and Engineering (HKUST) during 09/2016 -- 10/2016. Suining He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering (計算機科學與工程), Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), from the Hong Kong University of Science and Engineering (HKUST) in 08/2016, and the B.Eng degree (summa cum laude) in Mechanical Design, Manufacturing, and Automation (機械設計製造及自動化), the School of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) in 06/2012. He was drafted through the HKUST CSE Postgradudate Student Early Recruiting Program (2011 Fall Shanghai Round). He is also a product from multiple innovation hubs under the Qiming College (啟明學院), HUST, and worked as an undergraduate researcher with the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in the WPI-HUST Collaborative Senior Design Project. He graduated (with the highest honors) from the Guangdong Province Innovation Class (省創新人才實驗班) in Physics/Maths of the Affiliated High School of South China Normal University in 06/2008. Suining He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2023, Google Research Scholar Program Award in 2021, and two UConn Research Excellence Program (REP) Awards in 2022 and 2020, and held the Google PhD Fellowship in Mobile Computing in 2015, HKUST School of Engineering (SENG) PhD Research Fellowship Award in 2015--2016, and Hong Kong Telecom Institute of Information Technology (HKTIIT) Post-Graduate Excellence Scholarship in 2016. His scholarly works appear in WWW, SenSys, UbiComp, INFOCOM, TKDE, and TMC, and received the IEEE MASS Best Paper Runner-up Award in 2020 and IEEE RTSS Outstanding Paper Award in 2021. His core location-based service (LBS) technologies developed, patented, and transferred during his PhD studies have led to direct industrial and long-term societal impacts. Suining's research is supported by National Science Foundation (NSF), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Google, NVIDIA, Cigna, StreetLight Insight, and internal grants from UConn's Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR).
Performance Period: 09/01/2023 - 08/31/2024
Institution: University of Connecticut
Award Number: 2303575
Building a smart and connected rural community for improved healthcare access through the deployment of integrated mobility solutions
Lead PI:
Jun Liu
Co-Pi:
Abstract

Various programs have been established to extend and promote healthcare services to low-income rural Americans facing financial barriers. These programs offer a wide range of healthcare services at little to no cost. However, despite the availability of these services, challenges arise in bringing patients to healthcare providers in a timely manner for healthcare. Many individuals in rural communities are unable to receive recommended services, primarily due to transportation challenges. These challenges, in turn, significantly impact their care-seeking behaviors and hinder their access to timely healthcare. Patient no-shows not only delay diagnoses but also result in lost revenue for healthcare providers due to under-utilization of medical facilities and staff resources. To address these issues, the ongoing mobility transformation fueled by on-demand services may offer affordable transportation solutions to improve healthcare access and reshape care-seeking behaviors among people in under-served communities. This project focuses on West Alabama, specifically the health-disadvantaged Black Belt region, to investigate preventive care-seeking behaviors. The primary objective is to explore the impacts of on-demand mobility services on these behaviors among under-served individuals.

This project will create a Smart and Connected Rural Community (SCRC) comprised of interdisciplinary researchers, healthcare providers, transportation providers, and community stakeholders to promote preventive healthcare in rural communities through deploying on-demand mobility services. This project will conduct integrative research with objectives covering both technological and social science dimensions: 1) Technological Dimension – By partnering with local health providers and transportation providers, this project will develop a Smart Health and Mobility System (SHMS) to leverage and coordinate existing transportation resources within the study area to offer on-demand mobility services to patients and doctors/nurses in need of traveling between medical facilities and patient homes; 2) Social Science Dimension – Through community engagement activities (e.g., meetings, focus groups, and surveys), this project will explore the impacts of on-demand mobility services on preventive care-seeking behaviors among uninsured or under-insured patients. This project will significantly advance the knowledge by exploring the impacts of mobility services on care-seeking behaviors in disadvantaged rural communities. The knowledge will aid healthcare providers and stakeholders make informed decisions to leverage emerging mobility services to deliver cost-effective healthcare services and improve quality of life in disadvantaged rural communities. The project is expected to set the groundwork for implementing on-demand mobility solutions to enhance healthcare in these areas.

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.

Jun Liu
Dr. Jun Liu is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alabama (UA), and the Director of the NextGen Transportation Lab at UA. He received his PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Prior to joining UA in 2018, Dr. Liu worked as a transportation planner at the Virginia Department of Transportation and as a post-doc researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Liu's areas of research interests are innovations related to shared mobility, travel behavior, road safety, responder safety, transportation planning, intelligent transportation systems, connected and/or automated vehicles, and sustainable transportation. He possesses expertise in Big Data analytics, machine learning, agent-based modeling, micro- and macro-simulations, spatial and/or temporal modeling, and statistical analysis. Dr. Liu has published over 200 scholarly works, encompassing book chapters, journal articles, conference papers, and technical reports. Since joining UA in 2018, Dr. Liu has made significant contributions to securing $11.9 million in funding. He has been awarded a total of 19 projects, with 14 of them as the Principal Investigator (PI) and 5 as a Co-PI. The funding sources include prestigious organizations such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), US Department of Transportation (US DOT), AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, State Departments of Transportation (Alabama and Georgia), and various local agencies. Dr. Liu currently serves as an Assistant/Associate Editor for the Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems: Technology, Planning, and Operations, a Handling Editor for Transportation Research Record: Journal of Transportation Research Board, and an Editorial Board Member for Accident Analysis & Prevention and the Journal of Safety Research. Additionally, he is actively contributing to the academic community as a Paper Review Coordinator for the TRB Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Computing (AED50) for TRB Annual Meetings, and an Area Editor for The Joint COTA International Conference of Transportation Professionals. Dr. Liu also served on the Organizing Committee for the Bridging Transportation Researchers (BTR) Conference (BTR#1, BTR#2, and BTR#3). Dr. Liu is a member of the TRB Committee on Geo-spatial Data Acquisition Technologies (AKD80) and a member/friend of the TRB Standing Committee on Transportation Safety Management (ACS10). He was (2016-2019) a member of the TRB Standing Committee on Visualization in Transportation (AED80). Dr. Liu has served on an NSF Panel for the Humans, Disasters, and the Built Environment (HDBE) Program, and he also served as a panelist for the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) project titled "State and Local Impacts of Automated Freight Transportation Systems" under the project number NCHRP 20-102(22).
Performance Period: 10/01/2023 - 09/30/2024
Institution: University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
Award Number: 2303284
Securing Underserved Communities from Drug Abuse with Drone-Based Smart Medication Delivery
Lead PI:
Zhenbo Wang
Co-Pi:
Abstract

Despite considerable efforts in combating substance use and exploring novel treatment and recovery strategies, current practices have not been able to connect many patients from underserved low-income communities in rural areas with available healthcare resources due to infrastructure challenges, inaccessibility to pharmacies, patient’s inability to drive, and lack of transportation. Responding to such issues involves interactions among diverse community stakeholders, including healthcare providers, research institutes, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and community residents. However, these stakeholders are typically isolated or inefficiently organized, which leads to unbalanced community coordination and inefficient decision-making in substance use responses. To address these challenges and gaps, this Smart and Connected Communities Panning Grant (SCC-PG) will go beyond the current practices to promote substance use disorder treatment by connecting multiple community stakeholders via innovative community-based coordination mechanisms and connecting the residents from rural areas with urban medical resources via novel mobility technologies. Situated at the heart of Appalachia, Knox County and the surrounding communities are selected as an ideal natural testbed to demonstrate how the proposed delivery mechanism and framework can address infrastructure challenges, hurdle interaction and communication barriers, and help improve access to necessary medications among individuals with substance use disorder.

The goal of this SCC-PG project is to create connected systems and intelligent technologies to advance the understanding of interactions and perceptions among people who use drugs, healthcare providers, and government agencies; and build upon the in-depth understanding to engage communities to enable novel practices to treat substance use disorder and reduce illicit drug use. Specifically, the project aims to 1) develop community perception models that reveal how patients’ choices and concerns and public’s acceptance on truck- and drone-enabled delivery mechanisms influence the service patterns and operations, 2) create new truck- and drone-assisted healthcare delivery frameworks and operations through integration of these quantified perception models and operation constraints from healthcare providers and regulatory agencies, and 3) establish novel community engagement models that channel information in a connected way, through which patients, healthcare providers, scientists, engineers, government officials, and volunteers are all involved in a timely fashion to foster informed and all-inclusive decisions and practices to achieve connected interventions and treatment. This research is expected to lay a foundation for more comprehensive design and control of innovative mobility systems and connected and collaborative frameworks that span social and technical dimensions with community engagement to improve medication access of underserved people with substance use disorder.

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.

Zhenbo Wang
Dr. Zhenbo Wang is currently a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering (MABE) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK). He received his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. His research aims to improve the level of autonomy and autonomous operations of highly complex dynamical systems by solving real-world problems and creating and testing theoretically solid solutions that can enable novel mission capabilities and transform daily life. He has dedicated his research efforts mainly to the development of advanced control, optimization, and machine learning techniques for space, air, and ground vehicle applications. Recently, he has been focused on the combination of data-driven and model-based methods for real-time decision-making, control, and optimization of vehicular systems for emerging applications such as advanced air mobility, urban air transportation, connected and automated vehicles, drone delivery for health and wellness, and smart agriculture. Dr. Wang has established and maintained a strong research group. His total share of external funding is over $2.2 million from NSF, DOD, NASA, USDA, and ORNL. The cumulative sum of all awards he has been involved in is over $9.5 million. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2023.
Performance Period: 04/01/2023 - 03/31/2024
Institution: University of Tennessee Knoxville
Award Number: 2231710
Closed-loop Intervention to Promote a Supportive and Interactive Environment around Children
Lead PI:
Ou Bai
Co-Pi:
Abstract

For both parents and educators, monitoring and adjusting their behaviors to ensure that children develop appropriate prosocial and learning behaviors is a complex balance between nurturance and limit setting. When these interactions are strained, negative or coercive cycles may emerge that delay appropriate development and exacerbate existing impairment. To disrupt the development of coercive cycles, adults must have the ability to accurately assess the quality of their interactions with children and integrate this information into personal change. Approaches to measuring these types of interactions will inform what we know about the mechanisms of child social, emotional, and learning development in STEM learning settings, and enable the creation of adaptive interventions for those moments when support is most needed. This project envisions a closed-loop intervention framework to promote a supportive and interactive environment around children. Smart wearables will sense interaction and responses between the children and their parents or educators, using embedded machine learning technology to recognize supportive behaviors. The perceived behaviors will be sent to a cloud server where adaptive interaction strategies will be identified from either online psychological consultation or artificial intelligence. These interaction strategies will then be provided to the parents and educators in the form of guidance cues to promote a supportive STEM learning environment around the children.

This planning project aims to understand the barriers and critical problems in the implementation of smart technology and psychological strategies to support adult-child interactions in STEM learning settings. The work will proceed by convening key stakeholders (parent organizations, formal educational institutions, and informal educational institutions) in a series of iterative discussions to produce a set of adult-child behavioral targets that are essential to children’s development of social, emotional, and learning skills. Further discussions will then identify mechanisms to enhance these behaviors, and reduce competing, less effective approaches. Qualitative thematic analysis of the discussions will be used to capture these behaviors and mechanisms. Then technologies will be developed to measure, provide feedback on, and improve these behaviors. These devices will be piloted with adult-child dyads. Audiovisual data collected by the devices will be human coded as well as processed by algorithms to vet the technological capacity of the devices to detect and respond to targeted behaviors. A series of debriefing interviews and surveys with adult-child dyads will be used to determine the feasibility, acceptability, and utility of the devices. The collected preliminary data will support the forming of critical technological and social science research questions that co-inform one another: questions about the social engagement between adults and children will drive the technical research, and what can be discovered via the technological research will open up new questions that can be posed about social engagement between children and adults. Adult-child interactions are key social factors that integrate to produce student social, emotional, and academic outcomes. Within our informal educational communities, our formal educational communities, and our familial communities it is essential to find the best mechanisms for measuring, providing feedback, and improving these interactions. This work thus seeks to advance a new approach to, and evidence-based understanding of, the development of STEM learning. This Smart and Connected Communities project is also supported by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning program, which seeks to (a) advance new approaches to and evidence-based understanding of the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments; (b) provide multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences; (c) advance innovative research on and assessment of STEM learning in informal environments; and (d) engage the public of all ages in learning STEM in informal environments.

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.

Ou Bai
Dr. Bai serves as the Director of Human Cyber-Physical Systems (HCPS) Laboratory in FIU. He leads the HCPS Lab to develop new sensor, network and computing technologies to accelerate both the creation and our understanding of the complex and increasingly coupled relationships between humans and computing with the broad goal of advancing human capabilities. Dr. Bai has successfully developed a number of Intent-of-Things (IoT) applications that may promote better human interactions with physical world, such as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), neuro prosthetics, and human-robot interactions. Dr. Bai has published more than 100 Journal papers and conference proceedings. He is member of IEEE EMBS society.
Performance Period: 10/01/2021 - 03/31/2024
Institution: Florida International University
Award Number: 2125549
Sustainable Vertiports for Bringing Autonomous Drone Swarm Inspection to Oil and Gas Industry Community
Lead PI:
Sihua Shao
Co-Pi:
Abstract

This NSF Smart and Connected Community (S&CC) planning grant will set the groundwork for exploring a sustainable vertiport system capable of deploying autonomous drone swarms for methane emission measurements over orphaned wells. The planning grant will also scrutinize the responses of regulators and operators to the potential technological changes. These abandoned oil or gas wells, typically left behind by the fossil fuel extraction industry when operating expenses outstrip production rates, contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. Given the high costs associated with the plugging, remediation, and restoration of these wells, robust, data-driven evidence is required to justify and prioritize the allocation of state and federal funds. Traditional methane emission measurements, involving flux chamber installation at each open wellhead, carry high capital and operational costs and are challenging to deploy in hard-to-reach areas. While primarily targeting the oil and gas industry community, the research outcomes could offer valuable insights applicable to diverse areas such as wildlife monitoring, anti-poaching initiatives, infrastructure and aircraft inspections, construction site surveillance, and water pollution monitoring.

The research aims to create a new cross-domain framework for an integrated, sustainable vertiport that aids an autonomous drone swarm inspection system. The project revolves around three technical objectives: 1) Developing a low-cost, portable, and sustainable vertiport to facilitate precision landing and housing, protection, and recharging of multiple drones; 2) Constructing a safe federated deep reinforcement learning algorithm to enable drone swarm landing and takeoff in harsh environments; 3) Examining three-dimensional drone swarm path planning for efficient methane plume localization and emission quantification. Simultaneously, the project will pursue two social science objectives: 1) Quantitative assessment of potential efficiency and equity improvements in federal funds allocated for cleaning up orphaned wells; 2) Encouraging operators to adopt this cost-effective monitoring system by enhancing equity in carbon dioxide sequestration tax incentives. The research outcomes will revolutionize measurement and monitoring technologies, enabling the oil and gas industry to identify economically viable and sustainable solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while providing valuable insights and tools applicable to high-impact areas such as airborne wireless edge computing and autonomous drone swarm defense.

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.

Sihua Shao
Dr. Sihua Shao joins Mines as an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering in August 2024. Prior to that, he was an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at New Mexico Tech. He obtained the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and the Hashimoto Prize for best doctoral dissertation from New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2018. In 2023, he was honored to receive the NSF CRII Award, the NM EPSCoR Mentor Award, and was elevated to IEEE Senior Member. His area of expertise is wireless communication and networking, mainly focusing on reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, integrated sensing and communication, optical wireless communication, backscatter communication, machine learning in communications and networking, and drone-assisted wireless networks. His research, supported by the NSF, NIOSH, and NM EPSCoR, spans various applications including drone-based environmental monitoring, wireless infrastructure via drones, intelligent mine rescue operations, large-scale indoor robot navigation, microgrid security, warehouse automation, and smart healthcare systems.
Performance Period: 10/01/2023 - 09/30/2024
Institution: New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
Award Number: 2323050
Bridge: An AI-Enabled Platform to Support Coordinated Care for Children with Autism
Lead PI:
Mimi Xie
Co-Pi:
Abstract

Children with autism spectrum disorder (CWA) often engage in severe problem behavior, and thus require long-term care with individualized clinical assessment, treatment, and intervention. Applied behavior analysis (ABA) therapy, considered an evidence-based best practice, can be time-consuming, resource intensive, and prone to human bias. This Smart and Connected Communities Planning Grant (SCC-PG) project seeks to co-design an AI-based solution for collecting behavior data for automatic measurement of severe behaviors (e.g., frequency, intensity, latency, etc.), assisting diagnosis and treatment decisions, and communicating to patients and families in real-time for early intervention.

The project team partners with a range of community stakeholders in a pilot study in San Antonio, TX for coordinated care of CWA through an AI-augmented platform. The planning process begins with identifying key platform parameters including data types, privacy concerns, main function modules, and expected performance. Different AI algorithms are examined for fusing multi-modal data to inform ABA. Post-survey and focus groups are conducted to uncover the effects of incorporating the IoT-Edge-Cloud prototype into clinical practices. The project has the potential to improve health outcomes for autistic children and the well-being of their families.

Mimi Xie
I'm an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). Before I joined UTSA in August, 2019, I obtained my Ph.D. from Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Performance Period: 08/01/2023 - 07/31/2024
Institution: University of Texas at San Antonio
Award Number: 2306596
Getting the Edge on Data-Driven Self-Managed Care: A Focus on Older Veterans in Arizona
Lead PI:
Ming Zhao
Co-Pi:
Abstract

Older adults strive to be independent and healthy yet compared with younger individuals, they are at greater risk of chronic health conditions and social isolation. Solutions are needed that create ways for older adults to thrive, connect, contribute to, and shape their communities. The increasingly available Internet of Things (IoTs), particularly wearables and smart home devices (e.g., smartwatches, voice-activated home assistants), offer important opportunities for real-time interventions for self-management of care, especially if they are customized to meet each person’s unique needs and goals. This planning project focuses on older military veteran populations in Phoenix, Arizona. The project is building a multidisciplinary team to form a research agenda for studying, developing, and deploying an IoT based solution for providing high quality, low cost, and community-sensituve self-managed care. This project can benefit Arizona’s large populations of older adults and veterans, with potential to impact underserved aging populations across the U.S. The project also provides education and workforce development to all levels of students from multiple disciplines, and in particular creates innovations and access for many underrepresented students at Arizona State University, where the project is based.Through focus groups and pilot data collection, this planning project is laying the groundwork for innovations in real-time and privacy-preserving learning systems which that employ IoTs and edge computing to support learning on live, personal health data and provide real-time, personalized feedback without compromising user privacy. The project also entails heterogeneous data integration and learning techniques to detect social-emotional, and health changes and support prevention and early interventions. The project builds on human-systems engineering and health informatics. This approach is designed to meet the diverse needs of older adults and to allow them to more effectively take charge of their health; The project includes an analysis of social, cultural, and relationship factors and their effects on cognitive and affective processes in older veterans.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.

Ming Zhao
Ming Zhao is an associate professor of the Arizona State University (ASU) School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence (SCAI), where he directs the NSF IUCRC Center for Accelerated Real Time Analytics (CARTA) and the ASU research laboratory for Virtualized Infrastructures, Systems, and Applications (VISA). His research is in the areas of experimental computer systems, including cloud/edge, machine learning/big data, and high-performance systems as well as operating systems and storage in general. He is also interested in the interdisciplinary studies that bridge computer systems research with other domains. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and industry companies, and his research outcomes have been adopted by several production systems in industry. Zhao is a recipient of the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, the Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship, the VMware Faculty Award, and the Best Paper Award of the IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Tsinghua University, and his doctorate from University of Florida.
Performance Period: 05/01/2023 - 04/30/2024
Institution: Arizona State University
Award Number: 2231874
Intelligent Flood Detection and Warning System to Assist Homeless Communities and Emergency Management Entities
Lead PI:
Erfan Goharian
Co-Pi:
Abstract

Unsheltered homelessness has grown at staggering rates, particularly across West Coast cities such as San Diego. Unsheltered people are at higher risk than the general population of experiencing flooding risk, as they are more likely both to be living in the most flood-vulnerable locations as well as disconnected from existing flood warning systems. This predicament results in unequal disasters and environmental impact, burdening the most vulnerable people with the least information in critical moments. From a technical aspect, the absence of an intelligent system for flood detection causes inaccuracy in prediction and delays in responses. This project aims to overcome these challenges by integrating imagery data into the current state-of-the-art flood data acquisition and urban infrastructure modeling. The broader impact of the study involves raising community awareness about the use of new smart technologies and supporting proactive flood and emergency management by engaging residents, businesses, and practitioners in the development of the research program. Involved students will have the opportunity to learn multi-disciplinary research topics through engaging in collaborative teamwork. The new smart system and connected decision-making framework will be transferable to other flood-prone communities across the U.S. West and East Coasts that are confronting more frequent floods as a result of climate change coinciding with an unprecedented housing affordability crisis. This project will create a diverse, multidisciplinary community of researchers, practitioners, and concerned citizens to develop novel technologies and integrated theories and methods to improve the time and accuracy of flood data acquisition, detection, and monitoring. A set of deep learning-based image processing systems will be developed and trained using large fully segmented flood image datasets to detect formation and monitor flood events. A flood model will be developed to simulate and forecast real-time floods and impacts. This project will enhance the response time and accuracy of flood early warning and monitoring systems to support the resilience and emergency management of smart and connected coastal communities. During the planning phase, a Community Advisory Group will be assembled and convened to advise on the development of the intelligent flood system and guide the human subject’s data collection activities, including structured interviews with unsheltered people. This project enhances the knowledge needed to support smart and connected communities by including 1) novel data collection techniques from various sources of information, such as ground-based cameras, 2) artificial intelligence-based flood visual sensing and analyzing diverse data, and 3) substantive community engagement that centers the needs of unsheltered people.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.

Erfan Goharian
Dr. Erfan Goharian’s research, education, and practice nexus is centered on developing multi-source heterogeneous data fusion, artificial intelligence (AI), and systems analysis techniques to advance the smart and informed operation and management of water resources systems. In his research group, the intelligent Water and Environmental Resources Systems (iWERS), he develops and deploys intelligent cutting-edge systems and techniques to enhance informed decision-making and modeling of integrated Water and Environmental Resources Systems in the face of climate change and extreme events. He has contributed to over $10 million in external federal funding from a variety of sources, including NSF, NOAA, USGS, and DoD, state agencies such as South Carolina Sea Grants Consortium and South Carolina Department of Transportation (SCDOT), and private companies such as Microsoft. He has a record of over 60 top-notch peer-reviewed journal papers and has been honored with prestigious awards, including the NSF Early Career Award, UCOWR's Early Career Award for Applied Research, ASCE South Carolina Young Civil Engineer of the Year, ASCE SC Technical Merit Award, and ASCE’s best research-oriented paper. He also serves as an associate editor of the Nature’s Scientific Research and Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management and a member of the South Carolina Floodwater Commission, appointed by Gov. McMaster.
Performance Period: 08/01/2023 - 07/31/2024
Institution: University of South Carolina at Columbia
Award Number: 2244837
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