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.

Texas coastal communities have historically been exposed to environmental threats from natural and industrial sources. In Ingleside on the Bay (IOB), a small, rural community situated along the shoreline of Corpus Christi Bay, tropical storms and high rates of relative sea-level rise cause extreme and nuisance flooding, while industrial expansion is placing stress on the community’s way of life and the natural resources upon which it relies. Such communities lack the comprehensive data needed to advocate for and make informed decisions about risk reduction strategies to mitigate the impacts of industrial growth and climate change. This proposal engages with the nonprofit Ingleside on the Bay Coastal Watch Association (IOBCWA), community members, and governmental representatives to assess the role of distributed, real-time sensor technology in improving IOB’s capacity to respond to dynamic environmental conditions that affect the quality of its air, water, and land resources. It also examines how emerging community-based nonprofits like IOBCWA engage with diverse organizations in response to new threats and how they can utilize environmental sensing data in planning and advocacy efforts.

This project will leverage interdisciplinary, sociotechnical methods to (1) assess the current structure of communication and information-sharing networks related to environmental threats and mitigation planning in IOB; (2) activate academic-civic partnerships to deploy environmental monitoring sensors to generate a pilot smart grid for comprehensive and timely data collection; (3) develop a preliminary online data visualization dashboard that makes sensor data available in real-time to the community; and (4) assess how the data and dashboard can be utilized by residents and nonprofit organizations to inform sustainable planning and development strategies that address industrial permitting challenges and safeguard community and environmental well-being. To achieve the technical objectives, this project will develop and deploy a pilot sensing network for real-time environmental monitoring, design an online dashboard and data analysis framework to display the collected data in real-time, and beta test the dashboard among a diverse group of residents, community leaders, and local stakeholders. To achieve the social science objectives, this project will apply grounded theory to characterize the evolving role of community-based nonprofits in networking, civic engagement, and policymaking efforts in IOB and identify data needs that can be addressed by leveraging sensor technology to provide a scientific basis for decision-making. Community workshops will provide opportunities to refine the study needs and objectives, obtain feedback on the sensor network and dashboard, and co-develop a vision for future integrative research efforts.

Detained youth are a population that experience disparities in educational opportunities and in particular, have systemically fewer rich opportunities for STEM learning. Access to educational resources and STEM learning for detained youth are critical to position them to have marketable employment skills and potentially contribute to the STEM workforce of the future. Taking lessons from the conditions and challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, this project seeks to develop and deliver a Personal Learning Environment for Youth, an educational ecosystem that is accessible to a wide range of detained youth learners and provides individual tailoring based on youth interactions with the system. To develop the system, the project takes input from a multidisciplinary juvenile justice community collaborative working group that examines the existing educational infrastructure, determines challenges and affordances, and provides input into the design and delivery of the personalized learning system. The outcome of this research will be a framework for facilitating STEM learning for detained youth using smart and connected technologies.

The project takes place in the context of the Norfolk Juvenile Detention Center (NJDC). The work pursues a set of research questions that seek to identify the barriers and factors impacting accessibility to STEM learning and educational services, how the pandemic conditions changed those challenges, and anticipates the predicted challenges to delivering a personalized learning STEM education ecosystem. Stakeholders, including the center's academic staff, management, the public school system, and personnel related to juvenile justice, form a focus group engaged in conversation about the current educational ecosystem and the design features that would support stronger STEM learning for a personalized system. Participant responses will be distilled into design principles using grounded theory that will guide the design and development of the personalized learning system. The primary outcome of the research will be a case study that describes the framework for the personalized learning system and the design principles on which it rests.

Lack of participation in the digital economy is an impediment to societal well-being and production which asymmetrically affects rural communities. The literature indicates that technological availability (e.g., broadband) is only a part of the problem: rural communities are not as active as their urban counterparts in technology adoption. The adoption problem covers the extent to which rural communities have the financial resources and awareness, skills, and aspirations (or collectively, the literacy) to seize the productivity opportunities afforded by smart and connected technologies (SCT). This planning project will conduct a pilot study to determine how improved technology literacy can impact the rural adoption of SCT for building productivity to economically and socially revitalize rural communities. Specifically, this project will explore the development of a novel educational tool for technology literacy called Productivity Enhancing Technology Experience-Kits (Pete-Kits). Pete-Kits will be combinations of low-cost devices such as microprocessors and sensors that make use of communications technologies like WiFi, Bluetooth, and Radio Frequency ID (RFID), and which can be combined with cloud connectivity to support high school students as they develop entrepreneurial SCT projects within their rural communities. These kits will be developed with input from high school students and community members. High school teachers and students will receive training on how to use the kits, and students will then be invited to develop their own SCT entrepreneurial projects which will be judged in a final community competition event.

The research will examine: (1) how rural awareness of SCT is influenced by hands-on experiences with Pete-Kits, (2) to what degree are the basic skills for using SCT increased through interactions with Pete-Kit, and (3) the effects are of Pete-Kit based training and competition on rural participants’ productivity, and their aspirations for entrepreneurship, remote work, and quality of life within their community. These questions will largely be addressed via survey instruments, administered both before and after the intervention, to both participants and to attendees of community events. Community forums and workshops will also be held to review the strengths and weaknesses of the Pete-Kit program, and to develop relationships with other communities and tribal nations for future scalability. This planning project aligns well with the Smart & Connected Communities program’s goal to accelerate the creation of the scientific and engineering foundations that will enable smart and connected communities to bring about new levels of economic opportunity and growth. This project is also receiving funding from the ITEST program, which has priorities for (1) increasing awareness of STEM & ICT occupations, (2) motivating students to pursue educational pathways to those occupations, and (3) developing disciplinary content knowledge and skills necessary for entering those occupations.

The breadth of artificial intelligence (AI) applications has grown significantly, particularly over the last decade, increasing productivity and efficiency across numerous sectors. Cities have become the primary sites of data collection and algorithm deployment, but the professional field of urban planning lacks a comprehensive evaluation of how AI can/should be used to improve analytical processes. Urban planning anticipates and guides the future physical and social conditions of communities to improve quality of life – all with a heavy reliance on increasingly large and varied datasets, which suggests the untapped potential of AI if the field were to develop robust frameworks for ethical deployment. This project examines and seeks to address the tension between improving the efficiency of public service provision and enhancing redistributive and procedural equity within urban decision-making. As AI’s role in society grows, so do the concerns that it may reproduce racial bias, deepen “digital divides,” infringe on privacy, and do little to address the “wicked problems” at the heart of complex social issues. In addition, it may shed light on broader impacts of automation in urban life, such as workforce displacement, lifestyle changes, and future developments in public service professions.

This project is a partnership between Virginia Tech, the American Planning Association (APA), and Arlington County, Virginia’s Departments of Community Planning, Housing and Development (DCPHD Planning Division) and Technology Services (DTS). As part of this planning grant, the partnership will survey members of the APA and conduct feasibility analysis workshops and focus group sessions with DCPHD. The objective is to assess a broad range of tasks performed by County planners and determine which of these have the highest likelihood of being assisted and improved by AI technologies. This includes county-level responsibilities for comprehensive planning, land use, infrastructure, environment, housing, parks, and transportation. This project expects that each of these areas has the potential for more advanced data and analytical capabilities. The approach partners researchers, planning professionals, and community members will focus on the explainability and transparency of AI-based planning activities. This relates to the equitable deployment of AI methods and will also address concerns about trust in the use of data and analytical processes.

United States prisons exist in geographically bounded, technologically disconnected communities. Restrictions on services and isolation from the outside world, including lack of access to digital devices and the internet in prisons, has restricted prisoners’ opportunities for education and healthcare, has limited their future work and career prospects, and has reinforced divisions between incarcerated people and their communities. Recent legislation and the work of many volunteers and organizations is making it possible for correctional institutions to dramatically improve prisoner’s options and opportunities for education, communication, and future well-being. Nonetheless, regardless of delivery model, access to, and training in, a robust technology infrastructure is essential for these opportunities to become a reality. This project seeks to support technology access and the people impacted by incarceration, with the ultimate goal of fostering their prospects for the future.

With this planning award, the project team is tackling challenges to technology access and use through purposeful community engagement and is drawing on community-based systems dynamics research as a practical and empirical tool to constructively approach system change. Strategically selected focus groups will ensure the project team is addressing systemic factors and their interrelationships based on a variety of prisoners’ and experts’ perspectives and experiences. A working group is applying these findings in the development of a plan, which will be central to determining the recommendations for an infrastructure that disrupts current dehumanizing systems, supports successful re-entry, and addresses challenging conversations about security and administration. The leadership team will ultimately develop full project to develop and test this infrastructure.

Today we are entirely dependent on centralized infrastructures (aka Cloud) for pretty much all our everyday activities such as online education, neighborhood apps, access to driving directions, and restaurant suggestions in a neighborhood. This reliance on the Cloud has serious implications. Most importantly it is one of the primary causes for the increasing digital divide between the affluent and under-served communities. The thesis of this proposal is that such reliance on a centralized infrastructure is the bane of under-served communities blocking them from reaping the benefits of information services that are available at the fingertips of residents in affluent communities. Ubiquitous availability of low-cost software services that are tailored to the needs of the community and pertinent to the local conditions without reliance on the Cloud are key factors in enhancing the capabilities of such communities. The key hypothesis to be validated through the planning grant is the power of edge computing to address the digital divide and future-proof these under-served urban communities. The findings from the planning grant will help reveal feasible technological interventions for future-proofing under-served urban communities from the digital divide. There is promise that the results of this research could be replicated elsewhere leading to a positive impact on the lives of under-served communities nation-wide, if the hypotheses of the larger research vision is validated by the data collection being done through this planning grant.

Using the Westside communities of Atlanta as an exemplar for under-served urban neighborhoods, the planning grant wishes to carry out the following pilots along the technology dimension: (a) edge-compute based video-conferencing solutions for the residents of the community (e.g., for meetings of the stakeholders, tutoring help for students, etc.) ; (b) edge-compute based smart prefetching of content pertinent to the needs of the residents (e.g., entertainment, videos and presentations pertaining to school work, etc.) ; and (c) ad hoc connectivity solutions to bring WiFi hotspots to different neighborhoods. Along the societal dimension, the project will recruit participants (about 30) representing different demographic groups (such as community leaders, teachers, students, mentors, and local residents) for using the technology pilots. The data collection from the user group will consist of: (a) general understanding of the pressing needs of the community; (b) specific requirements of the focus groups for identifying the types of content to be prefetched and/or cached in the edge nodes; and (c) user experience on the technology pilots.

Contrary to trends in most rural communities, which are shrinking and aging, many rural Midwestern communities have experienced rapid population growth since the 1980s, as migrants and refugees have been moving there to meet growing labor demand in the agroindustrial sector such as meat and poultry processing. The school-aged residents of these growing Midwestern communities, who are primarily the U.S.-born children of low-skilled workers, represent a significant untapped population of future STEM workers and entrepreneurs who are growing up in, and want to stay in, rural America. There is a lack of research on workforce development in rural communities with large migrant and refugee populations. Thus, there is a critical need to study strategies to both train, and also keep, this skilled workforce local to rural communities where expanded employment opportunities (e.g., industries building state-of-the-art factories) can limit out-migration of technical and entrepreneurial talent. The goal of this planning grant is to pilot new Extended Reality (XR)-enabled STEM educational delivery models developed in collaboration with youth and adults in rural communities with large numbers of low-skilled workers. XR-enabled solutions can support active and experiential learning by enhancing hands-on activities, creating simulations of objects and experiences that may not be accessible in the physical world, and promoting learners' engagement with complex real-life problems.

The planning research consists of three main activities: 1) identify stakeholder needs and aspirations for new place-based educational curricula in STEM fields and entrepreneurship in partnership with the Storm Lake community via workshops, interviews, and focus groups; 2) use workshops to co-design (designing with as opposed to designing for) innovative XR-enabled technology delivery models to meet these needs; and 3) assess the outcomes of the pilot project via surveys. These activities will help address two research questions: 1) How can inclusive and place-based educational delivery models for rural workforce development benefit communities with large numbers of low-skilled workers? 2) Which XR-enabled smart and connected technology solutions will improve inclusive and place-based STEM educational delivery models in a rural community with a large number of low-skilled workers? This project is a partnership between Iowa State University, Iowa 4-H Youth Development, and the Storm Lake Community School District. The City of Storm Lake (pop. 10,600) was chosen as the site for these pilot activities because it is a rural Iowa community with a large low-skilled workforce employed in the agroindustrial sector and a K-12 student population that is 64% English Language Learners and 85% students of color. The results of the planning grant will yield new insights into the educational needs of rural communities, and the opportunities and barriers that place-based technologies can offer for supporting those educational needs, which is an underexplored area in the literature. Thus, this work is aligned with the Smart and Connected Communities program, which endeavors to integrate community stakeholders into smart and connected community projects to co-create and pilot solutions that are directly informed by the needs, challenges, and opportunities of present and future communities. This project is also being funded via the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program, which seeks to support projects that have high potential for broader societal impacts, including improved diversity of students and instructors participating in STEM education, professional development for instructors to ensure adoption of new and effective pedagogical techniques that meet the changing needs of students, and projects that promote institutional partnerships for collaborative research and development.