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      Can your phone tell if a bridge is in good shape?

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      Want to know if the Golden Gate Bridge is holding up well? There could be an app for that.

      A new study involving MIT researchers shows that mobile phones placed in vehicles, equipped with special software, can collect useful structural integrity data while crossing bridges. In so doing, they could become a less expensive alternative to sets of sensors attached to bridges themselves.

      “The core finding is that information about structural health of bridges can be extracted from smartphone-collected accelerometer data,” says Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT Sensable City Laboratory and co-author of a new paper summarizing the study’s findings.

      The research was conducted, in part, on the Golden Gate Bridge itself. The study showed that mobile devices can capture the same kind of information about bridge vibrations that stationary sensors compile. The researchers also estimate that, depending on the age of a road bridge, mobile-device monitoring could add from 15 percent to 30 percent more years to the structure’s lifespan.

      “These results suggest that massive and inexpensive datasets collected by smartphones could play an important role in monitoring the health of existing transportation infrastructure,” the authors write in their new paper.

      The study, “Crowdsourcing Bridge Vital Signs with Smartphone Vehicle Trips,” is being published in Communications Engineering.

      The authors are Thomas J. Matarazzo, an assistant professor of civil and mechanical engineering at the United States Military Academy at West Point; Daniel Kondor, a postdoc at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna; Sebastiano Milardo, a researcher at the Senseable City Lab; Soheil S. Eshkevari, a senior research scientist at DiDi Labs and a former member of Senseable City Lab; Paolo Santi, principal research scientist at the Senseable City Lab and research director at the Italian National Research Council; Shamim N. Pakzad, a professor and chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Lehigh University; Markus J. Buehler, the Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering and professor of civil and environmental engineering and of mechanical engineering at MIT; and Ratti, who is also professor of the practice in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

      Bridges naturally vibrate, and to study the essential “modal frequencies” of those vibrations in many directions, engineers typically place sensors, such as accelerometers, on bridges themselves. Changes in the modal frequencies over time may indicate changes in a bridge’s structural integrity.

      To conduct the study, the researchers developed an Android-based mobile phone application to collect accelerometer data when the devices were placed in vehicles passing over the bridge. They could then see how well those data matched up with data record by sensors on bridges themselves, to see if the mobile-phone method worked.

      “In our work, we designed a methodology for extracting modal vibration frequencies from noisy data collected from smartphones,” Santi says. “As data from multiple trips over a bridge are recorded, noise generated by engine, suspension and traffic vibrations, [and] asphalt, tend to cancel out, while the underlying dominant frequencies emerge.”

      In the case of the Golden Gate Bridge, the researchers drove over the bridge 102 times with their devices running, and the team used 72 trips by Uber drivers with activated phones as well. The team then compared the resulting data to that from a group of 240 sensors that had been placed on the Golden Gate Bridge for three months.

      The outcome was that the data from the phones converged with that from the bridge’s sensors; for 10 particular types of low-frequency vibrations engineers measure on the bridge, there was a close match, and in five cases, there was no discrepancy between the methods at all.

      “We were able to show that many of these frequencies correspond very accurately to the prominent modal frequencies of the bridge,” Santi says.  

      However, only 1 percent of all bridges in the U.S. are suspension bridges. About 41 percent are much smaller concrete span bridges. So, the researchers also examined how well their method would fare in that setting.

      To do so, they studied a bridge in Ciampino, Italy, comparing 280 vehicle trips over the bridge to six sensors that had been placed on the bridge for seven months. Here, the researchers were also encouraged by the findings, though they found up to a 2.3 percent divergence between methods for certain modal frequencies over all 280 trips, and a 5.5 percent divergence over a smaller sample. That suggests a larger volume of trips could yield more useful data.

      “Our initial results suggest that only a [modest amount] of trips over the span of a few weeks are sufficient to obtain useful information about bridge modal frequencies,” Santi says.

      Looking at the method as a whole, Buehler observes, “Vibrational signatures are emerging as a powerful tool to assess properties of large and complex systems, ranging from viral properties of pathogens to structural integrity of bridges as shown in this study. It’s a universal signal found widely in the natural and built environment that we’re just now beginning to explore as a diagnostic and generative tool in engineering.”

      As Ratti acknowledges, there are ways to refine and expand the research, including accounting for the effects of the smartphone mount in the vehicle, the influence of the vehicle type on the data, and more.

      “We still have work to do, but we believe that our approach could be scaled up easily — all the way to the level of an entire country,” Ratti says. “It might not reach the accuracy that one can get using fixed sensors installed on a bridge, but it could become a very interesting early-warning system. Small anomalies could then suggest when to carry out further analyses.”

      The researchers received support from Anas S.p.A., Allianz, Brose, Cisco, Dover Corporation, Ford, the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, the Fraunhofer Institute, the former Kuwait-MIT Center for Natural Resources and the Environment, Lab Campus, RATP, Singapore–MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), SNCF Gares & Connexions, UBER, and the U.S. Department of Defense High-Performance Computing Modernization Program. More

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      Visualizing migration stories

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      On July 27, 2020, 51 people migrating to the United States were found dead in an overheated trailer near the Mexican border. Understanding why migrants willingly take such risks is the topic of a recent exhibition and report, co-authored by researchers at MIT’s Civic Data Design Lab (CDDL). The research has been used by the U.S. Senate and the United Nations to develop new policies to address the challenges, dangers, and opportunities presented by migration in the Americas.

      To illustrate these motivations and risks, researchers at CDDL have designed an exhibition featuring digital and physical visualizations that encourage visitors to engage with migrants’ experiences more fully. “Distance Unknown” made its debut at the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) executive board meeting in Rome earlier this summer, with plans for additional exhibition stops over the next year.

      The exhibition is inspired by the 2021 report about migration, co-authored by CDDL, that highlighted economic distress as the main factor pushing migrants from Central America to the United States. The report’s findings were cited in a January 2022 letter from 35 U.S. senators to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken (who leads the Biden administration’s migration task force) that advocated for addressing humanitarian needs in Central America. In June, the United States joined 20 countries in issuing the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, which proposed expanded legal avenues to migration.

      “This exhibition takes a unique approach to visualizing migration stories by humanizing the data. Visitors to the exhibition can see the data in aggregate, but then they can dive deeper and learn migrants’ individual motivations,” says Sarah Williams, associate professor of technology and urban planning, director of the Civic Data Design Lab and the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, and the lead designer of the exhibition.

      The data for the exhibition were taken from a survey of over 5,000 people in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras conducted by the WFP and analyzed in the subsequent report. The report showed that approximately 43 percent of people surveyed in 2021 were considering migrating in the prior year, compared to 8 percent in 2019 — a change that comes after nearly two years of impacts from a global pandemic and as food insecurity dramatically increased in that region. Survey respondents cited low wages, unemployment, and minimal income levels as factors increasing their desire to migrate — ahead of reasons such as violence or natural disasters. 

      On the wall of the exhibition is a vibrant tapestry made of paper currency woven by 13 Latin American immigrants. Approximately 15-by-8 feet, this physical data visualization explains the root causes of migration from Central America documented by CDDL research. Each bill in the tapestry represents one migrant; visitors are invited to take a piece of the tapestry and scan it at a touch-screen station, where the story of that migrant appears. This allows visitors to dive deeper into the causes of migration by learning more about why an individual migrant family in the study left home, their household circumstances, and their personal stories.

      Another feature of the exhibition is an interactive map that allows visitors to explore the journeys and barriers that migrants face along the way. Created from a unique dataset collected by researchers from internet hotspots along the migration trail, the data showed that migrants from 43 countries (some as distant as China and Afghanistan) used this Latin American trail. The map highlights the Darien Gap region of Central America, one of the most dangerous and costly migration routes. The area is remote, without roads, and consists of swamps and dense jungle.

      The “Distance Unknown” exhibition represented data taken from internet hotspots on the migration pathway from the Darien Gap in Colombia to the Mexican border. This image shows migrant routes from 43 countries.

      Image courtesy of the Civic Data Design Lab.

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      The intense multimedia exhibition demonstrates the approach that Williams takes with her research. “One of the exciting features of the exhibition is that it shows that artistic forms of data visualization start new conversations, which create the dialogue necessary for policy change. We couldn’t be more thrilled with the way the exhibition helped influence the hearts and minds of people who have the political will to impact policy,” says Williams.

      In his opening remarks to the exhibition, David Beasley, executive director of WFP, explained that “when people have to migrate because they have no choice, it creates political problems on all sides,” and emphasized the importance of proposing solutions. Citing the 2021 report, Beasley noted that migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras collectively spent $2.2 billion to migrate to the United States in 2021, which is comparable to what their respective governments spend on primary education.

      The WFP hopes to bring the exhibition to other locations, including Washington, Geneva, New York, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Panama. More

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      Hurricane-resistant construction may be undervalued by billions of dollars annually

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      In Florida, June typically marks the beginning of hurricane season. Preparation for a storm may appear as otherworldly as it is routine: businesses and homes board up windows and doors, bottled water is quick to sell out, and public buildings cease operations to serve as emergency shelters.

      What happens next may be unpredictable. If things take a turn for the worse, myriad homes may be leveled. A 2019 Congressional Budget Office report estimated that hurricane-related wind damage causes $14 billion in losses to the residential sector annually. 

      However, new research led by Ipek Bensu Manav, an MIT graduate student in civil and environmental engineering and research assistant at MIT’s Concrete Sustainability Hub, suggests that the value of mitigating this wind damage through stronger construction methods may be significantly underestimated. 

      In fact, the failure of wind loss models to account for neighborhood texture — the density and configuration of surrounding buildings with respect to a building of interest — may result in an over 80 percent undervaluation of these methods in Florida.

      Methodology

      Hazus, a loss estimation tool developed and currently used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), estimates physical and economic damage to buildings due to wind and windborne debris. However, the tool assumes that all buildings in a neighborhood experience the same wind loading.

      Manav notes that this assumption disregards the complexity of neighborhood texture. Buildings of different shapes and sizes can be arranged in innumerable ways. This arrangement can amplify or reduce the wind load on buildings within the neighborhood. 

      Wind load amplifications and reductions result from effects referred to as tunneling and shielding. Densely built-up areas with grid-like layouts are particularly susceptible to wind tunneling effects. You might have experienced these effects yourself walking down a windy street, such as Main Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near the MIT campus, only to turn the corner and feel calmer air.

      To address this, Manav and her team sought to create a hurricane loss model that accounts for neighborhood texture. By combining GIS files, census tract data, and models of wind recurrence and structural performance, the researchers constructed a high-resolution estimate of expected wind-related structural losses, as well as the benefits of mitigation to reduce those losses. 

      The model builds on prior research led by Jacob Roxon, a recent CSHub postdoc and co-author of this paper, who developed an empirical relationship that estimates building-specific wind gusts with information about building layout in a given neighborhood. 

      A challenge the researchers had to overcome was the fact that the building footprints that were available for this estimation have little-to-no information on occupancy and building type.

      Manav addressed this by developing a novel statistical model that assigns occupancy and building types to structures based on characteristics of the census tract in which they are located.

      Analysis and cost perspective

      The researchers then estimated the value of stronger construction in a case study of residential buildings in Florida. This involved modeling the impact of several mitigation measures applied to over 9.3 million housing units spread across 6.9 million buildings.

      A map of effective wind speed ratio in Florida. Orange coloration indicates census tracts where, on average, structures experience amplifications in wind loads beyond what current tools estimate. Blue coloration indicates census tracts where, on average, structures experience reductions in wind loads.

      Image courtesy of the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub.

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      Texture-related loss implications were found to be higher in census tracts along the coast. This occurs because these areas tend to be more dense and ordered, leading to higher wind load amplifications. Also, these loss implications are particularly high for single-family homes, which are more susceptible to damage and have a higher replacement cost per housing unit.

      “Our results sound the alarm that wind loads are more severe than we think,” says Manav. “That is not even accounting for climate change, which might make hurricanes more frequent and their wind speeds more intense over time.”

      The researchers computed expected losses and benefits statewide for hurricane wind damage and its mitigation. They found that $8.1 billion could be saved per year in a scenario where all homes were mitigated with simple measures such as stronger connections between roofs and walls or tighter nail spacing.

      Conventional loss estimation models value these same measures as saving only $4.4 billion per year. This means that conventional models are underestimating the value of stronger construction by over 80 percent.

      “It is important that the benefits of resilient design be quantified so that financial incentives — whether lending, insurance, or otherwise — can be brought to bear to increase mitigation. Manav’s research will move the industry forward toward justifying these benefits,” says structural engineer Evan Reis, who is the executive director of the U.S. Resiliency Council.

      Further implications

      The paper recommends that coastal states enhance their building codes, especially in densely built-up areas, to save dollars and save lives. Manav notes that current building codes do not sufficiently account for texture-induced load amplifications. 

      “Even a building built to code may not be able to protect you and your family,” says Manav. “We need to properly quantify the benefits of mitigating in areas that are exposed to high winds so we promote the right standards of construction where losses can be catastrophic.”

      A goal of Manav’s work is to provide citizens with the information they need before disaster strikes. She has created an online dashboard where you can preview the potential benefits of applying mitigation measures in different communities — perhaps even your own.

      “During my research, I kept hitting a wall. I found that it was difficult to use publicly available information to piece together the bigger picture,” she comments. “We started developing the dashboard to equip homeowners and stakeholders with accessible and actionable information.”

      As a next step, Manav is investigating socioeconomic consequences of hurricane wind damage. 

      “High-resolution analysis, like our case study, allows us to simulate individual household impacts within a geographical context,” adds Manav. “With this, we can capture how differing availability of financial resources may influence how communities cope with the aftermath of natural hazards.” More

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      Looking forward to forecast the risks of a changing climate

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      On April 11, MIT announced five multiyear flagship projects in the first-ever Climate Grand Challenges, a new initiative to tackle complex climate problems and deliver breakthrough solutions to the world as quickly as possible. This article is the third in a five-part series highlighting the most promising concepts to emerge from the competition, and the interdisciplinary research teams behind them.

      Extreme weather events that were once considered rare have become noticeably less so, from intensifying hurricane activity in the North Atlantic to wildfires generating massive clouds of ozone-damaging smoke. But current climate models are unprepared when it comes to estimating the risk that these increasingly extreme events pose — and without adequate modeling, governments are left unable to take necessary precautions to protect their communities.

      MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science (EAPS) Professor Paul O’Gorman researches this trend by studying how climate affects the atmosphere and incorporating what he learns into climate models to improve their accuracy. One particular focus for O’Gorman has been changes in extreme precipitation and midlatitude storms that hit areas like New England.

      “These extreme events are having a lot of impact, but they’re also difficult to model or study,” he says. Seeing the pressing need for better climate models that can be used to develop preparedness plans and climate change mitigation strategies, O’Gorman and collaborators Kerry Emanuel, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Atmospheric Science in EAPS, and Miho Mazereeuw, associate professor in MIT’s Department of Architecture, are leading an interdisciplinary group of scientists, engineers, and designers to tackle this problem with their MIT Climate Grand Challenges flagship project, “Preparing for a new world of weather and climate extremes.”

      “We know already from observations and from climate model predictions that weather and climate extremes are changing and will change more,” O’Gorman says. “The grand challenge is preparing for those changing extremes.”

      Their proposal is one of five flagship projects recently announced by the MIT Climate Grand Challenges initiative — an Institute-wide effort catalyzing novel research and engineering innovations to address the climate crisis. Selected from a field of almost 100 submissions, the team will receive additional funding and exposure to help accelerate and scale their project goals. Other MIT collaborators on the proposal include researchers from the School of Engineering, the School of Architecture and Planning, the Office of Sustainability, the Center for Global Change Science, and the Institute for Data, Systems and Society.

      Weather risk modeling

      Fifteen years ago, Kerry Emanuel developed a simple hurricane model. It was based on physics equations, rather than statistics, and could run in real time, making it useful for modeling risk assessment. Emanuel wondered if similar models could be used for long-term risk assessment of other things, such as changes in extreme weather because of climate change.

      “I discovered, somewhat to my surprise and dismay, that almost all extant estimates of long-term weather risks in the United States are based not on physical models, but on historical statistics of the hazards,” says Emanuel. “The problem with relying on historical records is that they’re too short; while they can help estimate common events, they don’t contain enough information to make predictions for more rare events.”

      Another limitation of weather risk models which rely heavily on statistics: They have a built-in assumption that the climate is static.

      “Historical records rely on the climate at the time they were recorded; they can’t say anything about how hurricanes grow in a warmer climate,” says Emanuel. The models rely on fixed relationships between events; they assume that hurricane activity will stay the same, even while science is showing that warmer temperatures will most likely push typical hurricane activity beyond the tropics and into a much wider band of latitudes.

      As a flagship project, the goal is to eliminate this reliance on the historical record by emphasizing physical principles (e.g., the laws of thermodynamics and fluid mechanics) in next-generation models. The downside to this is that there are many variables that have to be included. Not only are there planetary-scale systems to consider, such as the global circulation of the atmosphere, but there are also small-scale, extremely localized events, like thunderstorms, that influence predictive outcomes.

      Trying to compute all of these at once is costly and time-consuming — and the results often can’t tell you the risk in a specific location. But there is a way to correct for this: “What’s done is to use a global model, and then use a method called downscaling, which tries to infer what would happen on very small scales that aren’t properly resolved by the global model,” explains O’Gorman. The team hopes to improve downscaling techniques so that they can be used to calculate the risk of very rare but impactful weather events.

      Global climate models, or general circulation models (GCMs), Emanuel explains, are constructed a bit like a jungle gym. Like the playground bars, the Earth is sectioned in an interconnected three-dimensional framework — only it’s divided 100 to 200 square kilometers at a time. Each node comprises a set of computations for characteristics like wind, rainfall, atmospheric pressure, and temperature within its bounds; the outputs of each node are connected to its neighbor. This framework is useful for creating a big picture idea of Earth’s climate system, but if you tried to zoom in on a specific location — like, say, to see what’s happening in Miami or Mumbai — the connecting nodes are too far apart to make predictions on anything specific to those areas.

      Scientists work around this problem by using downscaling. They use the same blueprint of the jungle gym, but within the nodes they weave a mesh of smaller features, incorporating equations for things like topography and vegetation or regional meteorological models to fill in the blanks. By creating a finer mesh over smaller areas they can predict local effects without needing to run the entire global model.

      Of course, even this finer-resolution solution has its trade-offs. While we might be able to gain a clearer picture of what’s happening in a specific region by nesting models within models, it can still make for a computing challenge to crunch all that data at once, with the trade-off being expense and time, or predictions that are limited to shorter windows of duration — where GCMs can be run considering decades or centuries, a particularly complex local model may be restricted to predictions on timescales of just a few years at a time.

      “I’m afraid that most of the downscaling at present is brute force, but I think there’s room to do it in better ways,” says Emanuel, who sees the problem of finding new and novel methods of achieving this goal as an intellectual challenge. “I hope that through the Grand Challenges project we might be able to get students, postdocs, and others interested in doing this in a very creative way.”

      Adapting to weather extremes for cities and renewable energy

      Improving climate modeling is more than a scientific exercise in creativity, however. There’s a very real application for models that can accurately forecast risk in localized regions.

      Another problem is that progress in climate modeling has not kept up with the need for climate mitigation plans, especially in some of the most vulnerable communities around the globe.

      “It is critical for stakeholders to have access to this data for their own decision-making process. Every community is composed of a diverse population with diverse needs, and each locality is affected by extreme weather events in unique ways,” says Mazereeuw, the director of the MIT Urban Risk Lab. 

      A key piece of the team’s project is building on partnerships the Urban Risk Lab has developed with several cities to test their models once they have a usable product up and running. The cities were selected based on their vulnerability to increasing extreme weather events, such as tropical cyclones in Broward County, Florida, and Toa Baja, Puerto Rico, and extratropical storms in Boston, Massachusetts, and Cape Town, South Africa.

      In their proposal, the team outlines a variety of deliverables that the cities can ultimately use in their climate change preparations, with ideas such as online interactive platforms and workshops with stakeholders — such as local governments, developers, nonprofits, and residents — to learn directly what specific tools they need for their local communities. By doing so, they can craft plans addressing different scenarios in their region, involving events such as sea-level rise or heat waves, while also providing information and means of developing adaptation strategies for infrastructure under these conditions that will be the most effective and efficient for them.

      “We are acutely aware of the inequity of resources both in mitigating impacts and recovering from disasters. Working with diverse communities through workshops allows us to engage a lot of people, listen, discuss, and collaboratively design solutions,” says Mazereeuw.

      By the end of five years, the team is hoping that they’ll have better risk assessment and preparedness tool kits, not just for the cities that they’re partnering with, but for others as well.

      “MIT is well-positioned to make progress in this area,” says O’Gorman, “and I think it’s an important problem where we can make a difference.” More

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      MIT announces five flagship projects in first-ever Climate Grand Challenges competition

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      MIT today announced the five flagship projects selected in its first-ever Climate Grand Challenges competition. These multiyear projects will define a dynamic research agenda focused on unraveling some of the toughest unsolved climate problems and bringing high-impact, science-based solutions to the world on an accelerated basis.

      Representing the most promising concepts to emerge from the two-year competition, the five flagship projects will receive additional funding and resources from MIT and others to develop their ideas and swiftly transform them into practical solutions at scale.

      “Climate Grand Challenges represents a whole-of-MIT drive to develop game-changing advances to confront the escalating climate crisis, in time to make a difference,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “We are inspired by the creativity and boldness of the flagship ideas and by their potential to make a significant contribution to the global climate response. But given the planet-wide scale of the challenge, success depends on partnership. We are eager to work with visionary leaders in every sector to accelerate this impact-oriented research, implement serious solutions at scale, and inspire others to join us in confronting this urgent challenge for humankind.”

      Brief descriptions of the five Climate Grand Challenges flagship projects are provided below.

      Bringing Computation to the Climate Challenge

      This project leverages advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data sciences to improve the accuracy of climate models and make them more useful to a variety of stakeholders — from communities to industry. The team is developing a digital twin of the Earth that harnesses more data than ever before to reduce and quantify uncertainties in climate projections.

      Research leads: Raffaele Ferrari, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Oceanography in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and director of the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate; and Noelle Eckley Selin, director of the Technology and Policy Program and professor with a joint appointment in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences

      Center for Electrification and Decarbonization of Industry

      This project seeks to reinvent and electrify the processes and materials behind hard-to-decarbonize industries like steel, cement, ammonia, and ethylene production. A new innovation hub will perform targeted fundamental research and engineering with urgency, pushing the technological envelope on electricity-driven chemical transformations.

      Research leads: Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Bilge Yıldız, the Breene M. Kerr Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering

      Preparing for a new world of weather and climate extremes

      This project addresses key gaps in knowledge about intensifying extreme events such as floods, hurricanes, and heat waves, and quantifies their long-term risk in a changing climate. The team is developing a scalable climate-change adaptation toolkit to help vulnerable communities and low-carbon energy providers prepare for these extreme weather events.

      Research leads: Kerry Emanuel, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Atmospheric Science in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and co-director of the MIT Lorenz Center; Miho Mazereeuw, associate professor of architecture and urbanism in the Department of Architecture and director of the Urban Risk Lab; and Paul O’Gorman, professor in the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences

      The Climate Resilience Early Warning System

      The CREWSnet project seeks to reinvent climate change adaptation with a novel forecasting system that empowers underserved communities to interpret local climate risk, proactively plan for their futures incorporating resilience strategies, and minimize losses. CREWSnet will initially be demonstrated in southwestern Bangladesh, serving as a model for similarly threatened regions around the world.

      Research leads: John Aldridge, assistant leader of the Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and Elfatih Eltahir, the H.M. King Bhumibol Professor of Hydrology and Climate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

      Revolutionizing agriculture with low-emissions, resilient crops

      This project works to revolutionize the agricultural sector with climate-resilient crops and fertilizers that have the ability to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from food production.

      Research lead: Christopher Voigt, the Daniel I.C. Wang Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering

      “As one of the world’s leading institutions of research and innovation, it is incumbent upon MIT to draw on our depth of knowledge, ingenuity, and ambition to tackle the hard climate problems now confronting the world,” says Richard Lester, MIT associate provost for international activities. “Together with collaborators across industry, finance, community, and government, the Climate Grand Challenges teams are looking to develop and implement high-impact, path-breaking climate solutions rapidly and at a grand scale.”

      The initial call for ideas in 2020 yielded nearly 100 letters of interest from almost 400 faculty members and senior researchers, representing 90 percent of MIT departments. After an extensive evaluation, 27 finalist teams received a total of $2.7 million to develop comprehensive research and innovation plans. The projects address four broad research themes:

      To select the winning projects, research plans were reviewed by panels of international experts representing relevant scientific and technical domains as well as experts in processes and policies for innovation and scalability.

      “In response to climate change, the world really needs to do two things quickly: deploy the solutions we already have much more widely, and develop new solutions that are urgently needed to tackle this intensifying threat,” says Maria Zuber, MIT vice president for research. “These five flagship projects exemplify MIT’s strong determination to bring its knowledge and expertise to bear in generating new ideas and solutions that will help solve the climate problem.”

      “The Climate Grand Challenges flagship projects set a new standard for inclusive climate solutions that can be adapted and implemented across the globe,” says MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles. “This competition propels the entire MIT research community — faculty, students, postdocs, and staff — to act with urgency around a worsening climate crisis, and I look forward to seeing the difference these projects can make.”

      “MIT’s efforts on climate research amid the climate crisis was a primary reason that I chose to attend MIT, and remains a reason that I view the Institute favorably. MIT has a clear opportunity to be a thought leader in the climate space in our own MIT way, which is why CGC fits in so well,” says senior Megan Xu, who served on the Climate Grand Challenges student committee and is studying ways to make the food system more sustainable.

      The Climate Grand Challenges competition is a key initiative of “Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade,” which the Institute published in May 2021. Fast Forward outlines MIT’s comprehensive plan for helping the world address the climate crisis. It consists of five broad areas of action: sparking innovation, educating future generations, informing and leveraging government action, reducing MIT’s own climate impact, and uniting and coordinating all of MIT’s climate efforts. More

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      Improving predictions of sea level rise for the next century

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      When we think of climate change, one of the most dramatic images that comes to mind is the loss of glacial ice. As the Earth warms, these enormous rivers of ice become a casualty of the rising temperatures. But, as ice sheets retreat, they also become an important contributor to one the more dangerous outcomes of climate change: sea-level rise. At MIT, an interdisciplinary team of scientists is determined to improve sea level rise predictions for the next century, in part by taking a closer look at the physics of ice sheets.

      Last month, two research proposals on the topic, led by Brent Minchew, the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), were announced as finalists in the MIT Climate Grand Challenges initiative. Launched in July 2020, Climate Grand Challenges fielded almost 100 project proposals from collaborators across the Institute who heeded the bold charge: to develop research and innovations that will deliver game-changing advances in the world’s efforts to address the climate challenge.

      As finalists, Minchew and his collaborators from the departments of Urban Studies and Planning, Economics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Haystack Observatory, and external partners, received $100,000 to develop their research plans. A subset of the 27 proposals tapped as finalists will be announced next month, making up a portfolio of multiyear “flagship” projects receiving additional funding and support.

      One goal of both Minchew proposals is to more fully understand the most fundamental processes that govern rapid changes in glacial ice, and to use that understanding to build next-generation models that are more predictive of ice sheet behavior as they respond to, and influence, climate change.

      “We need to develop more accurate and computationally efficient models that provide testable projections of sea-level rise over the coming decades. To do so quickly, we want to make better and more frequent observations and learn the physics of ice sheets from these data,” says Minchew. “For example, how much stress do you have to apply to ice before it breaks?”

      Currently, Minchew’s Glacier Dynamics and Remote Sensing group uses satellites to observe the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica primarily with interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR). But the data are often collected over long intervals of time, which only gives them “before and after” snapshots of big events. By taking more frequent measurements on shorter time scales, such as hours or days, they can get a more detailed picture of what is happening in the ice.

      “Many of the key unknowns in our projections of what ice sheets are going to look like in the future, and how they’re going to evolve, involve the dynamics of glaciers, or our understanding of how the flow speed and the resistances to flow are related,” says Minchew.

      At the heart of the two proposals is the creation of SACOS, the Stratospheric Airborne Climate Observatory System. The group envisions developing solar-powered drones that can fly in the stratosphere for months at a time, taking more frequent measurements using a new lightweight, low-power radar and other high-resolution instrumentation. They also propose air-dropping sensors directly onto the ice, equipped with seismometers and GPS trackers to measure high-frequency vibrations in the ice and pinpoint the motions of its flow.

      How glaciers contribute to sea level rise

      Current climate models predict an increase in sea levels over the next century, but by just how much is still unclear. Estimates are anywhere from 20 centimeters to two meters, which is a large difference when it comes to enacting policy or mitigation. Minchew points out that response measures will be different, depending on which end of the scale it falls toward. If it’s closer to 20 centimeters, coastal barriers can be built to protect low-level areas. But with higher surges, such measures become too expensive and inefficient to be viable, as entire portions of cities and millions of people would have to be relocated.

      “If we’re looking at a future where we could get more than a meter of sea level rise by the end of the century, then we need to know about that sooner rather than later so that we can start to plan and to do our best to prepare for that scenario,” he says.

      There are two ways glaciers and ice sheets contribute to rising sea levels: direct melting of the ice and accelerated transport of ice to the oceans. In Antarctica, warming waters melt the margins of the ice sheets, which tends to reduce the resistive stresses and allow ice to flow more quickly to the ocean. This thinning can also cause the ice shelves to be more prone to fracture, facilitating the calving of icebergs — events which sometimes cause even further acceleration of ice flow.

      Using data collected by SACOS, Minchew and his group can better understand what material properties in the ice allow for fracturing and calving of icebergs, and build a more complete picture of how ice sheets respond to climate forces. 

      “What I want is to reduce and quantify the uncertainties in projections of sea level rise out to the year 2100,” he says.

      From that more complete picture, the team — which also includes economists, engineers, and urban planning specialists — can work on developing predictive models and methods to help communities and governments estimate the costs associated with sea level rise, develop sound infrastructure strategies, and spur engineering innovation.

      Understanding glacier dynamics

      More frequent radar measurements and the collection of higher-resolution seismic and GPS data will allow Minchew and the team to develop a better understanding of the broad category of glacier dynamics — including calving, an important process in setting the rate of sea level rise which is currently not well understood.  

      “Some of what we’re doing is quite similar to what seismologists do,” he says. “They measure seismic waves following an earthquake, or a volcanic eruption, or things of this nature and use those observations to better understand the mechanisms that govern these phenomena.”

      Air-droppable sensors will help them collect information about ice sheet movement, but this method comes with drawbacks — like installation and maintenance, which is difficult to do out on a massive ice sheet that is moving and melting. Also, the instruments can each only take measurements at a single location. Minchew equates it to a bobber in water: All it can tell you is how the bobber moves as the waves disturb it.

      But by also taking continuous radar measurements from the air, Minchew’s team can collect observations both in space and in time. Instead of just watching the bobber in the water, they can effectively make a movie of the waves propagating out, as well as visualize processes like iceberg calving happening in multiple dimensions.

      Once the bobbers are in place and the movies recorded, the next step is developing machine learning algorithms to help analyze all the new data being collected. While this data-driven kind of discovery has been a hot topic in other fields, this is the first time it has been applied to glacier research.

      “We’ve developed this new methodology to ingest this huge amount of data,” he says, “and from that create an entirely new way of analyzing the system to answer these fundamental and critically important questions.”  More

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      in Data Management & Statistics

      MIT Center for Real Estate launches the Asia Real Estate Initiative

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      To appreciate the explosive urbanization taking place in Asia, consider this analogy: Every 40 days, a city the equivalent size of Boston is built in Asia. Of the $24.7 trillion real estate investment opportunities predicted by 2030 in emerging cities, $17.8 trillion (72 percent) will be in Asia. While this growth is exciting to the real estate industry, it brings with it the attendant social and environmental issues.

      To promote a sustainable and innovative approach to this growth, leadership at the MIT Center for Real Estate (MIT CRE) recently established the Asia Real Estate Initiative (AREI), which aims to become a platform for industry leaders, entrepreneurs, and the academic community to find solutions to the practical concerns of real estate development across these countries.

      “Behind the creation of this initiative is the understanding that Asia is a living lab for the study of future global urban development,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning.

      An investment in cities of the future

      One of the areas in AREI’s scope of focus is connecting sustainability and technology in real estate.

      “We believe the real estate sector should work cooperatively with the energy, science, and technology sectors to solve the climate challenges,” says Richard Lester, the Institute’s associate provost for international activities. “AREI will engage academics and industry leaders, nongovernment organizations, and civic leaders globally and in Asia, to advance sharing knowledge and research.”

      In its effort to understand how trends and new technologies will impact the future of real estate, AREI has received initial support from a prominent alumnus of MIT CRE who wishes to remain anonymous. The gift will support a cohort of researchers working on innovative technologies applicable to advancing real estate sustainability goals, with a special focus on the global and Asia markets. The call for applications is already under way, with AREI seeking to collaborate with scholars who have backgrounds in economics, finance, urban planning, technology, engineering, and other disciplines.

      “The research on real estate sustainability and technology could transform this industry and help invent global real estate of the future,” says Professor Siqi Zheng, faculty director of MIT CRE and AREI faculty chair. “The pairing of real estate and technology often leads to innovative and differential real estate development strategies such as buildings that are green, smart, and healthy.”

      The initiative arrives at a key time to make a significant impact and cement a leadership role in real estate development across Asia. MIT CRE is positioned to help the industry increase its efficiency and social responsibility, with nearly 40 years of pioneering research in the field. Zheng, an established scholar with expertise on urban growth in fast-urbanizing regions, is the former president of the Asia Real Estate Society and sits on the Board of American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association. Her research has been supported by international institutions including the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

      “The researchers in AREI are now working on three interrelated themes: the future of real estate and live-work-play dynamics; connecting sustainability and technology in real estate; and innovations in real estate finance and business,” says Zheng.

      The first theme has already yielded a book — “Toward Urban Economic Vibrancy: Patterns and Practices in Asia’s New Cities” — recently published by SA+P Press.

      Engaging thought leaders and global stakeholders

      AREI also plans to collaborate with counterparts in Asia to contribute to research, education, and industry dialogue to meet the challenges of sustainable city-making across the continent and identify areas for innovation. Traditionally, real estate has been a very local business with a lengthy value chain, according to Zhengzhen Tan, director of AREI. Most developers focused their career on one particular product type in one particular regional market. AREI is working to change that dynamic.

      “We want to create a cross-border dialogue within Asia and among Asia, North America, and European leaders to exchange knowledge and practices,” says Tan. “The real estate industry’s learning costs are very high compared to other sectors. Collective learning will reduce the cost of failure and have a significant impact on these global issues.”

      The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow shed additional light on environmental commitments being made by governments in Asia. With real estate representing 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, the Asian real estate market is undergoing an urgent transformation to deliver on this commitment.

      “One of the most pressing calls is to get to net-zero emissions for real estate development and operation,” says Tan. “Real estate investors and developers are making short- and long-term choices that are locking in environmental footprints for the ‘decisive decade.’ We hope to inspire developers and investors to think differently and get out of their comfort zone.” More

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      in Data Management & Statistics

      Exploring the human stories behind the data

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      Shaking in the back of a police cruiser, handcuffs digging into his wrists, Brian Williams was overwhelmed with fear. He had been pulled over, but before he was asked for his name, license, or registration, a police officer ordered him out of his car and into back of the police cruiser, saying into his radio, “Black male detained.” The officer’s explanation for these actions was: “for your safety and mine.”

      Williams walked away from the experience with two tickets, a pair of bruised wrists, and a desire to do everything in his power to prevent others from experiencing the utter powerlessness he had felt.

      Now an MIT senior majoring in biological engineering and minoring in Black studies, Williams has continued working to empower his community. Through experiences in and out of the classroom, he has leveraged his background in bioengineering to explore interests in public health and social justice, specifically looking at how the medical sector can uplift and support communities of color.

      Williams grew up in a close-knit family and community in Broward County, Florida, where he found comfort in the routine of Sunday church services, playing outside with friends, and cookouts on the weekends. Broward County was home to him — a home he felt deeply invested in and indebted to.

      “It takes a village. The Black community has invested a lot in me, and I have a lot to invest back in it,” he says.

      Williams initially focused on STEM subjects at MIT, but in his sophomore year, his interests in exploring data science and humanities research led him to an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) project in the Department of Political Science. Working with Professor Ariel White, he analyzed information on incarceration and voting rights, studied the behavior patterns of police officers, and screened 911 calls to identify correlations between how people described events to how the police responded to them.

      In the summer before his junior year, Williams also joined MIT’s Civic Data Design Lab, where he worked as a researcher for the Missing Data Project, which uses both journalism and data science to visualize statistics and humanize the people behind the numbers. As the project’s name suggests, there is often much to be learned from seeking out data that aren’t easily available. Using datasets and interviews describing how the pandemic affected Black communities, Williams and a team of researchers created a series called the Color of Covid, which told the stories behind the grim statistics on race and the pandemic.

      The following year, Williams undertook a research-and-development internship with the biopharmaceutical company Amgen in San Francisco, working on protein engineering to combat autoimmune diseases. Because this work was primarily in the lab, focusing on science-based applications, he saw it as an opportunity to ask himself: “Do I want to dedicate my life to this area of bioengineering?” He found the issue of social justice to be more compelling.

      At the same time, Williams was drawn toward tackling problems the local Black community was experiencing related to the pandemic. He found himself thinking deeply about how to educate the public, address disparities in case rates, and, above all, help people.

      Working through Amgen’s Black Employee Resource Group and its Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Team, Williams crafted a proposal, which the company adopted, for addressing Covid-19 vaccination misinformation in Black and Brown communities in San Mateo and San Francisco County. He paid special attention to how to frame vaccine hesitancy among members of these communities, understanding that a longstanding history of racism in scientific discovery and medicine led many Black and Brown people to distrust the entire medical industry.

      “Trying to meet people where they are is important,” Williams says.

      This experience reinforced the idea for Williams that he wanted to do everything in his power to uplift the Black community.

      “I think it’s only right that I go out and I shine bright because it’s not easy being Black. You know, you have to work twice as hard to get half as much,” he says.

      As the current political action co-chair of the MIT Black Students’ Union (BSU), Williams also works to inspire change on campus, promoting and participating in events that uplift the BSU. During his Amgen internship, he also organized the MIT Black History Month Takeover Series, which involved organizing eight events from February through the beginning of spring semester. These included promotions through social media and virtual meetings for students and faculty. For his leadership, he received the “We Are Family” award from the BSU executive board.

      Williams prioritizes community in everything he does, whether in the classroom, at a campus event, or spending time outside in local communities of color around Boston.

      “The things that really keep me going are the stories of other people,” says Williams, who is currently applying to a variety of postgraduate programs. After receiving MIT endorsement, he applied to the Rhodes and Marshall Fellowships; he also plans to apply to law school with a joint master’s degree in public health and policy.

      Ultimately, Williams hopes to bring his fight for racial justice to the policy level, looking at how a long, ongoing history of medical racism has led marginalized communities to mistrust current scientific endeavors. He wants to help bring about new legislation to fix old systems which disproportionately harm communities of color. He says he aims to be “an engineer of social solutions, one who reaches deep into their toolbox of social justice, pulling the levers of activism, advocacy, democracy, and legislation to radically change our world — to improve our social institutions at the root and liberate our communities.” While he understands this is a big feat, he sees his ambition as an asset.

      “I’m just another person with huge aspirations, and an understanding that you have to go get it if you want it,” he says. “You feel me? At the end of the day, this is just the beginning of my story. And I’m grateful to everyone in my life that’s helping me write it. Tap in.” More