Urban Informatics Brown Bag

Urban Informatics Brown Bag – Seth Guikema

Analytics for Urban Resilience, Disasters, and the Evolution of Regions Over Time

Urban areas and regions are constantly evolving, and many of these areas are exposed to repeated hazard events. There is a significant knowledge gap in the understanding of how repeated hazard events influence the evolution of cities and regions and how policies and individual behavior interact with hazards to influence the trajectory of resilience and sustainability over time. At the same time, many land use policies have wide-ranging effects, sometimes in unanticipated ways. This talk gives an overview of ongoing research in the Guikema group aimed at leveraging modern data analytic techniques to better understand the the evolution of cities and regions, and the impacts of hazards and both collective and individual behavior on that evolution. This work uses Anne Arundel County, MD as a case study and involves household-level modeling of the country. The talk also gives an overview of ongoing efforts to leverage predictive data analytics to examine the influences of green space on local characteristics and outcomes in the urban setting using data from Baltimore as an example. This research is ongoing, and the talk is intended to encourage a discussion and feedback for the next phase of the work.

Newly arrived from Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Seth Guikema’s research group in the UM Department of Engineering is dedicated to developing, testing, and implementing predictive risk methods for disaster risk analysis, sustainability and resilience for infrastructure and urban areas, terrorism risk analysis, and climate change impacts. These brown bags are informal with room for conversation, so bring your lunch, bring a friend, and we hope to see you there!