Destination Area: Global Systems Science (GSS)
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GSS fosters transdisciplinary study of the dynamic interplay between natural and social systems. Faculty in this area collaborate to discover creative solutions to critical social problems emergent from human activity and environmental change, in areas such as freshwater and coastal water systems, rural environments, infectious disease, and food production and safety. Work in this area also embraces equity in the human condition by seeking the equitable distribution and availability of physical safety and well-being, psychological well-being, respect for human dignity, and access to crucial material and social resources throughout the world’s diverse communities.
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Browsing Destination Area: Global Systems Science (GSS) by Content Type "Conference proceeding"
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- Exposing chemical engineering students to real world problems: health care and renewable energy systemsAu, Nichole; Bayles, Taryn; Ross, Julia M. (ASEE, 2008)High school and entry level engineering students seldom have a good understanding of the types of problems that chemical engineers solve. Two design projects have been developed to introduce high school and entry level engineering students to real world problems related to health care and energy systems. We have found that through these design projects our students begin to understand the breadth of chemical engineering. For our Engineering in Health Care design project, students are introduced to a patient suffering from kidney disease, who explains her experience with dialysis in a professional produced video segment. The students then go through a number of hands-on activities, demonstrations and computer simulation where they learn about the factors that influence dialysis. The patient and her doctor then challenge the students to design, build and test a hemodialysis system. The hemodialysis system must remove a minimum amount of ‘impurities’ from simulated blood, while minimizing both the cost of the dialysate (water) and the hemodialysis system. The teams subsequently evaluate the performance of the prototype that they create. The second design project, Engineering Energy Solutions, focuses on the world’s energy crisis. As the world moves further into the 21st century, the need for development in the field of renewable energy is becoming more apparent. The amount of fossil fuels available continues to decline and statistics show that only one barrel of oil is discovered for every six that are utilized. In fact, if the current rate of consumption is maintained, worldwide oil reserves are slated to last only for the next forty years. Therefore it is essential that renewable energy technology must continue to grow. The next generation of students represents those engineers who will struggle with energy issues over the ensuing century. In our Engineering Energy Solutions design project, students are asked to design, construct, test, and evaluate a system for collecting, storing, transporting, converting, and utilizing renewable energy from a water, wind, or solar source. The overall goal of the project is to light a 1 cell AAA Maglite® light bulb after being allowed to collect energy for 45 minutes and up to two hours. As part of the INSPIRES (INcreasing Student Participation, Interest and Recruitment in Engineering and Science) Curriculum (funded by the NSF), the design projects have been tested with a wide range of students who include: high school pre-engineering students, freshmen engineering students and sophomore and junior chemical engineering students. In conjunction with the design projects a series of hands-on activities and mini design challenges have been developed to enhance the understanding of the fundamental principles related to the design challenge. A web based tutorial features interactive animations and design simulations that allow students to adjust parameters to investigate the effect that each has on the efficiency of their simulated design. In addition, an on-line tutorial features pre and post assessments on content knowledge of the design process and underlying concepts. The results of these assessments will be compiled and presented; as well as details of the design projects and their solutions.
- Forecasting the Flu: Designing Social Network Sensors for EpidemicsShao, Huijuan; Hossain, K.S.M. Tozammel; Wu, Hao; Khan, Maleq; Vullikanti, Anil Kumar S.; Prakash, B. Aditya; Marathe, Madhav V.; Ramakrishnan, Naren (Virginia Tech, 2016-03-08)Early detection and modeling of a contagious epidemic can provide important guidance about quelling the contagion, controlling its spread, or the effective design of countermeasures. A topic of recent interest has been to design social network sensors, i.e., identifying a small set of people who can be monitored to provide insight into the emergence of an epidemic in a larger population. We formally pose the problem of designing social network sensors for flu epidemics and identify two different objectives that could be targeted in such sensor design problems. Using the graph theoretic notion of dominators we develop an efficient and effective heuristic for forecasting epidemics at lead time. Using six city-scale datasets generated by extensive microscopic epidemiological simulations involving millions of individuals, we illustrate the practical applicability of our methods and show significant benefits (up to twenty-two days more lead time) compared to other competitors. Most importantly, we demonstrate the use of surrogates or proxies for policy makers for designing social network sensors that require from nonintrusive knowledge of people to more information on the relationship among people. The results show that the more intrusive information we obtain, the longer lead time to predict the flu outbreak up to nine days.
- Global Systems Science (GSS) DA and Policy SGA (PSGA) Synergies and Opportunities Workshop(Virginia Tech, 2017-09-29)The goals of this day-long event, held on September 29, 2017, were to identify areas for collaborative synergy and cooperation between the GSS DA and PSGA and showcase a model for future DA/SGA collaboration and shared innovation.
- Increasing resiliency of integrated food-energy-water systems to viral pandemics: lessons from COVID-19Calder, Ryan S. D.; Grady, Caitlin; Jeuland, Marc; Kirchhoff, Christine J.; Rodgers, Samuel; Hale, Rebecca L.; Muenich, Rebecca L. (2021-12-15)COVID-19 disrupted labor and capital inputs to interdependent food, energy, and water (FEW) systems. We demonstrate how graphical modeling of phenomena realized during COVID-19 can reveal dynamics of FEW systems during viral pandemics. For example, physical distancing slowed COVID-19 spread but led to economic disruption and may have increased COVID-19 susceptibility by exacerbating FEW insecurities among individuals with many comorbidities. We review predictions of pandemic impacts on FEW systems and identify the mechanisms that explain divergences with respect to observed outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, supply-side breakdowns were averted, likely due to low morbidity and mortality among working-age people and net declines in overall energy demand. Modern food systems promote viral emergence, and future pandemics are likely to differ from COVID-19 with respect to one or more key variables such as age-specific mortality or viral infectivity. We use the case study of the poultry supply chain to highlight challenges in understanding how future viral pandemics may jeopardize food security. For example, a lack of publicly available data on staffing levels, working conditions, and product throughputs limits the possibility to simulate supply chain breakdowns as a function of outbreaks in meatpacking plants. Workers provide labor inputs to the food system, while the food system exposes them to risks of illness and death; simultaneously, workers face economic pressures to work while sick and face demand-side FEW insecurities that affect viral susceptibility. Labor inputs to industrial food supply chains hinge on such system dynamics for which there is virtually no quantitative modeling capacity. COVID-19 however provides an opportunity to parameterize and evaluate new models for FEW resiliency. We propose near-term data collection priorities that span classic FEW research, such as characterization of materials throughputs, and include social science methods and perspectives, such as accounting for workers’ behavioral responses to competing health and economic pressures.
- Towards an in silico Experimental Platform for Air Quality: Houston, TX as a Case StudyPires, Bianica; Korkmaz, Gizem; Ensor, Katherine; Higdon, David; Keller, Sallie A.; Lewis, Bryan L.; Schroeder, Aaron (CSSSA, 2015)In this paper we couple a spatiotemporal air quality model of ozone concentration levels with the synthetic information model of the Houston Metropolitan Area. While traditional approaches often aggregate the population, activities, or concentration levels of the pollutant across space and/or time, we utilize high performance computing and statistical learning tools to maintain the granularity of the data, allowing us to attach specific exposure levels to the synthetic individuals based on the exact time of day and geolocation of the activity. We demonstrate that maintaining the granularity of the data is critical to more accurately reflect the heterogeneous exposure levels of the population across time within the greater Houston area. We nd that individuals in the same zip code, neighborhood, block, and even household have varying levels of exposure depending on their activity patterns throughout the day.
- Understanding the Role of Medical Experts during a Public Health Crisis: Digital Tools and Library Resources for Research on the 1918 Spanish InfluenzaEwing, E. Thomas; Gad, Samah; Ramakrishnan, Naren (IEEE, 2014-10)Humanities scholars, particularly historians of health and disease, can benefit from digitized library collections and tools such as topic modeling. Using a case study from the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, this paper explores the application of a big humanities approach to understanding the impact of a public health official on the course of the disease and the response of the public, as documented through digitized newspapers and medical periodicals.