Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Data for Socio-Physical Extreme Event Resilience (Data-SPEER)

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The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research.Urban resilience against extreme events is widely recognized as a critical societal challenge for all societal groups, as indicated by major US Government programs and philanthropic efforts. Our vision is to create communities that are resilient to extreme natural events and national security threats though civic minded engineering. This planning grant will support three workshops to sharpen our research objectives. Across the workshops, we will deepen our team formation and refine our leadership structure by incorporating economists, computer scientists, researchers focused on disasters outside the proposing team's expertise, as well as researchers of resilience in minority communities. Moreover, we will establish a committed stakeholder community by convening federal and local resilience policy makers, emergency managers, and data providers (like technology companies) that can support and benefit from the planned center. Through these activities, we aim to help build a stronger society that is better able to withstand and bounce back from disasters.This project aims to unite engineers, social scientists, and community leaders to model and design for the dynamic interplay of physical structures and social systems using modern high-resolution data. With this effort, the impacts of preparedness and mitigation investments have the potential to be modeled at individual, household, and community-scales. We aim to constrain these models using crowdsourced data, high resolution imagery, and machine learning techniques to quantify the physical and social impacts of disaster events, planning, and recovery. Additionally, we aim to merge engineering and social science resilience models to produce more holistic benefit-cost quantifications of possible community investments and trajectories. Translating resilience data and modeling into societally beneficial tools and insights requires the convergence of technical expertise in modeling physical disaster impacts and social science expertise in modeling community resilience. The project will drive future convergent disaster resilience research and prepare a new generation of scientists conversant in engineering and social science. Such training will include the ability to engage with civic leaders to jointly work towards reducing economic loss and casualties, while increasing community well-being in the wake of adversity.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.