CAREER: Household Network Modeling and Empathic Learning for Integrating Social Equality into Infrastructure Resilience Assessment

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This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) project seeks to understand the interaction between households and infrastructure networks in disasters with the goal to break new ground on integrating social inequality considerations into infrastructure resilience research and education. The research will examine household network dynamics influencing disparities in risks among vulnerable populations (e.g., older adults and low income families) due to infrastructure service disruptions. The education objective is to integrate empathy and human-centric considerations with technical concepts in training next-generation practitioners and researchers of resilient infrastructure. This scientific research contribution thus supports NSF's mission to promote the progress of science and to advance our national welfare. In this case, the anticipated outcomes will yield transformative ideas to enhance how infrastructure systems can best be produced and managed to promote socially just and resilient services for different subpopulations. This project involves an integrative research, education, and outreach plan. The research component of this project will: (1) empirically characterize the influence of household-level socio-demographic characteristics, expectations, norms, and other factors on service gaps and adjustment practices when infrastructure disruptions occur; (2) model and analyze household social networks at the neighborhood scale to determine the effects of social network structure and stability on the diffusion of information and adjustment practices through social media; and (3) analyze the interplay between infrastructure networks and household social networks to examine the spatial patterns of risk disparity among different sub-populations at the urban scale. The research approach involves methodological fusion among household surveys, fine-grained social media data analytics, and computational agent-based modeling to extract, characterize, simulate, and examine household networks. The research approach will be tested in the context of Hurricane Harvey in Houston with a focus on electricity, water, and road disruptions. The education component of this project will create and test an empathic learning model consisting of multiple human-centric course modules, interdisciplinary service-learning projects, and seminars to promote empathy and critical thinking skills in participating students. The outreach activities and service learning projects will focus on underserved neighborhoods in Houston and will involve deep community engagement with stakeholders and residents to broadly disseminate findings. These integrative research, education, and outreach elements will promote convergence research for integrating social equality with infrastructure resilience and better incorporate the needs of vulnerable populations in planning and prioritization of infrastructure services. The project will also lead to capacity building for underserved communities, as well as resilience-aware and empathic engineers of the future.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.