People and Technology

New Research Embodies Queer History Through Artifacts

admin — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 16:58:13 +0000

New Research Embodies Queer History Through Artifacts admin Tue, 02/28/2023 - 11:58

“Gay power.” “I Love You Susan B. Anthony.” “ERA Yes.” These are just a few buttons in the Georgia State University Library LGBTQ Collection, an archive of the Georgia queer community. The buttons represent the politics, identities, causes, and humor of the 1970s Atlanta LGBTQ communities — in short, a snapshot of history.

But how do you archive and convey queer history? It’s a complex question for historians and LGBTQ people, who have been on the margins and often resist categorization. New research from the Georgia Institute of Technology offers a unique framework for understanding queer communities and their histories.

The buttons are from the personal collections of two local queer activists, Lorraine Fontana and Maria Helena Dolan. The researchers created replicas of the historic buttons and paired them with oral history recordings of Fontana and Dolan also in the archive. Participants of the study were encouraged to interact with the buttons through a wearable audio player — touching them, putting them on, and hearing these histories in the activists’ own words. The experience created a tangible connection to queer history and invited the participant into the narrative.

“Buttons are important because not only are they signals of political and social causes, but they're also identity signifiers,” said researcher Alexandra Teixeira Riggs, a digital media Ph.D. student. “When you're putting one on, you're signaling something that you believe in or some part of your identity to another person, and this has historically been central to queer communities.”

Riggs co-wrote “Button Portraits: Embodying Queer History With Interactive Wearable Artifacts” with advisor Anne Sullivan and Noura Howell, both digital media assistant professors. The paper was published in Interactive Storytelling in December 2022.

Bringing Tangible Narratives to the Archive

Riggs created a tangible narrative — an experience that uses objects embedded with digital capabilities — to tell these stories. In this case, each button interacted with an audio player containing a Raspberry Pi, or small computer, with a near field communication (NFC) reader in it. When a participant placed the button on the NFC reader, it activated a fragment of Dolan or Fontana’s oral history related to that button. This direct engagement with the button effectively enables the participant to imagine themselves in the narrative and reflect on their connection to that history.

Buttons were the ideal object for tangible narrative because participants could pick them up and pin them on their clothes, creating a sense of intimacy. The button is no longer just a historical artifact, but a part of the participant. The archive’s buttons offered a direct connection to 1970s feminism and queer activism with their political slogans, identity markers, location-specific designs, and other areas that clearly place participants in the historical narrative. Buttons themselves are also often seen as ephemera, or objects usually not preserved in history.

“There's this sense that some materials exist outside of the archive solely in personal collections of communities that don't necessarily consider their materials or stories to be worthy of a collection with a capital C,” Riggs said.

The researchers paired each button with clips from Fontana and Dolan’s oral histories that corresponded to the buttons’ themes through keywords or contextual meanings. However, the researchers didn’t impose a linear narrative or any type of organization on the buttons. Participants were encouraged to explore the buttons on their own without guidance and experienced the fluidity of queer stories.

Queering the Archive

The design of a nonlinear experience of the buttons is an application of queer theory to the creation of tangible narratives. The theory suggests that queer physical spaces are multidimensional — blurring the lines between past and present, historical figure and participant, and object and body. Tangible narrative invites the participant’s own experience, body, and identity into history and further complicates the idea of the archive.

It also challenges how archives are inherently organized. By inviting the participant to interact with the buttons on their own and without any discernible order, it effectively queers the experience of the archive or questions how archives are traditionally used and viewed as historic, canonical records fully in the past.

Riggs hopes to expand the research to queer and trans communities of color and other marginalized groups in the future.

“What I want to do with this project is to allow for a way of expressing design through queer means,” Riggs said. “I want there to be a way for us to relate to archives in a more embodied way than we would in a typical museum setting. Hopefully that leads to more accessibility of these stories and dialogue within queer communities about how we reflect on this history.”

CITATION: Riggs, A.T., Howell, N., Sullivan, A. (2022). Button Portraits: Embodying Queer History with Interactive Wearable Artifacts. In: Vosmeer, M., Holloway-Attaway, L. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13762. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22298-6_2

Summary sentence

New research from the Georgia Institute of Technology offers a unique framework for understanding queer communities and their histories.

Dateline

Tue, 02/28/2023 - 12:00

tess.malone@gatech.edu

Contact

Tess Malone, Senior Research Writer/Editor

Location

Atlanta, GA

Associated importer

Keywords

go-researchnews

News room topics

Society and Culture

Core research areas

People and Technology

Mercury ID

666266

Source updated

Tue, 02/28/2023 - 11:31

New Research Embodies Queer History Through Artifacts

admin — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 16:58:13 +0000

New Research Embodies Queer History Through Artifacts admin Tue, 02/28/2023 - 11:58

Bringing Tangible Narratives to the Archive

Queering the Archive

Riggs hopes to expand the research to queer and trans communities of color and other marginalized groups in the future.

Summary sentence

New research from the Georgia Institute of Technology offers a unique framework for understanding queer communities and their histories.

Dateline

Tue, 02/28/2023 - 12:00

tess.malone@gatech.edu

Contact

Tess Malone, Senior Research Writer/Editor

Location

Atlanta, GA

Associated importer

Keywords

go-researchnews

News room topics

Society and Culture

Core research areas

People and Technology

Mercury ID

666267

Source updated

Tue, 02/28/2023 - 11:31

Computer Science Major to Appear on ‘Jeopardy!’

admin — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 13:56:31 +0000

Computer Science Major to Appear on ‘Jeopardy!’ admin Wed, 02/22/2023 - 08:56

Third-year computer science major Sreekar Madabushi will star in today’s episode of the quiz show Jeopardy!. Madabushi was invited back for Jeopardy!’s High School Reunion Tournament, after appearing in the 2019 Teen Tournament with 26 other contestants.

Madabushi grew up with an interest in trivia, inspired in part by his family’s tradition of sitting together each night to watch Jeopardy!. And, in early 2019, he decided on a whim to take the Jeopardy! online aptitude test. To his surprise, he was invited to audition a few months later.

Madabushi was one of around 300 students chosen for this opportunity in San Francisco. In the end, he was selected to compete with students from around the United States in the 2019 Teen Tournament. He finished in the quarterfinals of that tournament, winning $5,000.

He says he was extremely surprised and excited for the chance to compete once again on Jeopardy!, as contestants who have already appeared once are not allowed to try out again, unless invited back.

With this latest opportunity to compete on the game show, Madabushi hopes to finish stronger than before. He says one of his greatest advantages is his buzzer speed.

“I think my biggest strength is being fast on the buzzer. In high school, I competed in a lot of buzzer competitions for Science Bowl, so I feel being fastest to the answers is what I’m leaning on,” Madabushi explained.

The winner of this 14-day reunion tournament will receive a $100,000 grand prize and a spot in the Tournament of Champions.

Watch Madabushi compete today at 7:30 p.m. on NBC’s Jeopardy! hosted by The Big Bang Theory actress Mayim Bialik.

Summary sentence

Third-year computer science major Sreekar Madabushi will appear on the quiz show 'Jeopardy!'.

Summary

Third-year computer science major Sreekar Madabushi will star in an episode of the quiz show Jeopardy!. Madabushi was invited back for Jeopardy!’s High School Reunion Tournament, after appearing in the 2019 Teen Tournament with 26 other contestants.

Dateline

Wed, 02/22/2023 - 12:00

eatkinson6@gatech.edu

Contact

Evan Atkinson, Institute Social Media Officer

Location

Atlanta, GA

Associated importer

Keywords

Computer Science

Jeopardy!

jeopardy

News room topics

Campus and Community

Core research areas

People and Technology

Mercury ID

666047

Source updated

Wed, 02/22/2023 - 08:39

Research Out Front: Experts Look Ahead to 2023 and Beyond

admin — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 03:46:02 +0000

Research Out Front: Experts Look Ahead to 2023 and Beyond admin Wed, 02/08/2023 - 22:46

What differentiates how people are able to hold their attention on a task? How do people acquire new skills? These are tough questions that Georgia Tech cognitive scientist Alex Burgoyne is trying to find good answers to.

For decades, schools, companies, and federal agencies have tried to use standardized tests to determine whether someone will be a success before they are hired or assigned. But Burgoyne says there are better ways to figure out if a candidate is likely to be a good fit.

“We’re looking at more fluid abilities like problem-solving, working memory, and how people can control their attention,” explains Alexander Burgoyne, a cognitive scientist in the School of Psychology.

Burgoyne and his fellow researchers are taking a closer look at the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, better known as the ASVAB. With the U.S. Navy, Burgoyne and his colleagues are using modeling to determine if pilots, air traffic controllers, and flight officers are hitting the mark during their training. The ASVAB, which is highly focused on acquired math and verbal skills, may not measure more specific skills necessary for success.

“Air traffic controllers, for example, need to be able to maintain focus for long periods of time. Whether or not they can make change for a $10 bill is less important for their day-to-day jobs,” he says.

Burgoyne says his work also addresses adverse impact in employment and selection practices. Acquired knowledge tests like the ASVAB often have stratified results that make it harder for applicants from minority communities to succeed.

“The military has a duty to improve their selection procedures to reduce inequities, and they can all better predict who will do well in certain types of training,” he says.

Burgoyne is conducting testing with naval trainees at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida, but Fortune 500 companies have also been in contact with him about this cognitive ability research.

Because every failed personnel search or newly assigned team member who can’t pass training costs an organization valuable time, money, and resources, says Burgoyne, “Every company that is hiring must worry about whether they have equitable selection measures in place.” He says it’s a systemic issue and currently a hot topic of conversation.

In the next year, Burgoyne and his colleagues in the Attention and Working Memory Lab at Georgia Tech will continue identifying how to measure different levels of memory capacity and mental focus, as a better determinant for successful performance in a variety of settings.

Learn more about Burgoyne and five fellow researchers in the Georgia Tech newsroom.

Summary sentence

As we kick off a new year, hear from six young, pioneering Georgia Tech researchers who are tackling some of the world’s most complicated issues and working on solutions.

Summary

As we kick off a new year, experts at Georgia Tech are working to understand how some of the world's most pressing concerns will play out over the next 12 months. Hear from six young, pioneering Georgia Tech researchers who are tackling some of the world’s most complicated issues and working on solutions — ranging from feeding an ever-growing population to controlling wheelchairs via wireless brain wave patches.

Dateline

Thu, 01/05/2023 - 12:00

jess@cos.gatech.edu

Contact

Steven Norris
Senior Director of Social Media and Media Relations
Georgia Tech

See the full story here.
Writers: Benjamin Hodges and Steven Norris
Layout: Brice Zimmerman and Steven Norris
Design: Mark Ziemer
Editing: Brigitte Espinet

Location

Atlanta, GA

Associated importer

Keywords

cos-community

School of Psychology

Cognition

Research

psychology

skills acquisition

memory

brain science

Categories

Institute and Campus

Research

Biotechnology, Health, Bioengineering, Genetics

Military Technology

Policy, Social Sciences, and Liberal Arts

Core research areas

National Security

People and Technology

Public Service, Leadership, and Policy

Mercury ID

664424

Source updated

Thu, 01/05/2023 - 14:45

Social Media Study Identifies Mental Health Culture at Top-Ranked Campuses

admin — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 18:12:32 +0000

Social Media Study Identifies Mental Health Culture at Top-Ranked Campuses admin Tue, 02/07/2023 - 13:12

Using information gleaned from social media, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a mental health index for the nation’s highest-ranked colleges and universities. Their study looked at five years of data on Reddit, scanning it for comments about issues that included depression, financial and academic anxiety and thoughts of suicide. Schools were given a score based on the frequency of those threads and robustness of the conversations.

The research found that students at higher-ranked schools have better mental health than those at lower-ranked colleges. The well-being index is also better at universities with higher tuition. It’s lower at large public schools with a majority of female students.

The study doesn’t identify schools individually for privacy reasons.

“Online conversations about mental health issues are definitely increasing,” said Munmun De Choudhury, Georgia Tech’s assistant professor, from the School of Interactive Computing, who led the study. “We saw it rise 16 percent from 2011 to 2015, even after we took into account that Reddit has become more popular in recent years.”

The study focused on the top 150 universities as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, gathering data from the 109 of them with active Reddit accounts.

De Choudhury suggests that the reason there are less posts about tuition anxiety at more expensive colleges is because their students tend to be more affluent than the average public school attendee. Therefore, the stresses of paying for college or going into debt aren’t as great. De Choudhury also thinks that the wider variety of backgrounds at large public schools likely lends itself to a more robust sharing of stress and anxiety issues.

“As for more posts about mental health at universities with more females, I don’t think it’s necessarily because women have more anxiety,” De Choudhury said. “Research has traditionally shown that females are more likely to express their emotions and feelings whether in an offline setting or social media. It’s not that they have poorer mental health — it’s that they’re more likely to talk about their troubles while online.”

The study also found an overall increase in mental health posts as the academic year progressed. It peaked in the fall in November and was even higher in May. It gradually decreased each summer.

The Georgia Tech team used a method called transfer learning to mine the data. First, they created a model to scan subreddit threads about depression, bipolar disorder and other issues to learn patterns of what is written when people discuss mental health. Then the model was used on the higher education subreddit communities.

The algorithm scanned the five years of discussions, day by day, looking for clues. Once it found keywords and phrases, it measured the breadth of the conversations. The more frequent the posts and depths of the discussions, the lower the respective mental health indexes.

Overall, three percent of the threads on the 109 sites were about mental health topics.

De Choudhury has previously done similar social media research to help identify expressions of eating disorders, postpartum depression and suicide.

“I’ve always wondered if there are things about college students and mental health that we could learn by using these same social media research tactics,” De Choudhury said. “We wanted to see if we could do something more collectively at the campus level before digging deeper to understand the challenges individuals might be facing. Perhaps this data can be used to help campus administrators as they create policies in real-time to benefit student bodies dealing with stress and anxieties.”

The paper, “A Social Media-Based Index of Mental Well-Being in College Campuses,” was presented this month at the 2017 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017) in Denver.

The study is partially supported by the National Institutes of Health (grant number 1R01GM11269701). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsor.

Subtitle

Students at private, expensive universities exhibit better mental health than public school peers

Summary sentence

Using social media, researchers create a mental health index for country's top-ranked colleges.

Summary

Dateline

Thu, 06/01/2017 - 12:00

Contact

Jason Maderer
National Media Relations
maderer@gatech.edu
404-660-2926

Location

Atlanta, GA

Associated importer

Keywords

social media

Munmun De Choudhury

depression

anxiety

News room topics

Health and Medicine

Science and Technology

Society and Culture

Categories

Research

Core research areas

People and Technology

Mercury ID

592303

Source updated

Thu, 06/01/2017 - 09:21

Likelihood of Dieting Success Lies Within Your Tweets

admin — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 18:12:32 +0000

Likelihood of Dieting Success Lies Within Your Tweets admin Tue, 02/07/2023 - 13:12

There is a direct link between a person’s attitude on social media and the likelihood that their dieting efforts will succeed.

In fact, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have determined that dieting success – or failure – can be predicted with an accuracy rate of 77 percent based on the sentiment of the words and phrases one uses on Twitter.

“We see that those who are more successful at sticking to their daily dieting goals express more positive sentiments and have a greater sense of achievement in their social interactions,” said Assistant Professor Munmun De Choudhury, who is lead researcher on the project. “They are focused on the future, generally more social and have larger social networks.”

Words and phrases like “Train smart like a trainer…win like 6 time champion [sic],” “If your not failing your not trying hard enough…[sic],” and “If we never stumble we never fall. If we never fall we never fail, and if we never fail we never grow!” are some examples of the upbeat and self-reflective language the research indicates is most common to successful dieters.

Other traits of successful dieters are that they tend to be more focused on topics related to health and fitness, and they are more socially interactive.

“We see that these users are much more likely to share healthy recipes, offer tips on nutrition and exercise, and report on their own progress,” said De Choudhury. “Their larger network of friends and followers, and increased engagement, means that they tend to also have stronger support systems, which positively impacts the likelihood of dieting compliance.”

As for those who are not successful in meeting dietary goals, their Twitter content often has a demonstrably negative tone and they tend to be more uneasy and fearful in their posts.

“These users tend to be more anxious seemingly because of a lack of emotional control, and because of certain activities and events of daily life,” said De Choudhury.

Sample posts here include, “I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose my mind. Completely lose what little is left. I cry at the thought of stupid things...” and “Feel rough as old boots this morning :/ Ankle hurts, shin hurts, chest hurts, head hurts.”

While the study of Twitter in isolation can reveal insights into users’ health status, this research breaks new ground in that the study group consists of individuals who have connected their MyFitnessPal (MFP) – a calorie-counting app – and Twitter accounts.

“These areas have been individually observed to glean health indicators,” explained De Choudhury. “However, considering these data sources together and applying an established causality testing methodology allows us to validate for the very first time the efficacy of social media and quantified self-sensing in revealing risk to diet compliance.”

The research looks at more than 2 million tweets and 100,000+ daily MFP entries from nearly 700 individuals. Twitter’s official streaming API was used to identify qualified users by searching publicly shared posts with the hashtag “#myfitnesspal” and that contained an embedded link.

An individual’s MFP food diary entries were coupled with Twitter posts from the corresponding time period. From this, adherence to their set dieting goals was compared to attitudes and behaviors expressed in the tweets.

Tweets were analyzed for linguistic attributes that reveal connections between a person’s behavioral expression and their health and wellbeing. Along with affective and cognitive aspects, the linguistic style of the tweets was also examined.

In future, De Choudhury suggested the new analytical method could be pushed forward to provide greater health and wellbeing benefits.

“For instance, by temporally aligning social media, quantified self sensing and self-reported attributes, statistical models may be able to explore dynamics of events around when or how soon an individual’s diet is likely to fail,” said De Choudhury. “This would allow for proactive measures to be taken to help ensure more positive health outcomes.”

A paper titled Computational Approaches Toward Integrating Quantified Self Sensing and Social Media details these findings and is being presented later this month at the 20th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

Subtitle

New research method reveals social media traits of successful dieters

Summary sentence

Georgia Tech researchers have determined that attitudes expressed on social media can predict dieting success.

Dateline

Tue, 02/21/2017 - 12:00

Contact

Albert "Ben" Snedeker - Communications Manager
404.894.7253
albert.snedeker@cc.gatech.edu

Location

Atlanta, GA

Associated importer

News room topics

Health and Medicine

Society and Culture

Core research areas

People and Technology

Mercury ID

587684

Source updated

Tue, 02/21/2017 - 14:50

Researchers to Study Connection Between Online Misinformation and Real-World Violence

admin — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 18:12:32 +0000

Researchers to Study Connection Between Online Misinformation and Real-World Violence admin Tue, 02/07/2023 - 13:12

It is well known that predators lurk on the internet seeking to harm others through misinformation, bullying, and hate speech. What is not understood, however, is how online abuse and harassment like this spread via misinformation can lead to real, physical violence in communities.

To understand and counter this phenomenon, faculty with Georgia Tech’s College of Computing is leading a two-year study on the impact of online violence-provoking misinformation and hate speech toward minority populations.

Realizing the implication on public health and safety, the Center of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is funding the study through a $678,000 grant. Georgia Tech’s Srijan Kumar is the principal investigator of the CDC grant while Munmun De Choudhury is co-PI.

“The conversations we have and the information we consume on the web really shape our behavior not just online, but in the real-world,” said Kumar, an assistant professor with the School of Computational Science and Engineering. “We need systematic evaluations and an all-hands-on-deck approach to study what sort of societal impact harmful online content has on health, equity, integrity, and safety.”

Inspiration for this study comes from the researchers’ observations of prevalent hate speech and calls for racially motivated violence on the internet and social media. This issue became more prominent during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In their grant proposal, the researchers say more than 11,000 incidents of physical violence and online aggression against Asians were reported during the pandemic. They also state that misinformation about Covid-19 led to destruction of property and over 800 deaths.

To understand the connection between virtual misinformation and physical violence, the study has four stated goals:

Identify health misinformation that promotes community violence
Map and measure prevalence of violence-provoking health misinformation across social media platforms
Establish the causal impact of such misinformation on consumers’ reactions and intention to engage in harm
Design mitigation and intervention strategies to reduce the prevalence of such misinformation

According to the group, social media is often “ground-zero” for health misinformation where it spreads at exceptional speed and scale. That is why the team intends to study hate speech and misinformation on social media platforms Twitter and Reddit.

“The very use of these platforms is impacting us in different ways. Sometimes these impacts are good, sometimes they are bad,” said De Choudhury, an associate professor with the School of Interactive Computing. “As we think about our wellbeing and the role of these online platforms, we cannot ignore the very fact that misinformation on those platforms is affecting our wellbeing in negative ways.”

The group selected Twitter and Reddit specifically due to their prominence in networking and wide range of demographically diverse users, a fact supported by Pew Internet Research statistics.

Diversity of the two social media platforms make them the ideal ecosystem for what the group intends to observe: anti-Asian and Anti-Black violence-provoking misinformation.

Given the correlation of Covid-19 misinformation spread and increase of discrimination and violence toward Asian and Black communities during the pandemic, the researchers believe their findings will make meaningful impact for people affected by this public health issue.

For example, the group points out that misinformation masquerading as medical racism further targeted Black communities. As a result, this both degraded trust in institutions and diminished vaccine efficacy during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Purdue University Assistant Professor Laura Schwab-Reese, an expert in community and behavioral health, joins Kumar and De Choudhury the research group. Together, they will collaborate with the non-profit Anti-Defamation League during the study. Backed with CDC funding, the team will develop tools to study and find solutions to violence-provoking health misinformation.

For example, the researchers will start by developing algorithms to detect health misinformation and violence-provoking hate speech targeting minorities. These algorithms will rely on the latest machine learning methodologies and social media data sets.

From there, the group can build an interactive dashboard that maps the spread of violence-provoking misinformation online and offers analytic capabilities on the visualized data for end users. This will provide quantitative insight about the causal relationship between misinformation exposure and violent attitudes toward targeted communities.

Finally, the team will provide an intervention design plan to mitigate the impact of the misinformation. This will include presenting exploratory evaluation of interventions, and even creating new social media-based intervention tools that can interrupt misinformation.

By leveraging computing methods and interdisciplinary collaboration, the group is poised to make online and physical communities safer places for all.

“The reason we are partnering with the Anti-Defamation League and public health researchers is because community engagement is paramount in this work,” De Choudhury said. “One of the unique things about this study is that the computational techniques and interventions we will develop will be informed by the communities who are targeted by these incidents.”

Summary sentence

Srijan Kumar and Munmun De Choudhury receive CDC grant

Dateline

Wed, 10/12/2022 - 12:00

Contact

Bryant Wine, Communications Officer
bryant.wine@cc.gatech.edu

Location

Atlanta, GA

Associated importer

Keywords

Computational Science and Engineering

Categories

Institute and Campus

Community

Student and Faculty

Research

Computer Science/Information Technology and Security

Policy, Social Sciences, and Liberal Arts

Core research areas

Cybersecurity

Data Engineering and Science

People and Technology

Public Service, Leadership, and Policy

Mercury ID

662017

Source updated

Wed, 10/12/2022 - 09:47

Researchers Find that to Achieve Long-term Sustainability, Urban Systems Must Tackle Social Justice and Equity

admin — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 22:45:37 +0000

Researchers Find that to Achieve Long-term Sustainability, Urban Systems Must Tackle Social Justice and Equity admin Fri, 01/20/2023 - 17:45

Inclusivity and understanding past policies and their effects on underserved and marginalized communities must be part of urban planning, design, and public policy efforts for cities.

An international coalition of researchers — led by Georgia Tech — have determined that advancements and innovations in urban research and design must incorporate serious analysis and collaborations with scientists, public policy experts, local leaders, and citizens. To address environmental issues and infrastructure challenges cities face, the coalition identified three core focus areas with research priorities for long-term urban sustainability and viability. Those focus areas should be components of any urban planning, design, and sustainability initiative.

The researchers found that the core focus areas included social justice and equity, circularity, and a concept called “digital twins.” The team — which consists of 13 co-authors and scholars based in the U.S., Asia, and Europe — also provided guidance and future research directions for how to address these focus areas. They detailed their findings in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, published in January 2023.

“Climate change has certainly increased the amount and intensity of extreme weather events and because of that, it makes our decision making today critical to the manner in which our economy and our day to day lives can operate,” said Joe F. Bozeman III, the lead author and an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He is also the director of Tech’s Social Equity & Environmental Engineering Lab and has a courtesy appointment in the School of Public Policy. “Our quality of life can be negatively affected if we don't make good decisions today.”

Three core areas of focus to achieve urban sustainability

The researchers’ first core focus area, justice and equity, addresses innovations and trends that disproportionately benefit middle and high-income communities. Trends like IoT, “smart cities,” and the urban “green movement” are part of a broader push by cities to become more sustainable and resilient. But communities of color and low-income neighborhoods — the same areas often home to environmental contaminations, infrastructure challenges, and other hazards — have often been overlooked.

The researchers’ findings showed a consistent trend with marginalized communities across several countries, including Canada, the Netherlands, India, and South Africa. They call for mandatory equity analyses which incorporate the experiences and perspectives of these marginalized communities, and, more importantly, ensure members of those communities are actively engaged in decision-making processes.

“Planning, professional, and community stakeholders,” the researchers write in the paper, “should recognize that working together gets cities closer to harmonizing the technological and social dimensions of sustainability.”

The second focus area, circularity, addresses resource consumption of staple commodities including food, water, and energy; the waste and emissions they generate; and the opportunities to increase conservation of those resources by boosting efficiencies.

“What we mean by circularity is basic reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling efforts across the entire urban system — which not only includes cities and under resourced areas within those cities — but also rural communities that supply and take resources from those city hubs,” Bozeman said. The idea is aligned with the circular economy concept which addresses the need to move away from the resource-wasteful and unsustainable cycle of taking, making, and throwing away.

Instead, the researchers argue, cities should look for ways to improve efficiency and maximize local resource use. That has potential benefits not only for urban areas, but rural communities, too. One example, Bozeman said, is the Lifecycle Building Center in Atlanta. It takes old building supplies and sells them locally for reuse.

“By doing that, they’re at the beginning stages of creating an economic system, a regional engine where we share resources between cities and rural areas,” he said. “We can start creating an economic framework, not only where both sides can make money and get what they need, but something that can actually turn into a sustainable economic engine without having to rely on another state or another country's import or export economic pressures.”

To strengthen circularity and make it more robust, the researchers call for more expansive metrics beyond measuring recycling rates and zero waste efforts, to include other parts of the supply chain that may yield new ideas and solutions.

The third focus area, digital twins, addresses the development of automated technologies in smart buildings and infrastructure, such as traffic lights to respond to weather and other environmental factors.

“Let's say there's a heavy rain event and that the rainwater is being stored into retainment,” said Bozeman. “An automated system can open another valve where we can store that water into a secondary support system, so there's less flooding, and that can happen automatically, if we utilize the concept of digital twins.”

Creating a new urban planning model

The research came about as part of the mission of the Sustainable Urban Systems Section of the International Society for Industrial Ecology, which aims to be a conduit for scientists, engineers, policymakers, and others who want to marry environmental concerns and economic activity. Bozeman is a board member of the Sustainable Urban Systems Section.

“In that role, part of we do is set a vision and foundation for how other researchers should operate within the city and urban system space,” he said.

For urban sustainability, engineers and policy makers must come to the table and make collective decisions around social justice and equity, circularity, and the digital twins concepts.

“I think we're at a really critical decision point when it comes to engineers and others being able to do work that is forward looking and human sensitive,” said Bozeman. “Good decision making involves addressing social justice and equity and understanding its root causes, which will enable cities to create solutions that integrate cultural dynamics.”

CITATION: Joe F. Bozeman III, Shauhrat S. Chopra, Philip James, Sajjad Muhammad, Hua Cai, Kangkang Tong, Maya Carrasquillo, Harold Rickenbacker, Destenie Nock, Weslynne Ashton, Oliver Heidrich, Sybil Derrible, Melissa Bilec. “Three research priorities for just and sustainable urban systems: Now is the time to refocus.” (Journal of Industrial Ecology, January 2023)

Summary sentence

Inclusivity and understanding past policies and their effects on underserved and marginalized communities must be part of urban planning, design, and public policy efforts for cities.

Dateline

Fri, 01/20/2023 - 12:00

peralte.paul@comm.gatech.edu

Contact

Péralte C. Paul
peralte.paul@comm.gatech.edu
404.316.1210

Location

Atlanta, GA

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Keywords

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Source updated

Fri, 01/20/2023 - 15:27

Ecolabels, Innovation, and Green Market Transformation: Learning to LEED

admin — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 19:45:16 +0000

Ecolabels, Innovation, and Green Market Transformation: Learning to LEED admin Thu, 01/19/2023 - 14:45

Whether they know it or not, most city dwellers have probably been inside a so-called “green” building. Plaques boasting various types of environmental or energy certifications — known as ecolabels — often hang prominently in their lobbies. They’re visible, but how can we know if ecolabels have a real impact or are mostly about showing off?

Daniel Matisoff, professor of public policy at Georgia Tech, illuminates the role and impact of green building ecolabels in his book, Ecolabels, Innovation, and Green Market Transformation: Learning to LEED, which traces the curve of ecolabel adoption in the building market, revealing how ecolabels have transformed the economy and construction industry to achieve green market transformation. Co-authored by Douglas Noonan, professor of public policy at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, it is the first book to comprehensively assess the green building movement. The book was published by Cambridge University Press in October 2022.

Green building ecolabels, simply stated, are marks or designations that indicate environmental performance and sustainability certifications. Matisoff and Noonan investigated prominent ecolabels, such as LEED, and examined how they work, exploring the theory and economics behind them. They also studied factors and initiatives that drive the adoption of green building ecolabels, breaking down the green building movement step-by-step.

“A central premise of the book is that early adopters, whether they are creating a demonstration project — such as Georgia Tech’s own Kendeda Building — or adopting an ecolabel early on produce positive information spillovers that help accelerate adoption of green technologies,” Matisoff said.

According to the authors, early adopters do this by moving both supply and demand curves for new energy and environmental technologies. When early adopters employ and experiment with new green building technologies, they help build supply chains, lowering costs for others interested in adopting the technologies. Undertaking green building projects also proves the market performance of new energy and environmental technologies, thereby reducing uncertainty and increasing demand by making them more visible and widely available.

“Early adopters often build pilot and demonstration projects largely for a marketing or reputational benefit, but then that provides positive information spillover to the market,” Matisoff said. “For example, once contractors become familiar with new energy and environmental technologies, they can recommend them to clients for new building projects.”

By looking at data, Matisoff found that there has been a rapid uptake of buildings using the LEED label. But the question that remained was, what does it ultimately accomplish? To answer that question, Matisoff and Noonan looked at several case studies. One such case study is The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design, a certified “Living Building,” at Georgia Tech.

The Kendeda Building: Tossing a Pebble in a Pond

The goal of The Kendeda Building was to create a facility that would transform the building and construction industry in the Southeast. Matisoff considered that a testable hypothesis. The Kendeda building inspired Matisoff and his collaborators to dig into 30 years of LEED data to look at the effect of pilot and demonstration projects. They found that if you have a demonstration project in a particular geographic location, it doubles the probability that another green building is going to be built that has similar technologies.

For example, an electrical contracting company working on Kendeda noted that being forced to work with high density poly-ethylene (HDPE) piping — a sustainable alternative to using PVC piping for electrical conduit — led them to realize that HDPE was cheaper and easier to work with, in addition to being a more ecofriendly alternative. The contractor intends to switch to HDPE piping in future projects.

“We at Georgia Tech, by building the Living Building, are providing all this information to the marketplace,” Matisoff said. “And the hope is that other universities or institutions may see this building and say, ‘Hey, we want one of those.’”

Moving Forward

Lessons in Matisoff’s book include how to harness information spillover in addition to more traditional price tools such as subsidies, taxes, and cap-and-trade emissions policies. The authors highlight the importance of leveraging private actors to provide information to the market and suggest that policymakers think carefully about how to incentivize early adopters into the green building market, beyond just prices.

While recent legislation has created a lot of price incentives, subsidies, and tax breaks designed to encourage people to make greener choices, Matisoff’s work emphasizes that, especially at early stages, prices probably aren't enough.

“It's unlikely that there's enough momentum in the policy space to get to where we need to be to address climate change,” Matisoff said. “We hope the book will help us think more carefully about how we leverage information and learning to accelerate the uptake of advanced energy and environmental technologies to facilitate green market transformation.”

Matisoff also hopes the comprehensive study will show the roughly 100,000 certified green building professionals around the world that their efforts have been worth it.

“We wanted to tell a story, especially to green building professionals, about what they’ve accomplished over the past few decades, and the impact their work will have for years to come.”

Summary sentence

Daniel Matisoff's book traces the curve of ecolabel adoption in the building market, revealing how it has transformed the economy and construction industry to achieve green market transformation.

Dateline

Thu, 01/19/2023 - 12:00

catherine.barzler@gatech.edu

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Catherine Barzler, Senior Research Writer and Editor

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Atlanta, GA

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Green Buzz

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664910

Source updated

Thu, 01/19/2023 - 14:40

Tech Alumni to Appear on ‘Shark Tank’

admin — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 16:42:38 +0000

Tech Alumni to Appear on ‘Shark Tank’ admin Thu, 01/12/2023 - 11:42

A few years ago, Braxton Davis, an avid gym enthusiast since college, started thinking about how he could track his strength training workouts every day more effectively than with a smartwatch or fitness tracker. He was looking for a seamless way to capture detailed workout data without having to write it down, which is how Metric Mate was born.

Metric Mate makes devices that, when coupled to pin-based and plate-loaded exercise equipment, send data to mobile phones, turning strength training equipment into smart equipment and allowing users to automatically count reps and sets while also tracking caloric burn, force exertion, muscular fatigue, and rep tempo. In addition, it gives healthcare workers the ability to monitor fitness in patients.

Davis, along with Ecleamus Ricks and their business partner, M.T. Strickland, have been working on Metric Mate ever since 2019. And this week, they will be showcasing their patented Training Accountability Partner (TAP) device and Metric Mate mobile app on the popular television show Shark Tank.

Both Davis and Ricks earned bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering through the dual degree program at Georgia Tech and Morehouse College. After graduating, Davis went on to get his law degree from Georgia State University with a focus on intellectual property. Ricks moved to Texas to work for National Instruments and earn his master’s in software engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

Within the Metric Mate team, Davis focuses mainly on strategy, intellectual property, and legal. Ricks works on all things technology, and Strickland, the CEO, is responsible for marketing and driving revenue.

“Handling the hardware and understanding it is one of the benefits of Georgia Tech that we now have — the ability to draw on those things you learned in college to create something new,” Ricks says.

Next, they will be exploring ways for their patented technology to help with physical therapy, and they are always working on new features and improving the accuracy of the platform.

See Metric Mate featured Friday, Jan. 13, on ABC’s Shark Tank.

Summary sentence

Georgia Tech alumni Braxton Davis and Ecleamus Ricks pitch their patented technology, Metric Mate, on ABC's Shark Tank.

Summary

Davis and Ecleamus Ricks met as students in the dual degree engineering program at Georgia Tech and Morehouse College. The electrical engineering alumni will pitch their patented technology, Metric Mate, on Shark Tank. Metric Mate turns strength training equipment into smart equipment, allowing users to automatically capture detailed workout data.

Dateline

Thu, 01/12/2023 - 12:00

eatkinson6@gatech.edu

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Evan Atkinson, Institute Social Media Officer

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Atlanta, GA

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664666

Source updated

Thu, 01/12/2023 - 09:06