Talk about "Smart Cities and Urban Resilience", 21 May 2025
Visiting Professor Dr. Yue Ge will give a talk on "Smart Cities and Urban Resilience – A Central Florida Perspective." The presentation, followed by a discussion, is hosted by the Future Cities Lab and the SPUR research group. It will take place on 21 May at the FCL Conference Space (HIL H45.2) from 11:15 am to 12:30 pm.
Abstract
This research talk starts with introducing an ongoing NSF-funded project in the Smart and Connected Communities (S&CC) Program (2020-2025, $1.2M) as follows.
Building community resilience has become a national imperative. Substantial uncertainties in dynamic environments of emergencies and crises require real-time information based on big data analyses and coordinated data analytics. These require networked communities and cross-sectoral partnerships to support resilience planning and policy making. This collaborative project proposes an interdisciplinary approach to building community resilience through a community-engaged study – one that leverages existing community partnerships and network resources, undertakes an all-hazard and whole-community approaches, and evaluates the state-of-the-art information technology and artificial intelligence. This approach is applied to emergency risk communication across sectors and jurisdictions in the east central Florida region. By integrating multimodal and multi-typed resilience functionality data collected from surveys of emergency managers and operators, policy and planning documents, social media posts of emergency management organizations, 311 non-emergency calls from residents, and simulated emergency drills, this regional study unveils the multifaceted intergovernmental and intersectoral networks through which resilience can be developed and sustained.
Two other proposal development projects will then be showcased, including 1) an NSF S&CC proposal (2025-2028, $1.5M) on designing an urban digital twin and artificial intelligence aided platform for electric vehicles’ emergency evacuation; and 2) an NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) proposal (2026-2031, $3M) on building a smart, connected, and resilient communities graduate certificate program across engineering, data science, and socio-behavioral sciences and in collaboration with governmental agencies, nonprofits, private companies, and other higher education institutions.
Along with presenting these interdisciplinary projects, methodological discussions will be delivered on human-centered digital twin applications, interdisciplinary research design and team science, and community engagement strategies in research and education.
About Prof. Dr. Yue Ge
Yue ‘Gurt’ Ge is Associate Professor in the external page School of Public Administration, Secondary Joint Faculty in the external page Resilient, Intelligent and Sustainable Energy Systems (RISES) Center, Faculty Co-lead of the external page Urban Resilience Initiative (URI), and Faculty Fellow of the external page Faculty Cluster Initiative (FCI) at the University of Central Florida.
Gurt studies smart communities and urban resilience through public-private partnerships from an interdisciplinary and community-engaged perspective. He has been involved as a PI or Co-PI on over $5 Million in sponsored research. Recent projects include risk communication enhanced by advanced IT and AI and community partnerships (NSF Smart & Connected Communities), urban resilience and education hubs (NSF Civic Innovation Challenge), modeling uncertainty in hurricane evacuation decision making (NSF Hazards SEES), housing resilience to urban extreme heat (Swiss National Science Foundation), and urban digital twins interoperability pilot (Open Geospatial Consortium). He received an early career award from the Early Career Faculty Innovators Program at the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). He is a recipient of the 2022 UCF Reach for the Stars Award, 2022 Excellence in Mentoring Postdoctoral Scholars, Early Career Faculty Award, and 2024 Faculty Sabbatical Award. He is an active UCF faculty representative in the steering committees for community resilience planning and management with the City of Orlando and Orange County.