The advent of smart and connected technologies is enabling new opportunities for innovation, improved services, enhanced quality of life, and economic growth for inhabitants of urban, suburban, and rural regions. This proposal builds a research coordination network (RCN) with a focus in the areas of mobility, health, and community resilience. This RCN will bring together diverse set of researchers spanning social and technical disciplines to explore new research ideas in these domains and how they may improve quality of life and spur economic growth. The project includes a set of structured workshops and analysis activities that are inter-disciplinary in character and will lead to the discovery of new ideas and research concepts that can have major societal impacts. The RCN includes an organizing committee led by leaders in Computer Science, Engineering, and Social Science research from multiple institutions and Community stakeholders who will plan and conduct annual workshops that will build and expand a strong Smart & Connected Communities (SCC) vision encompassing these domains and their impact on communities. The proposal will also leverage research from SCC initiatives being conducted in Taiwan, Japan, and India.
This Research Collaboration Network (RCN) will take an integrative approach to community engagement and research capacity building via a sequence of inter-dependent agenda-building workshops involving experts in social, behavior, economic, and learning sciences, design, built environments, computer science, and engineering, in partnership with local and municipal community leaders and practitioners. This effort will focus on Mobility, Health and Well-Being, and Resilience of Interdependent Infrastructures as primary areas for capacity building. Partnering with communities, we will identify how at-risk populations including the homeless, recently incarcerated, adolescents, and First Nations tribes are directly impacted by mobility through public transportation, health as shaped by access to services, food, and housing, and community capacity for infrastructural resilience. Capacity building efforts will include education, outreach, and workforce development modules, and form the basis of permanent, multi-disciplinary research conferences for the emerging SCC community.
Abstract
Payman Arabshahi
Payman Arabshahi is currently Associate Chair for Education, Industry Liaison, and Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Principal Scientist at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory. From 1994-1996, he served on the faculty of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. From 1997-2006 he was on the senior technical staff of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, CA, in the Communications Architectures and Research Section, working on Earth orbit and deep space communication networks and protocols, and design of planetary exploration missions. While at JPL he also served as affiliate graduate faculty at the Department of Electrical Engineering at Caltech, where he taught the three-course graduate sequence on digital communications. He has been the co-founder of, or advisor to, a number of technology startup companies. His research interests are in environmental monitoring and wireless sensor networks, resilience of critical infrastructure, emergency communications, underwater and space communications, acoustics, data mining and search, and signal processing.