Metro21, NSF host Sustainable Urban Systems Workshop

Metro21 hosted the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Sustainable Urban Systems (SUS) Workshop from July 29-30, bringing together faculty, students, and researchers from industry, municipalities, and the non-profit sector from across the United States. Over the course of the workshop, attendees ideated around themes of research questions related to the transformation of spaces for social, ecological, and economic benefit of stakeholders through automation. At the SUS workshop, participants collaborated to bring about a series of key research questions for the NSF and researchers. Themes of the sessions surrounded resilience, building equity into projects, application models for deployment, identifying opportunities for public-private partnerships, and seeking breakthroughs in sensing, edge computing, and machine learning to enable benefits from automation.

Partners from across disciplines and research foci convened on issues, such as: energy, water, buildings, transportation, sensors, data integration, agrofood, and automation. Engineers, policymakers, and academics collaborated to address challenges to the work in communities, broadly citing lack of community engagement and underutilization of technology in existing infrastructure. Following the workshop, NSF and partners of Metro21 will be releasing a document cataloguing the discussions and providing actionable next steps for collaborators.

To learn more about the workshop please visit the webpage: Concepts for Advancing Sustainable Urban Systems (SUS) Research Networks