Geodesign Approaches to City Resilience Planning: A Systematic Review

The increased frequency of extreme events facing society is placing mounting pressure on cities and regions that need more robust resilience planning against growing uncertainty. Data augmented participatory methods, such as geodesign, offer much promise in supporting strategic planning to make our cities and regions more resilient. In that context, this study aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of geodesign practices in resilience planning, through a systematic review of the selected 487 studies available from various bibliographic databases. The results indicate that a total of 75 studies were connected to resilience thinking, with a focus on climate change, floods, and sea level rise risks. A significant cluster of those resilience-related studies worked, especially, on improving sustainability. A detailed analysis of 59 relevant geodesign case studies revealed a strong underlying emphasis on disaster risk reduction and management activities. This study also noticed two prominent approaches among the analysed case studies to future city scenario planning: computational (41 studies), and collaborative (18 studies). It is recommended that an explicit integration of these two approaches into the geodesign approach can assist future city resilience planning endeavours. Thus, future research should further investigate the utility of integrating data-driven modelling and simulation within a collaborative scenario planning process, the usability of digital tools such as planning support systems within a collaborative geodesign framework, and the value of the plan’s performance evaluation during resilience decision-making. Another area for future work is increased community engagement in city resilience practices. The geodesign approach can provide a comprehensive framework for bringing communities, decision-makers, experts, and technologists together to help plan for more resilient city futures. Finally, while geodesign’s explicit role in empirical resilience implementations has been found to be low in this systematic review study, there are significant opportunities to support evidence-based and collaborative city resilience planning and decision-making activities.

Deep Else: A Critical Framework for AI Art

From a small community of pioneering artists who experimented with artificial intelligence (AI) in the 1970s, AI art has expanded, gained visibility, and attained socio-cultural relevance since the second half of the 2010s. Its topics, methodologies, presentational formats, and implications are closely related to a range of disciplines engaged in the research and application of AI. In this paper, I present a comprehensive framework for the critical exploration of AI art. It comprises the context of AI art, its prominent poetic features, major issues, and possible directions. I address the poetic, expressive, and ethical layers of AI art practices within the context of contemporary art, AI research, and related disciplines. I focus on the works that exemplify poetic complexity and manifest the epistemic or political ambiguities indicative of a broader milieu of contemporary culture, AI science/technology, economy, and society. By comparing, acknowledging, and contextualizing both their accomplishments and shortcomings, I outline the prospective strategies to advance the field. The aim of this framework is to expand the existing critical discourse of AI art with new perspectives which can be used to examine the creative attributes of emerging practices and to assess their cultural significance and socio-political impact. It contributes to rethinking and redefining the art/science/technology critique in the age when the arts, together with science and technology, are becoming increasingly responsible for changing ecologies, shaping cultural values, and political normalization.

Towards transboundary networks of climate-smart marine reserves in the Southern California Bight

Climate-smart conservation addresses the vulnerability of biodiversity to climate change impacts but may require transboundary considerations. Here, we adapt and refine 16 biophysical guidelines for climate-smart marine reserves for the transboundary California Bight ecoregion. We link several climate-adaptation strategies (e.g., maintaining connectivity, representing climate refugia, and forecasting effectiveness of protection) by focusing on kelp forests and associated species. We quantify transboundary larval connectivity along ~800 km of coast and find that the number of connections and the average density of larvae dispersing through the network under future climate scenarios could decrease by ~50%, highlighting the need to protect critical steppingstone nodes. We also find that although focal species will generally recover with 30% protection, marine heatwaves could hinder subsequent recovery in the following 50 years, suggesting that protecting climate refugia and expanding the coverage of marine reserves is a priority. Together, these findings provide a first comprehensive framework for integrating climate resilience for networks of marine reserves and highlight the need for a coordinated approach in the California Bight ecoregion.

Global health education for the post-pandemic years: parity, people, planet, priorities, and practices

Global health degree programs are now offered by institutions of higher education in most world regions. Based on our review of the curricula for many of these programs, we identified five domains that are central to current global health education. “Parity” emphasizes health equity as the ultimate goal of global health. “People” comprises the social, economic, cultural, and political contributors to health and access to medical care for individuals and communities. “Planet” encompasses various aspects of globalization and environmental health that affect population health. “Priorities” and “practices” include the values, data, and tools used to design, implement, and evaluate partnerships, policies, programs, and other global health interventions in countries of all income levels. The pandemic is likely to increase student demand for global health education from the undergraduate through the graduate and professional levels. Our “5 Ps model of global health education” provides a comprehensive framework for the core student learning objectives for global health today. Knowledge of each of these domains is essential for preparing students for meaningful experiential learning and skilled professional practice in global health.

MUFFLE: Multi-Modal Fake News Influence Estimator on Twitter

To alleviate the impact of fake news on our society, predicting the popularity of fake news posts on social media is a crucial problem worthy of study. However, most related studies on fake news emphasize detection only. In this paper, we focus on the issue of fake news influence prediction, i.e., inferring how popular a fake news post might become on social platforms. To achieve our goal, we propose a comprehensive framework, MUFFLE, which captures multi-modal dynamics by encoding the representation of news-related social networks, user characteristics, and content in text. The attention mechanism developed in the model can provide explainability for social or psychological analysis. To examine the effectiveness of MUFFLE, we conducted extensive experiments on real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms both state-of-the-art methods of popularity prediction and machine-based baselines in top-k NDCG and hit rate. Through the experiments, we also analyze the feature importance for predicting fake news influence via the explainability provided by MUFFLE.

MRO Spare Parts Management and Inventory Optimization

In this chapter, considering the importance of spare parts inventory management in the equipment life cycle, the excellence models in spare parts supply chain management are reviewed, and MRO-MMM framework based on the MMM maintenance excellence model will be presented in eight steps. In this comprehensive framework, all necessary actions are considered in terms of maintenance excellence, improvement, and optimization spare parts management. The steps include compiling strategies, spare parts management policies, and related indicators; determining criticality, classification, and spare parts data management; data and procedure preparation for analysis of inventory management; optimization of inventory management system; supplier management; integrity of automation and information system; continuous improvement; and risk based and smarting inventory management. This framework has been used in various industries and proved that the implementation of the MRO-MMM framework will optimize and significantly improve spare parts management.