###Operationalising socio-environmental simulation intelligence for crafting sustainability policies
Project ID: 2228bd1085 (You will need this ID for your application)
Research Theme: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
UCL Lead department: Computer Science
Lead Supervisor: Maria Perez-Ortiz
Project Summary:
Why is this research important? Our socio-environmental ecosystems form a complex dynamic web of interacting variables, where small changes can have considerable and often irreversible repercussions. More than ever, humans need comprehensive support in understanding change at a global scale, analysing scenarios and potential consequences and crafting effective policies for sustainability/resilience. This scholarship aims to set the foundations towards the novel field of large-scale computational methods (simulations paired with artificial intelligence) for sustainability decision making.
Who will you be working with? Apart from the main supervisors (based at UCL Computer Science and UCL Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering), given the interdisciplinary of the proposal, we aim to use a supervision structure with input from our wide network of academic and industrial collaborators, including researchers in behaviour change, energy, manufacturing, public policy, environmental research, education, interaction design and health, all of which are interested in the use of these technological foundations for better understanding the impacts of climate change, educating for sustainability, supporting policy makers and sustainability experts, and harnessing behaviour change.
What will you be doing? Building on our previous research, you will be designing innovative artificial intelligence systems that can interact with complex simulation environments (digital twins) that link society-environment, for example the one used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for projection scenarios, as well as digital twins of urban public behaviour. The aim will be testing the potential of these computational methods to support sustainability science at a global and local scale (e.g. optimising transport to reduce CO2 emissions, or finding international global policies that support social foundations and respect planetary boundaries) and engaging with experts for their deployment in the real-world.
Who are we looking for? A talented individual with strong mathematical, computational, and programming skills and a passion for sustainability and interdisciplinary research.