Teaming for Interdisciplinary Research Pre-Seed Program

The focus of the team will be on two aspects of convergent safety problems, one on safety science and the other on safety engineering. For safety science, the research will focus on exploring the following questions: 1) How does one event trigger another event that has no “logical relations”? 2) How to determine the thresholding values that cause and sustain chain reactions such as domino effects and cascading failures? 3) What are the hidden commonalities among seemingly disparate events, such as infectious disease transmission and pollutant diffusions? For the engineering aspect, the research will focus on answering the following questions: 1) Can we develop a common multiscale and multimodal spatiotemporal sensor network to enable detection and warning of diverse safety such as transportation, automation, and infrastructure safety? 2) Can we develop an AI with gradient enhancement and

modeling-based analytics that can perceive different events from the sensed data? 3) How do we improve human sensing and perception of safety in a broad context of human-machine socioeconomic systems? In addition to the transformative research as described, the team will seek to establish a convergent safety science and engineering education program across multiple colleges, including an MS program on convergent safety science and engineering; training programs for industrial professionals and agency engineers; and a seminar series that is open to all interested parties. The team will also establish a mechanism to turn research discoveries into innovations and products that serve the industries, the governments and the public via commercialization and startups. In addition, the team will develop graduate courses, partnerships with industries and academic institutions, and institutionalize the promising and successful programs. The following figure illustrates the core research, education, and outreach. At a later stage, the team will form specific sub-teams with established strengths to develop proposals for the NSF ERC program, the University Transportation Center (UTC) program of the Department of Transportation and other

programs. The pre-seed grant will allow the team to identify specific collaboration and proposal development opportunities and conceive a plan to establish a convergent safety science and engineering program in research, education, and outreach at UGA.

Research: Advances in nanosensors, biosensors and quantum sensors, and IoT sensor networks have offered unparalleled potentials for measuring and monitoring the minute changes of the state variables such as oscillations and temperature variations that are inherent to all thermodynamics processes including the safety evolution processes. AI-based data analytics offer exceptional capability to recognize patterns and subtle changes that may not be captured by human sensing and perceptions but signalize failures and abnormalities. Digital twin and mixed reality methods provide high-fidelity modeling and simulations that have enhanced the decision-making, emergency handling and safety management. The research will focus on distributed multimodal sensing, AI-enhanced perceptions for complicated human- physical-environmental systems, and digital-twin and mixed reality technologies for convergent safety science and engineering.

Education and Outreach: There is a serious gap in convergent safety science and engineering education in major universities. Possible reasons for the gap include that the causes and effects of accidents in different areas are seemingly drastically different, for example a traffic accident and a nuclear accident; most accidents involve human factors, management procedures, and technology limits, adding to the challenge. We will explore the feasibility of establishing a convergent safety science and engineering MS program first. Based on the success of the MS program, we will investigate the possibility of establishing a Ph.D. program, a BS concentration program, and a BS program.

Safety science, technology and engineering are very broad in scope (different subject areas, i.e., transportation, foods) and deep in time sequences (prediction, preparation, responses and recovering, pre- event monitoring, modeling and simulation) even on the convergent platforms. Academic, industrial, governmental (AIG) and public stakeholder groups are all interested and may contribute to the improvement of safety. We will devote efforts towards establishing AIG partnerships, joint organization of conferences, and engaging K-12, REU and public education.

Team Lead

Linbing Wang
lw07950@uga.edu
Engineering
Environmental, Civil, Agricultural, and Mechanical Engineering

Team Members

Mi Geum Chorzepa
chorzepa@uga.edu
Engineering
Environmental, Civil, Agriculture & Mechanical Engineering

Charles Easley
cae25@uga.edu
Public Health
Environmental Health Science

Deepak Mishra
dmishra@uga.edu
Arts and Sciences
Geography

James Marshall Shepherd
marshgeo@uga.edu
Arts and Sciences
Geography

Ping Ma
pingma@uga.edu
Arts and Sciences
Statistics

John Drake
jdrake@uga.edu
Ecology Ecology

Dave Chatterjee
dchatte@uga.edu
Business
Management Information Systems

Qianwen Li
cami.li@uga.edu
Engineering
Environmental, Civil, Agriculture & Mechanical Engineering

Harshavardhan Thippareddi
harsha.thippareddi@uga.edu
Agriculture & Environmental Sciences
Poultry Science

Adam Goodie
goodie@uga.edu
Arts and Sciences
Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Jidong Yang
jidong.yang@uga.edu
Engineering
Environmental, Civil, Agriculture & Mechanical Engineering

Ishtiaque Fazlul
ifazlul@uga.edu
Public Health
Public and International Affairs

Hongyue Sun
HongyueSun@uga.edu
Engineering
Environmental, Civil, Agriculture & Mechanical Engineering

Tom Mote
tmote@uga.edu
Arts and Sciences
Geography

Fred Beyette Jr.
Fred.Beyette@uga.edu
Engineering
Electrical & Computer Engineering

Weiwei Hu
Weiwei.Hu@uga.edu
Arts and Science
Mathematics

Kenan Song
kenan.song@uga.edu
Engineering
Environmental, Civil, Agriculture & Mechanical Engineering