Collaborative Research: HNDS-I: Cyberinfrastructure for Human Dynamics and Resilience Research

Disaster resilience research is concerned with learning how people prepare for and deal with damage to their communities because of events such as floods, fires, pandemics, and other existential threats. The concepts of risk, vulnerability and sustainability are very important because of the impact they have on individuals’ lives and well-being. However, advancing science-based resilience research is hard because the data that are used to measure disaster resilience come from many different sources and are difficult to merge. Even for available data there are few tools available to analyze them, especially for researchers who do not have extensive quantitative training. This project overcomes these difficulties by developing a national cyberinfrastructure called the Human Dynamics and Resilience infrastructure that contains large-scale data and analytic tools to support and advance human dynamics and resilience research. Knowledge gained from visualizing and analyzing the data using the infrastructure can better inform policies to increase community resilience. The project accomplishes four objectives. First, it develops four new databases containing integrated data from around the nation, including social media and cell-phone mobility data. Second, it constructs visualization and analytical tools, such as maps, statistics, and dynamic modeling and simulations to facilitate both exploratory and in-depth research. Third, it implements a training and feedback module to help engage researchers, practitioners, and the public to explore and conduct analyses that should lead to a better understanding of resilience. Finally, it includes three case studies that demonstrate how the infrastructure can lead to new knowledge about the relationship between human mobility and resilience. The project is a collaboration of multidisciplinary investigators from four universities, including Louisiana State University, University of South Florida, Texas A&M University, and Saint Louis University. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.