Excellence in Research: Implementing Urban Digital Twins with Responsible Foundation AI for Community Resilience

Rapid urbanization stands as a significant global trend in population projections. However, urban communities of color often confront heightened poverty rates, limited access to quality education and healthcare, inadequate housing, and diminished resilience in the face of natural disasters, economic downturns, social upheavals, or public health crises. Urban digital twins (UDTs) emerge as pivotal tools in enhancing community resilience by constructing virtual replicas of cities, enabling a holistic grasp of the urban landscape and its interconnected systems. A collaborative team comprising researchers from Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU), University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), and Texas A&M University (TAMU) is dedicated to advancing research and educational endeavors in implementing UDTs through developing responsible foundation AI techniques to bolster community resilience. The success of the proposed project advances various technologies such as AI, urban planning, and data mining. It also fosters collaboration and knowledge exchange across multiple institutions, and helps train students to become future workforce for the nation. This project unfolds through three research thrusts: 1) Data Curation: Responsible AutoML-GPT Based Data Collection and Representation; 2) Analytical Visualization: Explainable Foundation AI Based 3D Modeling for UDTs Construction; and 3) Social-Physical System Integration: Enhancing UDTs with Social System Information Through Integrating Knowledge Graphs with Multimodal Foundation Models. Aligned seamlessly with the objectives of the participating institutions, this project enriches the research and educational landscape with cutting-edge techniques. Moreover, it fosters collaboration among these three institutions, improves the involvement of underrepresented student cohorts in research endeavors, and grooms the future workforce in pivotal areas for the nation. By actively engaging minority students in forefront research, it cultivates broader participation and diversity in emerging domains. Ultimately, this endeavor contributes to nurturing a skilled cadre of future professionals adept at addressing the nation's challenges in responsible AI and urban planning. 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.