Trolls, Bots and Disinformation
The international media landscape is changing rapidly, and is vulnerable to disinformation, and the intentional dissemination of misleading content.
This vulnerability is increasingly visible in the climate and environmental domain, and is also worsened by the presence of so called ‘social bots’. Social bots employ machine learning technologies with increasing levels of sophistication to build social networks, create content and gain influence. Their direct influence on public health risks has already been shown in the health domain, and may very well influence public online discourses about environmental topics. How do we analyze and understand the diffusion of online misinformation and disinformation, and how can sustainability scientists navigate this new and polarized media landscape? The work is conducted in collaboration with the Complexity Science Hub (Vienna). For more information, contact Victor Galaz and read more here.
AI for Urban Climate Change Adaptation
How can AI, Big Data, and advanced modeling improve climate change adaptation planning and risk assessment?
Rapid advances in urban data science, availability of real-time data, advanced spatial modeling, machine learning, cloud-based GPU processing, and cutting-edge visualization of urban social and infrastructure systems are coming together to allow new questions to be asked about key climate change risks and opportunities to advance adaptation in cities. Scientific advances using social media data, spatial agent-based modeling, and 3D data visualization are offering city decision-makers new tools to plan, design, and drive policy that can examine equity and justice implications of current and future scenarios of climate risk, while also helping to prioritize resilience and adaptation interventions where they are needed most. This convergent urban social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) science represents a key conceptual and empirical advance to understanding complex urban system dynamics. Our interdisciplinary team includes scientists, planners, NGOs, industry, and other stakeholders working around the world to plan and envision positive urban futures, assessing heat and flood risk, and analyzing nature-based solutions and other strategies for building SETS resilience in cities. This work is led by Timon McPhearson, Director of the Urban Systems Lab at The New School, and Research Fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies.
Resilience and Smart Cities
Could increasing technological complexity lead to diminishing beneficial returns to humans and create less resilient and unmanageable urban systems?
It is often assumed that when digital technologies and ICT-solutions are integrated in the operation of city functions, they inevitably contribute to sustainable urban development, promoting e.g. energy efficiency and mitigation of global warming. In our work, we address social sustainability issues related to the development of “smart cities”, how an increased digitalization of city functions may change human-nature relations, and affect the resilience of infrastructures that provide inhabitants with basic needs, such as food, energy and water security. We also explore ways to use digital tools and methods to improve city-science, resilience building and place-making through e.g. visualization technologies, experiential data gathering, and digital tools to support the engagement and co-creation of solutions with civic society in planning and urban design. Such stools may involve environmentally focused AI, and Augmented and Virtual Reality. The work is conducted in collaboration with the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, University of Gävle and the University of Exeter. For more information, contact Johan Colding and Stephan Barthel. and Maria Schewenius (on AI, and Augmented and Virtual Reality).
SMARTer Greener Cities
Centre researcher Erik Andersson has been awarded a substantial NordForsk research Grant to lead an exciting new research project that will bring together AI and sustainable smart cities - To be liveable, equitable, resilient and positive contributors to global sustainability, cities need to be designed and governed as complex systems where technological and digital infrastructure supports ecological-biophysical and social-institutional-economic dynamics. However, social and ecological dimensions of urban design and governance are not well integrated into “smart” city agendas.
How can investment in smart cities jointly support multiple urban objectives? Smart cities have so far failed to address nature-based solutions in urban forests, parks, and community gardens and their contribution to human well-being, including stress relief and heat mitigation. The SMARTer Greener Cities project aims to develop and test novel tools and processes for explicitly converging social, ecological, and technological systems (SETS) approaches for improving life in cities. The convergence of these approaches will promote resilient and equitable urban futures in Helsinki, Copenhagen, and Stockholm, and generate new opportunities for transformative change and increasing resilience to extreme events in other Nordic cities. The comprehensive integration of emerging science and practice connected to each of the three couplings (social-ecological (S-E), ecological-technological (E-T), and social-technological (S-T)) into a combined SETS framework is essential for the development of “smarter” (through systems) solutions for resilience and equity.
Read more about this exciting new research project here.
Developing a Planet-Centric Business Intelligence
How can AI connect science, business and society at large to put scientific results into practice for sustainable business development?
Together with the young tech company Planethon, researchers from the Stockholm Resilience Centre explore new ways to use AI to transform scientific insights into actionable knowledge for business. Could graph technology combined with deep learning algorithms help connect information that at the moment is isolated in different fields of expertise? And which possible new and planet centric business models can evolve by connecting these insights in new ways? For more information, contact Planethon, and Per Olsson.
Simulations to Study Collective Action
Modelling our way towards a more sustainable future.
Why do some groups people collective manage their resource and others don’t? What makes them different? Their personalities? Their ecological challenges? Their social bubble? Or all of them? And how do people actually make (unconscious) decisions in their particular circumstances? And does this change over time? To pursue these questions, we make use of agent-based models, that allow us to bring explanations, stories and facts alive in an artificial world, where we can freely explore and follow these why and how questions about human behaviour. Our work thus falls under the oldest AI-branch that aims to understand behaviour, in which machine learning is sometimes used to mimic human learning or problem solving. Curious? Look at the work we do in the SES-LINK group and the models we already developed.