Course Description: Offers an evidence-based glimpse of what has been called a clear and present danger to mankind. Analyzes case studies from the magic of the butterfly effect in chaos theory to the deep challenges in physics, biogeochemistry, and data sciences. Covers topics from experimental design to satellite-based remote sensing, all the way to the design and operations of next-generation hydraulic infrastructures, transportation systems, smart grids, and communication networks, including the impacts on coastal or inland cities, the resilience to weather hazards, and the sustainability of water-energy-food resources. Includes policy issues and risk-informed trade-offs in renewable energy, environmental regulations, and emissions control. Graduate students are required to complete a mandatory class project.
Course Info and Faculty Bio(s)
Course Number: CIVE 5363
Department: Civil and Environmental Engineering (CIVE)
CRN: 20898
Faculty Bio(s): Auroop R. Ganguly is a College of Engineering (COE) Distinguished Professor, the Director of Artificial Intelligence for Climate and Sustainability (AI4CaS) at the Institute for Experiential Artificial Intelligence (EAI), and the Co-Director of the Global Resilience Institute (GRI), at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. His research and teaching interests are at the intersection of climate change and water sustainability, critical infrastructures and complex systems, as well as machine learning and data sciences. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, a Senior Member of the IEEE and a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery. Ganguly has 25+ years of full-time prefessional experience spanning the private sector, a government-owned national laboratory, and academia, while he and his former PhD students have spawned two successful startups. He has a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a B.Tech. (Hons.) from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India. Ganguly claims his current personal interests are in mythology, ancient world history, and comparative religion, playing with his 3+ year old niece who shares his birthday, and in offering study-abroad courses on climate science, engineering, and policy in emerging economies through the Northeastern University Dialogue of Civilizations program.
Puja Das is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Engineering at the Sustainability and Data Sciences Laboratory of Northeastern University in Boston, MA, where she has won the Civil and Environmental Engineering Graduate Teaching Award. As a part of her PhD, she has interned at NASA and a startup company called Capella Space Corporation in two successive summers. Her research is at the intersection of climate and water resources, remote sensing and machine learning, and hydrologic emergency and river management. She is the lead graduate student researcher in a NASA-funded project which uses machine learning and data sciences for precipitation nowcasting from remote sensing data, where she works with researchers previously at NASA and now at their own NASA SBIR-funded startup as development partners, as well as practitioners at the Tennessee Valley Authority and researchers at the US DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory as stakeholder partners. She has successfully mentored undergraduate and high-school students, co-taught undergraduate and graduate courses, and obtained an MS at Northeastern University. Das graduated from the prestigious Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) with a Bachelor’s in water resources engineering and was an instructor at a university in Bangladesh for two years.