News & Events

Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing work, including what it means for cooperative work to be supported by computers. The increased use of AI in CSCW can lead to many advantages, including increased productivity and efficiency, but it can also include several potential ethical trade-offs, such as invasions of privacy, loss of autonomy, and job displacement. This workshop will explore the ethical dimensions of AI in CSCW, building on Good Systems, a UT Grand Challenge. Specifically, the first half of the workshop will focus on the need to design AI to work for all users and to avoid bias through the use of universal design as well as the need for AI and CSCW researchers to interact with policy and legal experts to work together to ensure that AI will be developed in an ethical manner with sufficient consideration of its societal implications, and also that AI will be regulated and legislated in ways that will maximize its benefits to all people.

Join UC Santa Barbara Professor Alan Liu as he leads a discussion about multi-disciplinary perspectives as they relate to critical infrastructure studies. He’ll talk about why these different academic perspectives — sometimes divergent even in their quest to come together — are needed to imagine a good infrastructure as the foundation for a “good system.” In the case of “Bridging Barriers” Grand Challenges initiative, for example, how many different ways are there to understand what a bridge or a barrier is good for (and for whom)?

“Challenges of rapid population growth, increasing urbanization, climate change and the pressure these put on natural resources such as water, all are staring Texas in the face. Planet Texas 2050 is The University of Texas at Austin’s eight-year ‘sprint’ to better understand these forces, and as part of this project, Adam Rabinowitz, an associate professor of classics, is looking for lessons in settlements of the past, and one of the best regions to find those is around the Black Sea.”

“We are really aiming to understand how people have been resilient in the past and presently… So instead of imposing strategies for resilience before we get to know communities, (we are) actually going and learning about what people have been doing up until now.”

How can we create access to nature for everyone, not just people in communities with the resources to create and fund land trusts? Katherine Lieberknecht’s pursuit of this question ultimately led to a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University. Today, Dr. Lieberknecht is assistant professor in the School of Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches courses and conducts research related to the planning of urban ecology, water resources, green infrastructure, agriculture, sustainable land use and resilience. She also serves as chair of Planet Texas 2050, UT’s first grand challenge research program, and is faculty lead for the Texas Metro Observatory, a Planet Texas 2050 research project.

Something’s up with the weather, but is it climate change or just the seasons shifting? It depends who you ask, and in Texas and much of the rural U.S., words matter.

When pressed to summarize the path of his wide spanning career, Paul Adams offers one word, “discourse.” Adams, a professor at UT Austin’s Department of Geography and the Environment, is interested in how people discuss often contentious subjects and what makes these communications more or less successful.

“Before trust in artificial intelligence can be established, soldiers must first feel they have ownership of their robots, and the technology must be transparent enough ‘to make sure that humans can understand and interpret why a machine is making the decision it’s making,’ Ken Fleischmann, associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Information, said recently at a Mad Scientist conference in Austin. Fleischmann pointed out that while the development of artificial intelligence has yielded brilliant outcomes with chess and other games, it’s quite another thing to have a robot that will ‘behave ethically on the battlefield.'”

“The whole purpose of Good Systems is to ensure that AI is making the world a better place and is helping people. That’s exactly what we’re doing in this project. We’re using AI to help people.”

“When we limit our thinking about the health of our nation to a conversation about health care, we are missing upwards of 80 percent of the factors that actually contribute to our health. According to the County Health Rankings, only about 20 percent of our health can be credited to access to health care, while 40 percent can be credited to social and economic factors (e.g., employment, income), 30 percent to health behaviors (e.g., sedentary lifestyles, drug and alcohol use), and 10 percent to environmental factors (e.g., safe and accessible sidewalks, air and water pollution),” says School of Nursing and Whole Communities–Whole Health researcher Karen Johnson.

“You’ll see ‘sprawl at Mad Max levels, while the upper 10% all drive around…in their electric vehicles.'” UT School of Architecture and Planet Texas 2050 researcher Michael Oden attempts to answer the Austin Chronicle’s questions: Will it be bad? Can we be ready? Or should we not care?

“When developing policy guidelines and regulation, it is critically important to separate these various technologies and applications so as to deal with them individually. Any effort to consider all of AI as one unit when developing policies and initiatives would be very misguided.” — Peter Stone, Department of Computer Science professor and Good Systems founding researcher

What if there were a community storefront with a mission to connect residents with organizations and stakeholders that can assist them in co-creating solutions for the challenges they face? What if this storefront were led by the community and for the community, providing space for conversation and partnership?

Planet Texas 2050 researcher and report co-author Jay Banner explains what these newest predictions mean for our region.

Dell Medical School’s Lourdes Rodriguez talks about how her academic training and childhood in Puerto Rico give her a keen sense for what it means to prepare for — and recover from — natural and man-made disasters.

They say that what starts here in Texas changes the world, and that phrase has never rung truer than it does today. Extreme weather events and population numbers are on the rise, and Texas is experiencing its fair share of both.

“Rather than focusing on a return to an idyllic nature and childhood relationship, what is urgently needed is climate change education for young children that is situated within the actual ecological contexts in which all children’s everyday lives are situated — not just the natures that privileged children can access in forest kindergarten and preschools. We need education that values the knowledges and experiences that young children have of the environmental challenges facing their particular contexts.”

Photovoice seeks understanding through photography. It is an engaging approach to data collection that encourages children’s participation in research and seeks to understand their perspectives.

We need a more nimble and nuanced approach to urban water management, and not only because of climate change and growing urban populations, but because many communities urgently need to address failing infrastructure systems.

In October, Good Systems team members hosted a Good Systems 311 Calls and 500 City Hackathon. UT students used A.I. and machine learning methods to analyze large scale data sets of 311 calls, which log resident complaints, concerns, and non-emergency problems. This is valuable information that, when examined on aggregate, can help inform local decision-makers and city planners.

In September’s State of the University Address, President Gregory Fenves announced to faculty, staff, and students that Whole Communities–Whole Health has been selected as UT’s second Bridging Barriers grand challenge.

Researchers from nearly two dozen disciplines have been working for more than a year to build a grand challenge project that produces a new way to study human communities while, at the same time, responding to a critically underserved group in Central Texas: children and families living with adversity.

In honor of International Archaeology Day this month, Planet Texas 2050 researcher Adam Rabinowitz takes us behind the scenes to the ancient city of Histria, in Rome, which was abandoned in the 7th century AD because of a changing climate.

Not all past civilizations vanished died when the climate changed — they moved. But could we do the same, and where would we go?

Faculty members from across the university will work together to explore ways to foster the healthy development of children and families, struggling with adversity, by fundamentally rethinking how cohort studies are conducted on social, behavioral and health issues.

We’re collaborating with communities to figure out what questions they have and what answers they need, right now.

Planet Texas 2050 researcher Steven Richter, from the School of Architecture, joined graduate students from around campus in October for Sustainability Week. His work is part of the Texas Metro Observatory. “What does urbanization mean across Texas? We are looking at interdisciplinary questions, like how socio-economic patterns or changes in the built environment affect municipal water or energy use across the state.”

Scientists struggle with how to share research findings in ways that help people make changes quickly. Figuring out how to do this is our grand challenge.

The Good Systems development year is off to a running start! Thank you to everyone who has made our first two events a success. You have shown drive an initiative in this new UT Grand Challenge from Bridging Barriers and we hope to keep that enthusiasm going throughout the year.

We at Planet Texas 2050 and Bridging Barriers are humbled by the success of yesterday’s Austin Family Reunion. A Texas-sized THANK YOU to everyone who braved the rain and the traffic to be with us. We hope you had great conversations, met some new friends, and enjoyed your time in the beautiful space provided by the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. 

Real hurricane preparedness — the kind that not only saves lives but also preserves livelihoods — is something that’s built into our cities, settlements, roads, and infrastructure.

We live in an energy intensive society. Quality of life and quality of our communities depend on access to energy.

We’re excited to share with you that Planet Texas 2050 is partnering with the Austin Community Design and Development Center (ACDDC) to create a solutions-driven community center. Our pilot project will be a place where knowledge and data meet understanding and implementation, where scientists and city planners stand alongside neighborhood advocates. 

The dominant languages of climate change have been scientific, technological and economic, but art and literature get to the root of the beliefs and values that shape human behavior.

“Demographers expect Texas’s population to double by 2050. To accommodate that growth, existing cities will be forced to increase density in their urban cores, spread out, or a combination of both.”

Texas’s changing future means the air we breathe in our homes could change as well.

June 17th is World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, but that could be most days in parts of Texas and the southwestern U.S.

Planet Texas 2050 lead researcher has been named the next dean of Portland State University’s Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science. He will begin his appointment on Sept. 1, 2018.

“As Texas cities grow, natural watersheds will become urbanized. We can…. improve our understanding of the complex interactions among hydrologic systems, ecosystems, and human infrastructure systems.”

“I can tell you that real preparedness… is something that’s built into our cities, settlements, roads and infrastructure. And we are woefully unprepared for this year’s hurricane season…”

This past January, our team of more than 100 researchers and faculty members launched Planet Texas 2050 — UT Austin’s first grand challenge.

Today is the first day of hurricane season, which makes this the right time to launch six new projects that will tackle some of the biggest challenges facing Texas.

The CENTRAL organizing committee has been very active this year. Following acceptance of our development plan, we got right to work. People have met, gathered, conversed, and had a lot of fun sharing knowledge and ideas about how to make The University of Texas at Austin’s second grand challenge a reality.  

The invisible line that divides the arid western part of the country from the wetter eastern half is on the move, and that has important implications for the Texas capital. “[The 2011 drought], which was historic in terms of how intense it was, may just be a taste of things to come in the future.”

This summer, the country‘s largest indoor air quality and surface chemistry experiment brings leading experts to the university’s J.J. Pickle Research Campus to participate in an unprecedented initiative aimed at identifying the key causes of indoor air pollution.

“In our eyes, the only way to meet this challenge is an ‘all boots on the ground’ approach of integrating data and research questions from across the disciplines… Our goal is to get to 2050 with a Texas that is economically vibrant, safe, healthy, and has enough for all who live here.”

UT geoscientist Daniella Rempe has helped identify a new way trees get water during severe droughts: by sending roots deep down into the bedrock.

UT engineer Ben Hodges is finding ways to make roadways less likely to flood.

The Trump administration’s 2019 budget proposal reduces EPA funding by 23 percent. Lost in the noise was an even deeper gutting of several individual research and management programs at the EPA, which, if successful, will have great negative impacts on human health and productivity. Planet Texas 2050 researcher and indoor air quality expert Richard Corsi, Ph.D., explains.

Members of the Planet Texas 2050 research team kicked off the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2018 Annual Conference with their first Reddit AMA.

This past October, I wrote to tell you that UT’s first Bridging Barriers research grand challenge would be Planet Texas 2050.

Vice President for Research Dan Jaffe introduces Planet Texas 2050 and new projects in development that could one day become grand challenges at The University of Texas at Austin.

Extreme weather events, population growth and aging infrastructure are common challenges Texas shares with the nation and world.

The Bridging Barriers initiative is challenging researchers from different disciplines to find intersecting goals and work together to solve the world’s most pressing problems.

“We’re not trying to solve as many problems as we can. We’re trying to solve one very big problem very well.”