Role of walkability, bike infrastructure, and greenspace in combatting chronic diseases: A heterogeneous ecological anal...
Wine grape grower perceptions and attitudes about soil health
Developing and adopting strategies that preserve soil health from degradation due to drastic changes in climate is critical for securing sustainable viticulture. For example, healthy soils promote water infiltration, nutrient cycling, and retention functions that support grape production. However, little research has evaluated drivers of growers' d...
O'Hare Airport roadway traffic prediction via data fusion and Gaussian process regression
This study proposes an approach of leveraging information gathered from multiple traffic data sources at different resolutions to obtain approximate inference on the traffic distribution of Chicago's O'Hare Airport area. Specifically, it proposes the ingestion of traffic datasets at different resolutions to build spatiotemporal models for predictin...
Expert and operator perspectives on barriers to energy efficiency in data centers
It was last estimated in 2016 that data centers (DCs) comprise approximately 2% of total US electricity consumption. However, this estimate is currently being updated to account for the massive increase in computing needs due to streaming, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence (AI). To prevent energy consumption that tracks with increasing co...
Defining geoeconomics amid shifts in global hegemony: Critical geographies of new international conjunctures
Recent shifts in global hegemony make the need for critical geographical accounts of geoeconomics and geopolitics that much more critical. They underline that we need to come to terms with their dialectical relationships and tensions, doing so in relation to both underlying struggles over international hegemony and uneven capitalist development as ...
Anthropogenic heat from buildings in Los Angeles County: A simulation framework and assessment
Anthropogenic heat (AH), i.e., waste heat from buildings to the ambient environment, increases urban air temperature and contributes to the urban heat island effect, which leads to more air-conditioning energy use and higher associated waste heat during summer, forming a positive feedback loop. This study used a bottom-up simulation approach to dev...
Defining weather scenarios for simulation-based assessment of thermal resilience of buildings under current and future c...
In response to increasingly severe weather conditions, optimization of building performance and investment provides an opportunity to consider co-benefits of thermal resilience during energy efficiency retrofits. This work aims to assess thermal resilience of buildings using building performance simulation to evaluate the indoor overheating risk un...
What Is in a Plan? Using Natural Language Processing to Read 461 California City General Plans
Land-use control is local and highly varied. State agencies struggle to assess plan contents. Similarly, advocacy groups and planning researchers wrestle with the length of planning documents and ability to compare across plans. The goal of this research is to (1) introduce Natural Language Processing techniques that can automate qualitative coding...
Performative versus Authentic Equity Work: An Assessment of Current Practices in Transportation Planning
With the growth of attention to equity in transportation, there is a need to understand differing definitions of transportation equity and what constitutes impactful equity work. This report examines definitions and assesses equity work within transportation in California. We do this by analyzing the expert perspectives of 28 transportation profess...
Assessment of energy and thermal resilience performance to inform climate mitigation of multifamily buildings in disadva...
The compound impacts of heatwaves and power outages pose a serious indoor heat-related health risk for residents living in disadvantaged communities (DACs) with limited or no air conditioning. In this study we selected 13 heat vulnerable multifamily buildings in El Monte, in Los Angeles County, and employed CityBES to evaluate their energy and ther...
