Zuetell awarded “best student presentation” at sustainability conference
Emily Zuetell, a fourth-year PhD student in engineering and public policy and , won the Best Student Presentation award at this year’s International Symposium on Sustainable Systems and Technologies (ISSST) . Zuetell is advised by Dr. Paulina Jaramillo, professor of engineering and public policy.
Zuetell uses machine learning and remote sensing to evaluate how readily urban planning in Sub-Saharan Africa can adapt to climate change, asking, “Can we find ways to make the data we have more equitable so the most at-risk populations have access to information to make good long-term decisions for sustainable development?”
Growing up in Colorado, Zuetell witnessed extreme weather events on a regular basis, from wildfires to a year’s worth of rain in one week, and she was struck by how extreme weather affects people, communities, and recovery. In her studies, she noticed similar climate impacts on communities in Sub-Saharan Africa, despite the region contributing very little to global climate change. She hopes to fill a research gap, as she said that not much data currently exist on the rate and impacts of development on climate change impacts in this region of the world.
“With all these tools that we’ve developed, how can we make sure that they can be applied well and effectively globally?” she said.
She uses satellite data and deep-learning algorithms to monitor urbanization and how land cover changes, which affect how floods behave in urban areas. However, due to lack of data from Sub-Saharan Africa, the predicting algorithms are trained on data from the United States, which has very different topography. Once machine learning technology processes the satellite images into data sets, Zuetell transforms those data sets using statistical models so that she can improve the algorithms’ performance on data from Sub-Saharan Africa.
Zuetell presented this work at ISSST, which ran from June 18–20 in Baltimore and is one of the longest-running conferences focused on technologies, policies, and behaviors relating to sustainability. The conference attracts researchers from a range of academic fields with a shared interest in sustainability practices but who have different academic approaches.
Zuetell said the award validated the interest in and importance of her work, and her ability to communicate that work effectively. “These are really good checks of being able to say, ‘This worked,’ and then being able to build on that,” she said.
Emily Zuetell