Award Abstract # 1846069
CAREER: Household Network Modeling and Empathic Learning for Integrating Social Equality into Infrastructure Resilience Assessment
NSF Org: |
CMMI
Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation
|
Recipient: |
TEXAS A&M ENGINEERING EXPERIMENT STATION
|
Initial Amendment Date:
|
February 6, 2019 |
Latest Amendment Date:
|
June 5, 2025 |
Award Number: |
1846069 |
Award Instrument: |
Standard Grant |
Program Manager: |
Daan Liang
dliang@nsf.gov
(703)292-2441
CMMI
Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation
ENG
Directorate for Engineering
|
Start Date: |
February 15, 2019 |
End Date: |
September 30, 2026 (Estimated) |
Total Intended Award
Amount: |
$500,000.00 |
Total Awarded Amount to
Date: |
$570,000.00 |
Funds Obligated to Date:
|
FY 2019 = $500,000.00
FY 2020 = $70,000.00
|
History of Investigator:
|
-
Ali
Mostafavi
(Principal Investigator)
ali@resilitix.ai
|
Recipient Sponsored Research
Office: |
Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station
3124 TAMU
COLLEGE STATION
TX
US
77843-3124
(979)862-6777
|
Sponsor Congressional
District: |
10
|
Primary Place of
Performance: |
Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station
3136 TAMU
College Station
TX
US
77843-3136
|
Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
10
|
Unique Entity Identifier
(UEI): |
QD1MX6N5YTN4
|
Parent UEI: |
QD1MX6N5YTN4
|
NSF Program(s): |
CAREER: FACULTY EARLY CAR DEV, HDBE-Humans, Disasters, and th, Special Initiatives
|
Primary Program Source:
|
01001920DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
01002021DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
|
Program Reference
Code(s): |
041E,
042E,
043E,
091Z,
1045
|
Program Element Code(s):
|
104500,
163800,
164200
|
Award Agency Code: |
4900
|
Fund Agency Code: |
4900
|
Assistance Listing
Number(s): |
47.041
|
ABSTRACT

This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) project seeks to understand the interaction between households and infrastructure networks in disasters with the goal to break new ground on integrating social inequality considerations into infrastructure resilience research and education. The research will examine household network dynamics influencing disparities in risks among vulnerable populations (e.g., older adults and low income families) due to infrastructure service disruptions. The education objective is to integrate empathy and human-centric considerations with technical concepts in training next-generation practitioners and researchers of resilient infrastructure. This scientific research contribution thus supports NSF's mission to promote the progress of science and to advance our national welfare. In this case, the anticipated outcomes will yield transformative ideas to enhance how infrastructure systems can best be produced and managed to promote socially just and resilient services for different subpopulations.
This project involves an integrative research, education, and outreach plan. The research component of this project will: (1) empirically characterize the influence of household-level socio-demographic characteristics, expectations, norms, and other factors on service gaps and adjustment practices when infrastructure disruptions occur; (2) model and analyze household social networks at the neighborhood scale to determine the effects of social network structure and stability on the diffusion of information and adjustment practices through social media; and (3) analyze the interplay between infrastructure networks and household social networks to examine the spatial patterns of risk disparity among different sub-populations at the urban scale. The research approach involves methodological fusion among household surveys, fine-grained social media data analytics, and computational agent-based modeling to extract, characterize, simulate, and examine household networks. The research approach will be tested in the context of Hurricane Harvey in Houston with a focus on electricity, water, and road disruptions. The education component of this project will create and test an empathic learning model consisting of multiple human-centric course modules, interdisciplinary service-learning projects, and seminars to promote empathy and critical thinking skills in participating students. The outreach activities and service learning projects will focus on underserved neighborhoods in Houston and will involve deep community engagement with stakeholders and residents to broadly disseminate findings. These integrative research, education, and outreach elements will promote convergence research for integrating social equality with infrastructure resilience and better incorporate the needs of vulnerable populations in planning and prioritization of infrastructure services. The project will also lead to capacity building for underserved communities, as well as resilience-aware and empathic engineers of the future.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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(Showing: 1 - 10 of 37)
(Showing: 1 - 37 of 37)
Afroogh, Saleh and Esmalian, Amir and Donaldson, Jonan and Mostafavi, Ali
"Empathic Design in Engineering Education and Practice: An Approach for Achieving Inclusive and Effective Community Resilience"
Sustainability
, v.13
, 2021
https://doi.org/10.3390/su13074060
Citation
Details
Coleman, Natalie and Esmalian, Amir and Lee, Cheng-Chun and Gonzales, Eulises and Koirala, Pranik and Mostafavi, Ali
"Energy inequality in climate hazards: Empirical evidence of social and spatial disparities in managed and hazard-induced power outages"
Sustainable Cities and Society
, v.92
, 2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2023.104491
Citation
Details
Coleman, Natalie and Esmalian, Amir and Mostafavi, Ali
"Anatomy of susceptibility for shelter-in-place households facing infrastructure service disruptions caused by natural hazards"
International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
, v.50
, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2020.101875
Citation
Details
Dargin, Jennifer and Mostafavi, Ali
"Well-Being and Infrastructure Disruptions during Disasters: An Empirical Analysis of Household Impact Disparities during Hurricane Harvey"
ASCE Construction Research Congress 2020
, 2020
https://doi.org/
Citation
Details
Dargin, Jennifer S. and Fan, Chao and Mostafavi, Ali
"Vulnerable populations and social media use in disasters: Uncovering the digital divide in three major U.S. hurricanes"
International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
, v.54
, 2021
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2021.102043
Citation
Details
Esmalian, Amir and Dong, Shangjia and Coleman, Natalie and Mostafavi, Ali
"Determinants of Risk Disparity Due to Infrastructure Service Losses in Disasters: A Household Service Gap Model"
Risk Analysis
, v.41
, 2021
https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13738
Citation
Details
Esmalian, Amir and Dong, Shangjia and Mostafavi, Ali
"Empirical Assessment of Household Susceptibility to Hazards-Induced Prolonged Power Outages"
ASCE Construction Research Congress 2020
, 2020
https://doi.org/
Citation
Details
Esmalian, Amir and Dong, Shangjia and Mostafavi, Ali
"Susceptibility curves for humans: Empirical survival models for determining household-level disturbances from hazards-induced infrastructure service disruptions"
Sustainable Cities and Society
, v.66
, 2021
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2020.102694
Citation
Details
Esmalian, Amir and Ramaswamy, Maitreyi and Rasoulkhani, Kambiz and Mostafavi, Ali
"Agent-Based Modeling Framework for Simulation of Societal Impacts of Infrastructure Service Disruptions during Disasters"
ASCE Computing in Civil Engineering Workshop
, 2019
Citation
Details
Esmalian, Amir and Wang, Wanqiu and Mostafavi, Ali
"Multiagent modeling of hazardhouseholdinfrastructure nexus for equitable resilience assessment"
Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering
, v.37
, 2022
https://doi.org/10.1111/mice.12818
Citation
Details
Fan, Chao and Esparza, Miguel and Dargin, Jennifer and Wu, Fangsheng and Oztekin, Bora and Mostafavi, Ali
"Spatial biases in crowdsourced data: Social media content attention concentrates on populous areas in disasters"
Computers, Environment and Urban Systems
, v.83
, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2020.101514
Citation
Details
Fan, Chao and Jiang, Xiangqi and Lee, Ronald and Mostafavi, Ali
"Equality of access and resilience in urban population-facility networks"
npj Urban Sustainability
, v.2
, 2022
https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-022-00051-3
Citation
Details
Fan, Chao and Jiang, Yucheng and Mostafavi, Ali
"The Role of Local Influential Users in Spread of Situational Crisis Information"
Journal of computer mediated communication newsletter
, 2021
Citation
Details
Fan, Chao and Shen, Jiayi and Mostafavi, Ali and Hu, Xia
"Characterizing reticulation in online social networks during disasters"
Applied Network Science
, v.5
, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-020-00271-5
Citation
Details
Fan, Chao and Wu, Fangsheng and Mostafavi, Ali
"A Hybrid Machine Learning Pipeline for Automated Mapping of Events and Locations From Social Media in Disasters"
IEEE Access
, v.8
, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2965550
Citation
Details
Fan, Chao and Wu, Fangsheng and Mostafavi, Ali
"Discovering the influence of facility distribution on lifestyle patterns in urban populations"
Developments in the Built Environment
, v.17
, 2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dibe.2024.100348
Citation
Details
Fan, Chao and Xu, Jeffrey and Natarajan, Barane Yoga and Mostafavi, Ali
"Interpretable machine learning learns complex interactions of urban features to understand socioeconomic inequality"
Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering
, 2023
https://doi.org/10.1111/mice.12972
Citation
Details
Gupta, Yuvraj and Liu, Zhewei and Mostafavi, Ali
"Examining spatial and socioeconomic disparities in internet resilience during extreme weather events: a case study of Hurricane Harvey and Winter Storm Uri"
Urban Informatics
, v.3
, 2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s44212-024-00051-x
Citation
Details
Lee, Cheng-Chun and Chou, Charles and Mostafavi, Ali
"Specifying evacuation return and home-switch stability during short-term disaster recovery using location-based data"
Scientific Reports
, v.12
, 2022
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-20384-4
Citation
Details
Lee, Cheng-Chun and Maron, Mikel and Mostafavi, Ali
"Community-scale big data reveals disparate impacts of the Texas winter storm of 2021 and its managed power outage"
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
, v.9
, 2022
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01353-8
Citation
Details
Li, Bo and Fan, Chao and Chien, Yu-Heng and Hsu, Chia-Wei and Mostafavi, Ali
"Mobility behaviors shift disparity in flood exposure in U.S. population groups"
International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
, v.108
, 2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2024.104545
Citation
Details
Li, Bo and Mostafavi, Ali
"Location intelligence reveals the extent, timing, and spatial variation of hurricane preparedness"
Scientific Reports
, v.12
, 2022
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-20571-3
Citation
Details
Li, Bo and Mostafavi, Ali
"Unraveling fundamental properties of power system resilience curves using unsupervised machine learning"
Energy and AI
, v.16
, 2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egyai.2024.100351
Citation
Details
Liu, Chia-Fu and Mostafavi, Ali
"An equitable patient reallocation optimization and temporary facility placement model for maximizing critical care system resilience in disasters"
Healthcare Analytics
, v.4
, 2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.health.2023.100268
Citation
Details
Liu, Chia-Fu and Mostafavi, Ali
"Revealing hazard-exposure heterophily as a latent characteristic of community resilience in social-spatial networks"
Scientific Reports
, v.13
, 2023
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-31702-9
Citation
Details
Patrascu, Flavia_Ioana and Mostafavi, Ali
"Spatial model for predictive recovery monitoring based on hazard, built environment, and population features and their spillover effects"
Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science
, v.51
, 2023
https://doi.org/10.1177/23998083231167433
Citation
Details
Patrascu, Flavia-Ioana and Mostafavi, Ali
"Population activity recovery: Milestones unfolding, temporal interdependencies, and relationship with physical and social vulnerability"
International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
, v.114
, 2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2024.104931
Citation
Details
Podesta, Cristian and Coleman, Natalie and Esmalian, Amir and Yuan, Faxi and Mostafavi, Ali
"Quantifying community resilience based on fluctuations in visits to points-of-interest derived from digital trace data"
Journal of The Royal Society Interface
, v.18
, 2021
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2021.0158
Citation
Details
Wu, Fangsheng and Du, Mengnan and Fan, Chao and Tang, Ruixiang and Yang, Yang and Mostafavi, Ali and Hu, Xia
"Understanding Social Biases Behind Location Names in Contextual Word Embedding Models"
IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems
, 2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSS.2021.3106003
Citation
Details
Yang, Yang and Zhang, Cheng and Fan, Chao and Mostafavi, Ali and Hu, Xia
"Towards Fairness-Aware Disaster Informatics: an Interdisciplinary Perspective"
IEEE Access
, v.8
, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3035714
Citation
Details
Yuan, Faxi and Esmalian, Amir and Oztekin, Bora and Mostafavi, Ali
"Unveiling spatial patterns of disaster impacts and recovery using credit card transaction fluctuations"
Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science
, v.49
, 2022
https://doi.org/10.1177/23998083221090246
Citation
Details
(Showing: 1 - 10 of 37)
(Showing: 1 - 37 of 37)
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