Food for Thought: A series of public events featuring research and creative projects by recent CAS Associates and Fellows.

We are delighted to showcase the work of some of our most productive and creative faculty in this informal series of intellectually and spiritually invigorating presentations. You are invited to drop in when you can to learn about the exciting projects undertaken by our faculty.

11:00am-11:45am: Lei Zhao, CAS Beckman Fellow 2024-25, Civil & Environmental Engineering
Advancing Urban Climate Science with Modeling, Sensing, and AI/ML

Urbanization represents one of the most significant anthropogenic changes to the Earth’s surface. Rapid urbanization coupled with climate change not only exposes cities and their residents to substantial risks across the world but also presents a historic and time-sensitive opportunity to mitigate and adapt to the negative impacts of future changes and to advance global sustainable and resilient growth. Addressing this grand challenge, however, requires novel modeling frameworks that better resolve urban effects and their complex two-way interactions with climate across spatiotemporal scales, both for improved scientific understanding of cities and for planning effective resilient strategies. Recent advances in AI/ML, satellite remote sensing, high-resolution urban-resolving Earth system modeling, and advanced computing have enabled development of many of these advanced tools and opened up promising opportunities. In this talk, Professor Zhao will present examples, using recent work, on how AI/ML, hybrid modeling, remote sensing, and advanced computing can help enhance the urban-resolving capabilities in models, address the longstanding challenges in urban studies, and therefore advance the urban climate science. 

Noon-12:45pm: Jozsef Balogh, CAS Associate 2024-25, Mathematics

Independent Sets in Hypergraphs

Professor Balogh describes a result which characterizes independent sets in hypergraphs. This result has many applications, as several objects could be described as an independent set in a hypergraph. He demonstrates among others, examples from discrete geometry, additive combinatorics, and Ramsey theory.