Georgia Institute of Technology

The amount of data generated around the world has exploded. It’s available in volume and quality unmatched in human history. And this is just the beginning: Some estimates say the digital universe — currently 3.2 zettabytes — will grow to 40 zettabytes in just half a decade. (A zettabyte is about a billion terabytes.)

Our civil and environmental engineers are working to harness the potential of all this data with novel data-harvesting techniques — from wireless sensors to unmanned aerial vehicles — while also creating new ways to process, analyze, visualize and use that information.

Take, for example, our urban infrastructure, which is among the most complex systems in the world. It mixes the various man-made systems (transportation, water, power and telecommunications, to name a few) with natural systems (oceans, air, forests and more) as well as the social systems that enable our societies to function (everything from schools and the economy to the justice system and healthcare). Modeling these “systems-of-systems” will require managing data at an unprecedented scale.

For some perspective, consider a 2014 survey from Forrester Research that asked businesses how much of the data they possess they’re actually using. Most companies estimated just 12 percent. The remaining 88 percent could contain vital insights. Or it could be noise. Without the right tools to use it, data itself means little.

That’s why CEEatGT researchers are imaging groundbreaking means of using the data we have — and the new forms of data we’re inventing — for the betterment of humanity and the environment:

We are monitoring how our transportation systems perform and how people use them so we can make better decisions about how we get from place to place and what infrastructure we’ll need to do it.

We are effectively modeling future scenarios for city and regional infrastructure development to determine how and where we should grow as well as what will be required to meet the needs of future generations.

We are instrumenting our interconnected infrastructure systems so we can assess their health, correct weaknesses, catch problems before they happen and prioritize our limited repair and replacement expenditures.

And we are capturing the interdependencies between systems to predict cascading failures and implement mitigation measures to reduce losses during disruptions and facilitate community recovery.