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UGA Environmental
Informatics and Control Program




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Research Programs
Areas of Interest
Current Projects



>Environmental Foresight and Forecasting Environmental Change
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Adaptive Community Learning
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Watershed Management
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Quality Assurance of Models
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Analysis of Uncertainty, Structural Error, and Reachable Futures
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Reconciling Models with Data (System Identification
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Attainability and Inclination in the Behavior of Environmental Systems
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Monitoring the Environment in Real Time
>Control of Microbial Ecosystems
>Infrastructure Vulnerability and High-Performance Integrated Control (H-PIC)

>Sustainability in the Water Sector (Spotting "Hot Technologies" for
Sustainable Cities)

>Engineering for Sustainable Development (Cities as Environmental Goods)
>Read or Print all Projects


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 Research Program

Current Projects Read or Print all Projects

Engineering for Sustainable Development (Cities as Environmental Goods). Ponder the examination question: Discuss — with examples — the case for promoting cities as environmental "goods", not "bads". Now sit back and reflect on this. Much of the current debate about sustainability in the water sector is directed either at halting the transfer to the South — to caricature it — of the profligate, water-wasteful, centralized, end-of-pipe Northern paradigm, or at starting from scratch, by building new eco-villages, even new eco-cities, especially in countries literally in northern latitudes. And if it is neither of these, then it is about stakeholders, the need to be participatory and place-based, and reminders aplenty of the fact that sustainability amounts to more than just technical and financial considerations. At times it can seem to be all a matter of people, politics, and public relations, and sincerely meant so. Those of us schooled in the technocracy of the second half of the 20th Century might well wonder what we have to contribute to sustainability in the urban water sector. But this is not just a matter of engineering in the water sector, of course. For there is abroad the view that Engineering as a whole "missed out" on the great sustainability debate of the 1990s. So is it now gaining the recognition it richly deserves? Our program, in collaboration with Imperial College (London), is enquiring into the nature of the principles of Engineering, to track how they have evolved over the past 150 years and stood us in good stead — some would say debatably so. Are they still valid in the face of the calls today for a Science and Engineering of Sustainability? What might be the context and cultural milieu of Engineering 25, 50, or 75 years hence? Should we expect, as some have suggested, a Second Industrial Revolution? Do we have the right social and institutional arrangements, in the broadest of terms, for the principles and profession of Engineering to catalyze any such revolution? Given the notion of adaptive community learning, do we need some scheme we would label "participatory technological envisioning"? Perhaps, less grandly, the principles of Engineering are not "broke" after all. A mere introduction to social science is all the engineer of the future will require to return to his/her rightful place at the center of social and economic developments. If we could carry out the research in answer to our own examination question, how should we then pass on this experience to the next generation of engineers? We are currently working towards the idea of a Summer School, or Master Class, in which (not least) one goal would be for the "masters" to be outwitted by the "students".