Congratulations to UTTRI associated faculty Professor Shoshanna Saxe, a member of one of eight teams comprising 14 researchers selected to receive seed funding from the Innovation at Interfaces Fund, co-funded by the Low-Carbon Renewable Materials Centre (LCRMC) and their respective University of Toronto department.
Professor Saxe is a Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Infrastructure.
Saxe’s co-researcher on the project “Data analysis for more efficiency in city construction” is Professor Elias Khalil of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.
The next ten years will see rapid increases in Canadian and global needs for urban infrastructure construction. This will create enormous demand for primary resources, accelerating environmental degradation and global climate change. Unfortunately, our current understanding of how and where materials are used is weak and material stewardship limited. This research will work towards machine learning – bottom up studies of construction material use in cities. This project will yield essential new data and methods for understanding construction material use in cities, evidence-based design of infrastructure systems and policy making to help moderate resource consumption – and related environmental degradation – at the building, neighbourhood and city scale.
The award will support the work of a graduate researcher for up to two years. Interested graduate students with strong ML/computer science skills and an interest in urban sustainability are invited to contact Professor Saxe by email.
The seed funding was awarded to projects around sustainable materials, processing, practices, and data analysis, with the goal of furthering the University of Toronto research community through cross-departmental collaborations.
About the Low-Carbon Renewable Materials Centre (LCRMC)
The LCRMC is committed to responsible industry growth through science and engineering, and is singly focused on making life happen around environmental sustainability. Visit the LCRMC website.