City Science Summit Shanghai 2018
hosted by Tongji University’s College of Design and Innovation
Main Stage Event - May 20, 2018
The City Science Summit was held during the opening week of the World Innovation and Entrepreneurship Expo (WIEE), as part of the Future Thinkers Forum—an event dedicated to exploring options for an advanced, creative, and cooperative plan for both China and the rest of the world.
Keynote talks were given by Professor Yongqi Lou, dean of the College of Design and Innovation at Tongji University; Zhiqiang Wu, vice president of Tongji University and a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering; Bin Li, founder and chairman of Weilai Automobile; Ningning Li, senior director of Industrial Design at Xiaomi Ecochain; and Kent Larson, director of the City Science research group at the MIT Media Lab.
The rest of the talks were organized around five key themes: Insight, Transformation, Prediction and Experience, Consensus, and Deploy. Kent Larson introduced the themes in his opening talk and updated the audience on the group's current research and mission to enable dynamic, evolving places that respond to the complexities of life. Larson stated that new strategies must be found to create the places where people live and work, and to ensure that the mobility systems that connect them meet the profound challenges of the future.
City Science Network in the Pavilion at the Shanghai Summit. PC Arnadu Grignard
Urban designers will make use of powerful new data collection and analytic tools to achieve a fine-grained understanding of human behavior. During the Insight discussions, researchers discussed how data records and access to information about live/work relationships, mobility patterns, community values, and human interaction can allow scientists to create more accurate and user-friendly visualizations to inform the development of proposed interventions. Insight included talks from Ronan Doorley, a post-doctoral associate from the MIT Media Lab; Nan Cao, a professor on the Tongji University Smart Data Viz team; and Marc Pons, the director of the Andorra Innovation Living Lab.
In Transformation, researchers discussed the rapid change that cities will undergo as emerging systems are integrated into the urban fabric and cities replace heavy infrastructure with agile distributed systems for mobility, energy, food, live/work spaces, and urban design. Transformation included talks by Phil Tinn, a PhD researcher in the City Science group; Jörg Noennig, director of City Science Lab Hamburg; Holger Prang, a professor at HCU Hamburg; and Antti Tuomela, CEO of Aalto University Properties.
Experience and Prediction included talks from Jarmo Suominen, a professor at Aalto University and Tongji University; Arnaud Grignard, a research scientist in the City Science group; Xiaohua Sun, dean of the College of Design and Innovation at Tongji University; and Ke Ma Vice, a researcher at City Science Lab Shanghai and Tongji University. They focused on new simulation tools that will predict the impact of proposed interventions on how people interact with their environment, move through the city, consume resources, and exchange ideas. Interactive physical models with AI recommendation engines will enable rapid scenario testing and real-time simulation to allow a broader group of stakeholders to engage in a creative, iterative decision-making process.
The Consensus discussions emphasized the importance of inclusive decision-making between stakeholders for many of the challenges affecting urban centers. This section included talks by Ariel Noyman, a PhD researcher in the City Science group, who discussed revising urban decision-making through the City Scope Platform; Markus ElKatsha, a researcher City Science, who talked about the need for a platform or tools that facilitate consensus in the context of rapidly urbanizing parts of the world; and Ryan Zhang, a PhD researcher in City Science, who discussed how AI systems can improve consensus-building through computational support.
The final theme, Deploy, reviewed a future where communities will be empowered to quickly respond to changing economic and social conditions, and to optimize for social, cultural, and environmental benefits, deploying tech and software solutions to encourage pro-social behaviors. Deploy included talks from Yasushi Sakai, a PhD researcher in the City Science group; Luis Alonso, a research scientist in City Science; and Yunsheng Su, the executive director of SustainX Design Research Center at Tongji University.
City Science Pavilion
In addition to the talks during the opening event, the Media Lab City Science group and the Tongji University College of Design and Innovation designed an exhibition space to demonstrate the collaborative research of the City Science Network. The exhibit included three CityScope displays—an interactive, evidence-based, urban decision-making tool that enables stakeholder interaction through data-enabled simulation and visualization. The CityScope display in the pavilion included visualizations from three different cities that use the platform for various spatial design and urban planning challenges. The tool is being used for a range of problems, from simulations that quantify the impact of disruptive interventions in cities to communicable collaboration applications. The tables showcased work underway at the City Science Lab Andorra in collaboration with Actuatech, City Science Lab Helsinki at Aalto University, and City Science Lab Shanghai at Tongji University.
The Pavilion also highlighted the Persuasive Electric Vehicle (PEV), a low-cost, agile, shared-use autonomous tricyle that can be an electrically assisted vehicle for passenger commuting or last-mile logistics for package delivery in congested urban environments. Also highlighted were several video reels of the group's work, including robotic architecture, sensorized environments, artificial intelligence, and more. Two students from Taipei Tech, Luke Jiang and Justin Chang-Qi-Zhang, joined the City Science team in Shanghai to help with the construction and presentation of the PEV.
CSL@Shanghai
Tongji University, Shanghai, and the MIT Media Lab's City Science group are co-developing a version of the MIT CityScope platform for urban analysis, efficient resource utilization, and spatial programming. The MIT CityScope is a tangible, augmented reality platform used to visualize complex urban relationships, simulate the impact of multiple urban interventions, and support decision-making in a dynamic, iterative, evidence-based process.
The “NICE2035 LivingLine” project in Shanghai, China, is a design-driven, community-based urban innovation initiated by Professor Yongqi Lou, Dean of College of Design of Innovation. LivingLine is a crowdsourcing and co-creation project aiming at building an ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship on the internal street of a typical gated residential neighborhood. By introducing radical programs such as living labs, co-working space, and startup-incubators into underutilized storefront space, LivingLine’s goal is to revitalize the urban space and to prototype diverse future lifestyles
