A Note from the Director - - - Subhro Guhathakurta
I am pleased to share the Fall 2025 edition of our newsletter, highlighting the impactful projects led by researchers at the Center for Urban Resilience and Analytics (CURA) at Georgia Tech's College of Design. Many of these initiatives focus on helping communities adapt to increasing challenges from summer heat and extreme storm events. For instance, Professor Basu’s team is developing a mobile app to identify “cool routes” for walking and biking, while researchers at the Urban Climate Lab are exploring how planting trees can enhance urban cooling. As the severity and frequency of storms rise, the work of Professor Yiyi He and doctoral student Mengjue Zhu on innovative methods for assessing flooding risk and its impacts has never been more critical. A key feature across many projects is the use of high-resolution data and AI-driven analytics, including computer vision applied to street view imagery to estimate sidewalk widths and on-street parking as featured in this newsletter. Finally, I invite you to visit CURA and experience the “mixed reality” multi-sensory exhibit showcasing key information about the Georgia Tech campus and its surroundings. This installation is being curated by CURA's Imagine Lab team. For more information on these projects and others, please contact us at cura@design.gatech.edu or follow us on LinkedIn.
CURA Ph.D. Students' Research
Near Real-Time Flood Risk Updates
Bridging flood modelers and communities, Ph.D. student Mengjue "Patty" Zhu has developed a model that uses limited crowd-sourced information to predict flood risk at a large scale.
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Climate Displacement Patterns
Ever wonder where people go when evacuated due to a hurricane? Ph.D. student Chaeyeon Han analyzed spatio-temporal patterns of Florida residents' evacuation to Georgia during Hurricane Milton and found some interesting trends.
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Estimating Sidewalk Width Using Computer Vision
How can we collect scalable data on sidewalk presence and width? Ph.D. student Seung Jae Lieu proposes a novel method that estimates sidewalk width using computer vision and Google Street View imagery as the sole data source.
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Using Google Street View to Map On-Street Parking
CURA Ph.D. student Jae Geon Lee is using computer visioning coupled with Google Street View imagery to develop a scalable approach to mapping on-street parking in urban areas.
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CURA Project Highlights
Tackling Climate Inequity One Street at a Time
Through an ambitious multi-year project called NO-HEAT (Neutralizing Onerous Heat Effects on Active Transportation), CURA researchers led by Dr. Rounaq Basu are building data-driven tools to help cities — and the people who live in them — adapt to dangerous urban heat.
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Urban Flood Risks
Affiliated faculty Yiyi He led a new study that provides the first global evaluation of flood risks to urban road networks and mobility.Climate change is driving more frequent and severe extreme weather events, and flooding poses particularly acute threats to urban systems.
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Tree Canopy in Georgia
Ever wonder how much forest cover is in your county, watershed, or metro area? And more importantly, how it has changed over the last 40 years? Working with the Georgia Forestry Commission, CURA Associate Director, Tony Giarrusso, has created geospatial tools to visualize this information for Georgia.
Check Out The Tools
Maximizing Urban Cooling with Trees
Researchers in the Urban Climate Lab have been modeling the effects of tree planting programs to better understand how trees planted in different neighborhoods promote cooling. As cities are ramping up tree planting programs to manage rising levels of extreme heat with climate change, it is important to understand where the addition of new tree canopy will have the greatest impact.
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Visualizing Campus using Mixed Reality
Imagine a city model that comes alive with light. Using Georgia Tech campus as a test-bed, researchers in the IMAGINE Lab are developing a Mixed-Reality experience to visualize urban data and future scenarios.
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