Enhancing Decision-making in Smart and Connected Communities with Digital Traces

The ubiquitous use of information communication technologies (ICTs) enables generation of digital traces associated with human behaviors at unprecedented breadth, depth, and scale. Large-scale digital traces provide the potential to understand population behaviors automatically, including the characterization of how individuals interact with the physical environment. As a result, the use of digital traces generated by humans might mitigate some of the challenges associated to the use of surveys to understand human behaviors such as, high cost in collecting information, lack of quality real-time information, and hard to capture behavioral level information. In this dissertation, I study how to extract information from digital traces to characterize human behavior in the built environment; and how to use such information to enhance decision-making processes in the area of Smart and Connected Communities. Specifically, I present three case studies that aim at using data-driven methods for decision-making in Smart and Connected Communities. First, I discuss data-driven methods for socioeconomic development with a focus on inference of socioeconomic maps with cell phone data. Second, I present data-driven methods for emergency preparedness and response, with a focus on understanding user needs in different communities with geotagged social media data. Third, I describe data-driven methods for migration studies, focusing on characterizing the post-migration behaviors of internal migrants with cell phone data. In these case studies, I present data-driven frameworks that integrate innovative behavior modeling approaches to help solve decision-making questions using digital traces. The explored methods enhance our understanding of how to model and explain population behavior patterns in different physical and socioeconomic contexts. The methods also have practical significance in terms of how decision-making can become cost-effective and efficient with the help of data-driven methods

Secret Spaces and Human Traces: Border-Crosser Architecture in the Sonoran Borderlands

This dissertation contributes to the discourse of informal and temporary architecture through its investigation of the small structures constructed by unauthorized border-crossers (UBCs) in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Scholarship tends to frame self-built environments as a cultural phenomenon (as traditional vernacular architecture), a by-product or response to capitalism (as marginal spaces of resistance such as ‘slums’), or an artistic endeavor (such as pop-up architecture or guerilla urbanism). I argue that UBC structures, in their response to extreme situations, constitute illustrative microcosms through which we can view the larger relationship among the realms of architecture, politics, experience, and environment. During the early 2010s, the Tucson sector of the U.S.-Mexico border was the most highly trafficked area with UBC annual apprehension rates of around 120,000. This condition was a result of late 1990’s policy initiatives legislated by the United States government that fortified urban points of entry and strategically funneled UBCs into brutal desert terrain. Now, to cross the border, UBCs have to walk an average of three to five days through the Sonoran Desert, facing violence, harmful plants and animals, relentless terrain and climate, as well as Border Patrol surveillance. During their journey, some UBCs build small structures out of available materials such as mesquite branches, grasses, and rocks. This research project analyzes these seemingly simple structures and identifies three ways in which they negotiate the complexity of the border-crossing context. In order to elucidate the relationship between this architecture and the everyday experiences of border-crossers within this hostile natural and political landscape, the research is framed theoretically by three schools of thought: structuralism, phenomenology, and critical theory. First, through structuralism, I identify the ways in which often-shifting social roles and rules impact the siting and form of the architecture border-crossers build. The nature these structures underscores the ambiguity within this landscape, including how border-crossers must adapt their identities, bend rules, and reorder priorities. Second, I employ phenomenological theory to highlight the extent to which the structures provide physical and existential shelter from the traumatic context of border-crossing, revealing that while architecture can provide some respite, complete refuge is impossible to achieve. Thus notions of place and dwelling are enmeshed with struggle and survival. Finally, I deploy critical theory to identify the modes through which UBC architecture resists the militarized landscape, engaging direct strategies such as counter-surveillance and cloaking as well as indirect tactics of persisting and haunting what is intended to be a no man’s land. To investigate these dynamics, I completed two seasons of fieldwork in 2012 and 2013 on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Incorporating inter-disciplinary methods from architecture, archaeology, and anthropology, I gathered and analyzed over 30 exemplars of border-crosser architecture, several hundred of their associated artifacts (such as discarded clothing and food containers), and over 40 in-depth interviews with UBCs. The aim of this work is to bring UBC structures out of the realm of anonymous cultural artifact or thoughtless construction and instead to reveal the intricacy, intimacy, and individuality of each structure as it responds to and shapes the border-crossing process.PHDArchitectureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146100/1/grabowss_1.pd

Telling the Story of Mexican Migration: Chronicle, Literature, and Film from the Post-Gatekeeper Period

This study examines how the social process of undocumented Mexican migration is interpreted in the chronicle, literature, and film of the post-Gatekeeper period, which is defined here at 1994-2008. Bounded on one side by the Mexican economic crisis of 1994, and increased border security measures begun in that same year, and on the other by the advent of the global economic crisis of 2008, the post-Gatkeeper period represents a time in which undocumented migration through the southern U.S. border reached unprecedented levels. The dramatic, tragic, and compelling stories that emerged from this period have been retold and interpreted from a variety of perspectives that have produced distinct, and often paradoxical, images of the figure of the undocumented migrant. Creative narrative responds to this critical point in the history of Mexican migration to the U.S.by applying the inherently subjective and mediated form of artistic interpretation to a social reality well documented by the media, historians, and social scientists. Throughout the chronicle, literature, and film of this period, migration is understood as a cultural tradition inspired by regional history. These stories place their undocumented protagonists on a narrative trajectory that transforms migration into a heroic quest for personal and community renewal. Such imagery positions the undocumented migrant as an active agent of change and provides discursive visibility to a figure often represented, in media and political rhetoric of the period, as an anonymous, collective Other. Filtered through this creative lens, migration is revealed as a complex social process in which individual experience is informed not only by personal ambition, but also by the expectations of the home community and its culture of migration. The creative works examined here foreground the history, motivation, and experience of their migrant protagonists in relation to the socio-historical context of this period. In doing so, they compose tales of migration in which the figure of the undocumented migrant plays a primary role, one informed not only by the experience of migration, but also by personal and community history

HIV Testing

It can be said that now is the best time for everyone infected to become aware of their own HIV status. The state of the art in HIV management progressively reveals that antiretroviral treatment can prevent transmission, as well as chronic damage in the human body, if started early. Unfortunately, antiretrovirals are not widely available in many places, especially in developing countries. In these parts of the world, diagnosis of HIV infection must be kept in the agenda as a priority, in order to understand specific details of local epidemics and as an effort to interrupt the chain of HIV transmission

INRISCO: INcident monitoRing in Smart COmmunities

Major advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) make citizens to be considered as sensors in motion. Carrying their mobile devices, moving in their connected vehicles or actively participating in social networks, citizens provide a wealth of information that, after properly processing, can support numerous applications for the benefit of the community. In the context of smart communities, the INRISCO [1] proposal intends for (i) the early detection of abnormal situations in cities (i.e., incidents), (ii) the analysis of whether, according to their impact, those incidents are really adverse for the community; and (iii) the automatic actuation by dissemination of appropriate information to citizens and authorities. Thus, INRISCO will identify and report on incidents in traffic (jam, accident) or public infrastructure (e.g., works, street cut), the occurrence of specific events that affect other citizens' life (e.g., demonstrations, concerts), or environmental problems (e.g., pollution, bad weather). It is of particular interest to this proposal the identification of incidents with a social and economic impact, which affects the quality of life of citizens.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Government through the projects INRISCO under Grant TEC2014-54335-C4-1-R, Grant TEC2014-54335-C4-2-R, Grant TEC2014-54335-C4-3-R, and Grant TEC2014-54335-C4-4-R, in part by the MAGOS under Grant TEC2017-84197-C4-1-R, Grant TEC2017-84197-C4-2-R, and Grant TEC2017-84197-C4-3-R, in part by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and in part by the Galician Regional Government under agreement for funding the Atlantic Research Center for Information and Communication Technologies (AtlantTIC)