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Our relationship with technology is constantly evolving, and how we use technology in disasters has evolved even faster. Understanding how to utilize human interactions with technology and the limitations of those interactions will be a crucial building block to contextualizing crisis data. The impact of geographic scale on behavioral change analyses is an unexplored facet of our ability to identify relative severities of crisis situations, magnitudes of localized crises, and total durations of disaster impacts. Within this paper, we aggregate Twitter and hurricane damage data across a wide range of geographic scales and assess the impact of increasing scale on both the recognition of extreme behaviors and the correlation between activity and damage. The power-law relationships identified between many of these variables indicate a direct, definable scalar dependence of social media aggregation analyses, and these relationships can be used to inform more intelligent, equitable, and actionable social media usage in emergency response. 

Human-Building Interaction (HBI) is a convergent field that represents the growing complexities of the dynamic interplay between human experience and intelligence within built environments. This paper provides core definitions, research dimensions, and an overall vision for the future of HBI as developed through consensus among 25 interdisciplinary experts in a series of facilitated workshops. Three primary areas contribute to and require attention in HBI research: humans (human experiences, performance, and well-being), buildings (building design and operations), and technologies (sensing, inference, and awareness). Three critical interdisciplinary research domains intersect these areas: control systems and decision making, trust and collaboration, and modeling and simulation. Finally, at the core, it is vital for HBI research to center on and support equity, privacy, and sustainability. Compelling research questions are posed for each primary area, research domain, and core principle. State-of-the-art methods used in HBI studies are discussed, and examples of original research are offered to illustrate opportunities for the advancement of HBI research.

 

When subject to disruptive events, the dynamics of human-infrastructure interactions can absorb, adapt, or, in a more abrupt manner, undergo substantial change. These changes are commonly studied when a disruptive event perturbs the physical infrastructure. Infrastructure breakdown is, thus, an indicator of the tipping point, and possible regime shift, in the human-infrastructure interactions. However, determining the likelihood of a regime shift during a global pandemic, where no infrastructure breakdown occurs, is unclear. In this study, we explore the dynamics of human-infrastructure interactions during the global COVID-19 pandemic for the entire United States and determine the likelihood of regime shifts in human interactions with six different categories of infrastructure. Our results highlight the impact of state-level characteristics, executive decisions, as well as the extent of impact by the pandemic as predictors of either undergoing or surviving regime shifts in human-infrastructure interactions. 

One of the major barriers to closing the energy efficiency gap is the failure to successfully inform the population about measures to conserve energy. This paper introduces the design of a mobile application developed to improve energy conservation of residential buildings by informing occupants of transferrable energy efficient green features in a green-certified, non-residential building. The application was developed to investigate dissemination of transferable energy saving practices to explore spillover effects from non-residential to residential buildings. Our research aims to capitalize on such spillover effects to narrow the energy efficiency gap.