 Good morning everybody, and it is my pleasure to welcome you all to our panel today on Resiliency for the Home Planet. This is a topic that sort of builds on our visitor, Professor Anna Barroso's talk yesterday when she was talking about vegetation and mountains, rainfall, and ecosystems. We have an exciting panel, by the way, I am Rao Govindaraju. For those of you who do not know me, I am the head of civil engineering, and it is my pleasure to introduce the moderators who will essentially get us started on this. Our first moderator is Professor Aynes Hua, she is a professor in civil engineering and environmental and ecological engineering. Our second moderator is Professor Panayota Karawa, she is the Jack N. K. Hakeemha professor in civil engineering. I think the format is the moderators will get us started, they will tell us a little about the topic. We do want to say that we are live streaming this event, which means people who are watching online are not able to ask questions, so it will be up to us to keep the panelists engaged. So with that, I will hand it over to the moderators. Hello, good morning, and welcome to the panel. I am happy to see everyone here despite our weather outside. So what I would like to do is introduce the panelists, tell you some overarching themes of the panel, and then each panelist is going to speak for three or five minutes or maybe a little bit longer about their own work and how it relates to the theme. So the panelists are Anna P. Barros, Donald Bigger Willett, chair of engineering and department head of civil and environmental engineering, David Yu, assistant professor of civil engineering, Iman Habib, Thomas A. Page professor of civil engineering, co-director of the civil engineering center for applications of UAS for a sustainable environment, CCoS, an associate director of the joint transportation research program, Venkatesh Merwadi, professor of civil engineering with courtesy appointment in agriculture and biological engineering. I want to make a special note and give you some further information about our guest, Dr. Barros, is the Donald Bigger Willett chair of engineering and department head of civil and environmental engineering in the Granger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. So she has traveled here to be our guest. Her primary research interests are in hydrology, hydro meteorology and environmental physics with a focus on water cycle processes and regions of complex terrain, remote sensing of the environment and predictability and risk assessment of extreme events. Professor Barros has served in multiple national committees over the years, including the space studies board of the National Research Council, Water Science and Technology Board, Board of Atmospheric Science and Climate and the U.S. National Committee for the International Hydrology Program, IHP of UNESCO. She was a senior fellow at the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas from 2011 to 2015 and a founding member of the AAC Committee on Climate Change and Adaptation. Currently, Dr. Barros is the past chair of atmospheric and hydrospheric sciences at AAS and president-elect of the hydrology section of AGU. She was the chief editor of the Journal of Hydro Meteorology for five years and a member of the editorial board of AGU Advances. Professor Barros is a fellow of AGU, AMS, ASC and AAAS and a senior member of IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. So now I'm going to tell you a little bit about the panel abstract. Why are we here? What are we going to discuss? And here's the abstract. So the backdrop against this panel is that there's a long term economic and societal development that relies on sustainable practices and that can combat the increasing frequency intensity of natural and man-made hazards. Major threats to our well-being on this planet include loss and biodiversity, land degradation and climate change, the cascading effects of disasters and compound extremes cross-social, economic and geographic boundaries. Solutions that leverage the inherent resiliency of the natural environment and reduce risks from hazards at multiple spatial and temporal scales are needed. We seek solutions that promote sustainable and equitable societal recovery. And the panel discussion will shed light on this important topic and discuss innovative solutions to safeguard the planet and build resilience. So with that, I will turn it over to the panelists. Dr. Merwadi is going first. Thank you, Dr. Vain. Good morning, everyone. I'm also happy to see many of you. I'm a faculty member in civil engineering and is my primary area of interest is surface water hydrology. And since coming to Purdue, I have been working on the topic of flooding. So my primary area of interest is flooding. So when we think of flooding, and as Professor Hua mentioned in the abstract, we are experiencing extreme events at increased frequency and they're happening more and more often. And in the past, when we tried to address the issue of flooding as civil engineers, we have been building things. Build dams, build levees. So we call those structural measures. And in order to increase our resiliency, so the goal is, so we know that the floods are not going to go away. They may become more extreme, more frequent. So what do we do? Should we keep building more dams, more levees? And we have learned that they don't always work. We build levees and we think that we are safe because we have this wall that is protecting us. But actually we are less safe because that wall can fail anytime. So we are living under this false sense of security, thinking that we are improving our resiliency. So one of the things that I try to do in my research is how to address this issue in a non-structural way. So there are multiple ways of addressing this issue by not building dams or including structural measures. So there are, as I say, there are many ways to do non-structural measures. So my area of interest is how we can provide better information, accurate information and give more information to public so they are prepared to handle this flood. So towards that goal, what we do is we try to look at multiple pieces of information that is currently available to the public. So one of the pieces of information that many people have these days about flood is our maps from FEMA. So FEMA produced maps and many of us who bought homes, you may have heard from the real estate agent whether you live in the 100-year floodplain or not and if you do, you pay insurance, you buy flood insurance. But the issue with those flood maps are old, they were created using historical data and what we used to call 100-year flood is no longer a 100-year flood. That flood is happening more and more. So those maps are outdated. So what can we do to improve those maps? So that's one of the areas that I work on. The other area that I'm also working on is urban flooding. So there was a mention about urban in the abstract. So how do we improve resiliency in an urban environment? So we know that more and more people are moving in urban areas. You may have heard recent or in the last few years we had Hurricane Harvey in Houston. Houston was flooded, New York was flooded when Hurricane Sandy hit. So we hear about the stories of urban areas getting more and more flooded. So the problem of flooding is very different in rural environment and urban environment. So in rural areas, people can move in urban areas when there is flooding, the whole infrastructure collapses. Everything is connected. When the power station goes out, there is no power. Your trains stop. So there are cascading impacts of these floods when we have extreme events in an urban environment. So one of the things we are also trying to do is how do we simulate those cascading impacts? So if we can predict flood accurately, if we can predict how much water we are going to get at any given location, at any given time, then we can simulate these cascading impacts and give early warning to people who are going to get impacted. So, and then in order to do this, we need a lot of data. We need a lot of computational power and we need, so one of the things we are also trying to do is we don't have data for everything that we want to simulate. So we are also using machine learning and using high performance computing to simulate these environments and simulate the cascading impacts and inform and give better information to public that are going to get impacted from floods. I'll stop there. Thank you. Our next panelist is Dr. Habib. Thank you very much. So good morning, everyone. I'm Aiman Habib and my area of research and discipline is Geometrics and Engineering and basically what we are trying to do is collect data. Exactly, as Venkatesh said, that that's really the most important thing and in order to really ensure the resilience, we have to make sure that you have the right data at the right time, at the right location actually. So this is really where we come in as Geometrics. So I have my cheat sheet notes. So what is really relevant to geospatial data is that right now we are at the stage where we have really unprecedented accessibility to data that we never had at this or we never had the luxury to have this. So just to give you some examples about availability of the data, we talk about global navigation satellite systems. So we have the GPS segment. We have the Russian GLONUS. We have the Chinese Baidu. We have the European Galileo. So right now, we can actually position any point along the surface of the globe at any time with very good reliability. Long, long time at all, I would say, not long time ago, like a few years ago or like 10 years ago, that you have to be very careful when you go out with your GPS to say that I have to have enough constellation of satellites to give me a position. Right now, that's not an issue. With very simple actually smartphone, you have access to lots of satellites actually. Some of our smartphone technology right now are going beyond the GPS to include the GNSS. So they receive signals from non-US positioning satellites. Another advances in our area also which makes the data more accessible is inertial navigation systems. So inertial GPS or GNSS in general is quite good, but you have to work in an open sky. You have to have access to the satellite signals. Now, with inertial navigation systems, these are dead-recording systems. They actually all what they really need to have gravity actually. So by having accessibility to the gravity models, you can really determine positions or changes in your position and the orientation. Nertial navigation systems are becoming quite, quite actually accessible. Now we have IMU units in our smartphones, like just few dollar chips actually. So we are going beyond the stage where we have initial measurement unit, like in the millions and millions of dollars of submarines. Now we have much, much lower cost and good performance units as well. Other data that's becoming quite available right now imaging systems. So we have actually systems that collect visible data, collect thermal data, near infrared, multi-spectral, hyper-spectral data. We have this coming from lots of platforms, just one of these platforms, like high resolution imaging satellites. So right now we have from space, we can collect imagery that give us resolution or level of detail, almost like quarter of a meter on the ground. So the single pixel give us like 25 centimeters. These are available actually for the globe. We have the digital globe. This is high resolution imaging satellites. We have the cube satellites right now are launched by like hundreds and thousands that give us more data that we never had access to it before. We have also a ranging systems or active systems like radar and LiDAR. So as Venkatesh mentioned, we need to have information about the topography. So one of the effective ways of getting the topography is using active sensors like radar, which is a basic radio detection and ranging on LiDAR and LiD detection and ranging. So for example, radar, these are basically can work anytime day or night, whether like cloud independent. So we can get information about the topography even below the surface of the forest environment. LiDAR can do the same thing. We give us very high resolution. We have huge developments in LiDAR systems. But now we are going beyond what we call linear LiDAR to these photon counting LiDAR that basically we can get LiDAR topographic data from satellite from space. And we have the platforms. So we have the, I would say the imaging satellites. We have the airborne system. We have unmanned aerial vehicles. We have the terrestrial vehicles and we have robotics platforms. We have a wide range of data acquisition systems that we never had access to it. So the opportunities we have right now that we have this unprecedented accessibility to the data. We have convergence of disciplines, the fact that I'm here coming from Geospatial in this panel that talks about environmental and basically the resiliency of the environment. So we have really starting to talk to each other. And also we have the ability right now with these machine learning tools that how we can develop the techniques that allow us to take the synergy of this information. However, this is not really everything is easy now. As I said, there are some challenges. So all Geospatial data are not created equal. So basically right now it is very dangerous. Now I can go with my smartphone and I can create a map. This map is not really the same quality that I would create from high end systems. So developing standards and protocols to tell us how good is the data we have. That's very important because making a decision based on a data that you don't really trust. That's really a big problem. And also like the Geospatial data by nature are heterogeneous. You have imagery, that's raster. You have historical data. You have LiDAR data which is point clouds. And then you have also variability and the resolution. You have LiDAR data at 100 points per square meter in some areas you have only one point per square meter. So how you actually integrate data from these heterogeneous sources is quite, quite challenging. And the last part is basically this, like when we talk about data processing techniques. So again, having too much data sometimes it occurs because if you have a machine learning system and you feed all this data to the system, you might run into these overfitting problems that basically it works so nice to this area that when you go to another area it will not work. So have to make sure that which data is necessary for which piece of information that's very important. So this area of active learning and knowing exactly which useful data for your application, that's quite important. Thank you, Dr. Habib. Yeah, hi, I'm David Yu. So I'm an interdisciplinary scientist researching human environment interactions and how that's mediated by built environment design and how such mesh of interactions shape system level resilience. And I researched that using multiple methods ranging from social experiments to systems modeling. So that's kind of research that I do. So I think what we're dealing with is resilience of social hydrological system or couple of human natural system. And I think, so it's a complex system and so to understand resilience and how resilience emerges from such interactions I think we need to not only think about spatial and time scales of physical processes, but also human scale. I call it human or social scale. So people make decisions at different levels of this so-called human scale, like individual levels, households make decisions to protect their homes. At government level, people make decisions during emergencies, right? But even at like medium level, group level, people can organize and kind of group collective actions group level actions such as voluntary rescue operations. Also in countries like India, Bangladesh, when flood is about to happen, community members all come out and they kind of organize actions to, you know, raise levies by sandbagging. So this kind of like a multi-level social scale actions are critical for resilience. And so we need to understand how such human actions at different levels of human scale interact with built environment design and physical processes at different levels of scale. So in one research, so in one research that I'm doing, I'm looking into this so-called phenomenon of levy effect or safe development paradox. So it's a phenomenon where as a society, experience flooding, let's say every 20 years, 30 years and society decides to invest in levies, structural measures. So the society becomes immune or protected from this, you know, more frequent flooding events. But in the process, so it's good. It's good, everything is protected, but then the system becomes highly vulnerable to flood events that occur every 500 years and the results are much more catastrophic. Whereas if you let people, society experience flooding, moderate level flooding, time to time, people may maintain their awareness of their flood risk and they may be better prepared and maintain that kind of social capacity which is critical for resilience. So in one research that I'm doing, I'm currently doing a social experiment with actual human subjects. And I'm creating a scenario, it's abstract but it captures the reality and in the experiment that I'm doing, I'm kind of testing how risk communication affects this social capacity across generations. So in one treatment of this experiment, I allow human subjects to communicate their knowledge of flood risk in a lively conversational manner. And then, so that knowledge is transferred to next group and then to another group through this lively conversation. In another treatment, I test risk communication in which flood knowledge is transferred through historical documents, like in a more text format. So it's not really lively conversation, but it's written down as if it's in a chronicle document. In another treatment, I have this kind of like a bridge physical infrastructure with engraving of highest water level that was reached. So it's like a physical memory. And so I'm trying to test how this different forms of risk communication affects longevity of people's awareness of flood risk and their ability to cooperate and organize group action. So that's kind of research what I do. And so I think it's not about really, so yeah, we need to enter the discipline of research. So we need to do physical experiments. We need to do modeling, but we also need to understand human behavior, decision-making and how that's affected by physical processes. So that's what I'm doing and that's what I'm interested in. Yeah. Thank you, Dr. Yu. Dr. Barros. Well, thank you very much. It's a real pleasure and an honor to be here in this panel. And as I was listening to my colleagues, I thought I should tell two stories that are somehow related to the point raised here. So when I was younger and I started my career, I was very interested in flooding too. And this was at the time that the big flood of 1993 happened in the Mississippi in St. Louis. And this was a dramatic event. It was a continental scale event. And now when I tell students, you don't remember the flood of 1993, they all were born after that. And so nobody remembers that. But at the time it was a major, major event. And of course the statistics were such that you have historical data. And after the event happened, you go back and you calculate it. And it actually was not a 500 year event flood. It becomes suddenly a 130 year flood. And this point is important because we're talking about the communication of risk. And how much data do we actually have to estimate risk? And what does that mean? And the importance of understanding not only climate change, but the climate variability that actually is inherent to our climate system. And that was because of that flood of 1993. I did a huge literature review. And I found publications from the beginning of the 20th century and actually even late 19th century where engineers were publishing in the meteorology literature including monthly weather review. Engineers from Chicago looking at water distribution and water resources in this region. And they were very worried because they dependent on the lake levels. They were dependent on the lake levels for water resources. And there was a big drought and the lake levels were going down and everybody was very worried about this and so on. And they were already very interdisciplinary. So there's actually very impressive literature from that time looking at climate variability, multi-decadal, decadal climate variability. So much so that in the 1930s there are a couple of publications that sort of, you know, they were doing free analysis by hand. This is before digital free transforms and things like that. And you could almost predict the big flood of 1973. That's how far they went into their decomposition and prediction. But the point here being that somehow after the Second World War and the huge development and suburbs growing everywhere and huge industrial development and so on, it became so easy to design for the design event, right? To anticipate the design event. And somehow, you know, that became sort of a fixed value somewhere. And we gained the successive confidence on what does it mean 100 year flood, right? The 100 year flood can happen on average every 100 years, right? But what all that means is that over a thousand years it could happen 10 times, but it could happen twice in the same month, right? It's not about the frequency, right? And so, but because this idea of climate variability was not really included in the risk analysis, the idea of positioning risk, right? Of understanding, are we on the low cycle of 150 years of the water cycle or are we on the high end of that, right? So if we look, for example, at data from denial where they kept the records of the big floods for, you know, that were so essential, right? For the economy of over 5,000 years. If you look at those records you can clearly identify periods of high variability and these cycles of 100 years up to 300 years and so on. And we forgot about that. So independently of climate change, which of course is very, very important and makes everything more challenging. We also have this, you know, the problem of climate variability and how important it is to actually understand where we are in the climate cycle. And when we think about project life, for example, is it 30 years or 50 years, right? And so I noticed that you mentioned that I was a founding member of the Committee for Adaptation to a Changing Climate to the SCE. And so the story that's interesting about this is that in the 90s, as I was looking at all of these issues I got together with a colleague at Penn State. I was at Penn State at the time in the meteorology program and we wrote a paper about climate variability and extremes and the idea of designing for failure, right? So if we know where we are and it's very expensive then we design for things to fail gracefully and recover. So we tried to publish this paper very badly and nobody would take it. And so it was very interesting because eventually we published it in a journal that perhaps many of you have never heard about, which was the Journal of Professional Issues in Civil Engineering, really obscure. But I'm very proud that we actually published it there and that some editor at the time took this on, right? And that's the point that we were trying to make and this was a time when of course ASC magazine, for example, was publishing some articles saying, oh, don't worry about climate change, it's really nothing there and so on. So somehow I got classified as a climate person in the ASC database. And so when Dick White, who used to be a professor at UIC and then later on moved on to be the director of the National Institute of Standards, NIST, he was the founding chair actually of this committee and he fought very hard to start this committee. He finally convinced one of the presidents of ASC to form this committee and then they did a search and they identified everybody who had the word climate associated with their name and that's how I got invited to be part of that. So it's really interesting to see and so it took about 15 or 20 years to be identified that way. And so the reason why I'm telling this story is because I'm hoping there's some lots of young people out there maybe listening or and it's important to sort of stick to the ideas that you believe in, right? Sometimes it's not the right time, but the right time comes. And when the right time comes, you're prepared. And so that's the encouragement I'd like to leave here. And the message is also that this is a time for interdisciplinary research, right? It's not enough to just be good at what small area where we are comfortable, but it's good to be humble and go into other fields and learn from what others know and actually develop our own expertise in those fields and that's how we really can push boundaries. So I'd like to encourage that. So some of us have a history of always doing the wrong thing at our doing the right thing at the wrong time maybe. And that's the same thing with artificial intelligence. You know, we were working on this and the GS was actually also a pioneer in hydrology. In the 90s, we were among the very few doing this and not very well received at all, right? And but hey, 25 years later, this is the hot topic of the day. And so I think there's hope in that, right? That it takes time, but eventually things evolve and we have a contribution to make. So I'll just stop there, but I really wanted to emphasize this point of understanding variability that goes beyond just climate change, right? And these cycles, how important they are. And so the idea of positioning risk, how important that is. I'll stop here. Great, thank you very much. Very interesting insights from all our panelists. Thanks for sharing your research, your stories as well. And now it's time for our audience to ask some preferably provocative questions to our panelists. And I would like to open the floor to see if there is any question from the audience. Very good. I'm Bob Jackal here in the environmental area and civil engineering. And I have a question for Dr. Yu. You interested my thought process here. As you mentioned, the infrastructure, the dams and the flood prevention measures that we engineers make happen. And then you also said, perhaps maybe we shouldn't do that because maybe the people would learn how to live with the floods and wouldn't maybe live so close to the river. So that's my general question to you. Can you expand on that? Thank you. Yeah, yeah, thank you, Professor Jackal. Yeah, so there's this notion of living with floods. I think in Netherlands, they have this kind of a concept that they use to guide how they develop lands and build infrastructure. So I know one case in one kind of case that demonstrate how engineers are trying to reflect that in actual landscape design and infrastructure design. So in Arizona, I did my PhD there, they have this, so it doesn't flood often. You know, it's a desert environment, so it doesn't rain often, but sometimes it does and sometimes it causes flooding, yeah. And so I'm aware of that there's this two lakes in a residential area, and I don't know how exactly they did it, but whenever it rains, it floods, but it's done in a way that this flooded water doesn't get into streets of residential area. So these lakes are in a small neighborhood park, and so whenever there's some heavy rain, it floods this neighborhood park, not the houses, residential area. So people can still, like whenever it floods, they can see that there's flooding, although their homes are not affected, they can see flooding can occur and see, you know, inundation level reaching an ankle of a person. And so they can kind of become aware and maintain that kind of potential risk. So I think that's like, that demo shows like this clever park design that somebody did in Arizona to incorporate that, living with floods philosophy in physical landscape design. Okay, thank you very much. Any other questions from our audience? If I may, I actually wanna add something to this. I was thinking as you were asking the question about the Miami Conservancy District, I personally think this is one of the biggest successes in civil engineering before civil engineering as such existed, I think in this country, but what was done in between 1913 after the big flood of March of 1913 and 1920 in Ohio is really a leading example of how society as a whole actually arrived at an agreement with the legislature. And it was the first act that was actually passed by the state legislature to approve this compact between lawmakers and landowners, right, and local governments such that this idea of having these dams that we're built in several, five of them we're built in five years that most of the time are not working. They only work when there's a flood. And in that case, you let the water go and the farmers agreed and the landowners agreed that their land would be flooded when that happened. And so as a result of this in over more than a hundred years, this has been a very safe river system. But what happened there in terms of social impact involving politicians and private sector and so on was really remarkable. And it's a great example for I think for us to follow even though it's over 100 years old. Thanks, Dr. Barros for sharing your REITs experience from civil engineering. Any questions? I'll ask, well, first, somebody had their hand up. To kind of follow up on that theme, I was really interested in your talk yesterday about the experience in Tennessee with the TVA system and the change in climate there. I don't remember all the details, but you kind of talked about how the farmers switched from moving from crops with cattle and so forth and they adapted. Can you talk more about that? Yes, so I don't know if I know actually enough of the social side of the development, but so the first president of the TVA was actually, oh, am I off? Oh, okay, sorry about that. Yes, so the first president of the TVA was actually the person who engineered the Miami Conservancy District. And so the president of the United States at that time was so impressed. This was the time of the new deal. And so after the country had gone through a depression and so on, and they were inspired by the power of what had been done in Ohio because it involved, they brought in about 15,000 workers at the time and their families. They actually built small towns with churches and schools for these workers. And so for five to seven years, that's what they did. They made sure this was not going to happen again. And one of the dams is equivalent to the size of the Giza pyramid. And that's actually a national monument. But so being very impressed with what had been done in Ohio at the time, just the area of the country in Tennessee was really depressed as well. And so the idea of the TVA came in the tales of that. He actually ended up only being there for one year because he apparently was not very interested in managing money. And you had to in such a big project. But so that was the origin. So it was a project that had more in mind than just building dams, right? And it had huge impact in society at the time. This was also, it coincided with the time when Eleanor Roosevelt was really pushing for the national parks. And so this was the same time that the Great Smokies National Park was actually created. And so part of the land was converted into public land, into parkland and so on. So this all happened at the same time. And so those activities that were happening in the mountains and in the foothills of the mountains basically slowly faded away. People found other types of jobs and they moved on to the lower lands and the other areas of the state. And it became really focused on the hydropower and energy production and so on. So I can't get into a lot of the details. You know, I don't, I should know more, but yes. But it was really a project that completely changed also that region of the country, right? And has had a huge impact. I don't think anybody was anticipating that by creating this vast system of dams, which are basically lakes, right, with free water surfaces, that we were changing the landscape in such a dramatic way that it would change clouds, you know, that would change wind fields and that would have such huge impact in the regional climate. I don't think it's well appreciated. What we know, for example, is, and this was really interesting. So we're running weather prediction models, for example. And when we're comparing predictions of surface temperature over that part of the state, they're always very bad, right? The errors are very large. And the reason is because we're not actually representing the processes that are happening in that lake landscape system properly in these models. And that's an indication that we should do a better job with that. Of course, the data that I was showing from the satellites is basically just the evidence that the change has happened. Thank you very much. Yes, you had a question? Let's see. Anybody in the audience? Well, I have an observation and then a question. Okay. I think, David, you, many of you know holds a joint appointment in political science, which is not the first thing you think about in a joint appointment in civil and political science. But I know of many occasions where I have known the technical solution, how to solve a problem, but I have not convinced the society to be able to accept that solution. So perhaps having David with me would have helped a lot. My question is, you spoke about risk, resiliency, and so on. And we're talking about climate change. If you have any thoughts that you could share on how we assess risk, the climate keeps changing and how do we deal with risk-based design in the future? So this is a question for all panelists. Well, I can get started. So at least in the, in the design community for flooding, we always use these 100-year events and we design for 100-year flow. And historically, we, and the idea is that we use historical information to see what has happened in the last 100, 200,000 years. And we assume that whatever happened historically will happen again in the going future. So we call this the stationarity assumption. So what we are finding is that the stationarity assumption doesn't really hold these days, at least in some places. In some places it does hold, in some places it doesn't hold. So the idea is how we can design for the future by including this non-stationarity. So that's one aspect related to climate. But then there are lots of other things that are changing. We are changing land use. More and more people are living in areas that are prone to flooding. So how do we incorporate all those and estimate risk and quantify that risk and communicate? So those are the areas that we are working on to address that point. Thank you, Vikantes. Any other reflections from the panelist? Yes, actually, I was thinking that I talked so much about the Miami Conservancy District and I didn't mention the name of the big thinker who was in charge of that, who was Arthur Morgan, who eventually became president of Antioch College. But I wanted to actually say how the concept of the 100 year flood came up. So when he was doing his work for the Miami Conservancy District, he was told that he should come up with a design that was going to avoid floods forever, right? Whatever that meant at the time. And so he looked very carefully at sediment records and data from previous floods. And based on that information, he estimated the largest flood that could happen or basically actually the largest precipitation event that could happen on frozen soil, which was the cause of that flood, and used that and called it the 100 year flood. And that's how it started. So there was no standard risk assessment as we understand it, right? And so he came up with the concept of PMP, which is the probable maximum precipitation. And, but it was really something that took off after this. I don't think he was thinking that he was setting the standards for the next 100 years in how we do things. And so I wanted to stress this notion of non-stationarity and climate variability is the basis also for this. And so the importance of thinking, of integrating the notions of decadal and multi-decadal variability in these considerations. The other thing that I want to mention here is that when you live in a big city, we're very fortunate we don't, maybe some of us here, but if you live in Chicago or in Boston or in New York, sometimes in some neighborhoods, you have the 100 year flood every year. It gets to a certain time of the year. We get a certain time of event and everybody on TV is talking about how it's been really bad. Well, probably the storm water system was designed for the 100 year flood when it was designed. But after that, the population has increased by 50%. The paved area has increased by 100%, et cetera, et cetera. And so now the system is really kind of being, has a very narrow drainage system for a very large contributing area. And so this brings us to something that's very important in civil engineering is the idea that we build infrastructure, it's not forever. Infrastructure systems need to be adaptive and grow with us and change, right? And if you build a hospital in a certain location, the implications of that for the entire system in terms of resilience are very different from building, for example, just a neighborhood, right? And so we need to think about the idea of monitoring risk for infrastructure. And so always be adapting. So making adaptation as part of monitoring, I guess, that's what I'm trying to make the point of having this flexibility. It's hard to conceive when we look at concrete and so on, but that's really what we need to do, I think. Thank you very much. You're very insightful, all of you. Any other questions from the audience? Yes, Eijan? Thank you very much for being here for the panelists. A comment and a question. I'm coming from the structural earthquake engineering side. In earthquake engineering, we look at strong motion seismology. If you focus on a parameter such as peak ground acceleration, we have an understanding of its distribution over time based on observations. But when you look at peak ground displacements, which are also important for high rises that are coming up nowadays, we seem to be getting a power load distribution. So the more observations we make, the larger the mean is and the variance becomes pretty much, I mean, there's no end to it. So I wonder if there's something there with the 100-year event, but my question is generally, we inherit the urban environment when we were born to a place, obviously, for our parents. And with the flexibility of having the right idea at the wrong time, including today, if you were to start a new city and you are not allowed to necessarily move away from a river, flood plain or anything like that, because likewise in earthquake engineering, we cannot always move from the hazard seismic hazard. What would you recommend? What are the areas of engineering ideas that perhaps the new generation of engineers, civil engineers or multidisciplinary engineers should work on or think about and research for new development? Existing problems, we will deal with them and I'm sure they will benefit from it. But if you had this kind of blank sheet of a new city, what are the key things that you think we should pay attention to informing? Stop. Wow. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead. You asked a very tough question. Thanks, Sahih. So assuming that I cannot tell them, don't do anything that is prone to flooding. So there are some examples. So for example in Holland, so they are building or at least designing houses that you can move up and down. So even if it is flooded, you don't have to move out. So you just push a button and move your house up. So that's one example. As I mentioned earlier, our infrastructure, everything is very interconnected. So if one thing fails, it leads to failure of lots of other things. So one aspect of the design will be, can whatever you design sustain, despite what happens to other components of the system. So we talk about interdisciplinary and interconnected. So how can whatever we design be resilient in this interconnected system? So maybe that's a sort of generic answer. Yeah, that's a good question, tough question. Sure, I mean, I'm always promoting the need for data. So I would say, make sure that you have sufficient data. And again, for these like design areas, that topograph is not really the only thing that you have to really know information about the type of soil, the soil moisture and so forth. So I think collecting data as much data that gives you more than one piece of information about your site, that would be quite useful. So I can, I think you asked a really hard question that I think it has two answers to that. One of them is the engineering answer, which is we would like to instrument everything we build heavily. Sorry, can you move the microphone? Oh, I'm sorry. We would like to instrument everything we build heavily, we would like to have innovative approaches and technologies like floating structures and so on. You've seen a lot of this Lego based sort of structures, where basically infrastructure is changing or even buildings are changing, depending on the conditions, you can easily lift them or move them around and change pieces and so on. How do we do that in a way that it can be done efficiently and affordably and it's still a good investment. But I think there's also a soft side of this that's very important. And it's about regulation, about codes and standards, about zoning codes, for example, about how we deal with risk, right? How do we grow? And the idea that we need to think about our interconnected systems when we approve a new project, for example, how things fit together, how does risk change actually by growing in a certain way? So those considerations are usually not taken, right? So we do cost benefit analysis, but rarely you hear anybody discussing, for example, if we build a huge hospital, for example, which has been a big problem in the areas of hurricanes, right? In a certain location, what does that mean for energy distribution? What does that mean for water distribution? What does that mean for access, right? For and so on. So thinking about the fact that it should not be about norms that are written for 20 years or approved by the city council and work for all problems in the same way. So I think paying attention to that soft side is really important, in addition to all the creativity and so on that we can have with technology. Okay, thank you all. I would like to perhaps move away from this cost benefit analysis. I'm getting so tired of it. Maybe find something else to quantify, quality of life improvement on the human side. I think we need to move on. And I want to ask a question, our panelists, us being in civil engineering, how do we see our students transforming the world? And what do we do today? So they are the leaders, like you mentioned Professor Barros and Professor Govinda Raju, all of you are leaders, right? How do we make our students leaders on this topic? I would like to see your reflection on that. And do we do enough? Oh yeah, yeah. So I think people need students, young students and also policy makers, decision makers, people in policy space. They need to know complexity thinking, complex systems thinking. We live in a society that's, you know, that's everything is interconnected. Failure in one component of the system leads to cascades and affect other things in a really unexpected way. You know, human response to built environment design of physical hydrological events can be surprising. And so we need to, people need to be trained in complexity science, complex adaptive systems thinking, especially decision makers. And also we need to embrace, I think more and more people are talking about this. Embrace failure, like in designing infrastructure, in designing physical, when we design landscape, we need to not be afraid of failure, but you know, but actually embrace failure and use that as an opportunity to foster social capacity and to raise awareness of general population also policy makers. So, you know, I think young students need to kind of have the mentality, you know, we should not only designed to, you know, get rid of all the risks and failure, but rather we should make designs to embrace failure and use that as an opportunity, actively use that as an opportunity to promote learning and awareness. So that's nice, what I'm thinking, yeah. Thank you, David. Yes. Well, I can add since you spoke about students, so we train students at both undergraduate and graduate level. And I think at the graduate level, we have more control on how we can train them to be leaders, so we can train them in certain way. And I think undergraduate is a place where we need to do more. I feel like we don't do enough to train them to address all these complex issues. And since we are all civil engineers and I see many of our colleagues, so I think we need a major overall of our curriculum if we really want to train our students to be prepared to handle these issues in the future. So thank you. Since we have a visitor from a competitive university, I wanted to bring this up. So I want to be mindful of everybody's time. We have two minutes left. Yes, I'll talk about that. I think this is a very important question. And for example, in the case of risk and extreme events, as you've heard this spring, well, it's not yet, well, it started recently, but this winter spring transition has been especially hard in the Midwest, in the southern part of the country without the tornadoes and extreme events and so on. And for example, the question of whether we're designing structures for the right loading, are we accurately representing these types of loads in how we built structures and so on. So we just actually started a new center at UIUC for resilience for wind extremes, and it's a collaboration actually between civil engineering and atmospheric sciences. And we have our faculty and our students were out there in the field, actually in anticipation of the tornadoes, we knew it was going to be bad. So we had teams of students and faculty who traveled down to the south and so on and be right there so we can make these sorts of measurements of what happens in the boundary layer around structures and so on. So it's recognizing that even though we build wonderful things and civil engineers have been extremely successful, a lot of the things we build are standing and they will be standing for another hundred years and more, but the fact of the matter is that a lot of what we do still needs a lot of research and we could improve significantly what we do. And so it's investing, I think in research, investing in things that maybe are not yet the hot topic of the day, but that will be the hot topic of the day in 10 years. So we try to think ahead and plan for that. And I think there's a lot of opportunity for those sorts of initiatives. Great, thank you everybody. Let's... Thank you. Thank you. We really appreciate your visit, your time and thank you all the panelists. You did a great job sharing your worlds and your passion about civil engineering. So thanks everybody for being here and have a nice rainy day outside there. Bye.