Arizona State University and Devex are hosting a global hackathon. Open to universities from anywhere in the world and based on the model from the PLuS Alliance and Devils Invent, the hackathon calls on students to create solutions to five real-world development challenges aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). One winning team in each challenge category will showcase its solution at Devex World and receive opportunities to further develop their idea.
The event takes place Friday November 13, 2020 at 5PM MST through Sunday November 15, 2020 at 3:30PM MST.
Students at ASU will be competing for a slot to go up against students from around the world and will be creating solutions in 3 of the 5 areas which are related to: business transforming development, data revolution, and innovation at scale. One winning team in each challenge category will showcase its solution at Devex World and receive opportunities to further develop their idea!
Among ways being explored to combine biology and engineering to remedy a range of growing global environmental problems, algae-based solutions look especially promising.
The encouraging viewpoint stems from progress in research that is revealing how the properties of algae can be harnessed to become the driving force for a slew of productive biotechnological pursuits.
Some of the research findings have been the result of efforts based at the Arizona Center for Algae Technology and Innovation, or AzCATI, embedded in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University.
Meaghan K. Kramer, staff attorney with Arizona Center for Disability Law, will present the third of four lectures in the School of Social Transformation's Seeking Justice in Arizona Fall Lecture Series. The talk will take place via Zoom, with livestream on YouTube, Thursday, November 12 from 10:30–11:45 a.m.
Meaghan Kramer is a staff attorney at the Arizona Center for Disability Law (ACDL), where she advocates for Arizonans who have a wide range of physical, mental, psychiatric, sensory and cognitive disabilities. Meaghan is currently targeting systemic issues affecting Arizonans with disabilities in the areas of employment, housing, healthcare, education, voting and prisons. The ACDL uses advocacy, lobbying and impact litigation to bring positive change to Arizona’s disability community.
The series, now in its 16th year, brings in experts from our local communities to discuss critical national issues in an Arizona context. Each lecture is followed by a question and answer period and time to interact with the speaker informally. Admission is free and open to the public.
A new report from OECD, Addressing societal challenges using transdisciplinary research, examines how transdisciplinary research can be used to address complex societal challenges. The report is based in large part on analysis of 28 case studies to identify the key obstacles to effectively implementing transdisciplinary research and make recommendations for best practices.
The ASU Decision Center for a Desert City is featured as one of the case studies (p. 43) and was recommended to OECD by the National Science Foundation as an exemplary project illustrating best practices. DCDC is one of only three case studies located in North America, along with projects at Texas A&M and Purdue University.
The final recommendations for universities and public research institutions reflect several ASU initiatives and principles including the ASU Charter and Design Aspirations, institutional structures such as the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory and the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation, as well as the university's graduate faculty model and corporate and strategic partnerships.
The ASU Vita is an electronic curriculum vitae builder that supports the reporting of teaching research and service activities. ASU Vita maximizes the quality of personnel data, and streamlines the collection and reporting process. ASU Vita is a product in the Academic Personnel Actions Reporting System (APARS).
To support your research and instructional efforts, the Provost's Office is requiring ASU Academic Personnel to complete your profile with three years of data by Dec. 31, 2020.
The UREx SRN's Scenarios Working Group and each city team have worked tirelessly to create participatory visions of the future for each network city over the past several years. Now that we have rich databases of visions and preferred strategies for each city, the next step is to communicate and promote these visions to catalyze sustainability transitions. This is what several members of the San Juan City Team set out to do in August 2019.
For more than a year, several San Juan City Team members have been working together to design a platform to share the entire collection of scenario visions, narratives, strategies, and timelines for San Juan 2080 in a visual, engaging, and interactive tool. We also wanted to enrich this platform with background knowledge, a diversity of resources, and relevant case studies from other cities to make them more useful. For instance, to connect local stakeholders with the knowledge and financial resources to actually implement some of the strategies.
We used ArcGIS Story Maps as our platform to present these syntheses. The platform includes syntheses for each of the three flood scenarios (coastal floods, riverine floods, and urban floods) as well as the three transformative visions (Connected Municipality, Food and Energy Security, and Just and Livable City) developed during the UREx San Juan 2080 scenario workshops.
We are very excited to share the final version of this platform: Visiones de Ciudad - San Juan 2080. For those who are unfamiliar with the UREx Scenario Workshop process and/or outputs, we have created a landing page ("Inicio") that provides context for this collection of syntheses. We invite you to view the Story Map and share it with anyone who you think would be interested. Please note that it is in Spanish.
This platform is an example of one possible method for mobilizing each city's Scenario Workshop data within their communities, and it will ideally serve as an example for other UREx cities to create similar tools – increasing the knowledge uptake of the many invaluable resources co-produced by the UREx over the past five years.
This project could not have been possible without the gracious support of two NSF INTERN Supplement Awards provided to Robert Hobbins over the past year.
Sustainability scholar Iveta Silova, director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Global Education in ASU's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, has co-authored a background report for the UNESCO’s Futures of Education Initiative.
Global biodiversity loss is occurring at an unprecedented rate. Approximately 1 million species are threatened with extinction and many species have gone extinct in the past decade.
The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report offers an integrated overview of where the world stands in relation to key international goals, including the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and the Paris Agreement on climate change.
Join us Friday, October 30, for the 2nd annual (virtual) workshop on accelerating sustainable energy transitions and ethical responses to climate change. SEEK (Sustainable Energy, Education and Knowledge-Sharing) is an action research project of the Spirituality and Sustainability Initiative and catalyzes connections between social values and effective action. SEEK is led by sustainability scientist Elisabeth Graffy, professor of practice in ASU's College of Global Futures.
This year's workshop will explore four themes: practical energy stewardship and the ethics of care, the science and ethics of direct climate intervention, pathways to solar: what you need to know, and cultivating community resilience during uncertain times. Registration is free.
“As humans we have a profound ability to not only imagine new futures but to change them,” says Maynard, who is associate dean for curricula and student success in ASU's College of Global Futures. “That comes with a lot of responsibility. If we are doing things intended to change the future, we have to do so smartly.”
Nov. 13, ASU's School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment will host a research showcase to provide a high-level overview of research expertise by their new faculty. Faculty, students and others are invited to participate in this informative discussion of new research topics being undertaken by SEBE faculty.
The event will be webcast live via Zoom on Friday, November 13, from 1:00 - 2:00 p.m. Arizona time. View the flyer to learn more about the presenters.
According to an October 22 article in the Washington Post, Tesla is forging ahead with new self-driving technology, despite skepticism among some safety advocates about whether Tesla’s technology is ready — and whether the rest of the world is ready for cars that drive themselves. Self-driving is lightly regulated in the United States, and Tesla does not need permission to launch the new feature.
Ted Pavlic, assistant professor in ASU's College of Global Futures, works with autonomous systems. Asked about whether driverless cars are truly possible, Pavlic said, "They say that it’s just around the corner, but you don’t realize that the effort to get just around the corner gets more and more and more [complicated] as you get closer to the corner."
A new study by CAP LTER sustainability scientists evaluated how Phoenix residents perceive and value urban ecological infrastructure (UEI). This research can help urban planners, landscape architects, etc., create UEI that people enjoy and that has biological value.
The MCA offers an opportunity for scientists and engineers at the Associate Professor rank (or equivalent) to substantively enhance and advance their research program through synergistic and mutually beneficial partnerships, typically at an institution other than their home institution.
The MCA is the only cross-directorate NSF program specifically aimed at providing protected time and resources to established scientists and engineers at the mid-career stage. Projects that envision new insights on existing problems or identify new but related problems previously inaccessible without new methodology or expertise from other fields are encouraged.
Only eight countries have legislated full gender equality, according to the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law database. (No, the United States isn’t one of them.) And an estimated one in three women worldwide experience physical violence.
To accelerate the adoption of policies that empower women and ensure equal rights, Arizona State University’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory and EdPlus partnered with global organizations — including the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the United Nations and the World Bank — on a unique video training series: SDG 5 Training for Parliamentarians and Global Changemakers.
This series will inform members of parliaments and other leaders on gender issues and trends, providing actionable steps they can take to advance gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls (UN Sustainable Development Goal 5) in their countries. Read more on ASU Now.
ASU to join six other universities to create an institute to better understand locust phase change.
As a formidable ecological force, locusts have a long history of devastating crops and causing food insecurity throughout history and around the world. A secret to their success—dubbed phase polyphenism—is a textbook case of phenotypic plasticity where an individual can modify its phenotype in response to a changing environment. Locusts can capitalize on times of plenty by altering their morphology, physiology, and behavior as they shift from a cryptic and solitary lifestyle to a mobile and gregarious one. This ultimately results in the dramatic outbreaks with swarms of billions of individuals we are seeing currently on multiple continents.
Voices from the Future, a product of ASU's Narrative Storytelling Initative led by sustainability scholar Steven Beschloss, is a collection of stories based on the experiences and insights of survivors of extreme weather events on five continents. This project, both in its perspective and execution, represents the belief that personal stories have the potential to touch a wide cross-section of readers and constructively influence thinking and behavior.
Within these stories, you'll learn how people responded to disaster and how these experiences have affected their lives and visions of the future.
“I think there's been a failure to convince the public about the scale of the problem, the nature of potential responses and the science and the reality of climate change,” said Beschloss, who is also narratives lead of the Global Futures Laboratory. Read more about the series and its reach in this story on ASU Now.
Locusts are a major pest in many parts of the world, damaging plants and livelihoods. Senegal is one such place; farmers constantly battle migrating swarms of the local Senegalese grasshopper.
Led by Associate Professor Arianne Cease from the School of Sustainability and funded by USAID, the Global Locust Initiative went to Senegal — an area where they’ve been working since 2016 — to see if changing crops’ nutrients would deter locusts and to work with local communities and organizations to monitor and manage locust numbers.
The initiative, part of ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation, is devoted to researching the complex problem of locusts and finding solutions alongside local collaborators.
Join ASU's Operational Excellence Community of Practice (OECoP) for this speed networking event. Registrations are limited for an optimal interactive experience. Participants will have the opportunity to make their elevator pitch and work on their professional conversational skills as they answer structured discussion prompts in small-group zoom break-out sessions. You will leave the event having practiced your skills, learned something about other areas in ASU, and expanded your network.
Arizona State University and Devex are hosting a global hackathon. Open to universities from anywhere in the world and based on the model from the PLuS Alliance and Devils Invent, the hackathon calls on students to create solutions to five real-world development challenges aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). One winning team in each challenge category will showcase its solution at Devex World and receive opportunities to further develop their idea.
Among ways being explored to combine biology and engineering to remedy a range of growing global environmental problems, algae-based solutions look especially promising.
