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Francesco Pilla
francesco.pilla@ucd.ie

His work lies at the intersection between cities and technologies. His goal is to build better cities through technology, innovation, and citizen participation. He focuses on empowering local communities with cutting-edge technology and enabling them to act on pressing environmental issues in their local environment. He leverages his European projects to bring climate action in education. Specifically, he shows children in primary and secondary schools how they could have an active role in making their cities and communities more sustainable. He does so by co-designing, co-deploying, and co-monitoring nature-based solutions with the children in schools to explain and demonstrate with data from sensors how these green solutions have multiple positive impacts on the local environment. His area of expertise is smart cities and, specifically, geospatial analysis and modeling of urban dynamics, which involves the development of GIS-based models and decision support tools to pre-empt the impacts resulting from the interactions between human population and the environment. He uses a range of pervasive and community sensing applications as a means of calibration and validation of these GIS tools. He then integrates the GIS models and data streams from pervasive sensing deployments with advanced machine learning algorithms to gain a better understanding of the spatial dynamics in cities. He is currently exploring the use of these GIS-based tools as a way to integrate co-design in urban planning and pervasive sensing (static and mobile as part of citizen science initiatives). This is achieved as part of Living Lab activities which focus on improving city life from environmental and resilience to extreme weather events perspectives. It will be explored further during the course of his work as part of his H2020 projects: iSCAPE (Coordinator and Principal Investigator) focusing on smart control of air pollution and OPERANDUM (Principal Investigator for UCD) focusing on reducing flood risk with nature-based solutions, both of which are piloted in Dublin. He also empowers local communities by providing them with the tools (low-cost sensors for air quality and traffic counts) and skills to achieve a more sustainable and healthier local environment as part of the H2020 WeCount (Principal Investigator for UCD). Separate from this, he is also exploring the use of geospatial big data and sentiment-rich social media data to inform the quantity and quality of nature-based solutions in cities as part of another H2020 project called Connecting Nature (Principal Investigator for UCD). Finally, he is developing Scalable, Privacy-Enhanced Analytics for sharing mobility systems as part of an SFI Investigator grant of which he is the Principal Investigator for UCD. He has been active in GIS modeling and spatial data analysis for 15 years and has acquired considerable experience in networks of sensors for urban monitoring and data mining during his collaborations with IBM as part of an IBM Faculty Award (2017) and two different research laboratories in MIT as part of a Fulbright/EPA TechImpact Award (2015) and his PhD (2011) research work.

Research Areas:

Citizen science, decision support tools, participatory planning