Future Cool Singapore webinar

Every city, and Singapore in particular, is a complex system. Due to an imbalance between urban geometry, material, and active anthropogenic heat input into the urban complex system, outdoor and indoor thermal comfort are declining rapidly to the point that they are becoming a threat to productivity and the health of citizens.

No simple means are enough as a remedy: as the COVID-19 related slowdown demonstrates, the reduction of anthropogenic production of energy, pollution, heat, and noise can lead to more outdoor thermal comfort, but it also threatens the economic basis of most citizens. In this session, the speakers share on Cooling Singapore 2.0, the important role of high-performance computing in planning for a balanced urban climate system, and using a Digital Urban Climate Twin (DUCT), which is a federation of models, data and computing resources that allows the simulation of urban climate states.  

Speakers

Prof. Gerhard Schmitt is a professor of Information Architecture at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) and the founding director of the Singapore-ETH Centre. As the centre’s director, he leads an interdisciplinary team in developing practical solutions to some of the most pressing challenges on urban sustainability, liveability and resilience. These efforts are channelled through research programmes including the Future Cities Laboratory, Future Resilient Systems, Cooling Singapore, and Natural Capital Singapore.

He currently leads the Cooling Singapore project, aimed at mitigating the urban heat island effect and Big Data informed Urban Design and Governance project. With a strong belief in making knowledge accessible, he led a team to develop and teach the first Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) on future cities, followed by a series including the themes of smart cities, liveable cities and responsive cities.

Dr Heiko Aydt is a principal investigator and senior researcher of Cooling Singapore. He is a computational scientist with expertise in modelling and simulation as well as computer science with a focus on software engineering of distributed systems. He was responsible for coordinating the Future Cities Laboratory’s Responsive Cities scenario - an interdisciplinary cluster of thematically linked research projects that aims to develop methods to support better-informed and responsive urban planning, design, governance and management processes.

In the upcoming Cooling Singapore 2.0 project he will lead the research and development of the Digital Urban Climate Twin to support urban planners and policy makers in their efforts to address the urban heat challenge. Heiko has several years of working experience with high-performance computing and cloud computing. His previous research includes work on topics such as high-performance traffic simulation, crowd simulation, evolutionary computing and operations research.