Sustainability

According to the Brundtland Commission in 1987, sustainable development is defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This broader approach to sustainability aligns directly with the initiative of the Grand Challenges Scholars Program and enables fulfillment in the other themes. One of the first things that was introduced about this theme was that there are three pillars to sustainability: social, environmental, and economic. The absence of any one of these can lead to the collapse of sustainable development in modern society and all depend on each other to support fulfillment and longevity in life.

Based on these illustrations of sustainability, the United Nation developed 17 sustainable development goals to achieve worldwide to support the needs of the present and satisfy those of the future. The first lecture was a case study of the PlayPump, a product developed to generate play and pump water by means of mechanical energy by a merry-go-round. Although it seems simple for a playground feature used by children anyways to pump water, many concerns came about. Is it ethical? As children begin putting work and labor into water, an essential resource, could this be considered child labor? By capitalizing off of a commodity, is it ethical to use advertising (as it was intended) on the front and face of this product? It was very interesting to find that although this nearly foolproof product to achieve a simple task was able to collapse a handful of the pillars of sustainability. No part of the product worked in harmony with social, environmental and economic components. As I plan to focus on sustainability in this program, this particular lecture demonstrated that a great amount of focus should be put on meeting these three pillars to maximize the value of a product.

The guest faculty member brought for sustainability was Nathan Johnson, a sustainable energy and technology engineer whose main concentration was on micro-power grids. One of the great challenges in American currently is the long overdue update on the power grid. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the United States was given D+ rating in energy because of its vulnerability and insecurity. Microgrids deliver a solution to a problem that eminently faces all Americans. Some criterion Johnson illustrates in his work with microgrids are safety, reliability, affordability, and sustainability, in that order. Some more background on the situation is that power is directed one way, and the proposal is to use microgrids, a group of interconnected energy resources, to deliver a bi-drectional flow of energy. The issue is how specific and case-by-case each resource is, and the solution developed is to create a toolkit and methodology for engineers to develop these systems within communities of energy, to eventually large populations. What’s the most fascinating part about this research is how insanely close this aligns with my research interests. As an electrical engineer, I would like to focus on power systems and how to improve them over time, and the research and information provided by Dr. Johnson is one solution closer to the problems that can fail an entire nation’s power system.

The last activity on sustainability was the Renewable Energy Economics game. There were two groups: utility companies and energy sources (both renewable and nonrenewable). All energy must have a production cost and a supply amount, while utility companies must fulfil the needs of their communities and consumers by having demand and a price limit to continue making profit. I had been assigned as a nuclear energy producer and set my prices accordingly with the changing market, per each round. Halfway through, there was a revolution in nuclear energy that meant more could be supplied at a cheaper cost. There were many pushes forward and drawbacks to energy industries due to these market conditions. As a class participating, in order to remain competitive, we started mimicking the behaviors of how energy industries interact and respond to these changes in market condition. Some producers utilized deals on energy while other producers used propaganda and media manipulation to promote or defame particular energy industries. Nonetheless reflecting the rather extremely competitive energy industry.

Security

The guest speaker, Dr. Tatiana Walsh, is an alumni of Arizona State University and has worked in industry and beyond in cybersecurity and delivered her presentation as an analogy between cybersecurity and Game of Thrones. One topic that stood out the most was how legion hacking and security threats have been since 2004. It is no longer an issue of if a security threat happens, but rather when a security breach happens. Just about anything is a security threat, equally as much as anything can be a weapon. One thing that Dr. Walsh had mentioned was an anecdote with brushing teeth. Someone who doesn’t brush their teeth often because it's time consuming becomes so much more vulnerable to significant dental issues that could be detrimental to appearance, health, and even joy of living. And with that threat, there are more than one type of threats. For example, there could be zombies and vampires. Both are undead yet meet different criteria that assemble their identities. Installing a locked door is fine for preventing zombies but what about vampires? All considerations should be met to expect the unexpected intruder. The last few components of the presentation were about tactics used in cybersecurity: predicting attacks, preventing attacks, detecting attacks, and responding to attacks. Security is all about finding patterns and lapses when there’s a threat. Breaches can be internal or external within an organization so it’s important to be able to limit that access. And finally, having people on deck to respond to these threats are critical to minimizing the damage overall.

Another activity we had done as a class was look at different motivations and assets that would allow someone to breach a secure system. My team had designed a situation where one’s financial assets could be stolen and the methods and reasoning someone would do so. The situation was where someone had coerced or tricked someone into revealing their security details then taking their financial assets. We then prepared a strategy in order to solve this issue using the phases of protect, detect, respond, and recovery. Protect meant by having the banks ensure that customers can only use strong passwords, while detect was identifying small and compounded transactions and unusual emails and notifications from an institution. Then to respond, one should create a new password and consider two factor authorization, and finally to recover one should look into financial loss insurance and potentially legal action. The activity clearly defined ways to assess a security breach by identifying the possible scenarios of who could’ve done this and how, then to mitigate and fix the breach to ensure it won’t happen again and that no more data is abused.

The final activity we had done as a class was to prepare and respond for a security risk. The situation was that the United States now required only automated vehicles on the road, but the private organization that is responsible for vehicle automation experiences a security breach that threatens the safety of American citizens on the road. The objective for class was to play stakeholders in the state government, federal government, and the public. The state government was tasked to work with the federal government while also imposing plans to ensure safety. As the state government, we had developed a plan to lockdown the state from automated vehicles while also opening up public transportation that isn’t automated to ensure people can still get to work, while those who can work or go to school from home can do so. Working on behalf of our constituents while also working close with safety advisors was very daunting when developing a plan that will work for everyone. When it came for the federal government to work with the private automated vehicle company, developing a nationwide plan took much longer than the state government to develop, and isn’t necessarily the best solution as it isn’t one size fits all. Nonetheless, both governments had developed a solution as a response to keep the automated vehicles resilient.

Joy of Living

Joy of living is one of the broader initiatives in the Grand Challenges objectives but is often associated with including and implementing technologies that make life easier. Some specific observations would be advancing personal learning, increasing automation, and implementing virtual/augmented reality technologies.

Dr. Helen Chavez is a researcher at the Innovative Learner and User Experience (iLUX) lab at Arizona State University. During her guest speaker panel, Dr. Chavez discussed the importance of user experience when implementing technologies for multiple people to use. With regards to the engineering design process, user experience is the criteria often associated with accessibility and ensuring how one particular item can meet the needs of many different types of end-users. Dr. Chavez wore eye-tracking glasses that were developed by the iLUX lab to identify it as a tool she uses in the lab to understand human interactions with different environments. After discussing what the tool was, she showed us a video of someone using the glasses in one of the campus stores and how they interacted with different items. These tools essentially become a framework and all the qualitative data can allow different investors or engineers to develop new technologies. I found this technology very interesting as I had never imaged that they would look like wearable glasses that are able to compute data as a standalone device. Given these tools and frameworks can help investors determine more information about their consumers, I found that this is a very unique way to increase peoples’ joy of living. If investors are able to understand to a very specific detail how their users interact, they can continue to create more effective systems and methods to make people live better lives.

Moving forward, our lecture discussed the diffusion of technology and advanced technologies; essentially understanding how innovations diffuse, why, and at what rate. There are five elements where technologies diffuse: innovation, adopters, communication channels, time, and social systems. These five factors determine how quickly and widespread a technology can diffuse in society, following the rate of adoption, or the S curve. The S curve illustrates through a bell curve the number of individuals whos adopt the technology, and the actual “S” is featured on the growth through the market share; as more consumers use the technology there is an inflection point halfway through when half of the targetted market uses the technology. It was interesting to understand how innovators and engineers utilize this model to see the viability of their products in the market. It’s also interesting how clearly this outlines the effects and yet many products fail in the market, sometimes not due to any externalities. This is directly related to the joy of living because the more people implement this technology, the more satisfaction can come from it.

The final lecture discussed the joy of living in two case studies: space exploration and personalized learning. In groups, we were to compile a list of the pros and cons of space exportation in terms of what benefits it brings for society. The general argument was how can we expect to benefit from space exploration and all assets of future space travel when we cannot achieve this in most countries, let alone regions in economically developed countries? Although the argument is very nuanced, most of the responses seemed as if there were many doubts about space exploration although it would be an interesting hot topic. This may as well have been a reflection of the times and the available technologies we have now that shape this doubt and is nonetheless subject to change in the future. The second half of the lecture was, in the same groups, to develop by means of the engineering design process the ideal learning environment that is customizable for students, and simple enough for instruction. My group had created a framework for a classroom that encourages students to collaborate and break the “institution” of the classroom with more open spaces. Compared to our model, I found it very interesting how ours had compared to the needs other students had addressed; either as students or from the perspective of lecturers or administrators. Like many other assets, there is no one right way to approach this topic, but all attribute to joy of living because they seek to make what we understand about the world more enjoyable.

Health

The guest speaker for the health theme, Dr. Jimmy Abbas, is the director at the Center for Adaptive Neural Systems within the School of Biological and Health System Engineering at Arizona State University. Dr. Abbas works very closely and is very familiar with the Grand Challenges Scholars Program and begins to walk through his work and address a few of the 14 grand challenges related to health. He begins his lecture with reverse-engineering the brain by defining bio-mimicry, the aim to take inspiration from natural selection solutions adopted by nature and translate the principles to human engineering. Utilizing biomimicry, engineers hope to emulate two functions integral to the brain: sensory-motor functions and conversations/thoughts. Some methods to achieve this is through electroencephalography (EEG), a system of electrodes that attach to the scalp to emulate brain activity or functional imaging such as MRI, fMRI, and other types of brain scans. The results are nowhere near comparable to brain development but the outcomes are useful to learn from and create better biomimicry systems. I found this particualrly interesting because there are many complex systems in use to understand the brain, but with few outputs. As the future generation of engineers, understanding the aspects of the brain provide for scientific inquiry and even permits greater understanding of how the brain functions. This can have applications with how to preserve the brain from different diseases and disorders. Another area focus Dr. Abbas had focused on is water security and solutions. Arguably, this is also related to sustainability efforts, however lack of access to clean water is directly correlated to a decline in health. Although not as surprising, I recognize how interestingly the themes are correlated to each other. It’s important to recognize that the themes work together in tandem to support a greater quality of life.

The following activity regarding the helath theme were discussions about health debates currently: bionics and human modification or stem cell technologies. Bionics discusses the use of prosthetics or tools to enhance the quality of human life. While prosthetics are useful for many to gain control for more motor skills and applications in life now, there are a handful of potential drawbacks particularly among ethics. Bionics and investing technology in this field can allow people to gain strengths that make them above human or have insane human strengths. This becomes an issue of equity and who can have access to a better quality of life. I found this discussion really interesting becaue it challenged what it fundamentally meant to be human. Can one be too much human or are there different degrees to humanity based on added strengths? As a proponent, our debate team argued that this is meant to enrich lives rather than divide people and that none of it is forced. The other debate topic had been stem cell research. Stem cells are cells that have the ability to take form of different cells based on different conditions and needs. Extracting stem cells to learn about life forms comes at the expense of an embryo, and are highly debated ethically and morally. While I didn't participate in this debate, it was interesting hearing how what the different groups offered with this solution. What was consistent was the problems with equity and inquiry in health sciences. Is it fair for different individuals to have access to life changing technologies and encorages others to be marginalized? The societal impacts of both of these bring up questions of moral dilemma and debate.

The final lecture discussed disparities in health around the world and solutions in air pollution. We were tasked to list 16 different countries by life expectancy individually, and determine criteria as groups to why we choose each region. Some more developed Asian countries had found that they had a higher life expectancy while less economically developed countries as a result of colonization had lower life expectancies. The lecture then discussed how this is a trend between income and life expectancy; the rich live longer. We were then presented with a graph of all countries along a graph of income in real GDP to life expectancy in years. I found that the overwhelming correlation as new information, yet unsurprising. Richer countires have better access to food and water that allow them to progress more economically and have ample outputs to support more people and allowing people to live longer. In fact this is true to the expect that people are being fed and healthy well enough that obeisity can become an issue and greatly developed countries. We then performed a case study on the women of Tanzania who cook in homes with little ventilation that affects the quality of air that they breath. Due to the fact they don't necessarily have access to electric stoves, oftentimes they are left to burning expensive wood to be able to feed their families. The remainder of the lecture was disucssing how engineers had used the design process and customer needs to develop a solution that helps women in Tanzania be able to prepare food with minimal smoke and at a rather economic standing. What was interesting about this approach was the interdisciplinary activities between a health and the three other themes in this solution. Air quality, health and sustainability are all integrated within each other. But joy of living and such contribute to the impact of these technologies and enriching peopele's lives.