Hello and welcome to Listen.Up.People., a podcast
of the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social
Work. I'm Dr. Holly Priebe -Sotelo, Associate
Teaching Professor of practicum education. I
am honored to have two prolific USC researchers
as my guests who do extraordinary work in sustainability,
environmental justice, urban planning, and so
much more. Today we're going to discuss their
current research collaboration, which is actually
two interconnected studies spanning four USC
schools. And it gets even more interesting because
they are combining social science with machine
learning to study the positive effects of community
resilience following a natural disaster. I'd
like to welcome my distinguished social work
colleague, Dr. Michalle Mor Barak, Dean Endowed
Professor with a joint appointment with the
School of Social Work and the Marshall School
of Business, and Dr. Bistra Dilkina, the Dr.
Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg Early Career Chair
in Computer Science and Associate Professor of
Computer Science at the USC Viterbi School of
Engineering. And I must say, they were both recently
acknowledged by USC President Kim at his
State of the University address for their work
together. It is an honor to have you both here
today. I'd like to start off by asking a more
personal question about how each of you became
interested in sustainability and environmental
-related issues. Why don't we start with you,
Michalle? Yes, thank you, Holly, and a pleasure
to see you, Bistra, my wonderful collaborator
in this project. The work on environmental justice
has been a natural development from earlier work
that I've done throughout my career, focusing
on diversity and inclusion in a global context
and the model that I introduced in the first
edition of my book and developed further. in
the second, third, fourth, and fifth edition
of the book. The book is Managing Diversity Toward
a Globally Inclusive Workplace. And I emphasize
in the model that in order to become truly inclusive,
business and not for profit organizations need
to look at different circles of inclusion, expanding
circles of inclusion. That means inclusion within
the organization, reaching out to the community,
dealing with expanded circles. And the outer
circle is looking at the environment and making
sure that they not only not hurt the environment,
but do whatever they can to conserve the environment.
And in the book, I also present some research
on the benefits of such actions, not only to
the recipients of that, which is community residents,
but also to the businesses themselves in terms
of the bottom line. So in summary, this topic
of environmental justice is a natural evolution
from previous works that I've done. Excellent.
Thank you. And Bistra, how did you become personally
involved in this topic? Thanks, Holly. And also
as well, a great pleasure to be here on this
podcast and to talk about some of the wonderful
research work I'm doing with Michalle and our bigger
team. So my interest in sustainability actually
started during my PhD in computer science at
Cornell, where I was lucky enough to be there
at a very opportune moment where my PhD advisor,
Professor Carla Gomez, at the time had proposed
to NSF, to the National Science Foundation, in
response to their call for people to identify
grand challenges for computer science, at the
time she had proposed building this new field
of computational sustainability, which was essentially
a call to action that computer scientists should
and can play a pivotal role in advancing sustainable
development. A lot of the problems in sustainability
involve assigning very limited resources in order
to achieve the best benefits for the environment
and for the society, predicting complex processes
involving climate change and ecosystems and human
behaviors. And all of these things are under
the purview of people, especially people in computer
science working on artificial intelligence where
we have tools both in terms of building predictive
models, as well as building models that help
inform decisions and allocate resources efficiently.
But I really felt inspired by this message and
started learning a lot about environmental science
and the problems that arise there. Then I dedicated
a big portion of my research career on using
AI for environmental sustainability and for disaster
resilience. Excellent. Wow. Thank you so very much.
Michalle, you recently led an international
conference in France where you focused on a climate
disaster's impact on communities. And your current
work on community resilience has been also a
focus. Was this inspired by the recent wildfires
or had you been thinking and researching this
topic of community resilience for a while?
A previous research study that I did looked at
communities specifically. And from that, the
proposal and the conference in the Chateau de
la Bretèche in France emerged. And the idea was
to look at climate -related disasters around
the world and how they affect communities and
migration patterns. And so in that conference,
we had scholars from many different fields, including
demography, scholars in immigration, scholars
in environmental studies, and as well as AI experts
to bring that knowledge into the fold. And in
that conference, Part of what we have learned
was, again, the importance of communities in
relating to disasters. Then after the LA fires,
we realized that it's really important to focus
on communities, because what happened with the
LA fires which is typical to most disasters,
is that first responders do not have enough time
to get to the area and provide help. Therefore,
neighbors need other neighbors to help them.
And this is what forms community resilience,
when you can rely on your neighbors, when you
can help other people in the moment of need,
when the official help is not available. And
that's why focusing on communities in disasters
is so important. And so this project emerged
from a combination of what we learned in the
Chateau de la Bretèche conference that was funded
by the Borchardt Foundation and the experience
we all went through as LA residents that rattled
all of us. and cause us to learn how important
it is to look at the people in our close community.
Excellent. It brings me chills to hear that,
the importance of the neighbors for sure. And
Bistra, the research that you're working on,
if you can give us an overview of the two parts
of the study that you're working on together
and how they interconnect and what is the goal?
Yeah, happy to. And I guess the connection, I
guess, to even lay the grounds for this study
with Michal was, you know, I had also done previously
before this big study to develop a model of how
people might displace under long -term sea level
rise from coastal communities that will be immediately
impacted by sea level rise to inland and other
communities and really kind of focusing on with
these predictive models that tells us where people
can go, what are some of these secondary effects
like other communities that are not directly
impacted by sea level rise but might receive
a lot of migrants. essentially climate migrants
as a secondary effect of this. And so that's
how, I guess, Michal and I connected by our interest
in looking at climate driven disasters or changes
and their impact on communities and society as
a whole. And so as Michalle already outlined, I
think A critical thing is the understanding the
role of community in response to a disaster.
And these studies that we are leading are focusing
on identifying whether we can create a measurement
tool of community crisis resilience, which is
basically a way to estimate how does a community
perceive their shared perceptions of resilience
and support. and how these perceptions translate
into actual community resilience behaviors in
response to a crisis, such as expresses of mutual
support behaviors, like checking on your neighbors,
helping them, providing food, water, and shelter,
or crisis preparedness behaviors, like fortifying
their homes ahead of time, having fire resistance,
vegetation, et cetera. So the idea is can we
basically understand how essentially the social
psychological context of these communities, their
perceptions translate into behaviors in response
to a disaster. But the interesting part that
we are also injecting into this is actually thinking
about not only the kind of individual context,
but also thinking about the physical context
of where these communities are placed. So we
will be studying how the physical environment
acts as a moderator to the community crisis resilience
in order to change or to influence the behaviors
that we observe. So we'll be looking at, for
example, how does the community's access to shelters.
to roads, to let's say fire departments and other
physical infrastructure together with the actual
social components of the community can impact
these behaviors. And so at the end of the study,
what we are hoping to understand is can we identify
which communities are more likely to have a high
resilience versus low resilience in order to
inform policy and action? Can we understand how
some of these physical infrastructure components
might act as facilitators for resilience or inhibitors?
And again, inform investments and policies and
decisions about improving infrastructures in
communities that might lack them, et cetera.
One of the studies will focus on the immediate
community resilience behaviors. The second study
will take that same setup, but focus more on
the longer -term health impacts of this crisis
and the community response to them. And so I'm
going to ask Michalle, I guess, to chime in and
give her perspective as well. I would add that
the novelty of the study or the new element that
we're introducing is shining a light on the community
as a unit of analysis. Typically after disaster,
people are fending for themselves. They have
to cope with insurance company. They need to
decide if they're rebuilding or leaving. They
need to make many decisions and typically most
of these decisions and actions are taken individually.
Looking forward, it would be, it would make a
lot more sense for policymakers to look at the
community. as a unit of analysis because the
entire community is being affected. So if one
community has a strong sense of resilience and
is taking actions and another one is not, then
policymakers need to put more emphasis and more
efforts into the communities that do not have
the resources. And here in Los Angeles, we have
communities with varying degrees of generalized
resources, socioeconomic and other characteristics.
And what we're trying to do in this study is
examine different communities and learn from
those differences. So I'll give you an example.
community that I lived in before was one of those
communities that was prone to fires. Fires got
very close and we had to evacuate many times.
And after the second or third evacuation, which
is pretty rattling because When you evacuate,
you need to think of what am I taking with me
and what am I doing? It's very confusing, very
really disorienting. And so the community got
together and they decided to take action. So
first of all, they change all the vegetation
around the community, change it to vegetation
that is fire resistant. And second, they put
a new irrigation system. that kept the vegetation
from drying up. And the third thing was to bring
goats to eat the dry grass, which is really an
environmentally conscious way to deal with that.
I give that example to show that communities...
can take care of themselves and need to do that
because waiting for others to do it would probably
not bring the right consequences. And communities
that do not have the resources need the help
from policymakers to be able to do it. And I
think That's where the importance of our study
lies. I'm curious about the early findings from
your study. So are there additional findings
that you can share with our audience about the
community resilience? We are still in the process
of analysis, so we don't have statistical results
first. But I can tell you that from preliminary
interviews that we did with some participants,
there are different stages of decision making
for community residents. So the first one, if
you lost your home, are you planning to stay
or are you leaving? And if you plan to stay and
rebuild, you really need your community. And
what we've seen with a number of communities
that were the worst affected by the fire, is
that the immediate reaction is to create some
kind of communication system that includes all
the community residents. And that helps them
share information about how to deal with insurance,
how to deal with FEMA, how to find builders to
rebuild and so on. And there's a coming together
of the community that is extremely important
for building resilience. then there are communities
that were not directly affected, but like my
previous community, had to evacuate. And based
on that, they might take some action. And even
those who were not affected and did not have
to evacuate, I think all of us living in Los
Angeles were part of that experience. We were
all rattled by that and we all know that it's
coming. It's in the future. And the same can
be said about Florida and hurricanes and other
areas with flood. Once these major environmental
disasters happen, all communities wherever they
are need to take steps. to build resilience.
And again, that I think is the importance of
the study that we're undertaking. And which leads
me really, it's a nice transition to Bistra,
I'm curious about interdisciplinary aspect of
your study. And is this the future for figuring
out better recovery or best practices following
a natural disaster about the interdisciplinary
response? Yeah, for sure. I think interdisciplinary
work is the answer to many things. Many of the
big challenges that society faces today is having
a diversity of perspectives and diversity of
strengths and knowledge and methods and all of
this. So in this project, again, as Michalle said
earlier, we have people from social work, computer
scientists like myself, people from the business
school, students, from all of these fields. And
it's really important to bring these different
fields together in order to synergize strengths
in terms of how we think about understanding
these problems and solving them. So for example,
Michal and her colleagues are experts on understanding
the social aspect of things. And for example,
designing these social psychological measures.
And I bring a unique perspective from thinking
about predictive modeling, right? And so we are
leveraging the social work data that is being
collected for the study. So in fact, we'll be
collecting, we have been collecting and we'll
collect one more round of survey data under the
LA barometer study here at USC, which involves
taking survey responses from around 2000 residents
in the LA county where we're collecting data
about, you know, their community. their opinions
and beliefs about their communities, but also
their actual responses in the aftermath of the
LA wildfires that will help us identify how some
of the factors, such as the physical infrastructure
and the social infrastructure, can explain or
predict the crisis behaviors, right? And so combining
these strengths, understanding the social science
aspect, how to ask the right questions, how to
interpret the results with combining the methodological
analysis techniques from statistics, from computer
science and so on, I think uncovers possibilities
of greater knowledge and greater impact. Excellent.
And Michalle, would you care to also answer?
I'd like to mention our colleagues. This is a truly
a collaborative effort. And in addition to Bistra
and myself, we have Shinyi Wu, a professor with
a joint appointment in social work and in Viterbi.
We have Meghana Nallajerla who is our student
project director and brings expertise in community
reactions to traumatic events, among other things.
We have Kyla Thomas from Dornsife. We have Eric
Rice from CAIS and our school. We have
Shruti Natala from Viterbi, Junxian He from
Viterbi, Marcella Lopez from Viterbi. We have
Nick Walker-Craig from the School of Social Work.
And we have some international collaborators
because we're creating a platform that will help
us expand the study and based on the results
of this one go for additional grants and hopefully
larger projects and that includes Dr. William
Axel from the UN University in Canada. We have
Professor Gil Luria from the University of Haifa
in Israel and Professor Kojula Barzantny from
the business school in France. And that's our
team. And everyone contributes and collaborates
and makes this project what it is. Wow, thank
you so very much for sharing that. And Michalle,
I would also like to add that, you know, I know
that your work has been highlighted nationally
and internationally, and it's no surprise that
you were recently inducted into the American
Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare. And
you've indicated previously that environmental
justice is a natural evolution of your extensive
work as a management expert for global workforce.
diversity. Can you expand on this a little? We
know that the people who contribute the least
to climate change are the ones affected by it
the most. This applies to communities. Poor communities
typically reside close to polluting factories
or close to other environmental risk factors.
And poor countries are contributing less. to
pollution than rich countries. And so the issue
of environmental justice is not just the right
thing to do to create an environment that is
better for everyone, but it's also in the benefit
of anyone and everyone residing on this globe
that we all share because whatever is in the
air and in the waters and in the earth is really
shared by all of us. And if it's polluted in
one area, in the end, it will reach other areas
as well. And so this is something that we all
need to care about, think about, study and try
to do the best that we can to make it better.
Bistra, you've been engaged in AI research long
before the recent AI boom as the co -director
of the USC Center for AI in Society. And for
the benefit of our listeners, this research center
is a joint venture between the social work and
engineering schools at USC that was established
in 2016. I'd love it if you could please share
a little bit more about the center, the work
at the center and the area of environment, which
I believe is one of your research pillars.
Yeah, absolutely. Actually, the Center for AI and Society
is what brought me to USC. I was a faculty at
Georgia Tech, and then the center had just been
formed a year before that, and I was recruited
to consider it. And I was like, wow, there's
this group of faculty and students that are just
as passionate as I am about applying AI for social
impact. I finally found my people. And so I moved
to USC to be part of this initiative. And I've
been fortunate to co -direct the center for several
years now. The center's mission is really to
try to identify ways in which we can leverage
AI to help vulnerable communities. And it spans
three main pillars, work in homelessness, which
is a topic that's very relevant to Los Angeles,
but across the country, work in public health
and wellbeing, and then work in environment and
resilience. And so we have faculty working across
all three topics, but a lot of my work falls
under environment and resilience. I try to find
collaborations where we can identify real problems
and then figure out what can AI do for those
real problems in a useful way. And so a lot of
my work has focused on environmental protection.
So looking at where should we protect habitat
and then today in order to protect ecosystems
and their services to society for the future
under climate change. how we can use AI to curb
the second biggest threat to biodiversity after
habitat destruction and fragmentation, which
is actually poaching and trafficking. So the
purposeful killing of animals by humans for other
uses such as making furniture or traditional
medicine. And so how can we use AI to predict
where trafficking is going to happen, how we
can intervene. And then in terms of disaster
resilience, for example, I have worked very closely
with the Los Angeles Department of Water and
Power where they have this big uh, resilience
initiative. Actually LA was one of the 100 resilient
cities initiative that was like, uh, part of
the president's office, maybe like about 10 years
ago. And in during that time, LA created a very
ambitious resilience plan. And part of it is
earthquake resilience, which is committing to
fortify the LA water infrastructure with pipes
that can sustain earthquakes, such that the critical
customers like evacuation centers, schools, hospitals,
and so on our guarantee to have water in the
event of an earthquake. As you can imagine, LA
is humongous. It has thousands and thousands
of pipes and miles of pipes. And so we cannot
replace all of them. So they have to figure out
strategically which ones to replace. That's a
very hard decision optimization problem. which
is exactly in my wheelhouse. So I really got
very excited about partnering with them and helping
them translate that urban planning problem into
a computational optimization problem and then
designing methods that can help them find good
strategies of how to solve it. So these are just
some of the examples. We have other ongoing projects.
Wow, I am just so inspired and so overwhelmed
with such excellent information and I wish that
we could. continue this, but as we begin to wrap
up our dialogue today, I'd really like to give
you an opportunity, if there's anything else
that you would like our listeners to know about
environmental -related research or the importance
of interdisciplinary collaboration that was not
previously mentioned, I'd really love to give
you a moment to just kind of give our listeners
a summary of something else that you would like
them to know. We'll start with Michalle and then Bistra.
Yeah, I would like to highlight a few
things. From an academic perspective, interdisciplinary
work is the way to go. The problems of today
are so complex that no one, no one scientist,
no matter how brilliant, can study and find the
solutions by themselves. And so we have to collaborate
and we have to create ways to communicate across
the disciplinary silos. I think what Bistra and
our team are doing is exactly that and it's not
as easy as it may sound because From an academic
disciplinary perspective, we speak different
languages. And just recently we did a co -educational
session where we taught them what we know and
they taught us what they know. And so that's
number one. From a social policy perspective,
I think the community is a unit that needs more
attention. People live in a physical environment.
and they need to be able to collaborate with
their neighbors. The problem of modern life is
that we're all inside our computers and whatever
instruments that we have, and these cause isolation.
Now, Holly, you know how important it is to have
other people in your life and not be isolated.
Isolation is a grave risk to health and mental
health. And so we need to find ways to strengthen
communities, not only to sustain them during
crisis, but even for everyday health and mental
health. reasons. We have to shine a light on
communities. And the last thing I'll say that
is from a global perspective, environmental justice
is an issue that all of us need to care about
because it affects all of us, even if we feel
that currently it's not our problem, it's someone
else's problem. Eventually, it will be ours.
That's what I wanted to highlight.
Wow. Excellent. Thank you, Michalle. Bistra.
Totally agree with Michalle. Very inspiring what she just said.
I feel just as passionate about the need for doing this
work. And I'm really fortunate to be part of
this team. And again, I want to reiterate the
interdisciplinary aspect. And I feel fortunate
that at USC, I feel like we have the space and
the encouragement and the infrastructure that
supports this kind of interdisciplinary connections.
In fact, even the grant that is supporting this
work, the Zumberge grant, is focused exactly at
having co -investigators that span different
schools. I think that's really important and
kudos to USC for supporting it. At the same time,
it's also difficult and I guess want to emphasize
this need to also support the students of how
to learn about what it means to do interdisciplinary
work. Sometimes this is not sometimes, it is
not in our curriculum. And it's something that
is hard to learn. That's, I think, one thing
that for me is always like, I try to coach my
own students, but I always see that as a big
gap. How do we support students to learn to do
effective interdisciplinary work and not feel
disadvantaged or slowed down because of that,
but empowered? to do more, which is what I believe
interdisciplinary work keeps them, opens new
doors for new questions that nobody else has
looked at. And then as a last plug, I just want
to say that if the listeners are interested to
hear more about AI for social impact work done
across USC, You can consider coming to the annual
symposium that the Center for AI and Society
organizes called ShowCAIS. This year it's going
to be on March 27 on campus in Ginsburg Hall.
Thank you, Michalle and Bistra, for joining us
today for this inspiring and great discussion.
If you would like to learn more about our work
in sustainability and environmental justice,
please visit our website at dworakpeck.usc.edu.
If you are also interested in learning more about
the work at the USC Center for AI and Society,
visit cais.usc.edu. And finally, if you would
like to connect with our guests regarding their
work or want to support our transformative research
and programs, please email us at
listenuppeople.usc.edu.