Subhrajit Guhathakurta: Hurricanes, Flooding, and Displacement — AI-Accelerated Flood Risk Mapping and Human Relocation Dynamics | City & Regional Planning Lecture
Hydrodynamic models are essential for understanding flood processes, but their computational demands limit their use for updating flood risk during rapidly evolving storm conditions. Subhrajit “Subhro” Guhathakurta presents an alternative approach that combines crowdsourced information with a Bayesian Neural Network (BNN) to generate full-field, near-real-time flood risk maps with modest computational requirements.
This approach is validated in a testbed in Pinellas County, Florida, through a series of fixed cameras that capture and transmit images at 15-minute intervals. In the second part of the talk, Guhathakurta discusses the consequences of flooding from natural hazards on people’s intention to relocate and, if they do, their destination choices using mobile GPS-based mobility data. Finally, he discusses the generalizability of these findings and their impacts on housing markets.
About the Speaker
Subhrajit “Subhro” Guhathakurta is the Harry West Chair Professor at Georgia Tech’s School of City and Regional Planning, where he directs the Center for Urban Resilience and Analytics and the Urban Analytics master’s program. Formerly the school’s chair, he also held leadership and faculty roles at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability and School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning. Guhathakurta has published extensively on urban heat, energy systems, sustainable development, active transportation, and geospatial technologies. His editorial contributions include co-editing the Journal of Planning Education and Research and serving as associate editor for the Journal of the American Planning Association. He is a recipient of the Chester Rapkin Award and the Mercator Professorship. He has held visiting appointments in the UK, Germany, India, Australia, Sweden, and China, and continues to work with several scholars worldwide.
This lecture is part of the Department of City & Regional Planning’s fall lecture series.
If you require accommodations to fully participate in this event, please contact dcrpadmin@berkeley.edu.