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 become a threat to productivity and health of the 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. With Cooling Singapore 2.0, we suggest a Digital Urban Climate Twin, or DUCT. The DUCT is a federation of models, data and computing resources that allows the simulation of urban climate states. High performance computing has an important role to help planning for a balanced urban climate system.

Date: 3 September 2020

Time: 2:00pm - 3:00pm (Singapore Time / UTC+8)

The Zoom Room will be open 10 minutes before the webinar commences. Limited spaces available!

Programme:

2:00pm - 3:00pm: Presentation on Future Cool Singapore by Professor Gerhard Schmitt and Dr Heiko Aydt

Speaker's Profile:

Professor Gerhard Schmitt, Professor of Information Architecture, ETH Zurich and Founding Director of Singapore-ETH Centre

Prof. Gerhard Schmitt is professor of Information Architecture at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) and founding director of the Singapore-ETH Centre. The centre in Singapore was established in 2010 by ETH Zurich and Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF), as part of the NRF’s CREATE campus.

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, Principal Investigator and Senior Researcher of Cooling Singapore

Dr Heiko AYDT is a computational scientist with expertise in modelling and simulation as well as computer science with focus on software engineering of distributed systems. He joined ETH Zurich and the Singapore-ETH Centre in 2015. 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 his role as Principal Investigator and Senior Researcher of the Cooling Singapore 1.5 project he conceptualised the idea of a Digital Urban Climate Twin - heavily influenced by his earlier work on symbiotic simulation. 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