Urban Intelligence & Integrity Lab [URBiiLAB]
Elevate Energy Conservation, Human Health, and Equity for Sustainable Cities
"Integrity is the essence of everything successful."
–Richard Buckminster Fuller
As cities continue to expand, the interplay between multifaceted urban systems increases exponentially, resulting in urban complexities and associated issues such as climate change, air pollution, and socio-economic-environmental disparities. The Urban Intelligence and Integrity Lab (URBiiLAB), initiated by Mehdi Ashayeri, Ph.D., aims to facilitate the understanding of these complexities and support sustainability goals for cities, communities, and societies. Located within the School of Architecture at Southern Illinois University (SIU) in Carbondale, URBiiLAB is a multidisciplinary research laboratory founded on the philosophies of Richard Buckminster Fuller. His emphasis on integrity, equity, and systems theory as the foundation for sustainability motivates the lab to "build a new model to make the old one obsolete" in pursuit of its mission. URBiiLAB envisions a world where design and planning prioritize the needs of people at every scale. Our goal is to explore and innovate human-centric scenarios that enhance sustainability in the built environment, with a particular focus on energy conservation, decarbonization, human health, and equity. We strive towards the resilience goals of cities, working towards a future where all urban areas are livable, sustainable, and just. To achieve this, our lab develops and deploys user-friendly, interactive, integrated, and intelligent performance computing tools that utilize emerging technologies and techniques, such as big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, physics-based machine learning, digital media, NLP, generative systems, digital twins, and Sensing. These capacities facilitate the capture and exploration of real-world dynamics through proposed hybrid frameworks, methods, and tools. We are committed to advancing the state-of-the-art in our field and contributing to the betterment of urban communities worldwide.
