ASU Scholarship Showcase

Cities in the Global South face rapid urbanization challenges and often suffer an acute lack of infrastructure and governance capacities. Smart Cities Mission, in India, launched in 2015, aims to offer a novel approach for urban renewal of 100 cities following an area‐based development approach, where the use of ICT and digital technologies is particularly emphasized. This article presents a critical review of the design and implementation framework of this new urban renewal program across selected case‐study cities. The article examines the claims of the so‐called “smart cities” against actual urban transformation on‐ground and evaluates how “inclusive” and “sustainable” these developments are. We quantify the scale and coverage of the smart city urban renewal projects in the cities to highlight who the program includes and excludes. The article also presents a statistical analysis of the sectoral focus and budgetary allocations of the projects under the Smart Cities Mission to find an inherent bias in these smart city initiatives in terms of which types of development they promote and the ones it ignores. The findings indicate that a predominant emphasis on digital urban renewal of selected precincts and enclaves, branded as “smart cities,” leads to deepening social polarization and gentrification. The article offers crucial urban planning lessons for designing ICT‐driven urban renewal projects, while addressing critical questions around inclusion and sustainability in smart city ventures.`

Attitudes and habits are extremely resistant to change, but a disruption of the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to bring long-term, massive societal changes. During the pandemic, people are being compelled to experience new ways of interacting, working, learning, shopping, traveling, and eating meals. Going forward, a critical question is whether these experiences will result in changed behaviors and preferences in the long term. This paper presents initial findings on the likelihood of long-term changes in telework, daily travel, restaurant patronage, and air travel based on survey data collected from adults in the United States in Spring 2020. These data suggest that a sizable fraction of the increase in telework and decreases in both business air travel and restaurant patronage are likely here to stay. As for daily travel modes, public transit may not fully recover its pre-pandemic ridership levels, but many of our respondents are planning to bike and walk more than they used to. These data reflect the responses of a sample that is higher income and more highly educated than the US population. The response of these particular groups to the COVID-19 pandemic is perhaps especially important to understand, however, because their consumption patterns give them a large influence on many sectors of the economy.

Extreme events, a type of collective behavior in complex networked dynamical systems, often can have catastrophic consequences. To develop effective strategies to control extreme events is of fundamental importance and practical interest. Utilizing transportation dynamics on complex networks as a prototypical setting, we find that making the network “mobile” can effectively suppress extreme events. A striking, resonance-like phenomenon is uncovered, where an optimal degree of mobility exists for which the probability of extreme events is minimized. We derive an analytic theory to understand the mechanism of control at a detailed and quantitative level, and validate the theory numerically. Implications of our finding to current areas such as cybersecurity are discussed.

Deposits of dark material appear on Vesta’s surface as features of relatively low-albedo in the visible wavelength range of Dawn’s camera and spectrometer. Mixed with the regolith and partially excavated by younger impacts, the material is exposed as individual layered outcrops in crater walls or ejecta patches, having been uncovered and broken up by the impact. Dark fans on crater walls and dark deposits on crater floors are the result of gravity-driven mass wasting triggered by steep slopes and impact seismicity. The fact that dark material is mixed with impact ejecta indicates that it has been processed together with the ejected material. Some small craters display continuous dark ejecta similar to lunar dark-halo impact craters, indicating that the impact excavated the material from beneath a higher-albedo surface. The asymmetric distribution of dark material in impact craters and ejecta suggests non-continuous distribution in the local subsurface. Some positive-relief dark edifices appear to be impact-sculpted hills with dark material distributed over the hill slopes.

Dark features inside and outside of craters are in some places arranged as linear outcrops along scarps or as dark streaks perpendicular to the local topography. The spectral characteristics of the dark material resemble that of Vesta’s regolith. Dark material is distributed unevenly across Vesta’s surface with clusters of all types of dark material exposures. On a local scale, some craters expose or are associated with dark material, while others in the immediate vicinity do not show evidence for dark material. While the variety of surface exposures of dark material and their different geological correlations with surface features, as well as their uneven distribution, indicate a globally inhomogeneous distribution in the subsurface, the dark material seems to be correlated with the rim and ejecta of the older Veneneia south polar basin structure. The origin of the dark material is still being debated, however, the geological analysis suggests that it is exogenic, from carbon-rich low-velocity impactors, rather than endogenic, from freshly exposed mafic material or melt, exposed or created by impacts.

The relation between flux and fluctuation is fundamental to complex physical systems that support and transport flows. A recently obtained law predicts monotonous enhancement of fluctuation as the average flux is increased, which in principle is valid but only for large systems. For realistic complex systems of small sizes, this law breaks down when both the average flux and fluctuation become large. Here we demonstrate the failure of this law in small systems using real data and model complex networked systems, derive analytically a modified flux-fluctuation law, and validate it through computations of a large number of complex networked systems. Our law is more general in that its predictions agree with numerics and it reduces naturally to the previous law in the limit of large system size, leading to new insights into the flow dynamics in small-size complex systems with significant implications for the statistical and scaling behaviors of small systems, a topic of great recent interest.

Evolutionary dynamical models for cyclic competitions of three species (e.g., rock, paper, and scissors, or RPS) provide a paradigm, at the microscopic level of individual interactions, to address many issues in coexistence and biodiversity. Real ecosystems often involve competitions among more than three species. By extending the RPS game model to five (rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock, or RPSLS) mobile species, we uncover a fundamental type of mesoscopic interactions among subgroups of species. In particular, competitions at the microscopic level lead to the emergence of various local groups in different regions of the space, each involving three species. It is the interactions among the groups that fundamentally determine how many species can coexist. In fact, as the mobility is increased from zero, two transitions can occur: one from a five- to a three-species coexistence state and another from the latter to a uniform, single-species state. We develop a mean-field theory to show that, in order to understand the first transition, group interactions at the mesoscopic scale must be taken into account. Our findings suggest, more broadly, the importance of mesoscopic interactions in coexistence of great many species.

Dynamical systems based on the minority game (MG) have been a paradigm for gaining significant insights into a variety of social and biological behaviors. Recently, a grouping phenomenon has been unveiled in MG systems of multiple resources (strategies) in which the strategies spontaneously break into an even number of groups, each exhibiting an identical oscillation pattern in the attendance of game players. Here we report our finding of spontaneous breakup of resources into three groups, each exhibiting period-three oscillations. An analysis is developed to understand the emergence of the striking phenomenon of triple grouping and period-three oscillations. In the presence of random disturbances, the triple-group/period-three state becomes transient, and we obtain explicit formula for the average transient lifetime using two methods of approximation. Our finding indicates that, period-three oscillation, regarded as one of the most fundamental behaviors in smooth nonlinear dynamical systems, can also occur in much more complex, evolutionary-game dynamical systems. Our result also provides a plausible insight for the occurrence of triple grouping observed, for example, in the U.S. housing market.

Understanding the dynamics of human movements is key to issues of significant current interest such as behavioral prediction, recommendation, and control of epidemic spreading. We collect and analyze big data sets of human movements in both cyberspace (through browsing of websites) and physical space (through mobile towers) and find a superlinear scaling relation between the mean frequency of visit〈f〉and its fluctuation σ : σ ∼〈f⟩^β with β ≈ 1.2. The probability distribution of the visiting frequency is found to be a stretched exponential function. We develop a model incorporating two essential ingredients, preferential return and exploration, and show that these are necessary for generating the scaling relation extracted from real data. A striking finding is that human movements in cyberspace and physical space are strongly correlated, indicating a distinctive behavioral identifying characteristic and implying that the behaviors in one space can be used to predict those in the other.

We produced a geologic map of the Av-9 Numisia quadrangle of asteroid Vesta using Dawn spacecraft data to serve as a tool to understand the geologic relations of surface features in this region. These features include the plateau Vestalia Terra, a hill named Brumalia Tholus, and an unusual “dark ribbon” material crossing the majority of the map area. Stratigraphic relations suggest that Vestalia Terra is one of the oldest features on Vesta, despite a model crater age date similar to that of much of the surface of the asteroid. Cornelia, Numisia and Drusilla craters reveal bright and dark material in their walls, and both Cornelia and Numisia have smooth and pitted terrains on their floors suggestive of the release of volatiles during or shortly after the impacts that formed these craters. Cornelia, Fabia and Teia craters have extensive bright ejecta lobes. While diogenitic material has been identified in association with the bright Teia and Fabia ejecta, hydroxyl has been detected in the dark material within Cornelia, Numisia and Drusilla. Three large pit crater chains appear in the map area, with an orientation similar to the equatorial troughs that cut the majority of Vesta. Analysis of these features has led to several interpretations of the geological history of the region. Vestalia Terra appears to be mechanically stronger than the rest of Vesta. Brumalia Tholus may be the surface representation of a dike-fed laccolith. The dark ribbon feature is proposed to represent a long-runout ejecta flow from Drusilla crater.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the Geologic Mapping of Vesta Special Issue/Section of Icarus, which includes several papers containing geologic maps of the surface of Vesta made to support data analysis conducted by the Dawn Science Team during the Vesta Encounter (July 2011–September 2012). In this paper we briefly discuss pre-Dawn knowledge of Vesta, provide the goals of our geologic mapping campaign, discuss the methodologies and materials used for geologic mapping, review the global geologic context of Vesta, discuss the challenges of mapping the geology of Vesta as a small airless body, and describe the content of the papers in this Special Issue/Section. We conclude with a discussion of lessons learned from our quadrangle-based mapping effort and provide recommendations for conducting mapping campaigns as part of planetary spacecraft nominal missions.