Engineered pavements cover a large fraction of cities and offer significant potential for urban heat island mitigation. Though rapidly increasing research efforts have been devoted to the study of pavement materials, thermal interactions between buildings and the ambient environment are mostly neglected. In this study, numerical models featuring a realistic representation of building-environment thermal interactions, were applied to quantify the effect of pavements on the urban thermal environment at multiple scales. It was found that performance of pavements inside the canyon was largely determined by the canyon geometry. In a high-density residential area, modifying pavements had insignificant effect on the wall temperature and building energy consumption. At a regional scale, various pavement types were also found to have a limited cooling effect on land surface temperature and 2-m air temperature for metropolitan Phoenix. In the context of global climate change, the effect of pavement was evaluated in terms of the equivalent CO2 emission. Equivalent CO2 emission offset by reflective pavements in urban canyons was only about 13.9e46.6% of that without building canopies, depending on the canyon geometry. This study revealed the importance of building-environment thermal interactions in determining thermal conditions inside the urban canopy.

The future of driving is largely headed towards autonomous vehicles, and this is clear with companies such as Tesla, Waymo, and even tech giant Apple. Many professionals predict that autonomous vehicles will likely be commercially available and legal to use in some places by the late 2020s [15]. There are some benefits to the rapid development of autonomous vehicle controllers, such as more independence for those who can’t drive due to impairments, the potential for reduced traffic, as well as possibly decreasing the number of accidents. Though these are promising prospects, there are ethical concerns regarding the implementation of such technology. The goal of this thesis is to provide an introductory literature review that discusses the history of autonomous vehicles, different levels of autonomy, ethical considerations in autonomous systems, and prior work on characterizing human driving behaviors and implementing these behaviors with autonomous vehicle controllers. Finally, recommendations are proposed for data collection on human driving behaviors in an ongoing NSF-funded project at Arizona State University, “Embodiment of Human Values Profiles in Autonomous Vehicles via Psychomimetic Controller Design.”