NJIT Design Professor Providing Expertise, From NSF to Department of Homeland Security
At the intersection of academia and innovation, Assistant Professor Mathew Schwartz at NJIT's Hillier College of Architecture and Design is involved in a diverse set of projects, from spearheading a National Science Foundation initiative to fortify America's infrastructure to collaborating on a national defense project tackling security threats.
Schwartz is co-principal investigator in an NSF Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) project that seeks to stimulate human-centered fundamental and transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure.
He’s also involved in a national defense project with Rutgers University and Northeastern University’s Soft Target Engineering to Neutralize the Threat Reality (SENTRY) Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence.
Strengthening America’s infrastructure
In the NSF SAI project titled, “Modeling Equitable and Accessible Public Spaces,” Schwartz and his team are trying to study how people make decisions when they're moving in environments based on different things that are in them, such as how people who have impairments or are temporarily encumbered navigate around objects and people. It also considers how non-disabled people navigate around people who are disabled or encumbered, and how announcements and signs change the way people travel through transportation hubs.
“One example is like a chair, so let's say you're walking down the hallway, you open the door to enter the hallway, and there's a door at the end of the hallway, there's a chair in the middle of the hallway, do you decide to go to the left of the chair?” Schwartz explained. “Or the right of the chair? How do you get past the chair? And how far away from the chair do you walk? And what if we then put a person in the chair? Does that change your decision-making process? Do you walk in front of the person in the chair? Or would you now start turning behind the person in the chair? And then we want to know what happens if you change the chair with a wheelchair.”
Schwartz is working with a motion capture system for game development to record people with disabilities so that they can use them as virtual characters in their studies.
“So when you're walking, or you're leaving a building, for example in a crowded football stadium or transportation hub like a train station, and you're walking out if someone is using a wheelchair, or they're using a cane, how do you change your walking behavior, based on them being in there?” He asked. “Do you walk slower? Do you try to walk faster to get around them? When you make a decision to go around them?”
“We want to model people's behavior based on someone else in the room, someone else's decision-making,” he said.
The projects will work on getting empirical data about how people make these decisions in virtual reality, and then apply those like-decision behaviors to virtual fake agents moving in the environment. With enough repetitions, they will build a body of evidence to influence building design.
National defense project
In the project Schwartz is working with Northeastern University and Rutgers University titled “Real-Time Crowd and Attacker Forecasting for Risk Assessment and Threat Mitigation”, his part of the group is scanning buildings with Lidar and converting to BIM models, then running crowd simulation on those 3D models to predict how crowds would react during situations like a terrorist attack or school shootings.
He’s evaluating building features and recording human metrics. For example, understanding what parts and aspects of an environment can impact a person's ability to make a decision on which way to evacuate.
In the future, he plans to use NVIDIA Omniverse in his research, as he’s already using it to help architects, interior designers and industrial designers address the challenge of accessibility that they all must consider before constructing a space or product. NVIDIA Omniverse provides realistic real-time ray tracing, and provides a platform to build digital twins. Schwartz and collaborators are using this platform in combination with their previous research on digital twins, which has ranged from linking digital twins to products with material science and path planning within the environment for accessibility and interior layouts for spatial distancing.
“The existing common versions of plans are whether you shelter in place, or whether you evacuate. If there’s a fire, leave. If there's a shooter, there's instructions like close the door, lock the door or stand in the corner,” said Schwartz. “So we're asking, are those always the best tools and are there other things that we could do or should do, given certain information about the event.
“If we can simulate in real time, someone says, ‘There's a shooter right here!’ We have a simulation framework in 3D of the model of the building, and it's giving you feedback of what the likely outcome will be and tell you the best route for exiting. It’s real time feedback on these environments.”
These are multidisciplinary projects, as Schwartz notes: “We’re working with psychology, in order to understand human behavior,” he added. “We’re working with computer science students to help implement and develop these simulation frameworks. We do work with digital design because we're taking the tools from digital design like motion capture.
“We're working with interior design because it's about how we build the environment, in signage, and things like that change the environment,” he added. “And we're doing industrial design research on how to design products and make things that will change people's decisions within the environment. So it's a broad scope and multiple disciplines interacting and engaging with all different fields."
