Seismic Soundoff

Yunyue Elita Li discusses her upcoming South & East Asia Honorary Lecture, "Listening to Singapore: Harvesting urban noise for space, water, and hazard mitigation." Today, more than half of the world's population lives in urban areas with a projected growth of over two-thirds in 2050. The city-state of Singapore faces the challenges of supporting a sustainable urban system with a growing population in a limited land, sea, and air space. The only direction to develop is toward the subsurface. In this conversation with host Andrew Geary, Elita shares how she designed novel signal processing techniques that turn urban hum into rich information about the urban system, both above and below the surface. She also highlights newly-developed fiber sensing technology using existing dark fiber infrastructure that has the potential to enable a million-sensor system underneath each major city around the globe. Elita also outlines what public officials, citizens, and engineers should understand about geophysics to suppo