How can cities be made more resilient to increasingly extreme weather events? With innovative new technologies – for example, for flood forecasting or route planning in disaster situations. In January, Prof. Markus Kraft (Cambridge University) spoke about a project that aims to make this possible as part of the “Future Lectures” series at the Hamburg University of Technology.
Rethinking the future: The World Avatar
Kraft's “World Avatar” is a digital twin of the real world that networks data and models complex relationships. This makes it possible to test a wide range of scenarios in the real world using the avatar, enabling proactive disaster planning.
In his presentation to an audience of almost 200 guests, Kraft highlighted the avatar's ability to predict the effects of flood scenarios. To do this, it combines data from the water, energy and telecommunications industries.
Proactive response to flooding
“The World Avatar closes gaps between individual data sets, enabling dynamic impact analyses that can determine how outages would spread across networks,” explained Kraft.
Beyond predicting the effects, the ‘Avatar’ supports a holistic response to disasters: for example, route plans can be optimized to avoid flooded urban areas. It can also be used to assess which infrastructures would remain accessible in the event of flooding.
The effects of rising sea levels are also monitored and analyzed by the “World Avatar”: “We assess the economic and cultural impacts and thus improve the climate resilience of cities in the long term,” said Kraft.
About the speaker
Prof. Markus Kraft conducts research on data-driven modeling and machine learning at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology and as a Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, England. Since January 2025, he has also been a Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.
About the “Future Lectures” series
In the public “Future Lectures”, researchers present their forward-looking research topics and ideas. The aim is to explain the challenges that society and research will face, as well as the positive changes that research could bring about in society.
The recordings of all previous “Future Lectures” can be found here:
https://www.tuhh.de/tuhh/forschung-und-transfer/future-lectures
