A Purdue research team led by Panagiota Karava, Professor of Civil Engineering, has been awarded a $1.6M grant from the National Science Foundation to fund their project "SCC-IRG Track1: Smart energy assistants for affordable housing communities."

The goal of the project is to realize a new paradigm for smart energy assistants that monitor energy use and energy needs and create customized community-based interventions that have the largest potential to mitigate energy-related disparities experienced by low to moderate income households. To achieve this goal, this project will bring together community residents and diverse stakeholders (state and regional housing authorities, utility service providers, municipal administrations, community action groups, housing developers/landlords) to co-design an interactive cross-platform for smart energy assistants that: 1) Collect and organize community sociotechnical data and create a community-shared knowledge platform; 2) Integrate a counterfactual engine developed using a theory-informed, hierarchical Bayesian approach that reveals causal links between socioeconomic disparities and system determinants; 3) Generate customized policies for interventions that are tailored to the unique needs of each community; 4) Leverage an AI layer empowered by Large Language Models (LLMs) to interface with residents and stakeholders and the developed tools and databases.