Dr. Delmelle is Using Engineering To Solve the World's Problems

The spread of disease has always plagued mankind. Great epidemics have ended millions of lives in the past, making the study of such diseases all the more important. But new problems also plague us as we grow and expand in the world. Overpopulation in many regions of the world has led to transportation challenges and complicated the optimal siting of facilities or the delivery of services such as hospitals and police. Then there are smaller problems in the world, such as how useful the new bike-sharing system in Charlotte actually is. All of these seem so unrelated, but Dr. Eric Delmelle sees the connection: geography. And, using engineering techniques, he and his team plan to help solve all of these problems, one by one.

When it comes to epidemiology, Delmelle's interests are in the modeling of vector-based diseases, specifically dengue fever, which is spread by mosquitos: "These diseases have a particular spatial and temporal signature” ," Delmelle noted.  "These diseases create geographical patterns and clusters in specific areas, which is critical for prevention purposes" says Delmelle. All of this mass of data comes from the Health Ministry of Columbia, specifically for the city of Cali. "It is a large, dynamicmetropolitan area that has seen a lot of migrants moving in with poor sanitation infrastructure, which makes it a particularly interesting environment," he noted.

 Figure 1 displays dengue fever cases in 2010, which was considered an outbreak in dengue fever. Spatial and space-time smoothing techniques are used to extract meaningful patterns of dengue intensity.

Dengue fever cases in the city of Cali, Colombia (a), spatial patterns in (b) and space-time patterns in (c).

The purpose of this research is to better understand the spatial patterns of infectious disease and predict where they will reemerge. Though we may not see dengue fever as a critical problem in the United States, other infectious diseases are at alarming levels, such as West Nile Virus. With a changing climate, the risk of similar diseases only goes up, especially in the southern states, such as Florida. Along those lines, Delmelle also collaborates with Dr. Eastin, an associate professor of meteorology in the Geography and Earth Sciences Department in order to help predict dengue fever outbreaks in the city of Cali. For instance, weather forecasts may help predict accurate counts of dengue fever, helping to increase awareness among population of an imminent risk. Using an autoregressive model, the team predicted a significantly high number of dengue cases in 2013. By mid-February 2013, the city of Cali had reported 1339 cases, with three individuals dying of the disease.

Another Diagram Explaining the Space-Time patterns of the dengue fever

This research stream is not just for research sake. Delmelle and his team take all of their findings back to the individuals they have worked with in Columbia. "We have the chance to visit numerous times on-site, receive critical feedback from local authorities on the techniques we use and to validate our results." Establishing a connection with local decision makers is a very important part of the process to Delmelle. "We do not tell people what they should do, but we do inform them on the risks posed by infectious diseases. It's important to see that the results of our models can be beneficial to the local communities for prevention purposes. ”

Vector born illnesses are not the only research problem Delmelle is interested in. Using similar spatial modeling techniques, Delmelle also tackles general problems in urban areas."Several problems we study are of geographic nature" Delmelle tells me. By utilizing engineering techniques –such as operations research -, Delmelle and his team look to optimize particular problems. In the case of infectious diseases, the optimal space-time allocation of spraying efforts may help reduce the magnitude of the infection.

Yet, the same techniques can be used for other, more basic problems. Delmelle brings his research approaches to look at local issues, helping the Charlotte-Mecklenburg region with multiple dilemmas. One such major issue is the question of where to site schools in a city that is only growing in population, but not evenly across the county. By attacking the problem as a quantitative optimization problem -- a number problem -- Delmelle and his team are able to utilize data to find the most optimal solution. "We were able to analyze data up to 2008 and predict where schools should be closed in the region and we've been fairly accurate," says Delmelle. By assigning an optimization value to every school, the team was able to predict, for the most part, which schools would be closing and where new ones should be built. His team was also able to help recommend adding more modular classrooms to help meet the increasing school demand, to keep classroom size stable while the new schools are built.

A Graphic Depicting the Work Delmelle Has Done to Help Place Schools in the Best Locations

A similar approach was conducted to identify bus stops redundancy in Charlotte. Delmelle collaborated with the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) helping to tackle where the best locations for each bus stop would be, using the optimization of  individual accessibility and low operating costs as their main objectives. "The city took great care to listen to our research," Delmelle said. Currently, Delmelle and his students are also evaluating accessibility to public parks with Mecklenburg County by different modes of transportation (car, public transit, biking, walking). These results will inform park decision makers on where to locate new parks and which ones are in immediate need to upgrading its amenities.  The next venture into help the Queen City would be to help optimize the new bike racks the city has placed. "We just received some of the data and it's all fairly new, so now we can run simulations to see where the best new places to expand would be," says Delmelle, rather excited by the problem.

Virtual Communities Research at UNC Charlotte

I walked into Associate Professor of Psychology Anita Blanchard’s office at the Unviersity of North Carolina at Charlotte and immediately felt like I was talking to an old friend. She was warm, welcoming, and eager to talk with me about her research on virtual communities.

Blanchard's research includes the interaction and community functions of professional and virtual communities. In other words, Blanchard studies how members of these online "communities" interact, develop groups, socialize in these groups, and the technological features that contribute to the success and feelings among the group and group members. Blanchard also seeks to understand the role of identity in these groups and organizations for group functionality.

After analyzing and researching Blanchard's research I realized I'm pretty social online. I knew I was active but I never stopped to consider if I myself am an active community member in my online groups of interaction. So I began to analyze my own personal online activity.

Monday nights after the Bachelor (my guilty pleasure) I am online reading about what other viewers of the show think; Tuesdays are my Parenthood nights where I am actively engaging in discussion about my life as a parent and homemaker;  Wednesday I’m usually on Pinterest looking for new recipes to try during the week to please my husband’s picky appetite; Thursdays I’m usually scoping out the Carolina Parent magazine blogs for weekend adventures with the kids; Fridays I’m scoping out where my kids can eat free, and then religiously throughout the week I’m checking my Twitter feed and Facebook page. This doesn’t take into consideration my comments on parenting.com, my Moodle account here at school, or my church’s website.

So what do my online habits say about me besides the fact that I spend WAY too much time online socializing? Well, according to Blanchard’s research, I fit right into a couple virtual communities. Included in these are my Facebook community of high school friends where I post regularly about our upcoming class reunion and engage often about our small town of Salisbury, North Carolina; my Linked In account, where I interact on a professional level about social media, technology, and the aspects of being a professional communicator; my meet up account that I joined when I moved to the Huntersville area to interact with other moms who also have two small children; my Twitter community, where we share blogs we've recently read and intellectual conversation;  and my Google+ community group of colleagues and friends from UNC, my alma mater. When I left her office I was quite comforted knowing that I have a whole forum of people who are interested in similar things.

The term "virtual community" refers to several different types of computer-mediated communication groups on platforms such as Etsy, Facebook, newsgroups, and Google plus. Essentially, any online group we interact with on a regular basis has the potential to become a “community." It is important to note that while virtual groups can be communities not all virtual groups are virtual communities. For instance my husband and I started a meet up account in Chapel Hill when we lived there. We had 30 people in our virtual group however we never interacted online or formed the social aspects of a community. While our accounts existed on this platform the participation and interaction in our group didn't form the structure of a community.

According to Blanchard’s research people need to identify where virtual communities exist on a virtual platform. Facebook itself is the platform; my individual page can become my community. But, in order to identify as a community Blanchard refers to the argument of another researcher in the field named Quentin Jones regarding "virtual communities" and "virtual settlements" and states: “We can understand virtual communities by understanding the artifacts of its virtual settlement: its postings, structure and content.”

Blanchard cites Jones (1997) proposal that a virtual settlement exists when there are:
A.) a minimal level of interactivity
B.) public interactions in public space
C.) a variety of communicators
D.) there is a minimal level of sustained membership over a period of time

A "virtual settlement'?

Additionally, Jones adds that even though virtual communities and virtual settlements are conceptually different and separate (a virtual settlement is the place in cyberspace where the interaction happens; the virtual community is the people interacting), if someone finds a virtual settlement, then they have found a virtual community. The feelings and social relationships that are developed within a virtual settlement help to distinguish a "virtual community" from a "virtual group." For instance Salisbury, North Carolina was my town (settlement) and my neighborhood of Summerfield, with my friends and neighbors, was my community within that settlement.

Blanchard defines the psychological state virtual communities produce as "a sense of community" and delves deeper than Jones did, stating that a “sense of community is a key element in establishing a virtual community." Therefore, Blanchard poses that while virtual settlements are necessary for virtual communities they may not be sufficient for continuing to foster a virtual community.

Blanchard focuses her research on answering a specific question: Should blogs be considered virtual communities too and how can we analyze these blogs? Blanchard identifies these characteristics by posing why virtual communities are important, what exactly the characteristics of a virtual community entail, and how blogs fit into these definitions.

According to Blanchard, virtual communities are important for social reasons. Blanchard has looked at blogs ranging from those aimed at multisport athletes, cat lover groups, parenting groups, medical health groups, and several blogs in between. She used her personal experience in her research -- Blanchard found groups she identified with at and started there.

When social media first took off, many social activists argued that this platform of communication would replace face-to-face relationships because people would isolate themselves from their neighbors. In opposition to those claims, Blanchard found those who would argue virtual communities have the added potential to connect people with similar interests from around the world. Blanchard has also found that virtual communities can increase involvement in person-to-person activism as well. Blanchard’s research highlights several positive social effects of virtual communities and the participation they evoke.

Deeper than the study of social relationships, Blanchard also explores the emotional connection virtual communities foster. One of my favorite blogs 65 red roses really captures this notion that an emotional connection to a blog can be very rewarding.

I don’t have cystic fibrosis and I didn’t know anyone with the disease but I felt an emotional connection to the girl in this blog because she was my age at the time; she showed us how real the disease was, and what it felt like to lose a battle. I often referred back to blog posts on this blog when I lost my grandfather to cancer because I was able to connect to others who knew the pain of the loss from a disease. Blanchard explores the notion of a virtual emotional connection by studying how participants experience feelings within the community and their emotional attachment to that community.

“When participants experience feelings of community, they are more likely to increase or maintain their participation in the virtual communities,” Blanchard writes.

“Additionally, the lack of this feeling among participants may be the key to explaining the frequent demise of many content management community groups,” Blanchard adds. “A virtual community, therefore, is more likely to be self-sustaining than a regular virtual group, and sustainability is a goal important to both for the sponsors and the participants of any particular virtual group." Blanchard continues by stating the importance of virtual communities is both practical and social.

The most exciting thing about Blanchard's research is the growing prevalence of the internet and how we receive our information. I think my newest addiction is Pinterest because it introduces me to so many wonderful ideas, recipes, and crafts I would have never thought to explore. What connects you to an online community? What online communities are you actively involved in? What keeps you actively involved in these communities?

(Moderator's Note: Dr. Blanchard will be contributing her own post to this blog about her research activity in the near future. -- JH)

What IS Research?

Welcome to UNC Charlotte’s research communications blog! We’re just starting, and that means that the entries here are, well… a work in progress. As active readers on the web, we have noticed that blogs are like children, puppies and scientific research programs – they need to develop naturally and a little informally. Like a lab proceedure that needs to react to incoming data, sometimes blog projects fail if you expect them to follow a rigid plan. In other words, this is an experiment with no expected outcome except, um… to show you something cool that none of us knew about before.


Sometimes, discovery is messy.


I’m Jim Hathaway, and I’m a long-time science writer who happens to direct research communication at UNC Charlotte. You will be hearing from me from time to time on this blog, but, with any luck, you will be hearing more from people who are even deeper in the trenches of science and technology at UNC Charlotte than I am. Among these others, you will definitely be reading posts from Christina Kaemmerlen and Brent Metcalfe, student reporters who work in my office, ferreting out science and technology stories on campus. They are writers, but they are also simultaneously engaged in university research in their academic lives, which makes their voices probably more interesting than mine.

Black-footed ferrets, an endangered species. Brent and Christina are not endangered. Photo courtesy of the National Science Foundation.

Beyond the three of us, we also hope to have regular guest blogs from UNC Charlotte faculty and other students who are actively engaged in their fields. As a university, we are already blessed with several active bloggers (see the blog roll on this page) and there is certainly room for more. (Yes, UNC Charlotte community, this is an invitation! -- If you are a faculty or graduate student researcher and want to show off  your work, email me at jbhathaw@uncc.edu and we will get you on the schedule!)

Does this all sound too-too open, messy and freeform? Well, in case you’ve never thought about it this way, that’s exactly what university research really is: the active, on-going, opportunistic, creative and chaotic process of hunting new knowledge, whatever and wherever that might be. Frankly, the very nature of university research often disturbs people who don’t understand the process and expect something more staid and business-like. Reseach is exploration and no real researcher can tell you in advance exactly what they are going to find. One of our goals here is to help you experience and understand the sometimes wild and quirky world of academic research, in the hope that you will also see its glories and then be interested and, perhaps, as excited as we are.

If you pay attention to politics or editorial comments, you’ve heard the criticism: “Why are university researchers studying (insert peculiar/obscure/unintelligible topic here) and why should my tax dollars be supporting it?” This common comment especially embarrasses us science writers – not because the criticism is embarrassing, but because it clearly means that we haven’t effectively done our job in showing you why this seemingly odd/trivial/strange/silly piece of knowledge really matters. In the last presidential election, one of the candidates hit such a nerve of mine with a campaign joke. He heard about researchers gathering DNA from grizzly bears in our national parks, and he quipped that this was "CSI Yellowstone" -- obviously a silly  and wasteful use of federal money. A science writer should have been able to immediately explain to the public that the research was, in fact, very relevant to people living in Montana and Idaho, where there are populations of wild bears that need to be carefully monitored and managed. Grizzlies are dangerous animals who are not easily located and approached in the vast wilds of the Rockies. They breed secretly, producing new, untagged bears, and they can range over hundreds of miles. Just about the only way to keep track of them is by looking at their DNA through the hair they leave behind on trees. See? This is not as silly/pointless/wasteful as it first seemed. In fact, it's critical research if you are a rancher concerned that your range land may be harboring an overly dense population of bears.

A grizzly. You might want to know how many of these are in the woods.

Okay then, you might ask, but what about the effective use of our limited tax dollars? Research is expensive -- why can’t such a big expenditure be limited exclusively to practical research topics that are economically or socially important? Why study bears when what the public really wants is a better cell phone?

The charge of obscurity/triviality/frivolity might well have been leveled a several decades ago against some materials researchers who were fanatically engaged in using multi-million dollar, state-of-the-art research equipment to lay down ultra-thin layers of atoms on top of other materials. They were curious, among other things, about electrical properties on the atomic scale, a topic which was, while interesting to physicists and some visionary electrical engineers, hardly an area of concern in the average American household. If this had been federally-funded and a politician had objected to this obvious “boondoggle,” the research might have lost critical funding and the subsequent loss of that science is something that you probably wouldn’t expect anyone to miss… except perhaps in Silicon Valley – which actually didn’t exist yet, and never would without this foundational research. And so would have evaporated the multiple futures of the integrated circuit, the PC, the internet, the cell phone, the smartphone -- and all the industries and culture these technologies spawned.

The writer, working at this blog. Odd to think that none of this
 would be possible without the arcane experiments of
physicists working at Bell Labs in the 1950's.

My point, of course, is that new knowledge is what makes possible new advances in human civilization, and it is often impossible to know whether or not some new truth is going to be valuable/useful/important until it is discovered…or even long after. New knowledge is like that – you often don’t know it is important or valuable ... until you find that it is. Some of the infinitely varied university investigations you read about on this blog may still strike you as arcane or weird, but we hope you will join us in keeping an open and receptive mind to their potential value. If the stories provoke or inflame you, please let us know, though we hope you will hold your harshest boos until the future has spoken.

Perhaps on occasion, you’ll feel inclined to cheer – that would be nice too.