Hurricane Sandy’s devastating floods exposed the need to re-engineer coastal communities for resilience and sparked a novel method to generate innovative design solutions: Crowd-sourcing. The six competition winners are now putting their ideas into practice.

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Tags: Civil Engineering, coastal engineering, crowdsourcing, design contest, Environmental Engineering, flooding, Hurricane Sandy, New York, Public Policy, rebuild by design, resilient structures

When Haiti suffered a devastating earthquake in 2010, Notre Dame engineering researchers created an online system that let students review hundreds of photos and reliably classify the structural damage. The effort is just one example of how “citizen engineers” and “citizen scientists” are advancing research in areas from astronomy to air pollution to penguins. Even snowflakes!

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Tags: Bumpass Cove, citizen engineering, Citizen Science, crowdsourcing, Environmental science, Flint water crisis, Great Backyard Bird Count, NASA GLOBE Observer app, Notre Dame. Haiti earthquake, RoboSub, UAV, Virginia Tech