Emerging MIT Tech Frontiers of Risk-based Resilience to Extremes in a Changing Climate

Urban centers in Thailand and across ASEAN face converging climate threats: cyclones, floods, salinity intrusion, and ecosystem degradation. These hazards interact in nonlinear, cascading ways that increasingly outpace conventional planning. This talk introduces a new computational paradigm for resilience that blends physical models, machine learning, and human systems in a co-active framework, enabling rapid, well-informed action under uncertainty. Drawing on field experience in Bangladesh and the United States—regions that grapple with some of the world’s most complex urban hazards—I will present tools ready for localization in Thailand. They include informative learning systems that generate high-resolution flood and cyclone risk maps, AI-enabled ecosystem inventories for climate-smart urban design, agentic impact models for strategic scenario testing, and machine-learning serious games that bring communities, industry, and policymakers into real-time, risk-based decision making. We will also sweep through MIT’s approach, which centers on embodied intelligence: advanced computation tightly coupled with multimodal data and direct stakeholder engagement. By linking vulnerability and exposure mapping to participatory tools, we build scalable platforms for anticipatory governance. Thailand now has a pivotal opportunity to lead through innovation. In this talk, I showcase opportunities that invite partnership with industry, infrastructure leaders, and funders to localize and scale these technologies, transforming frontier science into practical resilience for communities, ecosystems, and the national economy.