From: 2025-01-23 16:10 to 16:45
Place: Seminar Room M 3170-73 at Dept. of Automatic Control, LTH
Contact: anders [dot] rantzer [at] control [dot] lth [dot] se

Date & Time: January 23, 16:10-16:45
Location: Seminar Room M 3170-73 at Dept. of Automatic Control, LTH
Speaker: Angela Fontan
Title: Promoting sustainable behaviors: Insights from experimental studies at KTH Live-in Lab and from social campaigns on food choices

Abstract:  The digital transformation of cities, driven by a new science of cities focused on well-being and sustainability, enables a reinterpretation of urban systems as cyber-physical-human systems (CPHS). A key challenge is the limited understanding of human decision-making within interconnected communities, which can be viewed as social networks of interacting individuals. Residential testbeds and living laboratories provide an ideal setting for experimental studies to explore behavioral drivers of tenants, with the ultimate goal of designing effective intervention mechanisms based on data-driven models. In this talk, I will present experiments conducted at the KTH Live-in Lab, studying occupants' behavior patterns and diffusion of sustainable behaviors. One key behavior observed concerning household sustainability is food choices, which are critical to address due to their significant impact on chronic diseases, the environment, and financial costs to society. In the second part of the talk, I will introduce an opinion dynamics approach to promote sustainable food choices through social campaigns, illustrating this method within the context of sustainability goals for food consumption set by the UK Climate Change Committee.


Biography: Angela Fontan is an Assistant Professor with the Division of Decision and Control Systems, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. She received a B.Sc. degree in Information Engineering in 2013 and a M.Sc. degree (with honor) in Automation Engineering in 2016, from the University of Padova, Italy. She received a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering with specialization in Automatic Control in September 2021, from the Division of Automatic Control, Linköping University, Sweden. From 2021 to 2024, she was a Postdoctoral researcher at the Division of Decision and Control Systems, KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Her research interests are in the area of networked cyber-physical-human systems and nonlinear dynamics over networks, with applications to social networks, collective decision-making processes, and Live-in Laboratories.