The Letramento de Jovens, Adultos e Idosos (Literacy for Youth, Adults, and the Elderly) and Orla Sem Lixo (Clean Shore) projects will receive tomorrow, April 4, the Selo ODS Educação 2023 award (2023 Seal for Education in SDG), in a ceremony promoted by UFRJ.

“We are contributing towards a future in which a whole demographic that has been made invisible ceases to be so, becoming fully integrated citizens with better opportunities”, celebrates Denise Dantas, who is the education coordinator of the Letramento de Jovens, Adultos e Idosos project at Coppe/UFRJ.

For Susana Vinzon, a Professor of the Marine Engineering Program (PENo) at Coppe and coordinator of Orla Sem Lixo, an initiative conceptualized by the Polytechnic School of UFRJ, this award helps disseminate the project and values the collective commitment to revitalize the shore. “It means the acknowledgement of our efforts to restore Ilha do Fundão and Baía de Guanabara and an incentive to continue on this path”, she explains.

In total, there were 360 awarded projects from about 40 educational institutions, 38 of which were projects of UFRJ .

Conceived by the Selo Social Institute in a partnership with the UnB 2030 Program and the Civil Society Working Group for the 2030 Agenda, this SDG Education award is a certification that stimulates the effective participation of educational institutions in achieving the goals of the 2030 Agenda. The end goal is to increase the impact on SDG 4 (Quality Education).

The awarding ceremony for the 38 outreach projects will be held at the Praia Vermelha campus, UFRJ. The event is open to the entire UFRJ community, but it is requested to confirm attendance here beforehand.

About Projeto Letramento

This project aims to bring literacy to any and all people who did not have the opportunity to complete primary and/or lower secondary school, as well as to provide a more solid foundation for those who had to interrupt their studies and to give them more security so that they can return to formal education.

About Orla Sem Lixo

Orla Sem Lixo is a project by the Polytechnic School of UFRJ that brings together a multidisciplinary team with more than 20 researchers from many diverse research areas. It aims to develop solutions in intercepting, collecting, transporting, and recycling in an easily replicable, low-cost, and effective process that engages with and includes the local community. Its proposal is to prevent areas of shoreline degradation and transform the floating waste from the production chain into an opportunity, while also ensuring the economic and environmental sustainability of the solution.

Coppe/UFRJ will host the Senseable Rio Lab (SRL), a branch of the MIT Senseable City Lab in the city of Rio de Janeiro, which is a laboratory specialized in digital technologies and urbanism. The agreement is the result of a partnership between the Local Government of Rio de Janeiro and the Senseable City Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was signed today, April 4, at the Rio de Janeiro City Hall.

The MIT, or Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is one of the world’s leading centers for research in science, engineering, and technology. Its alumni and professors have been awarded 98 Nobel prizes (the best known of which is Richard Feynman, the father of quantum physics) and hundreds of them have won major technology awards.

Senseable World Labs is a family of global cities that address humanity’s greatest challenges through the creative use of new technologies.

As a founding member of the Senseable World initiative, the Senseable Rio Lab (SRL) is a five-year collaborative project between the city of Rio de Janeiro and MIT’s Senseable City Lab.

The main purpose of the laboratory is to promote, for five years, new resources and methods of articulating knowledge about the city of Rio de Janeiro to improve the quality of life of its residents as an outcome of the critical scientific research it develops. During this execution phase, Rio de Janeiro will be used as a living laboratory, with the resulting experiments and prototypes being conducted and implemented in the city.

SRL will operate at Coppe’s Laboratory of Computational Methods in Engineering (Lamce), implementing innovative methodologies that will allow technological advancements in data-driven approach, field research, and research on tools to improve public policies and urban projects for the Rio de Janeiro. The bench-level tests will focus on four research pillars: urban informality, artificial intelligence, urban modeling, and solutions that aim to make Rio de Janeiro a more equal and carbon-neutral city by 2050.

In order to promote the urban development specifically of the city of Rio de Janeiro, the SRL has outlined a number of initial research protocols of academic interest. The main project is called Favelas 4D and uses 3D laser scanning technology to analyze the urban morphology of favelas, with the purpose of making urban informality visible to enable improvements in the public actions of the local government. To this end, it will research digital means of detecting, analyzing, and managing informal settlements to improve health quality and the environment, as well as other development opportunities as enabled by the data and tools in question, such as improvements in housing and regularization of such informal settlements.

The SRL initiative will initially recruit six full-time MIT researchers who will focus on Rio de Janeiro, half of which will be working in loco, while the other half will stay at the headquarters in Boston (USA). During the project, MIT will engage with students from across the Rio de Janeiro region, providing knowledge about the methods and tools the city needs to enable future generations to lead urban transitions.

Coppe’s Director, Professor Suzana Kahn, says that this partnership will allow for all the institution’s expertise in digital transformation to be used towards improving urban quality of life and preparing cities for the climate crisis.