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500 Node "Array of Things" Tracking Life in Chicago at the City Block Level

Monday, December 12, 2016 6:29

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New urban-scale smart city technology acts as a fitness tracker for livability

This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant will enable the creation of a new tool – The Array of Things – for continuously measuring many aspects of the physical environment of urban areas at the city block scale.

Array of Things has officially launched in the City of Chicago!

Data collected will fill gaps in understanding across many disciplines such as how air pollution is controlled by urban form and traffic patterns, how different materials and surroundings affect the magnitude of the urban heat island, what correlations exist between weather, noise, pollution and traffic and social and behavioral trends, and how urban infrastructure faults.failures can be better detected and predicted.

The instrument opens an opportunity to experiment with new sensors and data collection strategies such as will be critical to understanding the urban microbiome or tracking disease outbreaks. Ultimately, the objective is to not only better understand elements of the built and natural infrastructure, but also the interactions of infrastructure systems with people and the environment, to understand complex city dynamics.

Credit: Array of Things

University of Chicago scientists supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) are collaborating with researchers at the Argonne National Laboratoryto build out a wide-ranging urban sensing project in Chicago known as the Array of Things (AoT).

One could think of it as a fitness tracker for a city — a network of 500 computer nodes designed to gather data on livability factors all over Chicago, from climate, weather and air quality to noise and traffic, on a city block scale. Each AoT node is equipped with power,

Internet and sensors to measure environmental health and safety factors, such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and ozone levels. The nodes also have a camera, which temporarily records images. Once the data of interest is extracted, the images are purged from the system. The data is gathered in real time and available to the public, as well as urban planners, health workers and others who can use the information to make better informed decisions.

A mounted node

Credit: Array of Things

The information is meant to fill gaps in understanding across many disciplines, addressing such issues as how air pollution is controlled by urban form and traffic patterns; how different materials and surroundings affect the magnitude of the urban heat island; what correlations exist between weather, noise, pollution, and traffic and social and behavioral trends; and how urban infrastructure faults and failures can be better detected and predicted.

Credit: Array of Things

Ultimately, the objective is to not only better understand elements of the built and natural infrastructure, but also the interactions of infrastructure systems with people and the environment, to understand complex city dynamics.

The instrument will comprise 500 nodes deployed in the City of Chicago, each with power, Internet, and a base set of sensing and embedded information systems capabilities, with capacity to evolve annually to incorporate new technologies and experiments from an already growing scientific partner community. The project will directly support scientific data infrastructure services for specific communities – engineering, physical, life, social, and climate sciences – with a data repository and tools to support workflows that enable combination with other urban data sources, analytics, and calibration and validation of computational models

Credit: Computation Institute

In addition, the instrument’s open data and application programming interface architectures will support science and education communities incorporating the data into their existing algorithms, tools, and methodologies, to merge the data with their community data resources, and to develop applications that directly access the instrument data in real time.

Potential applications of data collected by the Array of Things include

Sensors monitoring air quality, sound and vibration (to detect heavy vehicle traffic), and temperature can be used to suggest the healthiest and unhealthiest walking times and routes through the city, or to study the relationship between diseases and the urban environment.

Real-time detection of urban flooding can improve city services and infrastructure to prevent property damage and illness.

Measurements of micro-climate in different areas of the city, so that residents can get up-to-date, high-resolution “block-by-block” weather and climate information.

Credit: Array of Things

Observe which areas of the city are heavily populated by pedestrians at different times of day to suggest safe and efficient routes for walking late at night or for timing traffic lights during peak traffic hours to improve pedestrian safety and reduce congestion-related pollution.

The instrument will provide better spatial and temporal resolution of multiple phenomena simultaneously and at larger scales than what is available from other sensing modalities in urban infrastructure networks. The instrument will be the first instance of a general-purpose research infrastructure that allows researchers to rapidly deploy networks of sensors, embedded systems, computing, and communication systems at scale in urban environments.

This instrument award by the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Division is jointly supported by the NSF Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering, and the NSF Engineering Directorate (Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems, and Division of Civil, Mechanical & Manufacturing Innovation)

The research in this episode was supported by NSF award #1532133, Development of an Urban-Scale Instrument for Interdisciplinary Research. It was funded through NSF’s Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program.

Contacts and sources:
Miles O’Brien, Science Nation Correspondent
Marsha Walton, Science Nation Producer

National Science Foundation

Array of Things

Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/2016/12/500-node-array-of-things-tracking-life.html

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