Metro21 Presents: Instrumenting Cities: The Array of Things and Open Data

Charlie Catlett from the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratories will be discussing his most recent project, the Array of Things (https://arrayofthings.github.io/), a scaleable urban sensing project that will serve as a "fitness tracker" for a city to collect real-time data on city's environment and infrastructure, and has been featured in USA Today, Wired, and Bloomberg View.


Cities are increasingly publishing data about their operations while also internally using data to improve the effectiveness and quality of services through optimization, predictive analytics, and other methods. This represents new opportunities for collaboration between cities, national laboratories, and universities in areas ranging from scalable data infrastructure to tools for data analytics, along with challenges such as replicability of solutions between cities, integrating and validating data for scientific investigation, and protecting privacy. For many urban questions, new data sources will be required with greater spatial and/or temporal resolution, driving innovation in the use of sensor in mobile devices as well as embedded sensing infrastructure in the built environment. At the same time, new capabilities such as connected autonomous vehicles, implementing deep learning in concert with urban sensors, or augmenting mobile applications will require computation embedded in infrastructure. Catlett will discuss the work that Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago are doing in partnership with the City of Chicago and other cities through the Urban Center for Computation and Data, focusing on key scalable data infrastructure, data analytics, and resilient autonomous urban-scale embedded systems.

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