Abstract: Distributed environmental sensing is being explored and to some extent adopted by several cities, including Chicago. In this seminar, I will describe what is meant by the term ​“distributed environmental sensing,” why it’s being promoted, and how distributed environmental sensing data could be used to better understand the environmental conditions across a city and how such conditions relate to human health and local land cover.

I will then describe an ongoing National Science Foundation research project to deploy a distributed environmental sensing platform across the City of Chicago. This project is supported by the City of Chicago and is anchored in the use of a novel sensing platform called Waggle that can support multiple sensors and do onsite computation. The Waggle platform was developed at Argonne.