The National Science Foundation has awarded a $3.1 million grant to support the development of Array of Things, a research project to deploy hundreds of interactive, modular sensor boxes around Chicago collecting real-time data on the city’s environment, infrastructure, and activities. The project is led by Charlie Catlett, a senior computer scientist in Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science (MCS) Division and director of the Computation Institute’s Urban Center for Computation and Data.

The funding will be used to develop and install 500 sensor nodes for measuring such factors as temperature, pressure, ambient sound, emissions, and traffic. The project involves a multidisciplinary team of designers, engineers, and scientists at the Computation Institute, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Northern Illinois University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Array of Things is part of the new Smart Cities Initiative, announced by the White House. The aim of the initiative is to help communities tackle local challenges and improve city services.  The Array of Things will be the first at-scale research infrastructure deployment enabling researchers to study an urban environment.

An important component of the Array of Things project is Waggle, an open platform for intelligent sensors. ​“Waggle is a wireless sensor system that will enable a new breed of smart city research and sensor-driven environmental science,” said Pete Beckman, who leads the Waggle project at Argonne together with Rajesh Sankaran and Catlett.

 

For information about Waggle, see http://​www​.mcs​.anl​.gov/​p​r​o​j​e​c​t​/​w​a​g​g​l​e​-​o​p​e​n​-​p​l​a​t​f​o​r​m​-​i​n​t​e​l​l​i​g​e​n​t​-​a​t​t​e​n​t​i​v​e​-​s​e​nsors. For information about the Array of Things, see http://​array​ofthings​.github​.io.

For the announcement by the Computation Institute in UChicago News, see http://​news​.uchica​go​.edu/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​2​0​1​5​/​0​9​/​1​4​/​n​a​t​i​o​n​a​l​-​s​c​i​e​n​c​e​-​f​o​u​n​d​a​t​i​o​n​-​a​w​a​r​d​s​-​3​1​-​m​i​l​l​i​o​n​-​a​r​r​a​y​-​t​h​i​n​g​s​-​p​r​oject.

For more information about the new Smart Cities Initiative, see the White House announcement: https://​www​.white​house​.gov/​t​h​e​-​p​r​e​s​s​-​o​f​f​i​c​e​/​2​0​1​5​/​0​9​/​1​4​/​f​a​c​t​-​s​h​e​e​t​-​admin….