PFI:BIC A Smart-city Cloud-based Open Platform and Ecosystem (SCOPE)

Sponsor: National Science Foundation (NSF)

Award Number: 1430145

PI: Azer Bestavros

Co-Is/Co-PIs: Christos Cassandras, Lucy Hutyra, Enrique Silva, Evimaria Terzi

This NSF Partnerships for Innovation: Building Innovation Capacity (PFI:BIC) project from Boston University will research, prototype, and evaluate novel “smart-city” services for the city of Boston and for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The centerpiece of the project is a Smart-city Cloud-based Open Platform and Ecosystem (SCOPE), which creates a multisided marketplace for smart-city services based on the Open Cloud eXchange model, in which stakeholders compete and cooperate within the same infrastructure. By harnessing breakthroughs in cyber-physical, mobile, and cloud computing technologies, and by building upon novel data acquisition and mining capabilities to be developed by the investigators and their industrial partners, SCOPE-enabled smart-city services will address challenges faced by twenty-first century cities: connecting people with resources, guiding changes in collective behavior, and supporting innovative transportation, healthcare, energy distribution, and emergency response solutions, as well as business, commerce, and social applications. SCOPE’s broader impacts include providing a template for widespread experimentation with and adoption of smart-city services by other cities in Massachusetts and beyond; accelerating technological innovation, commercialization, and business development; breaking technological and institutional silos; facilitating institutional transformations and deep citizen engagement; and development of curricular content and projects that leverage smart-city big-data platforms.

The implementation of SCOPE entails the design and prototyping of new techniques and novel application programming interfaces, adding capabilities that are currently not available in public cloud offerings, including (a) support for predictable operation of cyber-physical systems in support of sense-and-respond real-time applications; (b) management of data quality and provenance attributes in support of applications that fuse potentially noisy data from multiple trusted and untrusted sources; and (c) incorporation of security-enhancing services in support of privacy-preserving analytics. In addition to the design and prototyping of SCOPE, the investigators and their collaborators will work with partners to develop specific SCOPE-enabled smart-city services, including (d) transportation and mobility services to reduce traffic congestion, save time and wasted fuel, and reduce pollution; (e) energy and environmental services that monitor/estimate greenhouse gas emissions for congestion management and coordination of smart-grid energy demand-response solutions; (f) public safety and security services for big-data-driven coordinated scheduling of public works and municipal repairs; and (g) tools for management of city assets through mining of large data sets and crowd-sourced coordination of asset use. Additionally, the investigators will investigate and evaluate various (h) social, institutional and behavioral mechanisms to facilitate adoption of new services, such as incentive programs and community report cards to promote transparency and sustainability.

Through the Hariri Institute for Computing at Boston University, SCOPE will be led by investigators from multiple disciplines including Computer Science, Systems Engineering, Earth and Environment, and Urban Planning. Once developed, SCOPE services will be offered through the Massachusetts Open Cloud, a new public cloud designed and implemented through the Green High-Performance Computing Center (Holyoke, MA) and supported by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (Westborough, MA). Industry partners include two large businesses: Schneider Electric (Palatine, IL) and International Data Corporation, an IDG subsidiary (Boston, MA), and three small businesses: Integrated Technical Systems (Wallingford, CT), Connected Bits (Bedford, NH), and CrowdComfort (Beverly, MA). Public sector partners include the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Office of the CIO, City of Boston, Metropolitan Area Planning Council, and the Metropolitan Planning Organization (Boston, MA).

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