{"id":15737,"date":"2014-10-17T14:43:58","date_gmt":"2014-10-17T18:43:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/systems\/?p=15737"},"modified":"2021-02-06T11:31:18","modified_gmt":"2021-02-06T16:31:18","slug":"designing-an-intelligent-urban-ecosystem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/designing-an-intelligent-urban-ecosystem\/","title":{"rendered":"Designing an Intelligent Urban Ecosystem"},"content":{"rendered":"

BU leads collaboration to make public services \u201csmarter\u201d
\nby Rich Barlow (BU Today)<\/p>\n

\"\"
Boston could benefit from \u201csmart\u201d traffic lights moving traffic efficiently, safer bike paths, and other improved services that BU is hoping to develop through a new online platform. Graphic by Rob Colonna<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

BU faculty, with help from business and government partners, will develop cloud computing\u2013based services and products to solve urban problems ranging from traffic congestion to dirty air with a grant from the\u00a0National Science Foundation<\/a>(NSF).
\nThe effort, called SCOPE (Smart-city Cloud-based Open Platform & Ecosystem), will be coordinated by the\u00a0Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering<\/a>\u00a0and led by faculty investigators from several disciplines\u2014computer science, electrical and computer engineering, earth and environment, strategy and innovation, and city planning and urban affairs. The NSF has funded SCOPE with a three-year, $850,000 grant. With contributions from the partners, its total budget exceeds $1 million.
\nSCOPE principal investigator Azer Bestavros, a College of Arts & Sciences computer science professor and the Hariri Institute\u2019s founding director, says BU and its\u00a0SCOPE partners<\/a>\u2014an array of Massachusetts businesses, city and state agencies, and planning groups\u2014could have their first products available within the grant\u2019s three-year life. A product or service could be offered for free or for a price, depending on which partner\u2014business, public agency, or university\u2014is offering it.
\nThe NSF is banking on SCOPE to solve problems, Bestavros says. \u201cWhy is it that there is incredible technology developed in universities and industry, but it doesn\u2019t find its way to everyday use by the average citizen?\u201d he asks. \u201cYou want to go get a driver\u2019s license or renew it, but it\u2019s a pain. Or services like snowplowing and picking up kids from school are not coordinated\u2014you end up with a plow behind a school bus.\u201d Collaboration among businesses, municipalities, and academia\u2014the \u201cecosystem\u201d in SCOPE\u2019s name\u2014leverages each group\u2019s incentives to improve those services, Bestavros says. Businesses might make a profit, academics find a platform for their research, and cities provide smarter services.
\nThe products and services offered through SCOPE\u2019s platform will be available via the\u00a0Massachusetts Open Cloud<\/a>\u00a0(MOC), the uniquely designed cloud run by BU and partners at the\u00a0Massachusetts Green High-Performance Computing Center<\/a>\u00a0in Holyoke, Mass. In cloud computing, users rent remotely located computational power and services.
\nSeveral BU research projects exemplify the kinds of services that SCOPE hopes to offer to municipalities. Christos Cassandras, a College of Engineering professor of electrical and computer engineering, is\u00a0researching \u201csmart\u201d traffic lights<\/a>, which would sense when there\u2019s no cross-street traffic and stay green for motorists on a main thoroughfare.
\nLucy Hutyra, a CAS assistant professor of earth and environment, is researching\u00a0improved ways to measure the mileage<\/a>\u00a0racked up by all private motor vehicles in Boston, now measured by live traffic cameras and underground sensors. But current technology doesn\u2019t record vehicle miles traveled with the precision necessary to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from traffic, a goal of the city\u2019s government. So Hutyra is developing an online data portal and a visualization system for recording miles traveled along specific blocks and neighborhoods in real time.
\nEvimaria Terzi, a CAS associate professor of computer science, has examined better ways to tap data from multiple sources to map bike routes for the city of Pittsburgh. She\u2019s also using multisource data to schedule public works projects and map the safest optimal routes for various types of vehicles, research that could be applied to Boston through SCOPE.
\nAll of these projects involve traffic flow, and that\u2019s no coincidence, Bestavros says. \u201cStudying and mitigating traffic congestion is one of the top areas of interest,\u201d he says, for both researchers and public agencies.
\nLinda Grosser (GSM\u201914), director of program and project management at the Hariri Institute, says the project\u2019s industrial partners are a key advantage of SCOPE\u2019s organization.
\n\u201cOften, research just never leaves the lab,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was an imperative that there are industrial partners at the table,\u201d since the NSF\u2019s purpose is to ensure that anything SCOPE develops is adopted beyond the lab. Business partners will \u201chelp do the job of carrying it out into the marketplace.\u201d
\nWhile SCOPE\u2019s products and services will be offered through the MOC, Grosser says the University is the sole academic partner running SCOPE. The partners are all based in Massachusetts, but any municipality would be able to use SCOPE\u2019s template to develop its own locally relevant services, she says.
\nSCOPE\u2019s ability to muster multiple academic disciplines at BU is also key, she says: \u201cIt\u2019s not a common project to have a computer scientist, an engineer, and an urban affairs expert all really collaboratively working.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BU leads collaboration to make public services \u201csmarter\u201d by Rich Barlow (BU Today) BU faculty, with help from business and government partners, will develop cloud computing\u2013based services and products to solve urban problems ranging from traffic congestion to dirty air with a grant from the\u00a0National Science Foundation(NSF). The effort, called SCOPE (Smart-city Cloud-based Open Platform […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1500,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[26],"tags":[156,132],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15737"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1500"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15737"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30592,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15737\/revisions\/30592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}