The Daily Free Press: Smart City: BU Researchers Work to Improve Urban Living
October 2, 2014 from The Daily Free Press
English zoologist and author Desmond Morris once said, “The city is not a concrete jungle. It is a human zoo.” In Boston, this metaphor certainly holds true thanks to the city’s less-than-savory drivers, messes of traffic around every corner and population of more than 645,900, according to a 2013 U.S. Census Bureau estimate.
Urban living is a lifestyle that several Boston University researchers are teaming up to navigate, using a program known as “Smart City.”
Smart-city Cloud-based Open Platform and Eco-system, or SCOPE, is a project at BU’s Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering that aims to create exactly what it says in its title: an open platform. The platform is expected to assist city dwellers with urban navigation while also providing a centralized domain for accessing information on anything from energy to social services.
“We are one of the first groups in the country to try this [Smart City design], in part thanks to a good relationship with the city of Boston and the fact that the city of Boston would like to be a Smart City,” said Dr. Christos Cassandras, a member of the SCOPE research team, professor of electrical and computer engineering at BU and the head of the division of systems engineering.