SCOPE Project Releases 2016 Annual Report

After two years of research activity, the Smart-city Cloud-based Open Platform within an Ecosystem (SCOPE) Project has made significant progress in three main research thrusts – end-user services, cross-cutting services and collaborative governance, and capabilities and application interfaces. Additionally, the project has produced broader impact outcomes, such as creating models for collaboration and innovative curricula. The project aims to create 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, 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.

Highlights from 2015-2016 are included below, and the SCOPE 2016 Annual Report provides additional details and accomplishments.

Research Thrust: End-User Services Informing the Design of SCOPE
Data Driven Traffic Analysis and Control
Co-PI Christos Cassandras and his research team spent the past year improving adaptive traffic light controllers to be quasi-dynamic and detect whether vehicle congestion is above or below certain thresholds. By combining these improved controllers with a congestion metric, researchers are able to iteratively adjust controllable light cycles to improve overall system performance under various traffic conditions and have tested these results in simulated urban settings.

Smart City Mobile Apps
Cassandras’s team has also identified opportunities to use optimal flow methods and Connected Automated Vehicles (CAVs) to improve traffic conditions by guiding vehicles to use socially optimal flows. Using this information, the team has begun creating a Smart City app that compares actual traffic flows with the “best possible” achievable ones.

Research Thrust: Cross-Cutting Services and Collaborative Governance
Traffic Management for Sustainability
Co-PI Lucy Hutyra lead a team that included collaborator from the Boston Metropolitan Planning Organization that developed a roadway-scale model of vehicle emissions of CO₂, CO, NO₂, NO_x, SO₂, and PM_2.5 for the greater Boston metropolitan area. The high-resolution inventory quantifies pollutant emissions at hourly time scales for every road in Eastern Massachusetts and identifies spatial and temporal “emissions hot spots” and traffic corridors where congestion produces excessive pollution levels.

Data-driven Public Safety Applications
Co-PI Evimaria Terzi and collaborator Frederick Joossens, SAIL Software Engineer, are developing a route recommendation platform that factors in distance and route safety to improve user experience.

Coordination of Crowdsourced Resources
Project PI Azer Bestavros has expanded the development of incentive compatible route coordination mechanisms that enable application interfaces to support Geo Presence as a Service (GPaaS) and monetize geo presence tagging for users.

Participatory Planning and Organization
Senior Personnel Katherine Lusk and Paul McManus, along with SAIL collaborators Andrei Lapets and Frederick Joossens, engaged with City of Boston and MassDOT stakeholders to unlock city data. Students from the BU Data Mechanics course, supervised by Lapets, worked with these data sets to solve challenges related to urban resources in Boston, and the results were then incorporated into the unifying SCOPE prototype platform.

Research Thrust: Capabilities and Application Programing Interfaces
Mobility Index Analytics
In pursuit of a comprehensive mobility index that takes into account a host of metrics (e.g. climate attributes, sustainability attributes, affordability attributes, safety attributes), researchers and collaborators have expanded their data collection to include social networking sites and additional cities (San Francisco and Austin). By using geo-tagged user-produced content, researchers were able to create two classes of data: that produced by locals versus content produced by tourists. The ability to distinguish between resident and visitor mobility  will improve the accuracy of a mobility index and will allow for the development of APIs tailored to specific user groups.

Secure Multi-Party Analytics
Following the 2015 success of SCOPE’s initial Multi-Party Computation (MPC) platform, which was used by over 40 Boston Women’s Compact (BWC) signatories to compute major pay equity aggregate statistics, researchers implemented a lightweight, web-based version of the application and deployed it for use by 70 BWC signatories to collect 2016 pay equity data. The research team, led by Project PI Azer Bestavros and including SAIL staff and Initiative on Cities Executive Director, Katherine Lusk, re-prototyped the original platform, scaling it to accommodate larger data sets that are spread across multiple organizations.

SCOPE Broader Impacts
Breaking down silos across the public, private, and academic sectors in addition to breaking down disciplinary silos in the academic setting
At BU, there is a diverse range of programs that are involved in the project focusing on smart-city applications: the College of Engineering (ENG) Systems Engineering program, the Questrom School of Business, and the College of Arts and Science (CAS) Computer Science and Earth & Environment programs. In the private sector, SCOPE has identified a major partner, Schneider Electric along with smaller company participants. In the public sector, a myriad stakeholders from the city, region and state, all contribute to the eco-system.

Supporting innovative curricula that integrate smart-city work into existing and new courses
– Data Mechanics for Pervasive Systems and Urban Applications
– Cloud Computing Course
– IT Strategies for a Networked Economy (Questrom School of Business)

Exposing students to the intersection of policy and technology of smart cities
– November 2015 Transportation Nudges Conference
– Schneider Electric-funded student internship focused on understanding and creating value from transportation data that will leverage the SCOPE platform

SCOPE reflects a consensus within and across public and private sector agencies that today’s urban problems require collaboration and new spaces to deliberate and improve upon existing public policies and planning practice. Participants from city, regional and state agencies are working to deliberate and improve these practices through the SCOPE platform and engage in purposeful and transparent data-sharing on smart-city issues related to mobility: transportation, equity of citizen services, and economic development. These are issues that transcend agency, as well as require new rules and protocols on data use and applications.