Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Advanced Streetscape Sensing, Communications and Computing (ASTRSCC)

Columbia University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research. The fundamental question to be explored through this ERC planning grant is how future generation wireless networks, combined with cutting-edge computing, may improve the life and landscape of local communities at the street level (streetscape), where engineering solutions can impact individuals directly. Pursuing science at the streetscape is challenging: it pits our scientific understanding against the messy complexity of human action and interaction, at scales of space, time, and impact that often outstrip our experimental ability to provide supporting data and analysis. This ERC will examine how to develop a deep understanding of the local streetscape needs and experiences amid all of the hustle and bustle that implies. This information will then be used to identify how that understanding can be quickly applied to large-scale smart city infrastructure. Improvements in infrastructure can be leveraged to return services at local scale to different users with locality-defined specificity. The initial planning grant activities will focus on a newly awarded NSF Platform for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) testbed entitled ?COSMOS? (Cloud-Enhanced Open Software-Defined ?Mobile Wireless Testbed for City-Scale Deployment) in an area of 1 sq mile in West Harlem (New York City). COSMOS examines how to fill-in critical gaps in smart city services along the streetscape, where individual people experience technology and the urban environment in often surprising ways that fall beyond the reach of current-generation smart city technology. Using the planning grant, the team will expand that reach beyond the Harlem testbed to other cities, as well as to rural settings. This ERC planning efforts will explore how future generation wireless networks, combined with cutting-edge computing, may improve the life and landscape of local communities at the street level. It will focus on smart city functionality at very local scales in five applied thematic areas: The future of retailing, particularly cashier-less retail; Road safety, focused primarily at the interface between vehicles, streets, intersections, and crossing behavior of children and the elderly; Ethical security in public spaces, particularly benefits and privacy pitfalls of remote monitoring of individual and crowd flow on streets and around sensitive facilities; Last-meter logistics, especially interim dynamics between existing delivery and loading logistics and forthcoming autonomous logistics at the street-side; and The future of outdoor work, especially work performed on and around streets by city workers such as police and emergency service providers, as well as traffic control, maintenance and construction crews, utilities, and sanitation providers. The potential for highly interactive real-time applications for individuals at the very local scale is profound for the five thematic areas already identified. It is very likely that through the planned community engagement, equally or more important thematic application areas will be identified. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.