SCC-PG: Coordinated Safety Management Across Smart Communities

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

This planning grant enables research at the University of Florida (UF) and the City of Gainesville (City) to guide UF and City communities on how best to integrate and coordinate safety-relevant data, decision-making, and protective interventions. A joint UF-City strategic plan, among other objectives, anticipates the deployment of smart sensing and adaptable infrastructure for data-informed coordinated management of community safety. UF and the City are deploying smart-lighting infrastructure on multiple streets across UF and neighboring streets which also provides the scaffolding needed to deploy sensors of several kinds. Multiple scenarios can be envisioned for safety enhancement, including talk-down speakers for warnings or instructions, gunshot/active shooter and duress sounds detection, remote image/video capture and light and mobility management. It is anticipated that human sensors (e.g. people using smartphones) will provide information via social networking platforms, home-security systems and safety apps. Data generated from social networks can complement data from infrastructure sensors with early warnings and help implement and evaluate interventions to address potential risk areas and actual safety events. Several multidisciplinary questions are being considered in the context of the project. How can data from UF and City locations be streamed, correlated, integrated, analyzed and visualized jointly by separate safety management entities? How can safety incidents be prevented and/or detected in real time from observed data patterns? How can data from infrastructure sensors and human sensors be integrated? How can humans (managers and citizens) access, visualize and interact with data analytics systems used to extract and present safety information? How are safety, security and privacy issues collectively addressed? How can distributed computing systems be architected to support computing, storage and network needs of such workflows across a smart city infrastructure, including devices owned by users in the community? The anticipated outcomes of this project include (1) well formulated research problems that integrate socio-technical perspectives in the context of UF-City communities, (2) identification of academic and community partnerships with the necessary knowledge to address the problems and (3) preliminary work and testbed designs to be included in a future SCC-IRG proposal to address the problems. 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.