MRI: Development of an Urban-Scale Instrument for Interdisciplinary Research

这项主要研究仪器（MRI）拨款将用于创建一种新工具-物阵列-用于在城市街区尺度上连续测量城市地区物理环境的许多方面。收集的数据将填补许多学科之间的理解空白，例如城市形态和交通模式如何控制空气污染，不同的材料和环境如何影响城市热岛的大小，天气、噪音、污染、交通、社会和行为趋势之间存在什么相关性，以及如何更好地检测和预测城市基础设施故障和故障。该仪器为试验新的传感器和数据收集策略提供了机会，这些策略对于了解城市微生物群或追踪疾病爆发至关重要。最终，我们的目标不仅是更好地了解建筑和自然基础设施的要素，还包括基础设施系统与人与环境的相互作用，以了解复杂的城市动态。该仪器将由500个节点组成，部署在芝加哥市，每个节点都具有电力、互联网和一套传感和嵌入式信息系统的基本功能，并具有每年发展的能力，以结合已经增长的科学合作伙伴社区的新技术和实验。该项目将直接支持特定社区（工程、物理、生命、社会和气候科学）的科学数据基础设施服务，并提供数据存储库和工具，以支持与其他城市数据源、分析以及计算模型校准和验证相结合的工作流程。此外，该仪器的开放数据和应用程序编程接口架构将支持科学和教育社区将数据纳入其现有算法、工具和方法，将数据与社区数据资源合并，并开发直接实时访问仪器数据的应用程序。与城市基础设施网络中的其他传感方式相比，该仪器将在更大的尺度上同时对多种现象提供更好的空间和时间分辨率。该仪器将成为通用研究基础设施的第一个实例，使研究人员能够在城市环境中大规模快速部署传感器、嵌入式系统、计算和通信系统网络。该仪器由先进网络基础设施部授予，由美国国家科学基金会计算机与信息科学与工程理事会和美国国家科学基金会工程理事会（化学、生物工程、环境和运输系统部门以及土木、机械和制造创新部门）联合支持。

This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant will enable the creation of a new tool - The Array of Things - for continuously measuring many aspects of the physical environment of urban areas at the city block scale. Data collected will fill gaps in understanding across many disciplines such as how air pollution is controlled by urban form and traffic patterns, how different materials and surroundings affect the magnitude of the urban heat island, what correlations exist between weather, noise, pollution and traffic and social and behavioral trends, and how urban infrastructure faults and failures can be better detected and predicted. The instrument opens an opportunity to experiment with new sensors and data collection strategies such as will be critical to understanding the urban microbiome or tracking disease outbreaks. Ultimately, the objective is to not only better understand elements of the built and natural infrastructure, but also the interactions of infrastructure systems with people and the environment, to understand complex city dynamics.The instrument will comprise 500 nodes deployed in the City of Chicago, each with power, Internet, and a base set of sensing and embedded information systems capabilities, with capacity to evolve annually to incorporate new technologies and experiments from an already growing scientific partner community. The project will directly support scientific data infrastructure services for specific communities - engineering, physical, life, social, and climate sciences - with a data repository and tools to support workflows that enable combination with other urban data sources, analytics, and calibration and validation of computational models. In addition, the instrument's open data and application programming interface architectures will support science and education communities incorporating the data into their existing algorithms, tools, and methodologies, to merge the data with their community data resources, and to develop applications that directly access the instrument data in real time. The instrument will provide better spatial and temporal resolution of multiple phenomena simultaneously and at larger scales than what is available from other sensing modalities in urban infrastructure networks. The instrument will be the first instance of a general-purpose research infrastructure that allows researchers to rapidly deploy networks of sensors, embedded systems, computing, and communication systems at scale in urban environments.This instrument award by the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Division is jointly supported by the NSF Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering, and the NSF Engineering Directorate (Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems, and Division of Civil, Mechanical & Manufacturing Innovation).