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

这笔重大研究仪器(MRI)赠款将使一种新的工具--物联网--得以创建，用于在城市街区范围内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，比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规模，天气、噪声、污染和交通与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，这些策略将对了解城市微生物群或跟踪疾病爆发至关重要。最终，目标不仅是更好地了解已建基础设施和自然基础设施的要素，还包括基础设施系统与人和环境的相互作用，以了解复杂的城市动态。该仪器将包括部署在芝加哥城市的500个节点，每个节点都具有电力、互联网和一套基本的传感和嵌入式信息系统功能，具有每年发展的能力，以纳入来自已经不断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的科学数据基础设施服务-工程、物理、生命、社会和气候科学-通过数据存储库和工具来支持工作流程，使其能够与其他城市数据源、分析以及计算模型的校准和验证相结合。此外，该仪器的开放式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整合到其现有算法、工具和方法中，将数据与其社区数据资源合并，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，该仪器将同时在更大范围内对多种现象提供更好的空间和时间分辨率。该仪器将是通用研究基础设施的第一个实例，允许研究人员在城市环境中快速大规模部署传感器、嵌入式系统、计算和通信系统的网络。该仪器奖由高级网络基础设施部门颁发，由NSF计算机和信息科学与工程委员会和NSF工程委员会(化学、生物工程、环境和交通系统部门，以及民用、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).