The Array of Things [Flash Forward Fridays]

Flash Forward Fridays

For the past few decades, technology has been evolving at a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it rate. In this biweekly column, Insights Staff Writer Kristin Manganello will be peeling back the curtain of the present and exploring the developing technologies that may soon become standard in the not-so-distant future.

Rapid Urbanization

In recent years, huge swathes of the global population have migrated into urban areas all over the world. This sudden spike in urban populations is expected to continue well into the future. According to the United Nations, by 2050 cities will be home to an additional 2.5 billion people.

Historically, cities have always acted as the central hubs of society due to their substantial resources, infrastructure, and job availability. However, living in urban areas also come with a host of problems, including crime, noise pollution, and compromised air quality.

To address these problems, researchers, scientists, programmers, designers, and even involved citizens are now envisioning how technology can be leveraged to improve the health, wellness, safety, and convenience of people living in urban areas.

The resulting plan is the “smart city” – a class of ultra-high-tech cities that utilize digital technologies such as sensors, internet connectivity, data analytics, and artificial intelligence to create urban spaces that monitor the environment to better care for and host its citizens.

The main theme behind these dream cities is to use sensing technology to collect data from all parts of the city and turn it into useful, real-time information, such as the location of hazardous or unsafe conditions, traffic patterns, details about air quality, or even something as simple as directions to a specific location.

Just like a smart home, a smart city needs a hyperconnected system to support it. However, to support something as big as a city, you need something bigger and better than the IoT.

Enter the Array of Things (AoT).

The Array of Things

The AoT is a collaborative project between the National Science Foundation, the University of Chicago, the Argonne National Laboratory, and the Chicago Innovation Fund.

Its goal, according to its founders, is to create “an urban sensing network of programmable, modular nodes that will be installed around cities to collect real-time data on the city’s environment, infrastructure, and activity for research and public use. AoT will essentially serve as a ‘fitness tracker’ for the city, measuring factors that impact livability in cities such as climate, air quality, and noise.”

As of March 2019, the project, along with the City of Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology, the Department of Transportation, and other partners, has installed approximately 100 nodes throughout the city of Chicago, with another 100 nodes scheduled for installation between March and June 2019. Once complete, there will be a total of 500 nodes installed throughout the city.

The AoT is also designed to be a democratic project. The information gathered by the nodes is available for the public to study and analyze, which in turn empowers the people to contribute and encourages the public to help innovate the betterment of the city.

Right now, the Array of Things is able to collect a diverse range of data points, including air quality, sound, vibration, temperature, flooding, micro-climates, traffic, and pedestrian congestion. One heavily-weighted piece of data that it doesn’t collect is information on individuals. The point of the AoT is to monitor the city, not its inhabitants.

So is this the future of urban life? Smart cities are still very few and far between, and to implement smart technologies on a global scale would require a massive overhaul of existing infrastructure. But if and when these metropolises become the norm, they will likely need to be supported by an AoT.