果冻影院

At the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, CASA is putting a human face on the Internet of Things. Words: Katie Puckett

鈥淭he gnomes keep me up at night,鈥� admits Professor Andrew Hudson-Smith, Director of the Bartlett鈥檚 Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA). 鈥淭here is a line between academic ideas, public-facing applications and the use of technology to understand place and space. Do academics do gnomes?鈥� On the desk in front of him sits a 3D-printed gnome of the garden variety, unpainted and not yet fitted with the Bluetooth transmitter that will replace its feet. 鈥淧robably not,鈥� he concludes.

CASA, however, does do gnomes. When it鈥檚 finished, this one and 29 clones will sit in solar-powered mushroom homes among the shrubbery of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London. They will be the most visible elements of a vast technology infrastructure underpinning the cutting-edge 鈥楽mart Park鈥� project, on which 果冻影院 is collaborating with partners including Intel and Imperial College.

The London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) aims to create the city鈥檚 鈥渟martest and most sustainable park鈥�, with ubiquitous wifi, superfast broadband and a dense mesh of sensors monitoring everything from temperature and humidity, to the movement of crowds and even their emotions. Over the next decade, CASA will collect and analyse this data to understand and transform how people use the space and, looking further ahead, plan the smart urban districts of听the future. So far, they have won four grants worth 拢13m, and Hudson-Smith leads a team of eight researchers working on associated projects, including three PhD students.

As well as crunching the data themselves, the CASA team are exploring ways to present it for policymakers and local communities, through technologies such as interactive dashboards and virtual and augmented reality. One of the first outputs, funded by the government鈥檚 Future Cities catapult programme, is a 3D model that displays data from across the park in real-time: 鈥淪o as a bus travels around the park, it potters around our model,鈥� says Hudson-Smith.

Flexible enough to integrate new buildings and data sources as they become available, the model will be used by LLDC for both day-to-day management and future planning. 鈥淔or example, if we can see real-time crowd flows for football matches, we might be able to persuade people to go to different exits or take different public transport home,鈥� explains Jim Wood, LLDC鈥檚 director of IT and information services.

鈥淲e could use that crowd-monitoring data to plan future events, and we can drop new buildings into the model when we go out for planning consultations.鈥� Many of its potential uses have yet to be conceived, he adds. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a bit like a data warehouse, where you鈥檙e not sure how the data relate to each other. Sometimes you don鈥檛 get those insights until you鈥檝e got the data and you start playing around with it.鈥�

The Olympic Park is an ideal testbed for smart-city technologies partly because it contains such a variety of building types: as well as the green spaces, there is residential, commercial, sports and concert venues, places to eat and drink. Its other unique selling point is that it is a work in progress. 鈥淚t provides a nice changing environment,鈥� says Intel鈥檚 Dr Duncan Wilson, Director of ICRI Cities, one of its collaborative research institutes for R&D.

鈥淲e can explore how changes in the physical built environment influence the digital layers we鈥檙e creating. If you build a new building, how will that change the way the radio waves propagate around that field? And as more and more people go to the park on a daily basis, either through living or working there, or for events like a West Ham game 鈥� how do changes in the numbers of users interrupt the radio traffic?鈥�

For technology providers, this real-world experience is crucial: 鈥淟ots of the component parts of these systems exist, but it鈥檚 still quite a young industry in terms of having end-to-end solutions that work,鈥� says Wilson. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 yet know what it takes to create a sustainable Internet of Things network.鈥�

A key aspect of their research is in how self-powering devices can be designed to react to their environment. With billions of sensors deployed across the smart cities of the future, it won鈥檛 be viable to change their batteries or set up each one individually, Wilson points out. 鈥淭he network itself needs to work out how it should run. If a device is on the east-facing side of a tree, it might start to learn that it has a good supply of solar energy in the morning but it鈥檚 going to run out at听the end of the day. The devices will have an awareness of themselves as a community, and decide how often they should be sending measurements and 鈥榳ho鈥� should send them.鈥�

But the physical side of the Internet of Things is only half the story. Just as we need to know how the equipment behaves, we also need to know how people will react to it. And while the full infrastructure of a smart city will take years to put in place, there is plenty of social data that we can gather now to find out how the design of a place affects people鈥檚 experiences of it.

A previous project saw CASA install a wifi prayer network in two churches. When congregants in one church posted a prayer, it appeared on the wall in both and an electronic candle lit up. It was about creating digital empathy, says Hudson-Smith, but it also revealed something else: 鈥淪omeone cleared out the church one night and all of our equipment was stolen. Which is interesting academically because you realise that the Internet of Things is not secure.鈥�

At the Smart Park, CASA has secured a grant from the EPSRC鈥檚 PETRAS hub to investigate cybersecurity, the Internet of Things and trust. 鈥淲e鈥檙e assuming a few of these gnomes will go missing, but they鈥檒l be tracked, so we鈥檒l know where they go,鈥� says Hudson-Smith. The tracking data will not be used to retrieve the gnomes, just to reveal what happens to the devices out in the wild. They will also turn some into 鈥渂ad gnomes鈥� to find out how easily people give up their personal data or how likely they are to take advantage of unexpected access to a secure network. 鈥淭hey might ask you for your password, or the gnome might tell you its password, and we鈥檒l see what people do with that,鈥� adds Hudson-Smith.

This is why academics do sometimes have to do gnomes. The Bluetooth beacons could have been installed in 鈥渦gly white boxes鈥� but then people wouldn鈥檛 engage with them in the same way: 鈥淭hat鈥檚 why a lot of research and devices fail. They鈥檙e too techie and no one cares about them.鈥� Hudson-Smith is a planner by background, but his lab is a mix of mathematicians, computer scientists, geographers, architects, psychologists. They are also working with Lancaster University鈥檚 Imagination lab and artists at Edinburgh University: 鈥淵ou need to get artists involved in your work to get that spark.鈥�

The Bartlett鈥檚 work at the park is set to continue with the opening of a 果冻影院 campus there in 2019. 鈥淩esearch grants can often come to an end whereas the point of this is that it needs to be longer term,鈥� says Hudson-Smith.

鈥淗aving a Smart Park lab based there allows us to carry on the research for the next 10 or so years with Masters courses attached. Hopefully, in 10 years鈥� time, there鈥檒l be new post-docs writing their own grants for work at the park. My job is then done.鈥�

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