Another in a series previewing speakers at Sensors Converge 2023.
Q: How do leading research and educational institutions use sensors ? What are the challenges and opportunities?
Mora: At the Senseable City Lab at MIT, we investigate new ways to learn about how cities work in order to design more inclusive and sustainable cities. Our lab is extremely multi-disciplinary and all, from undergrad students to principal investigator, take part in the design and execution of data collection studies. We have been pioneering new ways of sensing the urban environment designing opportunistic data collection methods; for example, mapping green spaces using publicly available street-view images; detecting hyperlocal changes in air quality and urban heat with low-cost sensors mounted on taxis; using lidar data to understand the morphology of informal urban settlements.
Q: What role do open source communities play in affecting the choice of technology?
Mora: We deeply rely on open-source (OS) technologies, both hardware and software, in order to rapid prototype IoT systems that we deploy in global cities to collect research data. OS software libraries and hardware schematics help us test different options in fast iterations and enable scalability across cities worldwide. We also release several backbone technologies powering our research works as OS. An example is Flatburn (senseable.mit.edu/flatburn), an OS environmental sensing platform we created to enable communities to collect, understand and share data about the environments they live in. We made everything freely available, from the schematics blueprint and assembly guides, to the data we have collected deploying the sensors, as well as the code necessary to calibrate and analyze the data.
Q: How do informal research and education organizations (citizens science communities, fablabs and others) use sensors and for what purposes?
Mora: The role of sensors in research and education is twofold. On one side sensors are needed to collect data necessary to answer research questions. On the other side the development of sensors is an experimental learning experience, both for students and members of communities such as fablabs and maker space. The challenge is to equip those users not just with the skills for building sensors using pre-made cooking recipes --often shared as OS-- but also to enable them to understand how sensors work as well as to validate and analyze the data collected.
Q: How can rapid prototyping of sensor-based solutions help tackle societal-critical questions in the field of climate resilience?
Mora: We are experiencing a global environmental crisis due to the effects of climate change and poor air quality. Hyperlocal data, which is data at high space-time resolution, can provide the much-needed information to take informed actions, steer policymaking and debunk fake news. Moreover, it can enable the fast feedback loops necessary to evaluate to evaluate and benchmark the many decarbonization solutions that are being designed by research institutions and cities worldwide.
Simone Mora, PhD, is a research scientist at Senseable City Laboratory at MIT. He speaks at Sensors Converge 2023 on June 21 at 8:30 a.m. PT as part of a Leaders Roundtable on “State of the Industry: The New Era of Sensors.” The event runs June 20-22 in Santa Clara, California. Registration is available online.