Sensing the City

Catalog description

For most of its brief history, the domain of “smart cities” has belonged to large corporate vendors who promise and offer ubiquitous, citywide intelligence that utilizes their proprietary systems. More recently, an increasing number of startups have developed solutions which can make the technology somewhat more accessible. Unfortunately for municipalities, working with product vendors can be a heavy lift and the commitments involve lengthy procurement and contracting processes. In the past five years or so, the access to connected technology has increased and the hobbyist or “maker” movement has seen an uptick in offerings related to IoT. From the Arduino IoT Cloud and Adafruit.io software, to the Raspberry Pi and Particle hardware, building connected IoT devices has become easier than ever before. Through platforms like Google Coral and Nvidia Jetson, even edge computing and AI has become available to those with coding skills and a modest budget. What this course aims to explore is what happens when low-cost, readily available electronics platforms address the data needs of municipal governments. Rather than thinking of smart cities as large scale, big data projects that provide intelligence across a city, we will look at targeted applications that would be too small or costly to pursue as a conventional IoT procurement. What intelligence can be gathered in a short period of time with a small budget? During this course, we will examine successful and troubled smart cities projects, discuss the ethics of public technology projects, and review the prevailing best practices and guidelines relating to the Internet of Things in government use. Thinking in terms of “rapid IoT” and “little big data,” students will partner with NYC agency representatives* to uncover insights about a particular issue related to their work. Students will undertake a semester-long project,…