Just come back from a great workshop organised by Charlie Catlett from the University of Chicago Urban Center for Computation and Data and the Argonne National Laboratory. The outcome from this workshop has been a draft US/UK draft proposal for instrumenting cities. All we need now is the funding!
The workshop was hosted at the Future Cities Catapult new Urban Innovation Centre (freshly opened and still smelling of paint – btw geo people apparently the OS is taking a floor there for their Research and Innovation group). Over 2 days we discussed solar powered mini cells from Jacqueline Cole at Cambridge University/Argonne and were introduced to the Waggle platform and Array of Things by Pete Beckman and Rajesh Sankaran from the Argonne Lab – just a small part of the great stuff going on in Chicago. We also heard from Intel/Imperial’s Duncan Wilson about the work they are doing in London with Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected Cites and the plans for instrumenting York from Alistair Boxall and the Capacitie project. One of the highlights was a tour of Umbrellium’s offices (and good Vietnamese food) in the company of Usman Haque the founder of Umbrellium (thingful.net and other things). Usman founded Pachube the sensor upload and data service.
We have already agreed to host some of Jacqui’s mini solar cell powered sensors and have already started to look at integrating Plenario (UCCD’s platform for displaying city metrics) as it is built on the same PostgreSQL/PostGIS/Python stack that we use for the Urban Observatory. Might be planning a trip to Chicago shortly!