Understanding Cities through Measurement and Embedded Intelligence
Charlie Catlett
is a Senior Computer Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy scientific research laboratory. Catlett is also a Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, and a Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His current research focus areas include urban data science, cyber security and privacy, mobile devices and social networks, and the use of mobile and embedded computing to create intelligent infrastructure. He served as Argonne’s Chief Information Officer from 2007-2011.
From 2004 through 2007 he was director of the TeraGrid Initiative, a national-scale facility supported by the National Science Foundation. In 1999 Charlie co-founded the Global Grid Forum, (now Open Grid Forum) serving as its founding chair from October 1999 through September 2004. Concurrently, he directed the State of Illinois funded I-WIRE optical network project, deploying dark fiber and transport infrastructure to ten institutions in Illinois. I-WIRE today provides over 200 Gb/s of lambda and dark fiber resources to major projects including TeraGrid, the Starlight international optical network hub, Optiputer, and ESnet.
Prior to joining Argonne in 2000, Charlie was Chief Technology Officer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). As part of the original team that established NCSA in 1985, Charlie participated in design, deployment, and evolution of NSFNET, which was one of several early national networks that collectively evolved into today’s Internet. Beginning in 1992 his team designed and operated NCSAs web infrastructure during the exponential growth of the web following NCSA’s release of the Mosaic web browser.
Abstract
Urbanization is one of the great challenges and opportunities of this century, inextricably tied to global challenges ranging from climate change to sustainable use of energy and natural resources, and from personal health and safety to accelerating innovation and education. There is a growing science community-spanning nearly every discipline-pursuing research related to these challenges. The availability of urban data has increased over the past few years, in particular through open data initiatives, creating new opportunities for collaboration between academia and local government in areas ranging from scalable data infrastructure to tools for data analytics, along with challenges such as replicability of solutions between cities, integrating and validating data for scientific investigation, and protecting privacy. For many urban questions, however, new data sources will be required with greater spatial and/or temporal resolution, driving innovation in the use of sensors in mobile devices as well as embedding intelligent sensing infrastructure in the built environment. The latter, "edge computing," provides the opportunity to deploy "intelligent" sensors that can adapt over time both through improvements in software and through deep learning techniques. Collectively these data sources also hold promise to begin to integrate computational models associated with individual urban sectors such as transportation, building energy use, or climate. Catlett will discuss the work that Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago are doing in partnership with the City of Chicago and other cities through the Urban Center for Computation and Data, focusing in particular on new opportunities related to embedded systems and experience to date with the Array of Things project in Chicago and partner cities.
