Select Page

Key to Chicago’s Quality of Life: The ‘Array of Things’?

By Rob Mitchum // May 4, 2015

Last winter, a crew from the BBC’s technology program Click visited Chicago to learn more about the Array of Things, the Urban Center for Computation and Data city-wide sensor network project. Reporter Marc Cieslak went to Argonne National Laboratory, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s “City of Big Data” exhibit to profile the technology, design, and potential of the project, which hopes to install hundreds of sensor nodes around the city over the next three years. CI Senior Fellow and UrbanCCD Director Charlie Catlett talks about how the high-resolution data of Array of Things can help asthma sufferers and public safety.

The piece does a nice job of explaining how the success of the project is tied to its scale, creating an unprecedented block-by-block environmental and health monitor for Chicago.

“The more of them there are, the more data they can collect,” Cieslak says, from the middle of a busy intersection, “and that’s really important, because the more data they capture, the more accurate the results will be.”

You can watch the full segment at BBC World News.