Campus testbeds pilot smart city solutions to climate threats — GCN
The recent uptick of natural disasters in the Pacific Northwest is pushing researchers at Portland State University’s Digital City Testbed Center (DCTC) to explore ways to raise the public’s awareness about environmental threats. However, between communities that are distrustful of urban digital technologies and startups’ innovations that never gain traction, many tech-based solutions for increasing awareness of local and global problems are never deployed.
“The analogy that we’ve been drawing is with the COVID-19 vaccine,” DCTC Director Jonathan Fink said. “You have this miraculous technology, but it’s not able to realize its potential because so many people have concerns about it and are reluctant to use it,” he said. “There’s a similar issue in terms of climate change, particularly in cities where there are technologies that can help mitigate some of the effects.”
To make it easier to evaluate smart city technology, DCTC is building a network of campus testbeds where promising applications can be piloted to evaluate their reception and effectiveness. The campuses offer the advantage of being similar to, but smaller than, municipalities, enabling them to make faster decisions than cities. The testbeds give researchers the opportunity to study various applications, their interoperability and data privacy and governance issues.
“The analogy that we’ve been drawing is with the COVID-19 vaccine,” DCTC Director Jonathan Fink said. “You have this miraculous technology, but it’s not able to realize its potential because so many people have concerns about it and are reluctant to use it,” he said. “There’s a similar issue in terms of climate change, particularly in cities where there are technologies that can help mitigate some of the effects.”
To make it easier to evaluate smart city technology, DCTC is building a network of campus testbeds where promising applications can be piloted to evaluate their reception and effectiveness. The campuses offer the advantage of being similar to, but smaller than, municipalities, enabling them to make faster decisions than cities. The testbeds give researchers the opportunity to study various applications, their interoperability and data privacy and governance issues.
gcn.com
