Creating a global open research platform to better understand social sustainability using data from a real-life smart village

Digital twin of the smart village from which the project team will be collecting data.

A BU team is working with SmartaByar and the Red Hat Social Innovation Program in order to create a global secure open source research platform allowing universities and researchers to study what social sustainability means using actual data from Veberöd, Sweden (or from its digital twin) as a test village supported by SmartaByar. The goal of this project is to build an open source technological infrastructure which has never been built before, so that researchers can collaborate on this platform effectively and securely to study topics that will ultimately define a link between well-being and eco-smart cities and provide smart services to their citizens. During the first year of the project, the team studied the available data and designed an open source platform that interfaces with the data sources (IoT devices) and supports a digital twin model of the village on which smart services can be tested. A specific use case (a smart traffic light) was identified from which a smart service is being built. The second-year goals are to (a) complete the open source platform to include large-scale data exchange APIs which are aligned with open standards used in digital twin and application development platforms for smart cities, and (b) test the use case using actual real-time data and scale up the use case to the entire smart village and beyond.

Outreach and Engagement Activities

Keynote Lecture: 14th EAI Intl. Conf. on Performance Evaluation Methodologies and Tools. Guangzhou, China, September 2021 [remote].
Invited Seminar: Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, October 2021 [remote].- Invited Seminar: University of California Santa Cruz, CA, October 2021 [remote].
Invited Lecture: Interface of Data Sciences and Sustainability Series. Boston University, Boston, MA, November 2021 [remote].
Invited Lecture: Tutorial Series on Discrete Event Systems, December 2021 [remote].
Invited Lecture: Workshop on Control for Autonomous Cities, 60th IEEE Conf. on Decision and Control. Austin, TX, December 2021 [remote].
Invited Seminar: Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China, May 2022 [remote].
Invited Lecture: KTH Royal Inst. of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, June 2022.
Panel organizer, Institute for Sustainable Energy: Understanding AI’s potential for sustainability, Boston, MA, April 2022 [remote].

Looking Ahead