USC and Los Angeles Collaborate to Launch IoT Sandbox
When cities and universities collaborate using the latest technologies, innovation blossoms.
Take Pittsburgh, for example. When Carnegie Mellon University worked with Uber and Google, both city and university benefited from the employment opportunities and insightful research generated from the partnerships.
In Los Angeles, city-university collaboration has gone a step further with the November opening of an Internet of Things sandbox on the University of Southern California campus.
The Intelligent IoT Integrator, or I3 Consortium, was created by the Los Angeles Information Technology Agency (ITA) and USC’s Marshall School of Business and Viterbi School of Engineering to be a test site for the city to explore emerging technologies, StateScoop reports.
Using this consortium to build a community-based IoT network will allow the city and university to consolidate valuable information needed to make technological advances.
“Community-based IoT networks are built from groups of independent citizens, companies and other entities that voluntarily work together to create powerful data ‘rivers’ or consolidated data streams from many IoT device owners into one common flow,” reads an article on the Viterbi School of Engineering website.
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The I3 Consortium Could Encourage Better Data Usage
As data streams grow, the I3 Consortium will be able to help the city of Los Angeles provide better customer service and streamline management of energy use, transit, garbage collection and other key city services. The Viterbi article notes that the planned data system could even help monitor unexpected activities such as cyberthreats.
To do this, USC Marshall reports that I3 will work with suppliers to create an environment to simplify testing of IoT tools, manage trust with the community of device owners and distribute information and software to encourage the evolution of IoT.
Another one of the primary goals of I3 is to develop an open-source deliverable to help other communities establish their own data “rivers.”
“USC Viterbi through its Information Sciences Institute developed some of the early protocols for the internet that helped propel the information revolution,” said USC Viterbi School of Engineering Dean Yannis C. Yortsos, in the Viterbi article. “I3 is to the Internet of Things what the core protocols were to the original internet. We continue this tradition of technological empowerment, this time in the IoT revolution, for the purpose of building smart cities.”
