National Science Foundation funds citizen science project to crowdsource an infrared street view

We are pleased to announce that the National Science Foundation has awarded us a two-year, $500,000 exploratory grant to develop, test, and evaluate a citizen science program that engages youth to investigate energy issues through scientific inquiry with innovative technology. The project will crowd-create the Infrared Street View, a citizen science program that aims to produce a thermal version of Google's Street View using an affordable infrared (IR) camera attached to a smartphone. In collaboration with high schools and out-of-school programs in Massachusetts, we will conduct pilot-tests with approximately 200 students in this exploratory phase. The project will develop SmartIR, a smartphone app that will guide users to collect IR images on both Android and iOS platforms for synthesizing a seamless street view. Figure 1 shows a prototype of the Infrared Street View and Figure 2 shows a little math behind the scenes.

Fig. 1: A hemispherical infrared street view (prototype)

In essence, an IR camera serves as a high-throughput data acquisition instrument that collects thousands of temperature data points each time a picture is taken. With this incredible tool, youth can collect massive geotagged thermal data that have considerable scientific and educational value for visualizing energy usage and improving energy efficiency at all levels. The Infrared Street View program will provide a Web-based platform for youth and anyone interested in energy efficiency to view and analyze the aggregated data to identify possible energy losses. By sharing their scientific findings with stakeholders, youth will make changes to the way energy is being used. 

We are completely aware of possible legal implications and complications of the proposed citizen science program. In the case of Kyllo v. United States in 2001,  the Supreme Court has ruled that the use of a thermal camera from a public vantage point to monitor the radiation of heat from a person's home was a “search” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and thus required a warrant. The ruling seems to be limited to the use of thermal cameras by law enforcement, however. Back then, IR cameras were available to only a handful of professionals, but they are only $200 nowadays and just a few clicks away on Amazon. The widespread use of smartphone-based IR cameras is making thermal images commonplace on the Internet and it is probably an interesting question for law scholars to study how civilian use of IR cameras should be regulated.

Fig. 2: Math behind the scenes.

Regardless, we will take the privacy issue very seriously and will take every precaution that we can think of to avoid potential side effects resulted from this well-intentioned program. Fortunately, we have a lot of public supports to conduct this research on large public buildings and possible commercial buildings, where the concerns of privacy are far less than private residential buildings and the needs to reduce the energy waste of those buildings and save taxpayer dollars are far more pressing. Hence, we will start with school, public, and commercial buildings in selected areas where performing thermal scan of the buildings and publishing their thermal images for educational and research purposes are permitted by school leaders, town officials, and property owners.  

From a broader perspective, the Infrared Street View program could serve as a pilot test that may shed light on increasingly important issues related to citizen privacy in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), which features the ubiquity of sensor data collection that could be viewed by many as invasive into their physical space (not just cyberspace). While no one can deny the tremendous potential of the technology in transforming the ways people learn, work, and live, careful research must be carried out to address legitimate concerns. This program could be one of those projects that provide a unique approach to meet those challenges from a citizen science point of view, which integrates many interesting scientific, technical, educational, and legal aspects. The lessons we can learn from conducting this work could be very useful to the citizen science community in the IoT era.

National Science Foundation funds research and development of an IoT platform for smart schools

Fig. 1: A schematic illustration of IoT as a STEM learning integrator

Future sustainable and resilient infrastructure is expected to be powered by renewable energy, be able to respond intelligently to changes in the environment, and support smart and connected communities. We are pleased to announce that the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded our team a $2.9 million, four-year grant to explore the STEM education and workforce development challenges and opportunities in the coming transformation of our nation's infrastructure.

One of the core innovations will be a cyber-physical engineering platform for designing Internet of Things (IoT) systems that manage the resources, space, and processes of a community based on real-time analysis of data collected by various sensors. This innovation is potentially transformative as it can turn the entire building of a home, the entire campus of a school, or the entire area of a town into an engineering laboratory with virtually unlimited opportunities for learning, research, and exploration.

Fig. 2: A possible IoT system for managing a parking lot

Designing an IoT system provides plenty of opportunities to learn math, science, engineering, and computation practices in an integrated fashion, rather than in isolation. Working with sensors allows students to learn the science behind them through inquiry. For example, to calibrate an IoT system, students must understand what specific variables the sensor data represent scientifically. They must analyze the data to explore in what ranges the variables are supposed to vary in different scenarios in order to determine which type of response should be triggered, to what, and when. The acquired knowledge is then applied to the design of an IoT system, which requires engineering design thinking to make trade-off decisions, optimize system performance, and achieve cost effectiveness. Finally, the control, response, and integration of the entire system are realized through computer programming that deals with all foreseeable complexities. The overlaps among three basic skills—scientific reasoning, design thinking, and computational thinking—supported by the IoT platform provide researchers an opportunity to study their integration, as illustrated in Figure 1. (In fact, mathematical thinking is also involved, but let's just leave that out for now.)

This project is unique to engineering and computer science education because IoT is not only a crucial part of electrical engineering and information technology, but it is also one of the few ways through which computer programming can be directly linked to scientific inquiry and engineering design in the material world. Figure 2 provides an example.

This work is supported by the NSF under grant number 1721054. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper, however, are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.