(upbeat music)
- Hi, I'm Scott Counts.
I am a Senior Principal Research Manager at
Microsoft Research.
I am part of a research team called Urban Innovation
that is a research and incubation team
focused on science and technology for cities.
And we have a primary focus on climate equity
and resilience.
Today I'm going to talk about a project
we call Project Eclipse,
which is a full stack solution
to enable neighborhood scale air quality sensing in cities.
So when we say that Eclipse is a full stack solution
for neighborhood scale air quality sensing in cities,
what we mean is that we start with hardware.
So we designed and built in-house novel sensing hardware
to do air quality sensing up through a data stack
that's in Azure through a bunch of different analytics
and ultimately some different experiences with the data
that target different constituent groups.
So this is the latest iteration of our Eclipse,
what we call Eclipse Pro II
which is our piece of hardware
for doing air quality sensing in cities.
Now when we designed this,
we had a number of design constraints.
So ultimately we want cities to be able to deploy hundreds
of these around a city
and so they need to be low cost,
and really, really easy to deploy.
So the devices are small.
They can simply even be zip tied up.
They don't require hard-line power.
So they're solar powered
and they don't require any kind of complicated networking
to transmit data.
They in fact transmit data right over LTE,
up into the Azure data stack.
So we did a bunch of design work for the enclosure,
which you just saw to ensure proper air flow for instance,
through the device
passing over the electro-chemical gas sensors,
to make sure that they can withstand different types
of weather, insects, birds, and everything.
So that's the exterior of the device.
Now let me talk a bit about what's inside the device.
So inside the device, we have four different gas sensors.
So we sense CO, Ozone, NO2 and SO2.
we also have a particulate matter or PM sensor
to sense PM 1.0, PM 2.5 and PM 10.
And then we also sense temperature and humidity.
And also you see,
we have the LTE SIM card slot in there
so that we can transmit data over LTE.
And we record data every one to five minutes,
and then we transmit data every 15 to 20 minutes
up into our cloud store.
So once the data come
into our Azure based data stack off the device,
so they come in through IoT Hub,
they then run up through Stream Analytics.
There's a SQL database on Blob Store.
Then there's a Cloud Service,
which ultimately we use to provide data via API
to our partners.
We also use data from that same API in a Power BI.
So we have various dashboards
that we use for keeping track of devices,
making sure their cell signals are at good levels,
basically as a way to kind of keep an eye
on an overall deployment system of devices.
There are also a number of custom pieces of analytics
that we built for Project Eclipse.
So there's two examples,
one is even before the devices get deployed,
we look at a city and we run analytics
to see where should these devices go
so that they're equitably distributed around the city
so that later, when we want to draw conclusions
from the data we feel those conclusions are more valid.
Another example of the types of custom analytics
that we're building
is looking at geographic disparities in air quality
at neighborhood scale.
Some neighborhoods getting more worse air
than other neighborhoods.
So that's the kind of climate equity analytics
that we can run
when we have really dense geographically dense coverage
of air quality sensors in a city.
So finally we've been designing a number
of different experiences for Project Eclipse.
We really want to make sure
that different constituent groups are able
to engage meaningfully with the data.
So residents, community groups, academics, policymakers,
and we've been piloting these different experiences
in the City of Chicago,
where we've done a large Eclipse deployment.
We have over a hundred sensors around the City of Chicago,
and we've done this in conjunction
with a number of partners.
So JCDecaux who manages the bus shelters in Chicago
and has enabled us to put our sensors on the bus stops
around the City of Chicago,
a number of just tremendous community group partners
and other partners in the city have all enabled this.
So the first experience that is live right now,
it's called Urban Air.
And if you are in Chicago and you're in a bus stop
with one of our sensors on it,
you can walk up to a barcode and scan it with your phone.
It will open up a mobile app that looks like this.
You will see a map of the city
with your current location highlighted.
So here I've highlighted the Laramie
and lake Northbound bus stop
and we see from the sort of red color
that air quality has seen some spikes
into sort of poor air territory,
over on the right you see a timeline
of the air quality throughout the day.
You can see it's generally been pretty good
in the kind of green category,
but we've had these spikes like I mentioned,
you can go back in time and see air quality
from recent days at the stop.
And then of course you can pan around the city
and you can zoom in and out
to see air quality around the city.
We also have a number of options
for how you can learn more,
how you can take action.
So if you want to get involved
with different community groups,
environmental justice groups
that are thinking about air quality in the city,
we gave links.
So basically if you want to learn more,
if you want to get involved,
we provide you those options right here
in the Urban Air tool.
We're also looking into some different types of experiences
with the data
that go beyond just looking at data on a map and over time.
So we're really hoping that we can enable people
to understand almost the story
of air quality in their neighborhoods.
So how does air quality vary in relation to different types
of places like schools or hospitals or restaurants?
How does air quality differ as you get closer
and move away from different potential sources
of air pollution, like highways for instance?
Another experience that we're developing
and deploying in this pilot in Chicago is called EcoPod.
And the EcoPod is in fact,
a horse trailer that we have taken,
we have renovated and we're going to be bringing it
to community groups and events in the city of Chicago
So that people can come to a physical place.
They can look at the actual sensors, at the technology.
They can look at the data, they can talk to people
who are involved with the project to learn more about it.
And the goal really is just
to help people understand this technology,
help enable people to get involved
and just promote discussion
about air quality in their neighborhood.
And so that's EcoPod.
To learn more,
please visit urban.microsoft.com
or the Urban Innovation Research webpage.
And then there's also project pages
for both Project Eclipse and for EcoPod.
So we are excited to see
what comes out of this pilot deployment
of Eclipse in Chicago,
and for potentially expanding into more cities.
If you are interested in Eclipse data
or learning more about the project
or otherwise getting involved,
please visit the Project Eclipse webpage
and there's contact information there.
Thank you.
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- [Programmer] All our code is now open source.