This project will help develop the underlying scientific and engineering foundation necessary to spawn the new technologies and systems necessary to make our cities and communities more sustainable.  By engaging the City of Palo Alto in a close partnership, this project will have broad impacts in both the academic and civic communities. Results will be readily accessible and disseminated to Palo Alto municipal officials to empower municipal officials to make data-informed design, management and policy decisions.  Overall, this project addresses the enormous pressure rapid urbanization is having on the myriad of complex and interdependent urban systems (e.g., energy, transportation, environmental, buildings).  Changes in one system can have substantial impacts on others making it difficult to discern and predict the effects of urban design, management and policy decisions. We will outfit 3-4 blocks in downtown Palo Alto, CA with sensors to form a “living lab” and employ a radically new data-driven micro-experimentation framework to characterize and quantify the coupled interactions and dynamics between urban infrastructure and human systems.

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Team Member(s): Dr. Marco Miotti, Rohan Aras, Ranjitha Shivaram 

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Partner(s): City of Palo Alto, Silicon Valley Clean Energy (SVCE)

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Funder(s): National Science Foundation EAGER program under Grant No. 1642315; UPS Endowment