City
Lab @ WPI
City Lab
is a research laboratory associated with the Interdisciplinary and Global
Studies Division of the Worcester Polytechnic
Institute (WPI).
City Lab is dedicated to the
study of cities and to the development of urban information technologies – both
soft and hard – to assist municipalities in their maintenance, management and
planning activities. The lab focuses
on the collection, archival, manipulation and analysis of municipal information
that can be used for urban and environmental maintenance, management and
planning. The lab assists project teams
that complete urban and environmental Interactive Qualifying Projects at WPI
Project Centers. Major Qualifying
Projects with the Computer Science department foster the creation of web-based urban information systems that are
incubated on City Lab servers to facilitate the dissemination and utilization
of the accumulated city knowledge resulting from WPI’s interdisciplinary and
global studies. Innovative urban technologies are developed,
through Major Qualifying Projects in City Lab’s hardware laboratory located in
the Electrical and Computer Engineering department, to automate the collection
of urban information. City Lab also
promotes a number of urban initiatives
in a variety of service-learning contexts.
Current initiatives include: the
Hometown Initiative, the E-campus Initiative and the City Sounds Initiative.
You can
take a look at a (very large) powerpoint presentation
about City Lab, by clicking here (53 Mb).
The main
areas of research at City Lab are:
The lab
focuses first and foremost on the collection, archival, manipulation and
analysis of city knowledge starting
from the raw data used for urban maintenance, including the organized
information that guides urban management, with the goal of arriving at the
deeper knowledge that inspires urban planning.
Principles
of City Knowledge are
applied from the middle-out in emergent fashion throughout the sphere of
operation of City Lab.
Sophisticated
urban information systems are the natural outlets for the dissemination and
utilization of the accumulated city knowledge that results from our numerous
urban studies. The primary focus of our
work in this context is the development of LOUIS,
which stands for Local On-line Urban Information System.
Innovative
urban technologies are being developed to automate or at least facilitate data
collection activities. Examples of these
activities are the Ultrasound Boat Monitoring project,
the Turbulence Mapper and the Pothole Mapper, that are aimed at the development of innovative
instruments to monitor urban transportation issues worldwide.
A solid foundation of city knowledge is gradually accrued
as a byproduct of a never-ending sequence of urban studies that are undertaken
under the auspices of City Lab at a number of global sites that are part of the
WPI global network,
in particular in the cities of Venice,
Italy, Boston,
Massachusetts and Worcester,
Massachusetts.
A number of urban
initiatives are promoted by City Lab to further its institutional aims in a
variety of service-learning contexts.
There are at present three main urban initiatives in progress: the Hometown
Initiative, the E-campus Initiative and
the City Sounds Initiative.
City
Lab [Homepage,
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Knowledge,
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Systems,
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