Dive Brief:
- Carnegie Mellon researchers are building a vision for the Pittsburgh campus that would give students and faculty access to unprecedented information collected from wireless sensors.
- Using $500,000 in startup funding as well as technology from Google, the plan is to start by placing sensors in the labs and offices of participating researchers and then expand campuswide — and perhaps citywide — from there.
- The sensors will be able to say whether a faculty member is in his or her office, whether a parking space is available, and whether a particular section of a building is using a disproportionate amount of electricity, among other things.
Dive Insight:
Tracking people’s movements necessarily brings up privacy concerns. Researchers are not forcing anyone on their teams to participate. Already, though, there is a question of whether the sensors will prompt changes in behavior simply because of their presence. Expansion of the sensor placement beyond the first few offices and labs to the entire Pittsburgh campus is expected by 2016. The project is open-platform, meaning researchers beyond Carnegie Mellon will be involved. So far, researchers at Cornell, Stanford, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are already participating.
Technological advancements bring greater ease-of-use to campus life and operational savings to school budgets. It is important, however, to keep security and privacy concerns in mind when considering how quickly to expand such initiatives.