AoT GOALS & USES

AoT's Purpose



AoT Goals


Developing Chicago's fitness tracker is no small undertaking. We've been working with numerous groups over the last few years to make our goals a reality.

So, why are we spending all this time developing and deploying this network of sensors?

We were hoping you'd ask.

Our Visions


Array of Things was conceived as an experimental project to explore the concept of an urban-scale “instrument” which enables users of the collected data to monitor and examine Chicago’s environment, infrastructure and activity.

Ultimately, the goal is to measure the city in sufficient detail to provide data that will make Chicago and other cities healthier, more livable and more efficient.

We hope to measure factors that impact livability in the urban environment and detect trends and changes over time.

The data will help cities operate more efficiently and realize cost savings by anticipating and proactively addressing local challenges, concerns & interests.

The success of the AoT project relies on the City, researchers, urban planners, policymakers, developers and residents working together.

This is truly a collaborative public effort with a lot of potential.

The project is also a computer science research effort to understand how to create a resilient platform that can support not only traditional sensing but "software-defined" sensing.

In other words, nodes have remotely programmable computing systems in addition to sensors, and this allows programs to be run within the nodes to analyze the data.

For instance, they could "sense" the number of vehicles at an intersection by using computer vision software to analyze images.

This concept, often called "edge computing," also supports very strong privacy protections such as are covered in the project's privacy policies.