Page 26 - Campus Technology, May/June 2018

INTERNET OF THINGS david raths
Grappling With IoT Growth on Campus
Universities share how the expanding Internet of Things is impacting their institutions, from the sheer volume of data to staffing issues and the overall potential for students.
SMART CAMPUS efforts take advantage of the Internet of Things (IoT) to gain efficiencies from automation and analytics, often starting with building systems and energy usage.
But as IoT efforts expand to other parts of the university, including student success, some universities are experiencing growing pains working across disciplines to gather and analyze so much data. For instance, a few years into a smart campus initiative called the Integrated Controls and Analytics Program, Stanford University (CA) is finding data quality and data management are raising unfore- seen challenges.
“Data management is the biggest obstacle we have right now,” said Gerry Hamilton, Stanford’s director of facilities energy management. “It all comes down to scalability and sustainability. We have found there is an exponential growth of effort that happens every time you deploy one more system.”
Getting one building control system to integrate with one cloud analytics application takes a lot of work, because several people with different subject-matter expertise have to be involved — including IT staffers who make connections to servers and configure firewall rules,
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | May/June 2018
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