Page 43 - GCN, June/july 2017

bunch of lower-end devices instead of high-end devices to be able to scale them out,” said Matthew Delcambre, director of the Center for Business and Information Technologies at the uni- versity’s Informatics Research Institute. “Because they are in traffic areas in some cases, we can start to correlate between our traffic monitoring and air quality systems.”
CGI officials said they hope to begin releasing reports on the data from the air quality sensors by end of the year.
“We are still in the stage of where we are building the initial prototypes of the sensors,” LaBar said. “We want to understand what works when it comes to them being exposed to different en- vironmental conditions that are unique to the Gulf Coast, state of Louisiana and Lafayette — like large amounts of hu- midity.”
The interoperability of the fiber net- work has CGI officials looking into oth-
er ways to make the city smarter, such as water management.
In 2016, several parishes in Loui- siana flooded when they got as much as two feet of rain in a 48-hour period. The National Weather Service’s Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center has estimated that the region has a 0.1 per- cent chance of that type of rainfall hap- pening in any given year.
“There is a lot of interest in expand- ing some of the data collection into stormwater management or water quality management to help with land use planning and transportation man- agement,” LaBar said.
The first two air quality sensors went online in March, right before Cajun Code Fest, an annual coding competi- tion run by the university. For the event, the city opened its datasets on the bud- get, public works, crime assessment, and parks and recreation — in addition to air quality — so that 12 teams could
create apps based on the data.
“One of the more interesting appli- cations was around emergency evacu- ations,” Delcambre said. “We’d just published the API data for the air qual- ity sensors a couple of days before, so unfortunately we didn’t have a lot of teams who were able to take advantage
of it.”
Lafayette officials are also working
with local public schools on science, technology, engineering and mathe- matics programs to spark students’ in- terest in IoT initiatives.
“Pursuing smart-city solutions in or- der to transform how LCG services and interacts with citizens and businesses is critical to economic growth in Lafay- ette,” Lafayette Mayor-President Joel Robideaux said. “Integrating our in- formation systems and enabling open- data initiatives will foster our economy, improve government services and in- crease citizen engagement.”•
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