Dozens of Sensors Are Installed in Urban Space

Dozens of Sensors Are Installed in Urban Space

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The City of Chicago is teaming up with the University of Chicago in a multi-million dollar effort to improve quality of life in the city. Sensors are being installed around the city to gather information on an urban scale, part of a project city leaders are calling “The Array of Things.”

“They’re designed to help us capture data about the environment and the activities of the infrastructure across the City of Chicago,” said City Chief Information Officer Brenna Berman.

According to FOX32 website, 50 of these “nodes” are currently being installed on light poles and buildings in the Loop, and other selected neighborhoods with as many as 450 more to go up by 2018. The data stored by these sensors will not only be made available to scientists and educators, but to anyone else who wants it. All the data will be made public.

With privacy a growing concern these days, some Chicagoans believe “The Array of Things” is just another way to gather information about them. “This is something that’s played out around open data in the past already, and that’s the ideas that will come from the public when they see the data and bring to us in partnership and be able to execute together,” Berman said. “The people behind the Array of Things want you to know this is not about tracking the individual, they’re interested in things like humidity and rainfall and traffic flow, whether it be by car or on foot.”