IoT & Sustainability: Practice, Policy and Promise
Brandie Nonnecke, PhD, @BNonnecke
Mia Bruch, PhD
Camille Crittenden, PhD, @CamCritt
By 2050 nearly two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities. The global challenges faced in natural resource and infrastructure management are immense. Global temperatures are rising, water shortages are more frequent, food supplies are increasingly scarce, and energy systems are overburdened. The “Internet of Things” (IoT) is poised to play a key role in enabling resilient and equitable management of urban environments. IoT can provide real-time data collection on the availability and use of energy and water resources, facilitating more informed resource conservation, and can streamline data collection on traffic patterns and parking availability, decreasing gas consumption and CO2 emissions. Yet, the potential benefits of IoT are matched by concerns regarding data security, privacy, and interoperability.
CITRIS and the Banatao Institute are pleased to release a research study on IoT for sustainability in urban environments. The white paper provides examples of the application of IoT for sustainability in the energy, water, and transportation sectors and offers recommendations to city-level officials seeking to implement IoT technologies within these domains. The report concludes with a recommendation to approach city-level IoT from a holistic perspective whereby collaborative public-private engagement is at the center of all IoT deployment plans and technologies; public-private-academic partnerships are sought for mutually beneficial sustainability outcomes; privacy, security, and interoperability concerns are balanced with trust and reliability; and technologies, data, and insights are shared across sectors and with the public, to the extent advisable for confidentiality reasons. Our findings and recommendations seek to inform public decision-makers, policy officials, technology developers, and consumers who create and implement IoT platforms to improve environmental sustainability and quality of life.
This white paper was sponsored by Microsoft and CITRIS and the Banatao Institute.
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IoT & Sustainability: Practice, Policy And Promise Public Symposium
Co-hosted by CITRIS and Microsoft on May 12, 2016, “IoT & Sustainability: Practice, Policy and Promise,” brought together leaders from academia, industry, and government to discuss the promise of the Internet of Things (IoT) for managing energy, water, and transportation in the urban environment. The symposium highlighted emerging technologies for smarter cities; raised questions regarding privacy and security; and identified issues pertaining to data collection, storage, and interoperability. Tom Siebel, Chairman and CEO of C3IoT, and Melanie Nutter, Principal at Nutter Consulting, provided keynote remarks.
The event was recorded and can be viewed at: http://bit.ly/289wkDL
