Promote Research
The long-term goal for the CSU T.E.C.H. Hub is to be known as a hub of digital and IoT research. The T.E.C.H. Hub fosters research activity by engaging additional faculty in deepening the demo projects, hosting brown bag series and events to bring together faculty in multiple disciplines, and facilitating ideation sessions for important proposal solicitations from federal funding agencies.
Faculty associated with the CSU T.E.C.H. Hub are at work on three demonstration projects alongside their partners from CWRU. These demo projects are intended to provide a blueprint for the kinds of transdisciplinary collaborations that the field of IoT enables:
- In Lakewood, the IoT Collaborative is deploying a novel instrumentation platform to monitor road surfaces and the sub-surface infrastructure using GPS, vibration sensing, and ground-penetrating radar, to detect issues before they become catastrophic (e.g., an undetected water leak leading to a sinkhole). The data is being collected, archived, and analyzed, providing continual insights to the city’s service department to better optimize scheduling and costs for pavement resurfacing, as well as identifying “hot-spots” for investigation. In the near future, the team will be looking at pathways for translating the technology that has been developed (e.g., licensing or spin-out).
- “Let’s Talk Tech Hough” is a community-based demonstration project under the auspices of the collaborative. The project is an authentic, people-driven community engagement process in which residents are at the center of innovation in their neighborhoods. Rather than impose technology and digital-based solutions from expert research onto a community, the project seeks to invert the traditional research-to-community adoption process by first engaging and empowering the community to determine and drive the types of digital solutions, devices, and applications they need to improve their lives. Through extensive community engagement, six opportunity areas have been identified: Safe Neighborhoods, Green and Energy Efficient Community, Technology, Walkable Neighborhoods, Health & Well-being, and Economic Growth. Through this project, researchers within the IOTC are thought leaders on community development initiatives that bridge appreciative inquiry with phenomenological interpretation to better understand human experience. The team is currently working on co-developing a 21st Century Park in a community-university partnership that would begin to address some of the aspirations of the community.
- A third demo project is in the social services domain. Using a unique anthropological approach, a research team that includes Urban Affairs and Data Science faculty are studying technical as well as administrative barriers to data sharing that could significantly improve the abilities of law enforcement agencies and health providers to address the opioid crisis. The pilot study will tell the stories of 3-4 survivors and 3-4 fatalities from opioid overdoses to investigate data gaps, patterns of behavior, and how they interacted with the criminal justice and health systems and services that target people suffering from addiction. By understanding where those systems succeed or fail to work together, we can address how connected technologies and data can be used to develop more effective, human-centered policies and programs to treat and reduce addiction.