A Smarter 'Building 23'

Imagine, if you will, a smart building. A building that will collaborate with your personal mobile device to seamlessly help in the daily tasks, remember people’s names, call repair people when things break and keep your appointments. A building that adjusts the environment to maintain comfort of the occupants, yet reduce energy costs in unoccupied parts of the building. This is the goal of the SensorAndrew project currently deployed in the Silicon Valley campus.

The SensorAndrew project's immediate goal is to make Carnegie Mellon one of the most "sensed" campuses in the world. Being a part of the "living testbed" of sensors, this will enable the dense instrumentation of the whole of Carnegie Mellon’s campuses as a living laboratory for real-world challenges. Each SensorAndrew node is capable of sampling ambient light, temperature, vibration and noise levels every few minutes. (The Privacy Policy can be found at: http://www.ices.cmu.edu/censcir/sensor-andrew/sensor-andrew-privacy.html)

There are currently 30 nodes deployed around the building, making this deployment the densest deployment of SensorAndrew anywhere. Due to this dense deployment, it will allow researchers better understanding of context that can be inferred from our environment. In addition, this system will enhance other research projects by providing additional context information. Based on research needs, the plan is to increase the number to more than 100 nodes in the near future.

(pictured: Dr. Pei Zhang, who is overseeing the Sensor Andrew project at Silicon Valley)