Advanced Grid Interfaces for Environmental e-Science: Urban Pollution

Summary | Progress To Date | Publications | People | Miscellaneous

Overview

The Advanced Grid Interfaces for Environmental e-Science project (Main Page) looks at how sensors and user can be integrated into the eScience programme. Currently eScience focuses on data or computation heavy applications and in some respects neglects the fact that science is often done with large numbers of data sources and large numbers of users.

Two demonstration scenarios are considered:

Studying carbon cycling in Antarctic lakes, a demonstrator that as well as deploying new sensors, looks at integration of data and access to that data with geographically dispersed collaborators. (See page at Nottingham.
Environmental science in urban environments, a demonstrator looking at data integration between multiple static and mobile sensors with the aim of building and visualising a detailed map of pollution in London.

UCL works on the 2nd of these.

Environmental science in urban environments

Modern cities face daunting problems of population density, transport management and regeneration in both economic and social terms. At UCL, the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, the departments of Geomatic Engineering and Geography, and the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning have been collaborating in the general area of urban environmental science, developing frameworks for analysis and simulation. This includes macro-scale data from sources such as the National Environmental Technology Centre and also kerbside data from sensors such as Streetbox that have been developed at UCL and deployed within London.

Existing tools to understand the city, such as graphical modelling of the built environment, simulation and mapping of transport flows and pollution levels, tend to lead to isolated and relatively static models. We propose to provide an integrated visualization system that will allow presentation of models at the urban scale on a range of devices from mobile PDA through to Reactor. Our primary demonstration will be of a user physically present in the urban environment collaborating with a remote ReaCtor user over a visualization of data concerning their common geographical area.

Progress To Date

Within the City Project UCL is most interested in the rendering, modelling and interaction issues. We are continuing work on modelling and visualization of pollution data in urban context.

The following pages detail our work to date (latest work first)