A team led by Anind Dey at Carnegie Mellon University was awarded half a million dollars to turn the campus into a hot-spot where apps, sensors and user-developed tools could serve as a small part of Google’s Open Web of Things initiative.
In December, Google announced that its idea of the Internet of Things would allow people to connect everywhere. “Imagine a world in which access to networked technology defies the constraints of desktops, laptops or smartphones.”
According to Jeremy Hsu from IEEE.org, “the $500,000 awarded to the university coalition will help create an Internet of Things (IoT) platform called GloTTO that aims to create a complete interoperable system of IoT technologies. The platform would also allow researchers to figure out how to create a secure system that protects personal privacy in a sensor-filled environment.”
As good as this sounds, issues of privacy may be a concern for students on the campus. So the university will have a team working on keeping data safe.
“Dey sees the project as succeeding with massive amounts of cheap sensors to elevate ‘dumb’ objects on campus to sources of information,” reports Heidi Hoopes for Gizmag.com.
These dumb objects could be a trash can or a copying machine.
At the moment, other schools like Cornell, Stanford and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be helping Carnegie Mellon in the early stages of the work.