A team of University professors is working with city officials to apply technology to public issues in crime and transportation.
Associate Director for Cyber infrastructure at the LSU Center for Computation & Technology Seung-Jong Jay Park is the principal investigator for this project.
“This is an interdisciplinary research project spanning computer science, electrical and computer engineering, social work and civil engineering,” Park said.
The National Science Foundation awarded the team a $99,932 grant through its Smart and Connected Communities Program, according to a news release.
Other researchers include, director in the Office of Social Service Research and Development Cecile Guin; professor in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Chester Wilmot; Assistant professor of computer science Kisung Lee; and professor of electrical and computer engineering Jagannathan Ramanujam.
Civil research groups led by Wilmot are focusing on building research questions based on transportation, while social work is building research questions based on crime.
“For transportation, we can analyze live video streams to monitor traffic and some kind of abnormal event detection suggests a car accident or crime event,” Park said.
In addition to collecting information from video streams, the team also collects from social network data through applications like Waze and Twitter about Baton Rouge.
“At LSU, we do not have explicit research groups that can solve smart city yet,” Park said. “We’re using this grant to form the team and within one year we try to communicate with Baton Rouge to connect and hear their problems.”
Last year, Baton Rouge proposed a multi-million dollar smart city project. They did not receive the grant, but the city is still working toward this project by working with the University.
“We try to make use of our supercomputing resources at our centers to build a large-scale research platform to help with software development and data collection,” Park said.
Park and his team are working closely with city officials to make Baton Rouge a smart city.
“I expect that if we successfully develop these technologies, we can expect new things in cities like video analysis software that can really help not only the transportation bureau, but also the police department to detect crime- or traffic-related issues,” Park said.
Park said he hopes to continue working with the East Baton Rouge Parish Mayor-President’s office to follow cities like Austin and Chicago to develop a smart city.
“We did not have much work on crime and transportation yet, but until now, we have worked on more biomedical research,” Park said. “I thought that if we apply those developing technologies to crime and transportation I thought it would be really helpful for Baton Rouge to reach the level of smart city.”
East Baton Rouge Parish Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome did not respond to The Daily Reveille’s request for comment.