Smart Campus Innovation Day Gathers University Leaders to Discuss New Challenges
University leaders from across the globe convened ahead of ASU’s Smart Region Summit for Smart Campus Innovation Day, an event held to share the successes, struggles, and the opportunities they have encountered on the journey to create a Smart Campus.
These university leaders focused on four core tracks to guide their discussions:
Building Management + GIS, Maintenance & Security
Parking, Transit, Autonomous Vehicles & Mobility Solutions
Student Success, Learning & Classroom Spaces
Student Services & Dining Solutions
Attendees turned to these topics after the keynote address by Jerry Hultin, co-founder and CEO of Global Futures Group, who spoke to the intersection of universities and cities and the development of smart campuses. By the end of the day, working through multiple group exercises and working sessions, the university leaders presented action plans to bring high concept ideas into reality.
A common theme across all four groups was the challenge of decentralizing large systems and using the large amount of data gathered every day effectively and safely. That was clear from the outcomes from the Student Services group. Its members drew the collective conclusion that improving processes, especially as epitomized by dining systems, is solving needs with IoT devices separately, innovating in smaller bursts so as to not have to overhaul large components of institutional infrastructure.
That was also a challenging prospect for the Mobility team, which was focused on the safe and effective movement of people in a congested urban environment. LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) will be central to changing transit behaviors to benefit everyone.
When the Student Success team began to discuss its challenges, its members realized there was a large overlap with the Building Management group’s goals. Student Success is based on changing the pedagogy, how information is taught; to do so, designing learning spaces that can appeal to a broad range of learners is crucial. And changing those Building Management processes, drilling down into test environments such as one floor of one building, to more effectively utilize data can lead to better predictive maintenance and sustainable energy use.
ASU’s Smart City Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) was the site of Smart Campus Innovation Day and is the focal point of the University’s Smart Campus/City/Region initiative, itself an attempt by ASU to leverage its place and bring the Internet of Things (IoT) and connected devices into everyday infrastructure and improve our quality of life. With these discussions, the core tracks have become increasingly actionable, and bring us one step closer to solving pressing issues facing modern life.