Grappling with IoT Growth on Campus
Universities share how the expanding Internet of Things is impacting their institutions, from the sheer volume of data to staffing issues and the overall potential for students.
Smart campus efforts take advantage of the Internet of Things (IoT) to gain efficiencies from automation and analytics, often starting with building systems and energy usage.
But as IoT efforts expand to other parts of the university, including student success, some universities are experiencing growing pains working across disciplines to gather and analyze so much data. For instance, a few years into a smart campus initiative called the Integrated Controls and Analytics Program, Stanford University (CA) is finding data quality and data management are raising unforeseen challenges.
"Data management is the biggest obstacle we have right now," said Gerry Hamilton, Stanford's director of facilities energy management. "It all comes down to scalability and sustainability. We have found there is an exponential growth of effort that happens every time you deploy one more system."
Getting one building control system to integrate with one cloud analytics application takes a lot of work, because several people with different subject-matter expertise have to be involved — including IT staffers who make connections to servers and configure firewall rules, Hamilton explained. If you have 100 buildings, all with slightly different control systems and multiple analytics applications, every time you do these integrations, it adds to the layers of complexity. "From a labor standpoint, all this smart stuff we are putting in place to save us 80 percent on labor costs and make us 80 percent more efficient is doing just the opposite," he said.
At Stanford, the energy metering systems are used for billing individual colleges and forecasting projections for the on-campus generating plant. In order to create verified billing data, the university has created its own data correction tools for times when there are errors or gaps in the data flow or IP reliability issues. Yet one problem is that new stakeholders in the colleges are getting access to the raw data in one-minute timeframes. "What if someone tries to re-create that verified number from the raw data?" Hamilton asked. "They might say, 'When I add up these instantaneous values, I am not getting the same total you got.' That is an issue. If we want to do reliable forecasting, we need to have a clean set of historical data. That means we have to disregard the bad data or come up with some way to automatically backfill with reasonable approximations."
Hamilton said it all gets down to figuring out the business drivers. "Are we trying to be perfect for the sake of being perfect? There is some responsibility that comes with access to the data."
From Tech-Infused Stadium to the Classroom
IoT efforts at Arizona State University have seen a similar pattern of "exponential growth."
Last year, Campus Technology described how the institution was outfitting its Sun Devil Stadium with sensors connected to the WiFi and cellular network, to collect temperature, humidity and noise data for use by facilities staff. Sensors can identify if a faucet anywhere in the stadium is left running after a football game is over, for example, to help cut water usage. ASU also worked on providing information through a mobile app on the availability of parking and wait time estimations for concession lines and restrooms.
The tech-infused stadium was created as a test bed for a larger investigation of and investment in IoT technologies at ASU. "One thing we explored was what beacons can and can't do and what we can and can't get from the network," explained Chris Richardson, assistant vice president of IT development at ASU. "Some of that experimentation influenced our broader approach to using the network."