U.S. Ignite Smart Gigabit Community

The US Ignite Smart Gigabit Communities (SGC) project is a network of more than two dozen communities developing a catalog of applications and services to address smart city and IoT challenges. Lafayette is a proud gigabit community with numerous projects and research.

A Gigabit IoT Platform: Visualization and DTS enhancements to LEaRN

The Lafayette Engagement and Research Network (LEaRN) Collaborative is a result of a partnership between the Lafayette Consolidated Government (LCG), the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and CGI. LEaRN is focused on understanding how smart community initiatives can be successfully leveraged to help local governments better manage resources, improve planning, make more informed decisions, and improve citizens’ quality of life. This project extended and redesigned the IoT portion of the Lafayette Digital Town Square network for LEaRN adoption. It also enhanced the GUI and visualization aspects of the dashboard to allow improved adoptability and provided higher impact on the displaying of data.

Automated Live Video Prioritization System for Public Safety

Live video streaming improves situational awareness and offers better visibility for public safety. There are many different types of video sources in a public safety scenario such as body cameras, street cameras, mobile video cameras, dashboard cameras, etc. Incident commanders are often faced with information overload when too many videos are presented on a single screen. Existing video ranking systems (such as those used by YouTube) rank videos based on user’s preference and metadata associated with the video. However, there is very limited metadata available for the video stream. The goal of this project was to build a method and tool for ranking live videos in the context of public safety.

CrisisEye ‐ Smart Video‐based Information Sharing Platform for Public‐Safety

The goal of the project was to build CrisisEye – a real-time video crowdsourcing application that will enable the public to share video based situational awareness with incident commanders during emergencies. This app was intended to benefit public safety officials including law enforcement personnel, first responders, emergency crew, and criminal investigation personnel. It was also intended for first responders/command center to use this system to communicate situational awareness and coordinate efforts between in-field team members.

Dynamic Video Analytics for Public Safety: A Fog Computing Approach

This project built upon previous work on CrisisEye – a real-time video based situational awareness platform that has a mobile based video streaming app with the ability to control QOS of video by incident commanders. The goal was to build a real-time video stream management and analytics system using a fog computing approach for public safety.

Extensions to Kvasir-VR: VR Field Trips with Networked Teacher

Led by a team of researchers and graphic artists, Kvasir-VR developed educational networked virtual reality technology and brought it to schools, working with students to integrate their own Virtual Reality (VR) scenes as well. Students wearing VR headsets were guided through virtual field trips, which utilized live imagery from a 3D camera (Kinect V2) to render a live instructor in the VR environment in real-time to interact with students and create an immersive experience. High school groups gained VR design experience by creating their own virtual reality scenes, viewed through Kvasir-VR. In 2017, the team won the Best Research Demo award at the IEEE Virtual Reality 2017 Conference.

Louisiana Smart Community Cloud Platform

Communities are continuing to face new challenges in supplying citizen-engaged services in a connected world. Cloud computing and application development/deployment through containers have become the defacto technologies for today’s developers. With bandwidth readily available in our community, latency became the larger obstacle. In addition, our current smart city offerings do not provide a deployment platform for recently developed smart gigabit community applications. This Louisiana Smart Community Cloud Platform project addressed these needs by migrating our existing GENI rack research platform into a regional cloud platform based on containers that provide for high bandwidth/low latency community application access as well as the capability to easily extend to regional communities as well as the major cloud providers.

Networked Collaborative Exploration of Earth Sciences Datasets

This project aimed to create an earth sciences data viewer that allows remote users to share a VR environment using widely-available VR devices, supporting applications such as education, city planning, and environment discovery. This supported the networked interpretation, presentation, and exploration of terrains and associated geophysical data, enhanced through the visual representations of interpreters (network-streamed avatars) and visualized affective computing (using enhanced sensor data about users). Future earth sciences dataset users will benefit from developed VR tools and educators will benefit from the novel educational approaches and potential distribution of the application.