Charlie Catlett
April 28, 2017
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Urbanization is one of the great challenges and opportunities of this century, inextricably tied to global challenges ranging from climate change to sustainable use of energy and natural resources, and from personal health and safety to accelerating innovation and education. There is a growing science community—spanning nearly every discipline—pursuing research related to these challenges. The availability of urban data has increased over the past few years, in particular through open data initiatives, creating new opportunities for collaboration between academia and local government in areas ranging from scalable data infrastructure to tools for data analytics, along with challenges such as replicability of solutions between cities, integrating and validating data for scientific investigation, and protecting privacy. For many urban questions, however, new data sources will be required with greater spatial and/or temporal resolution, driving innovation in the use of sensors in mobile devices as well as embedding intelligent sensing infrastructure in the built environment. Collectively these data sources also hold promise to begin to integrate computational models associated with individual urban sectors such as transportation, building energy use, or climate. Catlett will discuss the work that Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago are doing in partnership with the City of Chicago and other cities through the Urban Center for Computation and Data, focusing in particular on new opportunities related to embedded systems and experience to date with the Array of Things project in Chicago and partner cities.
Charlie Catlett is the founding director of the Urban Center for Computation and Data, UrbanCCD, which brings scientists, artists, architects, technologists, and policy makers together to use computation, data analytics, and embedded system to pursue insight into the dynamics, design, and resilient operation of cities. He leads the NSF-funded Array of Things, establishing a network of 500 Argonne-developed intelligent sensor units in Chicago. He is a Senior Computer Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago’s Mansueto Institute for Urban Sciences, and at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. In previous roles he was Chief Information Officer for Argonne National Laboratory, Director of the NSF “TeraGrid” nationally distributed supercomputing facility, designer and director of the I-WIRE regional optical network, and Chief Technology Officer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He has worked in Internet and supercomputing technologies since 1985. Recognized as one of 25 “Doers, Dreamers & Drivers” of 2016 by Government Technology magazine and in 2014 as one of Chicago’s “Tech 50” technology leaders by Crain’s Chicago Business, Charlie is a Computer Engineering graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Date posted
Jun 14, 2019
Date updated
Jun 14, 2019