Alex is a recent PhD graduate in Computer Science from Harvard University, where she was co-advised by Jim Waldo and Amy Mueller. From 2020 to 2022, she was a member of the Urban Innovation group at Microsoft Research, where she helped deploy and maintain the Eclipse air quality sensing network. Her research is focused on designing reliable, scalable, and equitable sensor networks for urban environmental sensing. Beginning summer 2024 she will be a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Ka Moamoa group at Georgia Tech.
As the global urban population continues to increase each year, cities, researchers, and residents are eager to use low-cost sensing and IoT technologies to monitor traffic, pollution, and other systems essential to the development of sustainable urban futures. Yet despite the nearly two decades since technology companies such as Cisco and IBM began publicly investing millions of dollars into the research and development of smart cities, the smart city reality has still not come to fruition. Based on my PhD research and nearly two years’ experience working with Microsoft Research on a 118-node air quality sensor deployment in Chicago, I have identified three main obstacles that hinder the development of mega-scale smart city networks: 1) energy harvesting, 2) sensor network maintenance, and 3) sustainability of low-cost sensing hardware. My proposed research will provide contributions to the CPS field by highlighting generalizable ways to ensure the success of real-world deployments through improved energy harvesting, self-maintaining systems, and sustainable computing. Building on my expertise of working with real-world deployments, urban communities, and open data, I will help propel smart cities from vision to reality through IoT research that is grounded in both theory and practice.