"She-Bot" Update...sort of...

This Saturday a group of Lake Washington Girls Middle School students, parents, and faculty made its way down to Seattle Central Library expecting to learn something of the whereabouts of the now-famed "She-Bot" who left her quiet, comfy existence in Kirsten Rooks' science classroom and headed straight for the trash. Well, not really. Before she was fit for the bin, she spent some time with the researchers from MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory who fit her with a small, smart, location aware tag: "a first step towards the deployment of "smart-dust" – networks of tiny locatable and addressable microeletromechanical systems." Wait. What?

We thought we went to the library to learn about trash, but Carlo Ratti, director of SENSEable City Laboratory, and his team first introduced the audience of more than 50 of Seattle's finest environmentalists to the absolutely inspired, innovative, and incredible work they've been doing in Boston (and all over the world) for more than three years. The lab's mission, to look at how we can embed technologies in cities, and at how embedded technologies in cities can help us understand them and one day change them, was revealed to us through short presentations (with fantastic graphic renderings) of a few of their many projects. "Computers," said associate director Assaf Biderman, "are making their way out of their home, out of the office, and into the streets. They are increasingly present in our pockets, street lights, traffic lights, urban furniture, and infrastructure. There’s a blanket of increasingly dense interconnected computers covering cities. This allows us to extract and put back information at specific locations. So we thought, why not apply the thinking that’s behind human computer interaction to cities?"

Ratti and Biderman told us about EyeStop, a touch-screen bus shelter that monitors environmental conditions (weather, air quality) and real-time bus movement, and also provides information and communication tools that can interact with your cell phone (sending tweets if your usual bus is running late, for example), scheduled for installation in Florence, Italy, next month. The EyeStop, which has touch sensitive "e-Ink" screens as well as LEDs, features a bus map plotting locations in real-time, email and Web access, tools for planning a best route and getting directions, a community bulletin board, and, of course, a place for silent video advertisements. Intended for tourists as well as locals, the EyeStop tools are accessible in several languages.

Another project, the Copenhagen Wheel, aimed to transform bicycle use in Denmark’s largest city where there are more bicycles than people, through promoting urban sustainability and building new connections between the city’s cyclists. They made the bikes "smart mobile sensing devices that map[ped] the real-time flow of people and environmental conditions in Copenhagen." This was achieved through strategically placing small location and environmental sensors on bicycles to gather information as people rode through the city. The data from the cyclists was used to understand more about city dynamics, and eventually power applications of benefit to citizens, city municipalities and researchers interested in bettering them, making their city more efficient and user- or biker-friendly.

It is hard to convey how exciting it was to learn about these projects, mostly because my mind was - and still is - about to burst, but by the time Ratti and Biderman got around to talking to us about Trash, we were all hooked, and actually more prepared to understand the mechanics of the Trash Tracking program. 3000 pieces of Seattle trash were tagged, taken back to their "homes," and disposed of or recycled as they would normally have been. Once picked up by Waste Management, one of the sponsors of the project, the tags somehow sensed movement, triggering a search for nearby cellphone towers. The tag then sent an SMS (i.e. text message) containing this information to MIT, where software compared it with standard maps of cell phone signal strength to determine the position of the tag. The tags calculate the ongoing location of each piece of rubbish and report back to a central server, where the data is analyzed and viewed in real time. And back to the "smart dust": yes, someday these tags will be as small as particles…and attached to, well, whatever!

Seattle's Waste Management is very interested in the results of the Trash Track project, hoping that finding out more about how trash goes through the systems will help them improve their logistics, from trash transportation to recycling to disposal systems. But Waste Management isn't the only thing the experiment hopes to improve - the researchers want to get at the root of the problem: how we treat consumables in the first place.

"Trash Track has the potential to encourage people to make more sustainable decisions about what and how much they consume, and how it affects the world around them," said Biderman. "The project represents a type of change that is taking place in cities: a bottom-up approach to managing resources, promoting more informed decision-making in the public through the use of pervasive technologies and information."

Naomi True '10, head of the LWGMS Green Team, attended the presentation and is as dedicated as ever to help our community consider and improve the way we handle and treat trash and recyclables. Already this year she's addressed the student body about waste free lunches – informing her peers which typical lunchbox items are reusable, recyclable, and which are not – and is creating a series of green goals for the year. Naomi is one of many LWGMS students who strive to be contentious consumers and stewards of the environment, excited to be part of the MIT Trash Track project.

We did not find out where our "She-Bot" is, but the MIT team will continue to track data through October 11, presented online and at the Central Library, and we have no donut she'll make her presence known…she's an L-Dub girl after all!

-Shannon Blaisdell