by Caspar Lant
This past summer, I flew to NYU’s Shanghai campus for two weeks. This was the culmination of a nearly two-year long project to develop a prototype of a low-cost air quality monitoring network. Ironically, the project both culminated and originated at NYU Shanghai. A few years back, I did a study abroad there. I was in the Cafeteria and started chatting with a fellow student about some circuit diagrams I had seen over her shoulder. She told me they were for an independent study class she was taking with a visiting professor (Kevin Cromar, now my advisor on the Green Grant project). As she explained it, the diagram was an existing design for an air quality monitor, which over the course of the semester she would be building from the ground-up with the rest of the class. I rushed to the professor’s office to ask if I could take the course as well. Luckily, even though it was a week after the enrollment deadline, he obliged!
We realized shortly into the semester that the diagram for the monitor — which had been provided to Prof. Cromar by the UN contractor who had designed it — was in disarray and would need some serious revision. Recognizing that the project was more complicated than anticipated, Prof. Cromar and I applied for a Green Grant with a proposal to design and build an air quality monitoring network for the Shanghai Campus. As of my trip to China, we have installed two monitors in Shanghai: one at the academic center and the other outside the Jinqiao residence hall. The data from these monitors is displayed live on a website developed by me and other members of the Tandon group, IoT Sensors hardware development. This website, in turn, is broadcast continuously onto two digital displays located on the Shanghai Campus.
What many people don’t understand is that air quality is extremely localized; the reported air quality from a station at one end of your city may be entirely different from the air you’re actually breathing. Smart Cities of the future must shift their focus away from expensive research-grade monitoring of certain widely-dispersed areas, and instead towards deploying a dense network of low-cost air quality monitors with a greater spatial resolution than traditional environmental monitoring methods. Our network now gives the NYU community access to valuable, reliable air quality information, and establishes a lean web framework for similar projects to use. A project at the UN Environmental Program, that inspired all of this, has already expressed interest! Though comprising only two nodes, the system we have developed is a micro-scale model of a scalable distributed environmental sensing solution.
I have recently applied to the Fulbright program in China using this project as a template. My intention is to build a scaled-up environmental sensing mesh, and to use machine-learning models to keep the monitors calibrated. One more step towards understanding how human activity impacts our environment, and what impact our environment has on us.
Caspar Lant is a recent graduate of NYU and is now an adjunct instructor in the Physics Department. He is an NYU AY2020 Leadership Fellow and a Fulbright scholar. He is team-leader of an IoT Sensors hardware development group at Tandon, which he joined to help complete this project.
NYU Green Grants are awarded to improve the university’s operational environmental performance, foster environmental literacy and community engagement, advance applied research and design, and demonstrate the viability of best practices and technologies for sustainability. The Green Grants Selection Committee awards up to $20,000 for the most feasible, impactful, and innovative projects that have potential for institutionalization on campus or are self-sustaining.