> The recent award of $3 million in NSF funding — announced at a White House summit last week — will cover the engineering and software development needed to deploy 500 of these devices throughout Chicago ...<p>When NSF grants this kind of money, do they mandate that the recipient provide the source material (code, schematics, etc) under a liberal license (or public domain)? Seems like it would be a big benefit for cities everywhere to leverage the technology and not just the concept.
This is a very exciting project, and it opens the door for quite a bit of analysis and hopefully better city planning/services.<p>For a few years I worked for a company based in Chicago, and had to travel there often. I would stay a particular hotel on Kinzie St. I learned quickly that you never wanted a room on the second or third floor, especially facing the alley. Almost every night, 5 or 6 separate trash companies' garbage trucks would ramble down the alley to empty one or two dumpsters. These were acoustically, vibrationally, visually and atmospherically noxious events. It wouldn't have been as bad if it was one truck, but the temporally spaced parade made for fitful sleep. Hopefully this project will bubble issues like this to the surface.