EPICenter

Inspiration

We want to make Smart Cities even Smarter. In 2015, GE partnered with the city of San Diego to create a truly smart city. Our application, EPICenter, conceptualizes the next step in making cities truly smart.

What it does

EPICenter simulates the movement of people around the Minds and Machine Conference here in San Francisco. You'll see that as people move, clusters are formed, and a colour and number assigned. The number represents how many people are in that cluster and the colour how dense of a population that in comparison to the population of the greater area. This scale changes as you zoom in and out of the map.

This application has multiple use cases. For Security: -Optimizing resources on social and political events. -Predicting security threats.

For Retail: -Smart advertising based on visibility -Premium charges for “busy” billboards.

For Government: -Smart city planning. -Energy saving. -Improve emergency response.

How we built it

We used a whole host of technologies. We have a time-series database on the backend controlled by a springboot Java Application. This feeds the data through to a node Javascript project which includes a whole host of external libraries. Our foundation was the smallworld sample project.

The whole application is protected by UAI to ensure only those privileged groups who should have access to should.

Challenges we ran into

Time! As with all hackathons, the learning curve is steep and there is not much time to debug issues which can mean changes of direction are necessary.

The time-series database was difficult to get running and as a team we had knowledge gaps which we had to fill quickly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Morale stayed high throughout the project and we worked really well as a team. We had a lot of knowledge gaps that we worked hard to fill. We created a fully functional product that completely works!