Carnegie Mellon University and the City of Pittsburgh are founding members of the MetroLab Network, a new national alliance among 20 metro areas and more than 25 neighboring universities to research, develop and deploy innovative technologies to address critical challenges facing urban areas. The new network was announced today at a White House event.
Carnegie Mellon has been a leader in developing infrastructure solutions with the city, especially issues related to traffic congestion. To launch the new initiative, the MacArthur Foundation awarded CMU a $1 million grant to cover administration costs of the MetroLab Network, including the hiring of a executive director. During the network’s formative phase, the executive director and staff will work with a steering committee comprised of founding member representatives.
“In the spirit of collaboration, Carnegie Mellon is excited to take a leading role in the founding of the MetroLab Network,” said CMU Provost Farnam Jahanian, who along with Pittsburgh Mayor William Peduto attended the announcement today in the nation’s capital.
“This effort builds on decades of collaboration among CMU researchers, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense and other government agencies to create solutions that improve urban areas and provide real benefits to the public. We are eager to participate and work together with the other members of the network to develop and implement technologies capable of creating a brighter future for our cities.”
“Since solidifying our partnership with Carnegie Mellon University through the Metro21 initiative, the city has become an urban lab where investigators have found practical applications for their research, allowing our city to do more with less,” Peduto said. “We look forward to the ways this partnership will expand and strengthen through our participation in the MetroLab Network.”
CMU’s Metro21 is a multidisciplinary research and educational initiative housed in its H. John Heinz III College that taps expertise across the university to improve the economy and quality of life in metro areas through research, development and deployment.
New technologies present a unique opportunity to solve challenges and improve infrastructure, city services and civic engagement. Universities possess the expertise to develop and implement the technologies, while city governments possess the knowledge and information necessary to deploy these technologies in real-world settings.
The MetroLab Network will provide the opportunity to share successes and build shared platforms between cities and universities to increase the tangible results of innovations.
Conceptually, the MetroLab Network is based on previous successes developed from established city-university partnerships. Examples include:
- The smart traffic signalization project developed by Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and tested on Pittsburgh streets, which decreased the travel time at the tested intersections by 25 percent;
- The Vehicles as Infrastructure Sensors project, in which CMU’s College of Engineering collected data from Pittsburgh’s light rail system to better understand rail and bridge conditions;
- The Pulse of Allegheny County project, in which Carnegie Mellon’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department monitored hundreds of Pennsylvania Department of Transportation video cameras to understand traffic flows in and out of Pittsburgh; and
- The combined sewer overflow mitigation project researched and developed at the University of Notre Dame, which was tested and used by South Bend’s public works system, yielding overflow reductions at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems.
Participation in the MetroLab Network will require city-university partners to develop a memorandum of understanding between home metro partners, designate representatives responsible for maintaining the collaboration with the MetroLab Network, and host an active set of research, development and deployment projects. A series of workshops between founding members will be organized to determine parameters of the collaboration.