BigClouT Distributed City Data Platform

Keio University and Fujisawa City equipped the city’s refuse collection fleet, about 100 vehicles, with omnidirectional cameras mounted underneath, along with GPS, accelerometers, and environmental sensors. As the trucks make their rounds, the cameras continuously record the road surface and roadside. Keio’s research group trained deep neural network object detectors using footage annotated from the sanitation workers’ own drive recorders. This created a system that can spot deteriorating road markings, road-surface damage, dents in guardrails, and debris. Since refuse collection covers every street on a regular cycle, the fleet provides a systematic, repeatable survey of the city’s road infrastructure as a by-product of an existing service, with almost no extra operational cost. The work was part of the EU–Japan BigClouT project and built on an earlier deployment started under ClouT.

Bristol City Council and Bristol is Open, working with Lancaster University as part of the BigClouT consortium, developed a tool that forecasts household energy use and reveals hidden waste, such as standby load and peak-time demand, to help residents cut costs and avoid energy poverty.

Bristol City Council and Bristol is Open, working with Lancaster University as part of the BigClouT group, developed a pollution-aware walking route service on the BigClouT platform, which guides pedestrians along routes that avoid the most congested and polluted streets, not just the shortest ones.

UTA members Keio University and NTT East, working with UTA member city Fujisawa, turned moving sources into a city-wide data network under the EU–Japan BigClouT project: city officers filing geolocated photo reports of illegal dumping, missed collections and damaged facilities through the MinaRepo app, refuse collection vehicles measuring air quality street by street with thirteen types of sensor, and festival-goers sharing live crowd updates through an app and signage.

UTA members Keio University and NTT East, working with UTA member city Fujisawa, replaced the city’s paper-based park and public realm maintenance workflow with MinaRepo — a participatory sensing application in which city officers, not residents, file geolocated photographic reports that are routed and tracked digitally. The pilot ran under the EU–Japan BigClouT project, alongside refuse collection vehicles fitted with thirteen types of atmospheric sensor.

UTA members the University of Tsukuba and NTT East, working with UTA member city Tsukuba, trialled two linked services for international visitors under the EU-Japan BigClouT project: HukuRepo, an Android application delivering real-time tourism, traffic and environmental information, and a problem-reporting channel that routed visitor reports to local volunteers who answered with help or a recommendation.