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Technology
The home of Purdue University, the city of West Lafayatte, Ind., sees its population swell in the fall, straining traffic. Through a smart city challenge, the city seeks solutions to improve traffic safety. (Shutterstock.com)
Challenge to stoke traffic solutions in West Lafayette By LAUREN CAGGIANO | The Municipal
In Indiana, the Innovation Partners Institute at the Purdue Research Foundation — together with partners — is looking for new solutions to a familiar problem via the West Lafayette Smart Cities Challenge. Purdue University in West Lafayette has about 50,000 students who descend on campus each fall. This means the population of the Midwest city doubles overnight. And that much growth over a few days’ time can spell trouble in terms of collisions between vehicles, pedestrians and people on other forms of transportation. This can be a recipe for injury or even death. This problem is on the radar of Erin Easter, director of development with the city of West Lafayette. So, when the Purdue Research Foundation contacted the city about coming up with a plan that they as a community could research, she and her team were all ears.
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They were connected with partner US Ignite, a high-tech nonprofit with a mission to accelerate the smart community movement. Its public-private partnership programs leverage advanced networking and data science to drive key outcomes for communities. Its work also enables new opportunities for wireless and IoT research designed to help narrow the gap between cutting-edge experimentation and scalable, real-world technology deployments. “So once we started having the conversation with US Ignite, we came up with a lot of ideas about potential research projects. But the one that we kept coming back to was this idea of keeping all of our citizens — our students and our visitors — safe. Purdue has a number
