The Urban Innovation research effort at Microsoft Research (MSR) was launched to do social, health, and environmental science and technology development in support of the coming wave of urbanization. Upwards of 2 billion additional people are expected to live in cities by 2050, pushing the global percent of people living in cities from about 50% today in 2020 to about 70%. This massive shift in the organization of humanity will disrupt nearly every aspect of daily life and will pose many challenges, but also will create opportunities to reconceive and improve our social, health, and environmental systems and infrastructure. Given the climate crisis, and its tie to human activity, and in turn urban life and systems, we maintain a strong emphasis on advancing green technology and sustainable development.
Process
The Urban Innovation team uses an Engage – Sense – Build cycle. This approach starts by getting engaged with local city government, civic tech, and community members to learn about the challenges they face in order to build solutions to real problems. The aim is to incorporate technology into environments that is seamless, relevant, and accessible to all.
MSR Urban Innovation research and deployment process
Next, sensing technology is developed and embedded in the built environment, with the aim of providing relevant information to residents and policy makers, in a way that maintains rigorous privacy standards. Data from sensing platforms then drives cloud-based services that power data dashboards, advanced analytics for policy and resource allocation decision making, an ecosystem of mobile and web experiences for residents, and development of novel hardware.
The cycle continues by reengaging the community to deploy new and evolve existing technology solutions. Ultimately, the goal for the process is to enable responsive, dynamic urban infrastructure (sense + build) that informs residents and policy makers (engage) toward advancing environmental, economic, and equity goals.
Research Agenda
Toward those ends, the Urban Innovation team seeks to do original research and technology development in three umbrella areas: environmental impact, economic development, and equity.
MSR Urban Innovation research agenda: main areas and example domains and projects.
These three areas are interrelated, and consequently an initial keystone project for Urban Innovation is on air quality sensing (see Project Eclipse (opens in new tab)), which brings together environmental sensing, public health modeling, and sustainable development and environmental justice. As examples, other projects focus on migration, housing, and water quality.
Multidisciplinary
Cities are complex organisms, requiring holistic, multidisciplinary thinking. Urban Innovation at MSR brings together expertise in the following areas: electrical engineering, hardware design, user experience and design, social science, public health, urban science, software and data engineering, and industrial design. This mix of skillsets is leveraged to build solutions that can, for instance, collect data with low level electrochemical environmental sensing, engage communities through mobile and other user experiences built on that data, and inform policy makers through data science. Urban Innovation also partners with academic colleagues across a range of disciplines.
Contact
If you are interested in partnership opportunities with the MSR Urban Innovation team, please contact urbantec@microsoft.com (opens in new tab). You can follow us on Twitter @MsrUrban (opens in new tab).