BlackCloud
BlackCloud Origins
Cairo is a multilayered city, and every year, a Black Cloud known as سحابة سوداء pervades its busy streets.
This cloud was the inspiration for MacArthur-funded research to support public participation in air quality. Basically the project was a mirror to show an aspect of reality normally hidden to us: the air we breathe. After years of research, the team of excellent grad students and Niemeyer created an early version of IOT fused with social networks to support collective action: From raw data to policy change in a matter of months.
aclima.io
aclima licensed the “Black Cloud” patent more formally known as Multimodal climate sensor network, Patent number: 9332322. The company now operates diverse sensor networks including one on Google StreetView. As air quality becomes a ubiquitous topic of health and environmental justice, the patent has a bigger role to play in leveraging air quality data with social networks.
Research Paper
Niemeyer and his team described outcomes of the project in a paper called “Patterns Towards Da Future”. There is also a brief video clip made by Daye Rogers and others at KCET.
Future Air Quality Work
Extraordinary environmental events including wildfires and COVID-19 affect air quality in palpable ways. What can these natural experiments teach us about our future and our ability to cope with systemic changes? Solid data is the foundation for that question.