Promoting Smart Technologies in Public Safety and Transportation to Improve Social and Economic Outcomes in a US EDA-Designated Critical Manufacturing Region

The U.S. Economic Development Administration, through its Investing in Manufacturing Communities Partnership (IMCP) initiative, recently named the entire east-west, 200-mile span of South Louisiana centered around Baton Rouge (BR) as one of the nation's strategic manufacturing regions. This "chemical corridor" is the home of hundreds of chemical manufacturing facilities and refineries worth billions of dollars. Despite the major economic significance of this region, the BR area suffers from critical problems including i) crippling transportation issues, and (ii) high levels of crime. Heavy traffic congestion is one of the main reasons why manufacturing industry in BR is reluctant to build new plants and hire more people in this region; it is also a key factor in making the region unattractive for new investments from elsewhere in the U.S. The violent crime rate is substantially higher than that of similarly- sized regions, further affecting economic development in this important region. The goal of this S&CC planning proposal is to build a partnership between community stakeholders and a multidisciplinary team of academic researchers. By considering economic and social issues in a holistic manner, this partnership will develop research concepts that will promote and employ S&CC technologies to help stakeholders tackle the major factors affecting the region's economic progress. Through multidisciplinary team- building and strong community engagement, a proposed integrative S&CC research concept will have significant impacts on various disciplines and communities for planning and developing smarter cities. In particular, the research concept will be directly aligned with the strategic plans determined by the city's Smart City Committee and Subcommittees. Through the proposed Web portal, PIs will share the developed outcomes and information collected from the project with researchers from other higher education including Southern University , a local HBCU. The most significant impact will be seen through quality of life measures pre- and post-project implementations. Building community-wide tools to help stakeholders of all missions addressing crime- and traffic-related challenges for all citizens in the region has real impact on quality of life and economic health, making the region more attractive for growth.


From a technical perspective, this project proposes to build a multidisciplinary research team by integrating different research groups with significant research strength in the areas of High Performance Computing (LSU CCT), Big Data Analysis and Cybersecurity (Computer Science), Sensors (Electrical Engineering), Violence Prevention (Social Work and Sociology), and Transportation (Civil Engineering). The intellectual goal is to define challenging problems and develop research concepts via offline workshops, tutorials, and an online Web portal, which allows an easy access to integrative cyberinfrastructure for computing, storage, and software tools. The software tools we plan to develop will enable predictive analyses on heterogeneous data collected from city infrastructure, public open data from the city of Baton Rouge, and relevant social network data. The developed research concepts will increase the research capacity of every individual research group, enhance the understanding of cross-disciplinary demands, and advance state-of-art technologies for the design of smart and connected communities.