New Delhi: Who would have thought a glacially sculpted basin filled by clear waters could be turned into a 'smart' water body to study Big Data! IBM and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute along with a local non-profit organization-The Fund for Lake George, have turned New York's Lake George into the 'smartest' lake in the world to look for answers related to the larger aquatic ecosystems.
Under the 'Jefferson Project,' the lovely Lake George, nestled along the eastern edge of New York's stout and beautiful Adirondack Mountains, is being studied for its basic processes to understand and come to new opportunities of environmental research.
A report on Ars Technica notes that the Jefferson Project sees the next evolutionary research step in environment science as putting some brains in the robotic assistants and increasing their potential. To help achieve that, IBM is supporting by building the most advanced infrastructure possible to extract the maximum knowledge out of the lake.
The lake is measured by sampling stations for data on varied parameters like temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, dissolved organic matter, and algae content. Other instruments measure the water level and flow velocity of the stream. The data is then periodically uploaded over a cellular Internet connection and entered into the project database.
There are a set of anchored, floating platforms which collect data about the vertical profile of the lake while a number of current profilers at the bottom of the lake to calculate velocities at various heights above the device.
IBM's Harry Kolar says that they aren't merely building the architecture to bring the data back together with sophisticated analytics but also building an embedded computing system on the sensors that will have custom code on it which will increase the data availability, integrity, and quality.
Apart from measuring the data about the quality of the lake water and finding out the concentration of salts in it, the project is also focused on biological monitoring of aquatic species and weather. The idea is to create a highly advanced sampling system that could make research easy in real-time and help fasten up conservation attempts.
The tools being developed in the Jefferson Project could lower the barrier to entry for others who could make good use of some smart sampling technology.
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