I’ve posted before (I think) about Boston University’s Center for Computing and Data Science – affectionately known in the Boston area as the “Jenga Building”, due to its odd (but cool!) design.
If I’ve missed doing that, or you have no idea why I am talking about a Jenga building, you may enjoy this video in which Boston University students react to the building.
And, although this may make you dizzy, have a 5-minute, really cool drone tour of the building’s interior and the local campus which is my stomping grounds with this video:
In any case, the building is known well on campus (and in the city of Boston, where it is strikingly visible from across the Charles River by folks at Harvard and MIT) because of its shape, and somewhat because of its LEED Platinum rating. No gas is plumbed into the building. There are 31 boreholes, each 1,500 feet deep, under the building. This is TWICE AS DEEP as Boston’s John Hancock Tower is tall. So if you know Boston, that’s 31 very, very deep wells, which provide the heating and cooling for the building. The system provides over 300 tons of heating/cooling capacity. Heat pumps use the temperature differential the earth provides (ground temperatures are constant at about 55 degrees Fahrenheit) to draw heat from the ground in the winter and to expel heat in the summer.
But this post is not about those aspects of the building in particular. It is instead, focused on … garbage.
We all know the old adage, Garbage In, Garbage Out – GIGO. It’s particularly apropos in today’s age of AI. Ask AI to schedule and budget your project, and have a decimal point missing or mistype a year’s last digit and AI will dutifully provide you with a beautifully-wrong calendar and aesthetically-pleasing pie and donut charts (now I am hungry!) that are way, way, off.
At the BU Center for Computing and Data Science, the Garbage In is actual garbage. And the idea is to measure what sorts of garbage are going in using a uniform set of 234 bins for collection – and eliminating bins in each room of the building. The analytics from all of this garbage data provided information, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom (The DIKUW Pyramid as promoted by the folks at AI Today!) about waste which can be used to make decisions on processing that waste, and even to provide a means to change the behavior of individuals to improve recycling.
Much of this is covered in this tremendous article called “Waste Watchers” – summarized in this video:
Here’s an extract:
“Everybody talks about the geothermal wells and the no fossil fuels, but we’re also striving to be a TRUE zero-waste–certified building,” says Sam Moller, BU Sustainability assistant director of communications. “That’s arguably harder than getting an LEED certification because zero waste is all about human behavior.”
TRUE zero-waste designation requires a facility to divert a baseline 90 percent of its waste away from landfills and incinerators and ensure that “contamination”—aka incorrectly disposed-of items—is under 10 percent. The 90 percent number comes from the fact that in general, about 90 percent of the waste we generate could be “recycled, composted, reduced, or eliminated altogether,” Moller says. (The TRUE designation requires a year’s worth of data before a facility can be certified.)
And that’s where the interns (the three ‘waste-watchers’ featured in the article) come in. Each bin has a sensor that tracks the weight of its contents. But as for what those contents include? Cue Shotland, Palmer, and Lagomarsino. They make the rounds every shift with their phones, photographing bins throughout the building’s 17 floors to see what’s being put where and to see who needs a little lesson in proper disposal. (The photos and weight data go to Spare-It, a Boston-based waste technology company partnering with BU Sustainability.)
Spare-it is an interesting company and probably worth a blog post on its own. It’s the partner that is helping to process the garbage into good data, using their platform (see figure below). With the advent of AI, and improvements in data analytics, the garbage in is NOT garbage out. It’s more like our title – Garbage In, Good Data (and Information, Knowledge, Understanding, and Wisdom) Out.
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