Center for People and Infrastructures

From smart utilities like the smart grid and intelligent transportation systems to social networks on sites like Facebook and YouTube, the infrastructures of tomorrow will heavily utilize information technology. While these “smart” infrastructures promise many benefits, they often require new kinds of interaction between people and the machines meant to serve them. Yet the social, cultural, economic and political side of these relationships often receives little attention.

The Center for People and Infrastructures seeks to address these issues by better understanding social norms, market structures, public policies and human capabilities that shape and are affected by the development of smart infrastructures. The center brings together experts in engineering, design, the social sciences, and computer science.

Research Projects

Societal Implications of Broadband Internet: Much interest in public investment in fiber infrastructure centers on supposed benefits to communities and the economy, but the societal implications of broadband are still an open question in this fast-evolving area. A local project, UC2B (Urbana-Champaign Big Broadband), will deliver "Big Broadband" connections to several thousand households in Champaign and Urbana, with quality that will make new applications possible. Working with UC2B and other projects, Center researchers are working to understand the consequences of fiber infrastructure for education, the economy, health, and community participation. This work also includes imagining the next generation of Internet applications.

Cyberinfrastructure and Virtualization of Scientific Work: In contemporary science and engineering, the emergence of cyberinfrastructure has allowed for very large-scale sharing of instrumentation and very flexible collaborative groupings. A tacit belief held by many is that as social and technical resources become more accessible to more researchers, scientific productivity will increase both at the individual level and at the aggregate level of the scientific community as a whole (meaning a faster pace of discovery and invention). This research project investigates organizational and infrastructural factors that make a difference to social outcomes as scientific work becomes more virtualized.

Visualization of Smart Systems: Users of all kinds of infrastructures are increasingly asked to interact with the socio-technical systems that serve as the foundation for modern life. Web pages and cell phone apps allow new forms of human-infrastructure interaction with electronic toll roads, power companies, and Internet service providers. In these interactions users are asked to manage their consumption for the sake of frugality, environmental sustainability, or some other efficiency -- but as the data available about our use increases it is not clear what should be represented and how these interactions should work. Center researchers are working to invent new metaphors and practices for the representation of infrastructure.