Our society faces significant challenges in sustaining and improving the environments in which we live and work. For example, we need to provide for the health of the growing elderly component of our population. We need to provide security for the critical infrastructures of these environments. We need to improve the efficiency of our resource utilization in order to sustain these environments in the face of ever-increasing demands on productivity and economic growth. At the same time, we also enjoy an unprecedented ability to collect large amounts of data (or “big data”) from these environments, mine the data for new knowledge, and take actions to effect changes in the environments in order to improve safety, health and productivity. A multi-disciplinary team of researchers at WSU is working on approaches to collect and analyze data in order to sustain and improve these environments. The WSU team is recognized both nationally and internationally for their accomplishments in these areas, and they have established significant interdisciplinary collaborations with other academic, industry and government institutions. Therefore, in order to provide a focal point for this work, accelerate growth and collaboration, and further establish WSU as a leader in this area, we formed the WSU Smart Environments Research Center (SERC).
The mission of SERC is to enable the environments in which we live and work to be safer, healthier and more productive through the use of intelligent data analytics and adaptive systems. SERC will pursue this mission through multi-disciplinary research, education, outreach, and technology development and transfer in areas related to data analytics and adaptive systems for smart environments. Our vision is for SERC to become a nationally and internationally recognized center of excellence in the study of data analytics and adaptive systems for smart environments. The main strategy for achieving these goals is to facilitate and promote multi-disciplinary research within WSU and in collaboration with other academic, industry and government institutions.