Turin Polytechnic receives 300,000 dollar research grant

Turin - The Polytechnic University of Turin has received a 300,000-dollar grant for six research projects to be developed in the fields of energy safety and information and communications technology (ICT). The Turin-based university participated last week in Washington in the "Energy Grid Cybersecurity" Conference, which was organised by Siebel Energy Institute, a consortium in which Turin is one of the 8 research centres working on issues such as smart energy. The consortium seeks to promote an international network and enhance projects stemming from universities.

The Polytechnic has been awarded six 50,000-dollar prizes for studies where it is the leading partner. The first worthy of mention is the "Smart Grid Resilience", which is meant to become a tool ensuring the continuity of the energy supply in critical situations such as accidents, natural catastrophes or attacks. Another project, entitled "Urbe", is research focusing on the energy consumption of citizens in urban buildings (heating, gas and electricity) and the mobility across different districts of a city in relation to urban morphology and behavioral models. Still another project is called "CCG - Cars, Communications and the Grid", a study that analyses the advantages that can be obtained by using three technologies at a time: namely, wireless communcations, car sharing and electricity distribution.

"Power Aware - Lights Off" is a web-based platform which compares energy consumption models with similar characteristics. Citizens themselves are the beneficiaries of this project, which compares the sizes of houses, the number of family members, the number and types of appliances, and consumption strategies to save energy. The "Big Data Platform for FFCS" stems from the web-based platform supporting car-sharing systems to hire a car in a given geographical area. Lastly, the project called "Multi-modal Crowd Sensing to Monitor Buildings in Smart Cities" focuses on how to utilise drones and cars to monitor the health conditions of buildings and cultural properties.

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