The Aware Group keeps an eye on Lincoln University students

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Photo credit: Lincoln University

The Hamilton-based artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) specialist has developed a bespoke system for Lincoln University in Canterbury to help the institution track classroom occupancy in real time.

Based on Microsoft offerings such as Azure and Power BI, the Aware Group has developed and provided a system for the university that installs cameras in classrooms that take snapshots of the room every five minutes.

The solution’s People Counting module counts heads using a custom machine learning system that can also track people moving through a room to show where they spend most of their time.

To ensure that data protection standards are adhered to, the cameras themselves are hardwired to the network and secured with the same security precautions as Lincoln’s existing CCTV network.

In addition, the images only stay in the university’s Azure environment for a few days before they are deleted, and any access to the small archive is rigorously scrutinized to ensure that the images are only ever used for checking accuracy or retraining the model can be used for marginal cases.

The solution comes after the university decided to replace the largely manual processes it had for measuring student use of its facilities for reporting to the Tertiary Education Facilities Management Association (TEFMA) and for efficiently managing their teaching resources.

By 2020, however, TEFMA reporting required an employee to walk through different rooms on campus, manually count how many people were there, and report back.

This was not only time-consuming and expensive, but also did not take into account the regular fluctuations during the semester or year.

“We’ve done enough to meet our compliance requirements,” said Fiona Taylor, director of information technology services at Lincoln University. “But beyond that, the data was of little use. It was very difficult to predict room occupancy and create timetables efficiently. ”

Amid plans for a new construction and modernization program, Lincoln University was looking for a way to get a more accurate picture of the use of their space.

Ultimately, the university turned to the Aware Group to develop a new system that would optimize expenses, reduce the manual work involved in counting heads, and enable more informed decisions that would improve the Lincoln experience for employees and students alike.

The solution, designed and built by the Aware Group, was tested as a proof of concept in three lecture halls in 2019 and has since been rolled out to 30 rooms on Lincoln’s Te Waihora campus.

Tests have shown that the accuracy of the new system is on par with manual counting – but according to Microsoft, the counts are performed 24,000 times more often.

“Our people counting solution is an improvement over a manual process in almost every way,” said Jeff Brown, solution manager at Aware Group. “It’s less expensive, much more common, and just as accurate.”

The new solution not only relieved the TEFMA requirements of all time-consuming manual work, but the university team can also view all aggregated data from the cameras in almost real time. An integrated Power BI dashboard shows the occupancy of each room and trends over time.

With the system installed, Lincoln University is now able to think about the possibilities of its data.

For this reason, the university is now working with the Aware Group to develop a reporting system that will enable the new information to be used optimally. The next step is to integrate the data with the timetable system.

Lincoln’s new wealth of data will also feed into its 10-year asset upgrade plan, which began in 2019.





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