At Aclima, we’ve always been committed to the power of cooperation. Addressing the complex challenge of reducing air pollution and climate changing emissions, takes all of us. It requires collaboration across multiple stakeholders — locally with communities, across international players, and the private and public sectors. In that spirit of cooperation, we are excited to announce the next chapter in our long-term partnership with Google. Aclima is now a Google Cloud SaaS technology partner, unlocking the best of Aclima and Google for our customers. Together, we are bringing the Aclima Environmental Intelligence platform, powered by Google Cloud, to cities and governments, enabling bold action to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
At Google Cloud Next ’19, Aclima CEO Davida Herzl shared the stage with Chad Jennings, Product Manager at Google Cloud; Mike Branch, Vice President of Data and Analytics at Geotab; and Jon Walton, CIO of San Mateo County to announce our latest customer deployment. This will begin with an innovative showcase in San Mateo to demonstrate the power of street level air pollution data to help inform solutions and drive action to reduce emissions and exposure.
Breaking Boundaries With Environmental Intelligence
Living in areas of elevated air pollution increases the risk of serious health problems like asthma, heart disease, COPD, and ultimately, premature death. Despite the serious impacts on public health, efforts to measure air quality are typically sparse and fail to capture the hyper-local nature of air pollution. In fact, air pollution can be eight times higher from one end of a city block to another. Air pollution is also costing us big money; in 2011, air pollution cost the U.S. $866 billion.
Working with partners like Google and leading scientists, Aclima pioneered measurement and mapping of climate emissions at the block-by-block level. Deploying in major regions across California including Los Angeles, the Central Valley, San Francisco and Oakland, Aclima generated an entirely new dataset that provided new insights about the hyper-local nature of air quality and how we can empower governments, impacted communities, and industry to advance solutions that improve the air we share. We’ve shown that urban air pollution is more variable than previously known, with air quality changing over the course of a city block by as much as 5–8x. This is why it’s critical to measure at a hyper-local resolution.
In order to solve this problem, Aclima is delivering this new class of information through an end-to-end SaaS platform. Our methodology is scientifically validated through 10+ years of R&D — and we’re only getting started. Aclima manages the full network including best-in-class mobile sensing capability, combined with stationary sensors, and machine learning to map and analyze air quality at the hyper-local level. Our data integration tools and backend are powered by Google Cloud to make this available in an easy to use SaaS tool. As Aclima’s platform scales, we’re able to provide increasingly sophisticated analytics and prediction tools, empowering customers to address emissions and exposure far more effectively, and at a fraction of the cost of traditional approaches.
Our services provide a range of benefits for users, allowing them to diagnose and act on this new class of data. Users can identify pollution hotspots and sources to prioritize emission reduction efforts, and better understand air pollutant concentrations to protect the health of citizens.
“This is really the tip of the iceberg, where in a few years this is going to be the norm for everything.”
— Jon Walton, CIO of San Mateo County
Check out the video below for the full presentation to learn how Aclima, Google Cloud, Geotab and San Mateo County are changing the way government and communities measure air pollution to take action on reducing climate emissions and pollution exposure.
Off To The Races, It’s Demo Derby!
We were early adopters of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) seven years ago, starting to use Cloud tools before Cloud was even a separate team! And we built a lot of custom infrastructure along the way. Now we’re happy to announce that we’re migrating to a full GCP stack — from BigQuery and CloudStorage, CloudSQL, Kubernetes, Google IoT, PubSub, DataFlow and Cloud Functions to move more processing to an auto-scaling data stream. Using Google Cloud Services for more of our infrastructure allows us to focus on users, and the science and product development we do best. So far we’ve reduced our dev-ops complexity and we’ve reduced costs by 65%.
Throughout Next, Google BigTable, Street View and Aclima hosted an exhibit on the showcase floor featuring live air quality mapping data from Aclima-enabled Street View cars driving across the country. On our touch screen display, visitors were able to examine and explore live block-by-block climate emission readings.
The exhibit was such a crowd favorite on the expansive Moscone Center floor expo, that we were asked to present on the DevZone Theater experience stage as one of five fun, fast-paced demo presentations.
What’s Ahead For Aclima And Google
Last Fall, we announced that we are going global with Google Street View. This year’s Next conference served as an opportunity for Aclima to announce our Google Cloud commercial partnerships, highlight our first engagement together with the County of San Mateo, and demonstrate live-streaming air quality mapping from our mobile platform. Working with Google Street View and Cloud, we look forward to scaling air quality mapping globally and delivering valuable tools to improve the health of people and our planet.
We’re extremely glad to have met you at Google Cloud Next ’19, but if you couldn’t stop by our breakout session or expo showcase, you can learn more about our environmental intelligence solutions and partnership with Google Cloud by reaching out to us at hello@aclima.io.