Smart Cities Connect & US Ignite Application Summit Explore Perennial Challenges, New Solutions
Source: AVNetwork on July 5, 2017 | David Keene
It’s perhaps fitting that the Smart Cities Connect Conference and Expo– held in Austin last week, and collocated with the US Ignite Application Summit – wrapped on the eve of a (very) long 4th of July weekend. Because rethinking the running and management of our cities–with the help of new technology and data tools– is a good way to honor this country’s birthday. If sorting out the key smart cities issues means looking beyond past accomplishments and entering some uncharted waters at the confluence of deep technical, political, and demographic tides, all the more reason to jump in feet first. And jump in we did last week in Austin, with a major conference exploring the use of technology, policy, data, and more to help cities become more efficient, secure, and sustainable–while improving the quality of life of its citizens and visitors.
Interestingly, Austin, TX, got a preview of sorts of the June Smart Cities Connect Conference, earlier this year at SXSW Interactive, with a very good one-day Smart Cities event on Sunday March 12th, the SMART CITY DAY @ SXSW. That event featured a series of lightning talks from mayors, city technology officers, and solution providers, who were tasked with showing what they are doing, and what works for smart cities solutions. That event caught my attention as a refreshing change of pace from typical conferences with their typical panel sessions– as the presenters were challenged to explain, solo, and succinctly, what was at the top of their smart cities agendas and what specifically they were doing to make things happen.
Fast forward to last week– the smart cities ante was upped on every level. The Smart Cities Connect Conference and Expo/US Ignite Application Summit saw 1800 attendees converge in Austin, from 27 countries. 300 cities were represented (with city officials from mayors to data, policy and tech executives). There were 25 live application demos. And the expo section of the event featured 150 exhibitors, including 50 startups & innovators pitching their emerging tech solutions for cities. Beyond the impressive numbers I was struck by the unique mix of analytical sessions, formal presentations, panel discussions, demos of technology solutions, demos of prototype solutions such as robots and transparent (digitally) cars. The atmosphere was a creative and lively cross between a government conference, a tech expo, and high level university/research facility dive into future technology. All that is a testament to two things: good planning by Smart Cities Connect, the conference organizer, and the heavy participation of U.S. Ignite, the nonprofit organization that according to their mission statement “helps to accelerate new wired and wireless networking advances from research to prototype to full-scale smart community and interconnected national deployments.”
But don’t be distracted by that stated “wired and wireless networking” focus in the mission statement of US Ignite. In Austin last week, the organization showed how they are nurturing some amazing projects that go way beyond transmission platforms– drawn from among US Ignite’s over 100 application prototypes in the areas of public safety, healthcare, education, energy, transportation, and advanced manufacturing. On hand at the conference, representing just some of US Ignite’s great work: key creators and users of an application that enables STEM students in a rural community in Tennessee to learn biology in new, immersive ways by viewing microorganisms under a 4k microscope online, and remotely operating the microscope in real-time and simultaneously holding high-definition video conferences with world-class university researchers; real-time see-through technology for connected autonomous that can provide a vehicle with a real-time augmented view of a traffic scene normally blocked by surrounding vehicles; a system where a robot can automatically identify and track surrounding objects and people, as a building block of 3D robotic, collaborative wireless-networked augmented vision; and a streaming inter-city VR application.
The panel sessions and presentations in the conference track delved into every manner of smart city initiative. Many experts on both the municipal and solution provider sides gave presentations on technology trends– smart Kiosks using digital signage and other display technology, the Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, and more, with sessions that included:
• How to Design a Smart City – IoT Technology Based
• Urban Mobility - Transforming Smart Cities
• City Spotlights: Networks & Data
• Urban Mobility on Demand
• Public Safety and Smart Cities – The Urban Area City of Tomorrow
• Using Data Science and Fog Computing to Accelerate Smarter Cities Use Cases
• Streaming Analytics: Transforming Local Government Operations
• Enhancing the role of higher education institutions in your smart community
• Immersive Virtual Reality Field Trip to a Solar Plant with a Live-Streamed Remote Teacher
And many more.
A common theme at the conference– and the most common ongoing theme in smart cities conversations nationwide– was data: big data, aggregated data, open data, privacy issues in data, data storage– because wrangling data is the prime concern in smart cities. Not the only concern, but it’s usually seen as the starting point, the DNA, of all smart cities applications– maybe too much so, at the expense of data visualization or citizen-facing interactive tools that could help city officials both "sell" smart cities ideas to their constituencies and put the data they do have and control to work on the ground.
Data in all those ambitious, big-D iterations are tricky things to wrap a business model or any other kind of model around. Because in smart cities initiatives you face the same conundrums you face in any industry: either you don’t have enough resources to gather, store, share, and analyze all the data that’s the basis of what you are promising, or you have so much, or such different kinds of data, that no one knows how to analyze or manage it. In smart cities, add to that dynamic the perennial budgetary challenges all governments face– both qualitative and quantitative, as funding issues take on added political dimensions– the latter manifest themselves in the form of timing issues even when you do have adequate budget. In this context, top smart cities players (including city governments) are trying to build new smart city data gathering and management models– a task that even Fortune 500 companies are vexed by: what to do with all the data they collect (like retailers' POS data), because the task is huge. Even the U.S. government does not have the bandwidth to analyze all the data they collect.