This course introduces current market trends and AWS offerings for Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (Ai/ML) technologies. You will learn about IoT/Ai/ML opportunities, the overall AWS value proposition, and customer success stories. This will include a deep dive of the various services in the AWS IoT, Ai/ML stack. Live demonstrations that show how these services can be applied to various smart city challenges. You will have the opportunity to bring your current/future projects and discuss them with AWS experts and get advice on how to leverage these technologies in your projects. Lastly, you will learn how to engage AWS resources to help quickly get enabled with these services and accelerate innovation. This will start off as a business presentation and then will seamlessly transition into a technical session.

Attend this session for a deep dive into the sensor hardware and software driving our smarter cities. From the sensor manufacturers themselves, hear how the sensor works, the roadmap to improvements, what’s next in sensor development and how that might affect your installed systems. From the Product Integrator, hear their what they are looking for in sensor capabilities and the features they are planning to introduce. Attendees should expect an open exchange of ideas and plenty of time for discussions and questions. With the rest of the week for listening to success stories from the city planners, CTOs and customers…this session is devoted to the sensor systems that have made it all possible.

Regional partnerships can be the key to the daunting task of creating smarter cities. When city, business and community leaders come together, they can share approaches, best practices and even data to mitigate risk, maximize resources and enhance opportunities for funding. Join us as we explore real-world case studies on how to structure and implement multi-city ecosystems while outlining frameworks to best position your region for success.

"If you can't measure it you can't improve it.” This famous quote from Peter Drucker gets to the heart of the possible related to how smart city technology, data and infrastructure can support the creation of cleaner, greener, more sustainable cities. The appropriately designed and deployed technology platforms can reduce waste and save energy all while inspiring new innovation to power new partnerships. Attend this panel to learn how to combine smart technology with smart city making that supports sustainable design goals.

With a $65B infusion of funds for energy, $15B for electric vehicles, and another $47B for resilience, the American energy ecosystem can expect changes never-before-seen in our lifetime. How the government - federal, state, and local - utilizes available funds will make a mark on every household and fundamentally solidify how we source, consume, and think about energy. Together with a panel of experts, join us for a discussion about how this once in a generaton funding opportunity will create opportunities for the future of energy in this country, and grasp the various routes available to cities that ensure the smartest possible outcomes.

Data is key, the key to the smart city, that is. Join Spectrum and their smart city clients to learn what data can unlock for your smart city. The panel will discuss implementation of smart city initiatives and how leveraging data provides a foundation for the future to build citizen engagement and drive city outcomes. Q&A will follow the session to engage audience members in the discussion.

This panel will provide insights in the sensor hardware and software driving our smarter cities. Working with the leading integrators, SEMI MSIG is bringing their members, the sensor designers and manufacturers who are enabling the technology advancements to SMARTER, SMALLER, BETTER sensors. Hear as they also address the business and market questions of how to flatten the ecosystem for efficiencies, the impact of regulations on security and sensor accuracies, and how sensor fusion and edge-processing will be changing the systems you buy and install.

With a huge innovation to transit, the Swift Rails panel will discuss what individualized, elevated, semi-autonomous transit vehicles mean for the future of cities. How do you best make use of transit that is 5 times faster; 40 times cheaper; comfortable and emission free? Start before your roads are congested. Tomorrow’s infrastructure will favor sustainable transportation that combines on-demand, comfort-of-a-car transit with a walkable, bikeable, and more livable city – make your city smarter.

Panel members will discuss how energy companies, working with cities and municipalities, are moving to upgrade and improve energy infrastructure, safety technology, and energy efficiency programs in a way that all stakeholders can share in the benefits of the new energy paradigm.

This panel will show a path for local government leaders to meet their challenges with affordable and innovative startup solutions. Challenge-based procurement, free support from nonprofit organizations like CivStart, and pilot program best practices will all be discussed, as well as examples in small and large cities and counties.

Join us for the 9th annual Smart Cities Startup Challenge, delivering transformational solutions to cities and military components. Leading startups will pitch solutions and engage with attendees and review panel featuring investment, city, industry, and military leadership.

It is widely recognized that many districts in cities are lacking true essential broadband connectivity, and it is also widely recognized that many cities are struggling to scale some of their digital transformation initiatives, which are often staying at proof-of-concept level. What is the commonality in between both situations? Building the business case to bring investment in some of these projects has often been the main challenge. But the situation is changing and solutions are emerging which require to play at the political, financial and technical levels. Through testimonial of cities, this panel discussion we’ll look at the solutions to build the case for a city-wide digital transformation and provide real use cases of actual deployments: The different source of financing The different models that local governments can consider The technological solutions to lower the ROI of these projects

We see a future in which heavy duty municipal fleets are adaptable, scalable, and leveraged to share data across departments, provide equitable services, and empower public works teams to thrive even during times of crises. Today, modern fleet technologies are helping cities uncover efficiencies and valuable data integrations, achieve sustainability goals, and deliver quality customer service, all while promoting fiscal responsibility to save taxpayer dollars. This panel, featuring experts from Rubicon and the City of Columbus, will delve into the unique needs of government fleet managers and provide insights into the solutions and strategies that will extend the life of city fleets, optimize routes, streamline operations, and empower drivers in 2022—all of which are essential to helping public works teams transition to agile work environments as part of a reimagined push towards resilience.

In this panel discussion, the European liaison to California, Intel Mobileye General Manager USA, and TNL Mobility BU Director will share how leading cities in the USA are rapidly adopting solutions that deliver tangible benefits to the people and businesses in terms of mobility, safety, equality, and climate.

Leveraging the full capabilities of smart technologies will require development, demonstration, and deployment of autonomous energy systems – smart systems capable of effectively and efficiently managing the complexities of distributed power generation, storage, and loads to provide grid flexibility and non-wire solutions to cities’ growing energy demand. In this session you will learn about new efforts to push the envelope of community-scale energy solutions as communities from Ohio to Colorado to Oregon plot their course to demonstrate the business case for grid-interactive efficient buildings by solving real utility challenges. Leveraging the capabilities of smart devices and advanced control systems across communities – with residential and commercial applications, optimized using advanced analytics and control algorithms, and tested at utility scale, this panel will highlight three communities that are scaling up grid benefits at the leading edge of smart energy adoption.

As cities are making decisions about smart city implementations, there are often questions about what the first (or next) type of technology will be. Street lights? Parking monitors? Equipment for police? Air pollution monitors? Rather than going with the technology that the mayor happens to think is cool or the technology that a vendor pushed on the CIO, the city should choose technology that fits the unique needs of the individual city. And the best way to determine those needs with quantitative evidence is the E Source Smart City Assessment Tool. Join representatives from E Source, as well as our partner Connected Cities Integrators and our recent client the City of Allentown, Pennsylvania, to learn more about how the Smart City Assessment Tool was used in Allentown and how the city benefited from the greater understanding of their needs. Prioritizing smart city investments in Allentown led to a greater degree of success in the implementation and higher approval from residents, setting the city up for additional successes with future implementations.

Join us for the 9th annual Smart Cities Startup Challenge, delivering transformational solutions to cities and military components. Leading startups will pitch solutions and engage with attendees and review panel featuring investment, city, industry, and military leadership.

Amazon has made a commitment to sustainability, and we are not alone—our customers look to us for guidance on using AWS services in a more sustainable way, and using AWS products and services to improve the sustainability of their overall businesses. In this session you will learn about how data services from AWS are being used to help drive sustainability solutions in smart cities. You will hear from customers and partners that have used services such as IoT, AI and ML to innovate and solve sustainability challenges. You will also learn of resources available to embark on your own sustainability journey using data led decision making.

Many communities are looking at lighting projects in isolation. They are switching to LED, adding controls, and saving money. While these are important first steps, these projects could deliver significantly more value from your streetlight and utility poles. Learn how you can tap into lighting projects to provide residents with WiFi access, enhance safety, and gain more insight into the communities you serve. Attend this session to learn: * How you can use video AI to make transportation more efficient, improve pedestrian safety, and gain critical insights that enable law enforcement officials to solve serious crimes and make communities safer. * How you can break down city government silos to bring wireless access to communities of all sizes, particularly for digitally underserved communities facing increased demands for remote learning and telework. * How you can more easily tap into government funding to get your smart city and smart grid projects done

This panel of city leaders and innovators will discuss their mobility priorities and the biggest challenges they are facing in transforming urban mobility. The moderated panel will look at best practices and lessons the cities have learned as they cope with a changing mobility landscape, industry disruptions, and the complexities of implementing new services.

With cities increasingly recognizing the need to control energy consumption, reduce waste, improve operations and inefficient consumption of vital resources, the requirement to make utilities and cities smart is increasingly important. Although the needs of electricity, gas and water utilities are different, each utility type requires similar foundational technologies for smart devices, connectivity and data analytics. In this panel session, experts share information and educate participants on the LoRa (Long Range) technology stack to gain perspective of what it is and its’ value proposition enabling small to medium-sized cities to economically modernize their distribution grid metering. Typically LoRa is deployed to initially support today’s next gen AMIs, this network architecture is used to interface an Advanced Metering Infrastructure Headend with field device meter endpoints based on a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) IoT radio frequency (RF) technology called LoRa. This infrastructure gives the cities and utilities a flexible IoT network that can be leveraged for many other data enablement use cases.

During the pandemic, the loudest town hall voices moved online and dominated city-run social media & message boards. This left local governments asking: how do we engage our community, including those who aren’t already online? In this session, the City of Lancaster and CitizenLab will share how a mix of digital and offline engagement tactics brought traditionally unheard communities into the feedback loop on topics such as creating Lancaster’s next Comprehensive Plan, prioritizing $39.5 million in American Rescue Plan funds, and planning for safe streets. We’ll cover the process of balancing online and “low-tech” engagement strategies that build off existing community networks and systems by starting with an overview of digital community engagement, doing a deeper dive into concrete Lancaster’s good practices, and wrapping up with a Q&A session.

Join us for the 9th annual Smart Cities Startup Challenge, delivering transformational solutions to cities and military components. Leading startups will pitch solutions and engage with attendees and review panel featuring investment, city, industry, and military leadership.

What will it mean when broadband reaches every American home? How can we heal fractured communities with thoughtful infrastructure? How do we prioritize accessibility in transit? Municipal decision-makers consider these questions and more every day. The choices they make impact residents and the community for generations to come, resonating most loudly with the underserved. On this panel, we will discuss how city leaders can judiciously employ funding from the recently passed Infrastructure Bill, along with a data-based approach, to bolster social equity in their communities.

Join US Ignite in recognizing a leading group of communities working toward accelerating the smart city movement, closing the digital divide, and driving innovation.

The City of Philadelphia recently partnered with Comcast on SmartBlockPHL, a pilot program that uses sensors to count objects, understand space utilization, and monitor air quality in a heavily trafficked area of the city. In addition to creating a new kind of partnership, the solution prioritized privacy, developing a solution that addresses the city’s needs while protecting and ensuring the privacy of its residents. Hear from representatives of Philadelphia and Comcast as they discuss how they came together, the challenges they faced, what lessons were learned in building out the pilot, and early findings.

Whether you dream of a driverless world, a cityscape without personal vehicles or parking garages, taking flight on your way to work, or the simplicity of a smart public transit system that is accessible to all, the future of mobility begins with decisions that cities and regions make today. On this panel, join us for a discussion about how the recently passed Infrastructure Bill will impact modern decision-making about mobility and the legacy our cities create on the open road and beyond.

The recently passed infrastructure package underscores the need to deliver broadband to everyone as it allocates $42.5 billion to set up the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) grant program. In early 2021, US Ignite established Project OVERCOME to select, launch, and oversee seven proof-of-concept efforts that deployed novel broadband technology solutions in rural and urban underserved communities. This panel discussion will feature Project OVERCOME grantees sharing their experiences in quickly deploying connectivity solutions to underserved and unserved areas. Be inspired and learn how to incorporate their learnings into upcoming BEAD funding opportunities.

Hear how one large city is innovating their water network and using utility resources to address population changes, the impacts of climate change, and on-going regulation modifications. With more connected and innovative devices that modernize urban areas, utility services can often be overlooked as the backbone of a smart city. Imagine being able to attach remote sensors to alert you to rising floodwaters that provide a quick response to keep your community safe. What if your water system allowed you to manage the temperature and pressure of the water to maintain healthy water quality and reduce water loss? Learn how this utility is using connected solutions and devices transmitting large amounts of data over their network to provide the intelligence to make the right decisions at the right time. Moving from a physical system to a digital network allows utility operators to proactively manage network assets, providing the tools for more efficient-to-day operations, and insights across the entire water system, leading the way to a future where water is safe, accessible and affordable.

Effectively harnessing the power of mobile edge computing (MEC) and 5G in transit operations.

Smart, Resilient and Sustainable. Cities throughout the US are being challenged to incorporate these elements into new projects, while also considering the equity impact on their communities. Events of the past few years demonstrated how critical resiliency and sustainability efforts are. Join us for this panel discussion among sustainability, resiliency, and smart city leaders and hear them share their success stories and lessons learned from projects in their communities.

How can cities and counties better connect with and improve daily life for residents? Grand Rapids and Cabarrus County turned to innovative technology for the answer, improving revenue collection and disbursement, IT efficiency, operations and constituent satisfaction along the way. Join Grand Rapids City Treasurer, John Globensky, and Cabarrus County NC Tax Administrator, David Thrift, as they discuss the immediate and unanticipated benefits of digitizing tax and utility bill collections, and how changes in their operations are leading to more positive resident experiences with other government agencies.

Join us for the 9th annual Smart Cities Startup Challenge, delivering transformational solutions to cities and military components. Leading startups will pitch solutions and engage with attendees and review panel featuring investment, city, industry, and military leadership.

The passage of the infrastructure bill will bring much needed funding to mitigate the Digital Divide. The disparity in access to broadband is not new but the past two years have highlighted the challenge for many students, employees, and others struggling to connect and participate in today’s digital economy. School districts have invested heavily in a variety of mobile devices keeping students connected to the classroom. The opportunity now exists to build on these investments and improve access to technology, solve the homework gap and provide internet service to families and individuals in need. Performance on the traditional mobile networks is not consistent across all neighborhoods. Many cities are considering improvements to Wi-Fi deployments or building private CBRS networks. Working with existing service providers can solve poor service areas as well. All of these options can be leveraged to improve connectivity for city services including education, law enforcement, telehealth, and general IoT infrastructure. Understanding network availability and performance is necessary for directing efforts to ensure that everyone can share in today’s technology as well as the advancements in the years to come.

Deployment of infrastructure solutions, where multiple technologies are deployed in a single form factor, are growing in popularity and functionality and offer cities a plethora of possibilities. Solutions today include combinations of 4G/5G radios, IoT sensors, Wi-Fi, GPS, mesh nodes, LED lighting, CCTV cameras, mobile edge computing, advertising/signage and more, offering a host of use cases, information and transactional services. This panel will discuss some of the exciting solutions available today, examples of deployment, the importance of digital twin-based multi-infrastructure planning solutions for optimizing MI placement and various business models to support.

Join IDC as we celebrate the award winners and finalists from 2022 IDC Smart Cities North America Awards. This session will shine a spotlight on the winners and finalists of our 5th annual SCNAA. All the winning projects are from forward-thinking state, local and/ or educational institutions and founded on strong leadership and the innovative use of technology to serve the public and deliver outcomes. These awards are especially important as these organizations executed and sustained successful smart city initiatives amid challenging times. Moderated by Ruthbea Yesner, Vice President, IDC Government Insights and Smart Cities and Communities Strategies, this session will focus on best practices for successful project implementations. Join us to gain insight into the critical success factors of these award-winning initiatives that made more sustainable and livable cities with new services and economic opportunities.

This moderated panel will explore and identify challenges and best practices presented by the participating cities. Some of the topics covered may include, buildings, energy, grid, utilities, and resilience.

The Chicago Smart Lighting Program is the largest city-led wireless smart street lighting program in the country, and it is already providing significant environmental and financial benefits. In 2021, for the first time since the start of the project in 2017, the City’s streetlight electricity bill was cut by more than half. With energy prices on the rise, the City projects savings of $100 million over the first ten years.  In this session, City representatives and the prime contractor for the $160 million program, Ameresco Inc., will discuss how this can be done at Cities across the nation, no matter the size. Through this unique partnership, the City and Ameresco were able to design the program to ensure diversity in subcontractors and access to jobs and marketable skills for City residents, exceeding all Minority Business Enterprise (MBE) and Women’s Business Enterprise (WBE) participation goals. As the third largest city in the country, Chicago’s Smart Lighting Program serves as a roadmap for how other large cities nationwide can partner with the private sector to make fundamental changes in infrastructure programs. Presenters will discuss how your city can improve climate outcomes, increase operational efficiency, create jobs, and save money. - Attendees will learn how the Chicago Smart Lighting Program can be used as a blueprint for smart cities initiatives, no matter the size of the city. - Attendees will understand how the City of Chicago and Ameresco worked together from the early stage of program development to ensure a local and diverse workforce was a priority. - Attendees will leave with tactical next steps to take following the session to get their communities on the path to becoming a smart city.

Join us for the 9th annual Smart Cities Startup Challenge, delivering transformational solutions to cities and military components. Leading startups will pitch solutions and engage with attendees and review panel featuring investment, city, industry, and military leadership.

In order to most quickly and effectively realize value gained from Smart City initiatives, a community must embrace and establish two key actions: First: Establish a unified and mutually benefitting plan amongst departments/agencies; Second: Have access to a Single Pane of Glass (SPOG) providing real time and historic reporting of the effects of their Smart/Connected infrastructure investments, which in turn allows communities to make automated data driven decisions that drive efficiencies and outcomes for their citizens. This panel will provide tangible examples from both end users and solution providers to help your community accelerate its success.

Leveraging a strong partnership between Police, Fire, Dispatch, Transportation Engineering, IT and a local school district, the City of Frisco brought a vision for Situational Awareness for Emergency Response (SAFER) into being through the in-house development of a geospatial platform. Since its initial implementation, SAFER has grown into a critical business application that utilizes real time data from nearly 30 integrated systems. These include: 9-1-1 caller locations, RapidSOS, Vehicle and Motorola Radio GPS locations, Waze incidents and road closures, live-video feeds, Weather Conditions, Hazmat Plumes, building floor plans and the location of critical infrastructure. Frisco officials will share and answer questions about the evolution of this critical system and their ongoing efforts to incorporate emerging technologies while keeping SAFER relevant and sustainable. This includes a recent reinvestment resulting in an initiative to ensure that the closest available units were always dispatched, providing faster response times, reduced operational costs, and lowered risk to both first responders and motorists by reducing duration of the incident.

A DoorDash driver, an Amazon delivery van, and a commuter—stressed and running behind schedule—have all been circling the same block or double parked for 15 minutes when, finally, a parking spot opens up. The dangerous and unregulated parking jam that ensues belongs in “The Hunger Games,” not a modern American city. Transportation activity has still not returned to pre-pandemic levels, which means the coming year is a one-time opportunity for city leaders to roll out technology to change street usage, add pedestrian and bike infrastructure, better manage micromobility, improve parking, carve out permanent parklets, and more.

The passage of the infrastructure bill will bring much needed funding to mitigate the Digital Divide. Although much of the attention has been on connecting rural communities, cities have much to gain from this new legislation as well. School districts have invested heavily in Wi-Fi hotspots, Chromebooks, iPads and other devices so that students could connect to the classroom during remote learning. School districts are now continuing to build on these investments in order to improve access to technology and solve the homework gap. Maintaining these services on traditional mobile networks, however, is quite costly. Many cities are looking to improve existing municipal Wi-Fi networks as well as building private cellular networks using Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum — allowing for access to disruptively priced LTE and 5G technology. All of these options can be leveraged to improve connectivity for city services including education, law enforcement, telehealth, and general IoT infrastructure.

This moderated panel will explore and identify challenges and best practices presented by the participating cities.

Join us for the 9th annual Smart Cities Startup Challenge, delivering transformational solutions to cities and military components. Leading startups will pitch solutions and engage with attendees and review panel featuring investment, city, industry, and military leadership.

Cities share what it means to remain relevant, safe, and invested in a time of digital transformation. Hear about the unique challenges and opportunities facing city leaders and what the future may hold for connected communities.

Learn how Smart Trash system that is in operation in Spain, Italy, and France is working in two Florida cities.

Creating the smart city of the future while designing for the here and now can be quite confusing at best, if not seemingly conflicting objectives at worst. We can help make things easier with this panel as we will explore the Wi-SUN FAN (Field Area Network), which provides all the versatility and flexibility to implement smart, automated, and wireless solutions designed to make major city infrastructure scalable, safer, more efficient, and more sustainable. Wi-SUN FAN’s numerous technical, performance, and reliability benefits for smart city IoT infrastructure, including superior coverage and resilience and enterprise-grade security already proven at a very large scale make this the smart choice. With more than 100 million devices deployed globally, Wi-SUN FAN is a field tested and proven smart city technology with compatible devices already extensively deployed in North America, EMEA and APAC regions. Learn how Wi-SUN FAN is particularly well suited to dense urban networks applications as well as how easy Wi-SUN networks are to commission and maintain.

With the advent of technology advancements, a focus on renewable energy and grid resiliency, and an injection of funding from the new Infrastructure bill, a revolution is upon us. The call is for us, as a nation, to unite and revolutionize our infrastructure to modernize our grids with the goal of de-carbonizing our country. With this in mind, Cities are opting to deploy microgrids to their critical infrastructure (e.g. fresh and waste water treatment plants, hospitals, and public safety facilities, etc.) that provides local energy resiliency, hardening them from power outages, reducing their own cost of energy, and using on site renewable energy resources helping to achieve sustainability goals. Furthermore, the microgrid assets can be leveraged by the local utility for dispatchable demand management for greater grid benefits.

There is a tectonic shift occurring as we all begin to really recognize the impact of climate change on our economies and daily lives. Investors and large global organizations are keenly aware and declaring Environmental Sustainability Goals (ESG’s), but how do we get there?

As economic inequality and the consumer price index continue to rise, more and more Americans lose their financial stability and plummet into our municipal run social safety nets. With the number of people to serve and the cost per person served growing at a faster rate than a municipality can increase staff and revenue, what is the prudent government official to do?! This panel will examine how by digitizing, for example through an Open Data Portal, governments create a platform to increase cross departmental collaboration and attract the assistance of entrepreneurs and academics to deliver more services with less staff and reduced budgets. We will then consider how to not leave entrepreneur and academic participation to fate by incorporating accelerators into the municipal strategy. From the government perspective, we will discuss how Colorado Springs approached digitization through a “smart community” approach, deploying emerging technology for operational efficiencies, taxpayer savings, and improved quality of life. Then, we will look at how a Legislator in Buffalo digitized part of his checks & balances functions to improve housing court case outcomes. From the accelerator perspective, we will examine two different models (one a NPO serving govtech companies specifically; the other a qausi-governmental regional innovation solution deployed to address that region’s innovation ecosystem as a whole) and how they’ve been able to use the increased transparency and interoperability of digitized governmental entities to help achieve the municipal goals of greater service, manageable staff workloads, and more robust revenues.

This moderated panel will explore and identify challenges and best practices presented by the participating cities.

LinkUS seeks to provide a complete, smart mobility system along key regional corridors, including high capacity and advanced rapid transit, technology solutions, bicycle and pedestrian improvements, and land use changes. The initiative is a strategic, data-driven and collaborative response to the challenges facing a growing region, including managing traffic congestion, ensuring equitable access to jobs and housing, promoting economic vitality, and improved sustainability. Ongoing coordination with other growth management efforts will be essential to its success. This panel will focus on the comprehensive planning work leading up to LinkUS [including COTA’s NextGen plan and the MORPC Insight 2050 Corridor Concepts study], as well as the current regional collaborative approach COTA, MORPC, City of Columbus and Franklin Co are taking to bring LinkUS to fruition. From the initial analysis of possibilities within multiple jurisdictions' right-of-way, to a LinkUS program that incorporates multiple elements, the latest in mobility technology, and establish meaningful metrics, this multi-agency approach takes careful collaboration and communication, With the current infrastructure investment climate, the LinkUS partners are preparing for our future!

Power A Clean Future Ohio is a coalition effort focused on helping communities in Ohio set clean energy targets and supports the development of carbon emission reduction strategies. The PCFO technical support team works directly with the 22 PCFO communities and their innovative city leaders throughout Ohio to leverage the best technology, data, policy and programs to increase energy efficiency and renewable energy, expand electric vehicle adoption while also ensuring equitable outcomes. The unique model of PCFO has accelerated local climate action by providing city champions with free, direct access to first steps in their sustainability initiatives, including equity coaching, greenhouse gas emissions inventories, and municipal fleet analyses. Come learn more about how local cities and counties in Ohio are leading the way!

A smarter and more connected world impacts far more than just a community's residents - it influences our natural ecosystem. Innovative deployment of smart sensors may help communities monitor an environment for imminent risks in the water, land, and air. In this panel, three community leaders share the critical insights gained after deploying pilots to advance environmental resilience through smart sensors and community engagement.

In April 2021, the city of Gary, Indiana fell victim to a ransomware attack. The IT department was suddenly locked out of critical systems supporting essential city services which impacted thousands of residents and businesses in the Gary community. The IT team, led by Chief Innovation Officer Lloyd Keith, immediately took action to cut off any further damage and began taking steps to contain, eradicate and recover from the Conti ransomware strain including partnering with cybersecurity provider UncommonX. During this panel session, CIO Lloyd Keith and UncommonX CSO Patrick Hayes will share further details of the ransomware attack and strategies that occurred to quickly eradicate the strain as well as moving to get the City’s servers back online while ensuring that the hackers weren’t hiding in other systems. Keith will also discuss his ongoing approach to cybersecurity protection now that his department became a victim as well as his belief that no city/municipality is safe and it’s a matter of when not if.

This session focuses on how to identify, measure, and analyze urban mobility barriers through an equity lens. Access to mobility options has long been a challenge, contributing to underperformance in economic and social development. With new emphasis on improving transportation systems for those currently underserved, many communities struggle with how to quantify challenges in order to develop and mark progress toward goals. This session highlights case studies to inform design and iteration of solutions and considers emerging metrics such as the Mobility Energy Productivity (MEP) metric and Transportation Burden, and emerging tools for data collection such as OpenPATH.

The NIST Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC) is establishing a new effort in Ethics, Equity, Integrity and Technology to support community programs to integrate social dimensions of ethics, equity and trust into the fabric of Smart City initiatives, and define relevant technology challenges and solutions. The effort is being led by a collaboration between the GCTC, Ball State University, and the cities of Cincinnati, OH, Portland, OR, and Long Beach, CA with the goal of developing a Smart City roadmap or blueprint for incorporating social and ethical considerations in Smart City programs. This panel will describe challenges, opportunities and avenues for research as a starting point for community-based efforts to define more ethical and equitable approaches to Smart City development.

Sensors and video analytics are core to many smart city technology deployments. However, many questions are still unanswered. What benefit do they yield? What stakeholders do they serve? What technology should a city invest in? With so many offerings and sensor types, as well as the break-neck pace at which technology develops today, it is important to understand some underlying principles and definitions before using public funds to procure. In this session, Axis Communications’ Smart City Segment Development Manager, Kevin Taylor, and Senior Technologist, Ryan Zatolokin, are joined by Chief Operating Officer Marshall Freeman of the Atlanta Police Foundation to discuss what you can realistically expect from today’s sensor technology and how emerging technologies impact solution architecture. We will consider how the Atlanta Police Foundation supports the safety mission of the Atlanta Police Department including policy support, funding, community outreach and technology selection. Many sensor technologies such as thermal imaging, radar, and lidar will be considered, as well as the emphasis on the use of high-definition network video combined with intelligent video analytics. Session attendees will leave with an understanding of IoT endpoints, edge processing, deep learning AI, and video analytics."

Strategic Property Partners is building the future of southern downtown Tampa at Water Street: a connected, urban, multi-use project on the waterfront. Once all phases of the development are completed, there will be up to 9,000,000 square feet of new commercial, residential, educational, entertainment, cultural and retail space with a total investment exceeding $3 billion. Water Street Tampa is the world’s first neighborhood development to achieve the WELL Design & Operations designation under the WELL Community Standard. Their charge is to positively impact the people who spend time in the district’s public spaces to promote health and well-being across all aspects of community life. Whitespace is enthusiastically and uniquely qualified to work with Strategic Property Partners in this exciting endeavor. By ensuring the behind-the-scenes technology is in place to support the all of its initiatives, programs and activities, Water Street Tampa will lead world’s first Well District and define the standard for well-living in a community."

How cities are looking to utilize the blockchain and crypto as a tool to engage with their residents and promote equity. The attendees will learn about existing use-cases of city coins and new models that can be used to bridge the digital divide and close the racial wealth gap.