Written by Soledad Lalla for US Ignite The Smart Gigabit Communities program encourages civic leaders to use advanced networking and data-driven strategies to solve real-world problems. A star example of this work, Mike Cuales, the founder of LEVR Studios LLC, created a project that uses 360 Virtual Reality in a rural education setting. This VR solution puts students in rural areas in touch wit…

Over the past five years, industry and university labs have developed emerging technologies to support the Internet of Things (IoT), networks that connect everyday objects like cars, pacemakers, and thermostats to the Internet to drive down cost savings and improve safety and quality of life. These technologies have the potential to transform communities – improving transportation, reducing powe…

Smart Cities Connect, Smart Cities Connect Foundation, and US Ignite are once again recognizing some of the most innovative and influential smart cities projects around the world. This year the Smart 50 Awards program honors exceptional work in the categories of community engagement, digital transformation, smart mobility, urban infrastructure, and urban operations. We are also happy to ann…

The year 2020 is fast upon us, and while our crystal ball can’t tell us everything that lies ahead, we do have a strong lineup of US Ignite events in the forecast. Please mark your calendars for: FEBRUARY 6 US Ignite Forum - Smart City ROI San Diego, California The US Ignite Forum on Smart City ROI will cover smart city projects that demonstrate tangible return on investment such as s…

Top apps from this year’s IGNITE | SCALE | SAN DIEGO smart city challenge competition are on the road to commercialization, and we caught up recently with the leaders of FreshStart to hear how their award-winning project is progressing. Read on for details about how FreshStart is making the most of its boost from Ignite Scale San Diego as part of the Smart Gigabit Communities (SGC) program…

The City of Joplin, Missouri -- once a boomtown for mining of lead and zinc -- is on the road to an exciting high-tech future. With a name familiar to many as a stop on Route 66, or the temporary home to Bonnie and Clyde, the community has also been impacted deeply by a significant natural disaster – an EF5 tornado that struck the City in 2011. However, in the spirit of recovery and resilience, …

The city of Eugene has the largest open access fiber network in Oregon with broadband service that pushes gigabit speeds. Now, the community is quantifying the importance of that connectivity, and highlighting metrics that show the direct effect the EUGNet network has on the region’s economic growth. According to a new video released by the Technology Association of Oregon (TAO), more than 25…

Since winning an Ag Tech IoT challenge in 2018 in Red Wing, Minnesota, Jack Kilian has been innovating on his Poultry Patrol invention with the help of some much-needed barn time for his chicken chasing robot. In this demo video, see how the four-wheeled machine navigates the inside of a poultry barn, and hear from a local Red Wing farmer about why Poultry Patrol has the potential to ease agricult…

After years of effort, DARPA took the stage at Mobile World Congress Los Angeles to host the final match of its Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) - a competition run on a massive RF channel emulator called the Colosseum with 128 two-antenna software-defined radios and 64 field programmable gate arrays. Ten teams competed in the championship event with their Collaborative Intelligent …

How do we know when a city is smart? This is one of the most common questions we get and the answer is simple.  It's when a city understands enough about the people living in it to react in their best interests. But to understand its citizens means cities are watching us like never before; and what a city thinks it knows about us, and who else can use that information, is emerging as one of the m…

The Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program – co-led by US Ignite and Northeastern University – is supported by funding from both the National Science Foundation and our many Industry Consortium partners. These industry partners contribute equipment, software, money, and expertise, and as their numbers balloon, we are shining a spotlight on how and why they’ve decided to part…

Top Honors Awarded To: How’s My Driving (Washington, D.C.) – This locally-made app helps users report dangerous drivers and works to improve traffic congestion Enpira (Durham, NC) – Energy management solutions for municipal utilities and local government Helix Health LLC (Kansas City, MO) – Solution to incorporate real-time analytics into healthcare workflows.   …

We announced last week as part of the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program that the FCC has designated the PAWR testbed sites in Salt Lake City and the West Harlem neighborhood of New York as the first-ever spectrum Innovation Zones for experimental research. We, along with our partners at Northeastern University, will act as frequency coordinators for these Innovation Zones, wh…

We are making several important announcements for the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program today. In addition to the launch of AERPAW – the third PAWR testbed, which is located in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina (read more here) – we are also releasing a new Request for Proposals for a fourth and final PAWR platform. This latest RFP has a new focus on rural b…

Post authored by Glenn Ricart US Ignite wants to congratulate the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill on the announcement today that it will lead a team selected by the National Science Foundation to create and deploy a new national $20 million advanced networking and edge computing infrastructure called FABRIC. We also have small role to play in…

What happens when you bring new data to bear on a civic problem like reducing the number of critical restaurant health violations in a city? In Chicago, the answer is a new process that helps identify these violations eight days faster than the previous average. In our latest US Ignite Forum playbook published this week, we gathered insights from communities that are successfully applying n…