When you put a group of community leaders together at a table to talk about the practicalities of building a smart city, you get a flood of information, some effective group therapy, and a lot of good ideas. That’s what happened during a roundtable workshop facilitated by US Ignite Director of Communications Mari Silbey at the recent CityLaunch event hosted by the Connected Communities Collabor…

After nearly a year of painstaking planning and design, the POWDER team is now gaining rapid momentum in their physical deployment of the POWDER wireless testbed in Salt Lake City, Utah. But what does the nitty gritty of testbed deployment look like? Let us show you. There are several fixed endpoints being installed now throughout the testbed region, but before the installation process began…

We’re happy to announce the demonstrations appearing at the 2019 US Ignite Application Summit.  These demos feature some of the most promising advancements from our cohort of smart city partners throughout the year and demonstrate the transformative potential of investments in the local innovation economy. Be sure to register and book travel for the Summit now!. We can't wait to see you i…

What if you could transport the experience of an escape room into a virtual reality lab space? Thanks to a $100,000 grant from Verizon – prize money from the Verizon 5G EdTech Challenge – the COSMOS team from the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program plan to do just that. The VR application under development is part of a project called 5G COVET, or 5G COsmos Verizon Ed…

Congratulations to the Road Vision team out of George Washington University for winning the GigabitDCx innovation competition! Tasked with creating an app to help address fundamental city challenges, the GWU team developed Road Vision, which uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to analyze video feeds and translate visual data into useful traffic and public safety information. As the comp…

Each time we complete a US Ignite Forum workshop, we go through a process of trying to distill the most important experiences and lessons shared into playbook format. In the case of the Smart Transportation event we hosted in Columbus, Ohio, the volume of information was so significant, we decided we also needed a way to break the content up into smaller segments of reading material. In ad…

Welcome to the club! St. Petersburg, Florida is the newest city to join the Smart Gigabit Communities (SGC) family with an announcement at St. Pete’s inaugural Sunny Side Up Lecture Series earlier this week led by co-hosts Jason Mathis, CEO of the Downtown Partnership, and Sridhar Sundaram, Dean of the USFSP Kate Tiedemann College of Business. US Ignite Executive Director Bill Wall…

One of the earliest success stories from our group of Smart Gigabit Communities was the development of an application that let students in Chattanooga, Tennessee view and manipulate a 4K microscope located across the country at the University of Southern California (USC), School of Cinematic Arts*. The project has come a long way since those early days, and Chattanooga has turned its attention t…

The list of Smart 50 award winners is out! We congratulate all of the communities selected for your transformative work in the smart city space. Several community winners are also part of our network of Smart Gigabit Communitiesincluding: Austin, TX; Chattanooga, TN; Kansas City, MO; Lafayette, LA; Las Vegas, NV; Richardson, TX; San Diego, CA; and Washington, DC. The Smart 50 Awards are con…

The POWDER team in Salt Lake City, Utah, one of our selected PAWR wireless testbeds, just deployed its first software defined radio node on the Merrill Engineering Building located on the University of Utah campus. It may be a first step that only an engineer (or engineer at heart) could appreciate, but the installation of the first physical component of this new wireless research testbed has…

Smart cities and communities are at a critical juncture, as data generation is growing exponentially, applications are rapidly becoming reliant on more real-time streaming data, and the need to share data outside of city operational boundaries is becoming more evident. While cities could continue to develop cross-partner solutions, the scale of data and the number of potential partners will almost…

Our Smart Gigabit Communities (SGC) partners have produced hundreds of applications, with the best going on to deployment and widespread adoption. Now, one SGC challenge winner in Richardson, Texas has taken another step in that direction, announcing last week the launch of a new artificial intelligence platform that the development team plans to take to school administrators, municipal governme…

US Ignite is proud to announce the latest alums of our sponsored Kauffman FastTractraining, offered to some of the most promising application development teams from our Smart Gigabit Communities (SGC) program. This is the third cohort of teams to have taken on the FastTrac curriculum that helps teams hone their business or service concept, and prepare themselves for sustainability and to scale…

Last week we hosted our latest US Ignite Forum workshop on smart transportation in Columbus, Ohio. We talked about the impacts of transportation on city planning, the rollout of autonomous and electric vehicles, 21st century parking, and how to handle emergency response for distressed vehicles and their all-too-human passengers.   Following a warm welcome and orientation from our hosts …

(Post by US Ignite Smart Cities Big Data Program Manager, Praveen Ashok) The convergence of physical and cyber infrastructure has opened the door to a wide array of opportunities and technological advancements in the smart cities segment, giving local governments the ability to try out new IoT-based services, use new data-driven decision-making tools, and apply artificial intelligence and…

(Post by US Ignite Director of Technology, Scott Turnbull) The 2019 US Ignite Application Summit serves as one of the best demonstrations of the explosive growth of the Smart Community movement that I can think of. This year’s summit will be held in the great city of Denver, Colorado April 1-4.  Like previous years, we’ll feature some of the most promising advancements in applications …