Smart City Project

“NTT is a global technology and business solution provider who help clients accelerate growth and innovate new digital business models of the future.”

According to NTT, the city of Las Vegas will accelerate the Smart Cities Project. The Smart City Project is a way to help cities with many things. Some of these factors being: traffic congestion, real-time alerts of safety conditions, and alerts of maintenance issues to improve public safety. According to NTT, The city’s Smart Park Initiative is also designed to increase public safety while providing awareness of activity to generate “usage and operations benchmarks that allow leadership to make more informed decisions.” Now, high definition visual and audio sensors will now be deployed at multiple locations across the city, which will enable an automated system to notify law enforcement and maintenance personnel of safety hazards, such as large crowds, gunshots, vandalism, etc.

The Smart data platform is a very secure, distributed platform that captures data using sensors and micro data centers in the designated areas of the city through video and sound. Something I found interesting about this program is that they also integrate historical data sources such as crime, weather, and social media. By using analytics like machine learning technologies, the system can gain knowledge on patterns and can soon detect and alert authorities of patterns out of the normal.

NTT’s innovative Cognitive Foundation enables remote creation, management, and operation of information and communications from devices and networks to the cloud. Is this something you would feel comfortable with knowing it was in your city? Would you feel safer? Less safe?

Sources:

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200513005261/en/City-Las-Vegas-Accelerate-Smart-Cities-Project

https://statetechmagazine.com/article/2020/06/las-vegas-expands-smart-city-project-ntt

4 thoughts on “Smart City Project

  1. It’s very interesting looking forward to the future of smart cities. I always thought of the advantages of smart cities but never really looked at the potential harms of smart cities. It’s great that traffic and safety issues are improved and better maintained, but this means that the entire city would be recorded or controlled. The controllers of these sensors and technologies that make the city “smart” would observe the behaviors of citizens in order to be more efficient. This would result in a reduction of privacy. Whether a smart city is a good change would depend on whether citizens are willing to give up parts of their privacy for this change.
    Source:
    https://www.mexicanist.com/l/smart-city/

  2. I think this could be a really cool idea if done correctly. This seems to e modeling after the smart city Stockholm that we talked about in class earlier. I think its really cool that implementing this makes the city more manageable and more sustainable. One of the most slept on features in the city in my opinion is the parking spot availability. The idea of being able to check an app and seeing what parking spots near me are available is really cool. Especially in cities where it is very hard to find available free parking.

    Sources:
    https://smartcitysweden.com/

  3. To read about this was very interesting. I the concept of a Smart City would be beneficial as our population keeps growing. After COVID-19 happened I would say a lot of people lost their desire to live in the large cities that exceed large populations. However, I think if all cities become apart of the Smart City Project more people will have a desire to live in large cities again. One benefit that immediately comes to my mind about this aside from traffic flow, is the available jobs. When converting cities to ‘Smart Cities’ more people can have jobs. City areas are in high demand for employment right now. Aside from that benefit, the traffic flow in major cities would help people commuting in/out of the city. One thing that causes unnecessary traffic is people looking for parking spots. If the Smart City Project allows people to find parking spots easier, this will eliminate unnecessary traffic. Once this concept works for large cities, it will be easy to implement into smaller cities. I live at the Jersey Shore in the summers. I feel as though most all the traffic in the summer is a result from people looking for parking spots. Therefore, this concept will also benefit small cities.
    Article: https://smartamerica.org/teams/smart-cities-usa/

  4. I think this is interesting. I want to sorta spin my take on this with traffic. I have always thought the most annoying thing in the world is pulling up to a traffic light with no other cars coming the intersecting roads, and still having to wait for a couple minutes for the light to turn green. I think this is an interesting idea for law enforcement and a real challenge, but maybe we will start seeing this AI technology being used to control traffic lights. We are still using technology put in the ground during the first days of cars, and we’ve seen no major improvement. So what if this tracking technology could be used on traffic lights to sense when cars are coming from each direction, calculate how long till they get to the light, and then automatically switch in order to save time, gas, and money for everyone involved. It’s a win/win situation. What are your thoughts?

    Article:
    https://time.com/5502192/smart-traffic-lights-ai/

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