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Smart Cities Connect Spring 2025: Driving Innovation in Urban Transformation The Smart Cities Connect Spring 2025 Conference & Expo was held in San Antonio, TX, from April 14–16, 2025 and convened with over 200 city leaders, technologists, and innovators to explore the future of urban development. Key Themes and Sessions:
As part of my personal view and attending sessions, here is my highlight! One of the first sessions I attended was listending to how Skydio uses UAS drones for high mass light tower inspection and is working with Texas Department of Transportation saving time from what took 95 minutes that is now whittled down to only 16 minutes. Skydio also mentioned we have moved to a 1:1 relationship for managing drones in cities to a 1 to many relationship where UAS docking and preprogramming is advancing drone operations within cities. Additional use cases are event driven including those for public safety, rail inspection, bridge inspection, and building management. Another session I enjoyed was listening to University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA, and my MBA alma mater) and the team share more about their digital twin research project for City of San Antonio. The digital twin was built using geospatial, AI, machine vision, large language models (ChatGPT), 3D visualization, and NVIDIA Omniverse. The team also mentioned using the electric utility network for distribution to showcase CPS Energy data and information. Some of the primary use cases for the city included heat island identification, flood monitoring, and in the future planning for EV charging infrastructure build out and predicting the overall impact to enterprise fleets. A highlight of the event for me was the workshop, "Immersive Experiences Driven by Intelligent Data for the Modern Urban Environment. Here is my summary of that workshop. How Smart City Leaders Are Powering the Future with Real-Time Data and Integrated Solutions This workshop event held at Smart Cities Connect focused on advancing smart city innovation, with a panel of industry leaders from NVIDIA, AMSYS Innovation Solutions, True North Software Solutions, and Ipsotek shared insights on how technology is reshaping urban infrastructure, public safety, and city services, and in the end citizen or patron experiences. Laying the Foundation for Smarter Cities Bill Pugh of True North Software Solutions kicked things off by outlining the key steps cities should take to begin their smart city journey. He emphasized the importance of leveraging operational dashboards and digital twins—not just to analyze historical data, but to harness real-time information. By doing so, cities can make critical, data-driven decisions that directly impact public safety, transportation, and municipal services. True North’s approach goes beyond the typical “reactive” data model. Their operational dashboards integrate live data streams, enabling secure dynamic decision-making that supports a range of city department and agency services in real time. Frisco, Texas: Scaling Innovation Across Departments Wade Medlock from the City of Frisco, Texas, shared how their SAFER initiative has grown far beyond its original scope. What began as a modest goal has evolved into a wide-reaching program supporting multiple city departments and agencies. Today, Frisco has roughly 85 applications running across its network—each playing a role in making the city more efficient, secure, and responsive to residents’ needs. Wade discussed how it is working with AMSYS and the rest of the partner team to elevate SAFER to the next level for the city. Smarter Surveillance with Intelligent Cameras Sean Grimm of Ipsotek brought attention to the capabilities of smart cameras—many of which are already deployed on city streets. Far from being limited to traffic monitoring, these cameras can now provide advanced insights into public safety and city operations. This tech represents a massive opportunity to extract more value from existing infrastructure. NVIDIA Blueprints in Action Jumbi Edulbehram of NVIDIA helped define AI for the audience and gave a great example (You had to be there!). In addition he shared how NVIDIA is working collaboratively with AMSYS and their partners to provide the blueprints so execution of these services for applications such as intelligent traffic management and public safety response become a reality and scale efficiently. Bringing It All Together with “The Collective” John Rohrer and Jacque Istok of AMSYS Innovative Solutions described their role as a master systems integrator, highlighting their collaboration with a network of trusted partners known as “The Collective.” Their mission: combine best-in-breed solutions to transform how cities function. They discussed how getting started with AMSYS is a conversation and mutual relationship in learning, collaborating, and bringing the right solutions to the table. From elevating campus experiences and improving patient care in hospitals to streamlining city services, their integrated approach is delivering powerful results. They shared examples of projects across a variety of industries and use cases. Final Thoughts - Smart Cities Should Work For You, Not To You: Traffic management has long been the flagship use case for smart city technology. But as IoT, artificial intelligence, and intelligent data systems evolve, the potential use cases are expanding rapidly. These technologies are now enabling new services and experiences that go far beyond simply managing congestion. The message from these industry leaders is clear: smart city solutions should empower communities, not overwhelm them. As cities continue to adopt cutting-edge technology, the focus must remain on practical, people-centered outcomes—solutions that work for the city, its workers, and its residents.  How Qualcomm is Advancing AI and Internet of Things to Prepare Tomorrow’s Businesses and Cities9/20/2022
 In early July, I was honored to have a chat with Megha Daga, Senior Director of Product Management and AI/ML lead for the Internet of Things (IoT) at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. . As a critical player in AI enablement across the IoT group at Qualcomm, Megha has been crucial in the development of cutting-edge AI solutions used around the world.
We dove right into what Qualcomm has been up to as it continues to advance IoT through the different core offerings, partnerships, and cutting-edge solutions that Qualcomm offers. To set the tone of our conversation, we discussed Edge AI. Edge AI is essentially intelligence moving to the data generator, according to Megha. Along with getting data faster, a host of other factors impact Edge AI, including privacy, cost, latency, reliability, and bandwidth. For businesses or enterprises, the simplicity of the technology revolves around business intelligence occurring on the device or close to the device itself to enable IoT. Qualcomm provides a portfolio of hardware technology, but even more exciting is their advancements in software design and embedded processing innovation. The company understands how heterogenous computing makes AI possible and is pushing the envelope to remain competitive in AI and IoT. Some of the stronger vertical markets and industries that Qualcomm is targeting include retail, logistics, energy, utilities, industrial, and robotics. To further advance into AI, Qualcomm launched the Vision AI Development Kit. This Azure IoT Starter kit is a vision AI developer kit for running artificial intelligence models on devices at the intelligent edge. With Edge AI, data is generated and pushed to the cloud. Legacy devices such as retail payment terminals and other industry specific devices are being digitized and modernized. Hardware or devices can be connected to a box, i.e., edge gateway. Megha shared that Qualcomm is taking metadata and compute to the box, implementing further compute as needed, then sending only the required data back to the cloud. The traditionally “dumb” environment is becoming more intelligent and bringing efficiencies to businesses and operations. Another Qualcomm AI example outside of retail is in logistics, more specifically warehouse operations. Robotics and drones may be used for picking and dropping, reducing overall payloads, and therefore reducing costs. Edge AI and IoT are coming together to minimize compute to the cloud, as the overall costs of sending massive data to the cloud is becoming more cost prohibitive, and a concern for larger enterprises. The issues of privacy, latency, and connectivity again remain important factors. Privacy not only affects consumers, it also impacts businesses and their customers’ experiences. As for latency, think of delivery robots on the street, providing sub-millisecond intelligence and information to enable operations and efficiency so consumers can get food, packages, products delivered (similar to same day delivery). Regarding connectivity, especially for operations in remote locations (construction, agriculture), having on-device or near device data intelligence can be critical. Examples Megha mentioned included drones connected to a gateway to enable crop intelligence, construction management, and mining operations. Qualcomm’s portfolio continues to evolve to support AI and Edge AI, with a stronger focus on software. Their hardware and chipsets will continue to be their foundation, as they grow their partnerships with Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). Qualcomm is leading in the areas of enabling AI on traditional CPUs/DPUs or AI on SDKs. Another cutting-edge development includes AI on embedded processing (low power, high performance). According to Megha, a few exciting AI areas that Qualcomm has been innovating around includes drone robots, and camera technology. Taking regular cameras for example and making them intelligent, using technologies such as machine vision and AI running on heterogenous computing to completely disrupt its capabilities. Megha shared that Qualcomm is using hardware accelerators for neural network workloads. Furthermore, AMR devices (autonomous mobile robots, i.e., Bosch devices) is an area where Qualcomm is developing chipsets and reference designs to further advance delivery. For example, they recently launched the RB6, a high-end chipset with an accelerator card allowing the robot to greatly improve throughput (i.e., delivery robots). As far as software goes, Qualcomm is investing and innovating to provide seamless software across the Qualcomm AI stack. Qualcomm is providing unification for developer building and changes, using Qualcomm Intelligence multimedia SDKs providing authentication and simplification for development and deployment, across multiple verticals. Developers and software tools remain a top priority for Qualcomm. Qualcomm realizes the end-customer (businesses and government) require and need end-to-end solutions and thus continues to build out its IoT partner portfolio (vendors, integrators, industry focused providers) focused on software/applications, platforms, and other solutions I’ll end with a great use case example shared by Megha. The Qualcomm AI Engine runs ML models in IoT devices, such as a security camera that recognizes a family member and activates a smart lock to allow entry. Or an office building that allows employees onto an elevator based on a touchpad. This context showcases the importance of how Qualcomm is advancing AI and IoT to prepare tomorrow’s businesses and cities. For more reading, please check out, “Qualcomm Advances Development of Smarter and Safer Autonomous Robots for Logistics, Industry 4.0, and Urban Aerial Mobility with Next-Generation 5G and AI Robotics Solutions” Written by Stephanie Atkinson, CEO of Compass Intelligence  Smart cities or intelligent cities are not only about technology improving city services, but they are about improving the community experience as you live, work, and play. Yes, much has changed over the past 18 months, but city projects are moving forward and with a boost of energy because of the pandemic and new funding sources. The industry as a whole is finding new project opportunities centered around automation, remote operations, contactless services, public health and safety, and new ways to deliver legacy services to avoid the face-to-face interaction for safety purposes. A few key technologies directly aiding in smart city initiatives include Internet of Things (sensors, connecting assets, tracking assets, real-time alerting or intelligence), mobile applications, augmented or virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
Historically, smart city projects have centered around traffic management, smart lighting, and city asset management, and while those areas are expected to continue to be areas of focus, new use cases are coming into the mix. Under the American Rescue Plan and Coronavirus Relief Fund (CARES ACT), cities and public schools are receiving emergency funding to support in projects related to safety, healthcare, and administering city services in new and safe ways. READ MORE AT EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT
A week ago, I sat down virtually with Brandon Branham, Chief Technology Officer and Assistant City Manager of Peachtree Corners (PTC, one of the first cities in the United States powered by real-world smart city infrastructure, which also features ‘Curiosity Lab at Peachtree Corners’) to get an update on all of the progress being made in making the city smarter, more interactive, and inviting to technology innovators around the globe. Peachtree Corners launched an innovative living smart city lab about 1 year back that leverages autonomous technology, IoT, AI, machine learning, edge computing, virtual reality, and other advanced technologies to advance city operations, mobility, and introduce economic development. Some of the more interesting key facts about PTC include the following:
The innovation being embraced at PTC comes with the value it is placing in partnerships, leading technology company initiatives, and the live testing environment it provides to tech companies, OEMs, and startups around the globe. They currently have roughly 10 vendors with 15 different device types generating data across their network across around 15 or so different software systems. On the embracing of global companies, it is also working with a Tel Aviv company called IPgallery, that brings together city insights and intelligence using a real-time AI data platform that provides visualization (visual map) across PTC to monitor, analyze and secure all IoT devices across the ecosystem, buses, cameras, applications, etc. In addition, traffic flow and pattern data are being collected to adjust and make real-time rerouting decisions to improve public transportation.
PTC recently announced a partnership with Bosch, where they are implementing a sensor connected intersection and intelligent traffic management system to capture video including vehicle identification, vehicle recognition of objects (car, bus, scooters with drivers or without, pedestrians, etc. using machine vision). This partnership will allow real-time adjustments to traffic signaling, share the flow of traffic activity, and identify the type of vehicle in that flow for improved traffic management. PTC's Curiosity Lab will allow for a living city environment for Bosch to leverage its leading edge solution within a live, real municipality. A few other projects on the horizon include the following:
All of these activities would not be anywhere without the public-private partnerships (3Ps) in place. PTC has a process to test in their live environment, receive funding from 3rd parties or commercial entities (for some projects), decide on whether the project is scalable, and then the city decides and will invest as needed. This is a prime example of how business and government can and should work together to advance the smart city vision. On a final note, below is a list of key differentiators that enable PTC be the groundbreaking innovator in smart city solutions:
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