US launches second Global City Teams Challenge

The second Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC) was announced at this week’s White House Smart Cities Forum.

The US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and several partners are launching the effort to bring together communities with challenges and innovators with the technology to overcome them.

The challenge will bring communities and innovators together to encourage collaboration on a range of issues from disaster response to energy management to mass transit improvement.

The goal is to help communities and businesses connect to improve resource management and quality of life by using effective networking of computer systems and physical devices, often called the Internet of Things (IoT) or cyber-physical systems.

“The Internet of Things is just emerging, and community leaders may not know all the ways it can help them,” said Chris Greer, director of NIST’s Smart Grid and Cyber-Physical Systems Program.

“Likewise, IoT companies are looking for customers, and universities are looking for opportunities to pilot their IoT research projects in real-world environments. The workshop will be a great place for all these groups to team up in mutually beneficial ways.”

This new challenge will build on the success of the GCTC’s first round, which began in September 2014 and created 64 teams of more than 50 cities and 230 organisations.

The teams demonstrated the tangible benefits of using the IoT to improve quality of life, focusing on solutions that could be deployed across multiple cities.

More than 1400 people attended the final expo in June 2015, including the King and Queen of the Netherlands.

The second round has been expanded to run in two phases over 20 months, in response to team recommendations from the first challenge.

In the first phase, culminating in June 2016, participants will focus on creating plans for deploying their projects and proposals for measuring their success; the second phase will focus on actual deployment and measuring benefits in the real world.

The accomplishments of the teams will be showcased at an exposition planned for June 2017.

Examples of smart city projects from the new round of the challenge include the following:

• Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Atlanta, together with AT&T and IBM, are developing a network to identify leaks in city infrastructure water pipes, a problem that causes up to 40% of unexplained water losses in cities worldwide.
• Amsterdam, together with Accenture, Siemens and other partners, has developed a data collection and planning tool that will help cities plan energy usage that reduces both cost and carbon emissions.