IE 11 Not Supported

For optimal browsing, we recommend Chrome, Firefox or Safari browsers.

Technologists Look to Fit Silicon Valley-Sized Solutions in Middle America

Akron, Ohio, will join colleagues from big cities to accept funding to develop a strategic plan for safely and effectively implementing the Internet of Things.

(TNS) — James Hardy pictures a raindrop plopping on Main Street.

As it passes a traffic signal that hasn’t been installed yet, a sensor measures the space and time between it and the next raindrop. Then, with some slick computing, data flows into an algorithm with other bits of information detected by switches in sewer pipes and bobbers floating in water storage basins.

Within seconds, the machines predict rainfall and decide when to divert or drain water from a network of underground tubes before the whole system spills into the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

“That’s the vision. One little raindrop,” said Hardy, who is in New York City Friday explaining how Akron will use a $200,000 award from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to deploy such smart technology.

Hardy, Akron Mayor Dan Horrigan’s chief of staff, will join colleagues from Boston, Detroit, Miami, Philadelphia, and San José to accept $1.2 million in funding to take a step back and develop a strategic plan for safely and effectively implementing the Internet of Things (IoT).

Smart technology is everywhere. IoT is in smart watches and TVs. It feeds on an ever-connecting world where cell phone apps that guide motorists also relay traffic patterns, the weather and road conditions to a remote server.

Sitting on a trove of big data from utility bills, speeding tickets and every contact between taxpayers and the services they buy, city managers across America are looking to engineer solutions to society’s oldest problems.

In Chicago, civic analysts make the most of health inspectors by sending them to restaurants where meaningful data like previous code violations and other information like the weather (when it’s hot, food rots) predict problems.

In Louisville, Ky., 1,000 asthma patients carry inhalers that track and send pollution levels to a mapping system operated by a private company and shared with municipal leaders charged with safeguarding the public.

Kansas City, Akron’s partner, is “a leading-edge city as it relates to IoT development,” Hardy said. There, newly installed traffic lights help motorists find empty parking spots. Robots hanging on the lights can even track moving feet, which might be useful for investors in the market for empty storefronts where lots of potential customers walk by each day.

Slow down

A decade of possibilities have become endlessly overwhelming.

“The issue now is that they are coming out almost weekly,” said Hardy. The city is approached regularly by numerous vendors looking to sell the “newest and shiniest thing,” he said.

That could be a problem. What’s bought today may not work with what’s available tomorrow. And digging, say, a sewer system to refit it can be costly.

So the Knight Foundation grants are designed to give pause so cities can plan strategically into a future.

“For us, these are tools that aren’t coming around the corner. They’re being implemented now,” said John Bracken, vice president of Technology Innovation at the Knight Foundation.

The question becomes, “how do we make sure they are being implemented effectively while doing no harm,” Bracken said.

Collecting and parsing big data will require sensitive systems that balance personal privacy with access to public records. Cloud computing already has cut the cost of data storage. How cities create public-access portals to host the big data they collect could help Akron learn from the mistakes.

The solution is open input, hence the NetGain IoT Conference on Friday in New York.

“It’s not enough to just leave that in the hands of the city IT department,” said Bracken, speaking by phone on a plane before taking off from Chicago to New York. “We need to make sure we are going into this with eyes wide open.”

Robots in action

Technologists are looking to fit Silicon Valley-sized solutions in middle America.

“It has to work in Akron if it’s going to work across the globe,” Hardy said. “It can’t just work in Singapore and Dubai.”

As a Knight IoT grant recipient, Akron will share strategic plans and pilot projects with its five peers.

In the spirit of cooperation, Akron’s planners recently traveled to South Bend, Ind., to see “Smart Sewers” in action. The Knight IoT grant will be used in part to pilot some of the cutting-edge sewer technology learned in Indiana when the city completes a $14.5 million renovation of Main Street.

And so a raindrop could carry its weight in asphalt when redesigning downtown.

“Why would I want my city doing that? If we would track that raindrop to that level of precision then we could build infrastructure more effectively,” Hardy said.

Basically, smarter sewers mean smaller sewers. And smaller sewer means avoiding some of the $1 billion in court-ordered repairs. “In the end, it’s less that we would have to borrow to build. We can go back to through the EPA’s integrated planning process and say we don’t need to build as much.”

From there, Hardy said the city could take on public WiFi (that actually works) or a citywide smart phone app that, among other things, lets residents photograph and tag the locations of pesky potholes.

“That’s the vision,” he repeated. “One little raindrop.”

©2017 the Akron Beacon Journal (Akron, Ohio) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.