Emerging Tech

The Cleveland Department of Public Health and a host of community partners plan to improve air quality monitoring in disadvantaged areas and devise strategies for reducing their exposure to hazardous pollution.

San Francisco police will soon be allowed to use robots to kill people during rare and limited emergency situations under a controversial new policy that was approved by city supervisors on Tuesday.

The city has released its controversial policy that would allow police robots to use lethal force against a suspect as a last resort. A similar proposal in Oakland was withdrawn after public outcry.

The city of Boulder has announced the launch of a new web-based emergency mapping tool that will help first responders plan and coordinate evacuations. It will also provide the community with access to real-time updates.

Some 600 phones in the Bay Area recorded waveform data from the Seven Trees earthquake last October. That data is being used by researchers at the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory to better understand the effects of quakes.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ National Integrated Ballistic Information Network stores millions of pieces of ballistics intelligence to help law enforcement generate investigative leads in gun crimes.

Engineering professor Evgueni Filipov and his collaborators have developed a more efficient way to manufacture silicon robots that might be used for anything from plumbing to inspections to high-tech surveillance.

Nuclear power as a climate solution got a big boost when the Biden administration announced giving Pacific Gas and Electric Co. a $1.1 billion grant to help the company operate California's last nuclear plant.

Three companies were awarded a total of $260,000 from the Michigan Mobility Funding Platform to advance technology in the areas of bridge construction, electric vehicles and drone-operated deliveries.

Danbury police officers were able to explore Axon Network's virtual reality training simulator fit for critical thinking and de-escalation. The department did not purchase the equipment, but plan to if it aligns with their budget.

A petition filed with the South Carolina Supreme Court alleges that automatic license plate readers are part of a growing system of “unlawful and unaccountable surveillance” overseen by the state’s Law Enforcement Division.

They are young, starting careers and are beginning to vote. But Gen Z and its traits and attitudes promise to influence gov tech soon enough. What can the industry do now to prepare for that future?

On two short stretches of road near downtown Detroit, Mich., transportation officials plan to embed technology in the pavement that can charge electric vehicles while they’re being driven. Other places are not far behind.

As extreme heat events continue to test the power grid in parts of the U.S., the large batteries in electric vehicles are being seen as an opportunity to help smooth out consumer demand peaks. 

Thirty-eight states are operating or building networks of weather monitoring stations to provide more precise data than they receive from the National Weather Service. These networks that detect weather events spanning 1 to 150 miles.

Transit systems in Wisconsin and Colorado are upgrading fare payment systems to app-based and contactless payments, with riders no longer needing to stand at vending machines or search for spare change.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration selected companies to help compile and analyze worldwide climate and weather data, using AI and digital twin technology. The first phase will visualize sea surface temperature data.

In a forthcoming project, Secretary of Commerce Elizabeth Tanner hopes a centralized data lake and distributed ledger technology could securely share professional and business identity data across state agencies.