AT&T Smart Cities - San Diego

2017-04-05 | By Maker.io Staff

San Diego is set to become the smartest city in the US with a $30-million-dollar investment. General Electric will be putting cameras, microphones, and sensors on 14,000 street lights in San Diego throughout 2017, some 3,200 sensors will be installed. This makes it the first largest application of "smart city" status. The new smart city will be able to help monitor motor traffic and pinpoint crime hotspots.

Based on the technology from GE, Intel Corporation, and AT&T, the system will use a number of sensing nodes on street lights to locate gunshots, estimate crowd sizes, check vehicle speeds and a number of other tasks in hand. Moreover, the data collected will be available open-source to the city, for entrepreneurs, local business and students to develop applications based on the data. At the core of the project is GE's current platform, which serves as an analytics dashboard for sensor analysis. Not only is this project costing the city of San Diego $32 million but with the installation of new Led lighting, it is also going to save $2.4 million in energy bills.

The sensors include motion detectors, cameras, and microphones and it sounds like a super surveillance situation but the project leaders have stated that this is not the case, at least from GE the initial intentions are good. The project has categorically defined that the data is anonymous with no personal identifiers to any person in San Diego and the video recorded from the cameras is not as detailed as you might find on a high-end security system. One of many examples shown is that the sensors are able to eventually detect the movement of cyclists and pedestrians throughout the city and this information can then be relayed to smart cars to inform the drivers of such hazards that may occur.

As mentioned before there will also be opportunities for local third party companies to make use of the data that has been collected to improve their services. There are already a few companies that have lined up to become partners in building apps for the city. Currently, ShotSpotter and CivicSmart have signed up. ShotSpotter is used to help the police in pinpointing where gunshots are coming from, while CivicSmart can also help identify empty parking spaces around this city. The CivicSmart application would be like driving to a multi-story car park, where you see the number of available parking spaces for each level, this would be similar to the areas in San Diego.

Once all the sensors have been installed in the city they will be using the new AT&T 5G and LTE cellular network to share the data.

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