Exploring Smart City Technologies

BACKGROUND​

In the fall of 2020 I had enrolled in two courses related to smart city technologies: Introduction to Smart Cities (EGR 598) and Smart City Infrastructure (HSD 598). This was part of being National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) scholar at ASU. Both these courses emphasized intense interdisciplinary collaboration to encourage cross-pollination of ideas that would make the trainees aware of the problems and path to solutions in the cities of tomorrow.

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PROCESS

Every week, students in the cohort would peruse academic literature and interact to discuss issues related to development of technologies in urban environment. This also includes regular guest lectures to provide more insight into the real-world system of operation- interactions between the citizens, corporations and the government. Hence we were introduced to key smart city domains, emerging technologies, the social actors involved in promoting and contesting smart city effort.

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OUTCOME

Understood the role of an engineer in smart city context:

• Understand that “smart city” is not an optimization problem

• Work with social scientists for innovation through collaboration.

• Citizens are not just consumers. Public technology is more layered than product design and it has to be fruitful to a wider strata of society.

In addition:

1. I started a medium publication to put down my reflections every week related to smart city topics and product design in general.

2. Completed a report on the impact of BIM within smart city context. The thought process was guided by the understanding that when it comes to designing 'smartness', we need a solution that is mature and economical but also would have lower resistance to adoption and as future-proof as possible.

3. Completed a report on understanding the issue of inclusiveness in urban environment during the pandemic. As I am very interested in assistive technologies to help the disabled community, working on this paper gave me valuable insights into the socio-economic constraints of tech development.

4. Participated in IEEE-ISTAS 2020 (link) in the conference discussion panel on technology and also as reviewer of submitted papers.

5. A class project on implementing a simple prototype of emotional recognition and analyzing the social implications of the same