City of Las Vegas Has A Different Approach to Smart City

for those of you that ever use the word smart city don't ever say it around me what makes our city smarter than somebody else i don't i i can't answer that welcome to las vegas here's my business card for you so you can get a hold of me don't try to use it so my name is michael scherl I'm the director of innovation and technology for the city of Las Vegas. For the last four years, Michael Sherwood has been overseeing Las Vegas' gamble with We really set out with understanding the disruption that is coming. The city has piloted hundreds of solutions and a push to show that the entertainment capital of the world is open for business. We've received probably around 15 million dollars in in-kind donations. from these pilot projects. The city has spent roughly zero capital. It's what makes Las Vegas' technological ambitions slightly different than other cities. You won't find an overarching smart city agenda here. Instead, it's about transforming an economy that's largely dependent upon tourism and gambling. You know, we really do a lot of these smart city projects to showcase how great Las Vegas is, not just for four days for CES, but why, if you're a tech company, you should be here all year. investing and bringing customers and showcasing technology. The pilots all take place here in the city's innovation district. It didn't take long for the area to gain national attention. Oh my gosh, this is the most incredible moment. We didn't kill a soul. In 2017, Las Vegas came home to the largest self -driving pilot project in the United States after Nevada became the first state to legalize autonomous vehicle testing. What I really see is getting... and get moving our people around more safely, more healthfully. Under the project, an autonomous shuttle designed by the French startup Navia transported up to eight passengers on a 0.6-mile loop. The service ran for about a year. You know, what lessons have you learned from putting forward that and what still needs to be done to make it more mainstream? There's a lot of work still needs to be done. I think for us, a lot of what we've learned is the capability of what the vehicle can do versus what people think it can do. a lot about infrastructure and security setups and how we're going to maintain this new infrastructure. But the biggest thing we've learned through all of our smart city efforts is the real savings of doing a pilot. Today you'll find dozens of cameras, sensors and IOT devices in the innovation district. There's cameras in certain locations, there's sensors in other ones for temperature, climate conditions. There's ones that are counting the number of bicycles, the number of people. If you have a chance while you're here, download Lyft and go ahead and get an active BMW, which is an autonomous, basically, taxi, and you're actually talking, that vehicle's talking to our infrastructure, and our infrastructure's talking to the vehicle, so vice versa. The data is analyzed using NTT's Smart City Solution. It provides Las Vegas officials with real-time alerts on potential and active public safety incidents. Here's some of the things we have downtown. we use different layers of data to be able to figure out what's happening this is a heat map i think this is bonneville bonneville and casino center we're actually looking at the roadway here we're seeing where the cars drive so now we get an idea about where the street's going to wear out first kind of traffic that goes through the intersection the amount the speed las vegas partnered with ntt in 2018 and recently expanded the initiative to include more areas in the downtown the automated system collects information from micro data centers that are located throughout innovation district. This is our standard pull setup over here. This is surveillance and security. This is looking at a crosswalk. That's looking at parking spots. That's the video feed that we would see from the one that's watching the crosswalk. It's the kind of innovation that has enabled Las Vegas to spot worrying trends like wrong way driving and trespassing. So if a park closes at 9 p .m at night and someone goes into the park after that, we have automated sensors that use AI and basically play a very nice greeting to say thank you for coming but our park is closed you know please leave it calms as vegas develops its own private 5g network the city is buying its own equipment and working with a handful of undisclosed partners to launch a network which could be tested as early as this summer one of the challenges we have i think a lot of cities have is making sure everybody has equal access to the internet the internet is so important today from an educational standpoint as well as just from a learning standpoint not having that resource that access is limiting now while las vegas hasn't unveiled a formal smart city strategy it does have a goal to be appear to silicon valley by 2025 and that could be within reach here's why nevada has zero income tax and a history with low regulation plus as we've explored in this story las vegas specifically is continuing to improve its infrastructure a lot of the data that we collect through our systems we make available in our open data portal so between transparent privacy and security we think we're really moving on the right forefronts there to really do some great things and again providing the data that we collect to the public means they're gonna create great applications that others are gonna benefit from and that benefits the economy of Las Vegas as a whole so while Las Vegas is open for business it might just be good for business to send us your questions and your comments with the link below we'll do our best to get your answers till next time I'm Diana black reporting for Current Insights.