New York City Launches Testbed for Smart City Solutions

New York City's Office of Technology and Innovation, or OTI, recently announced the launch of a smart city testbed in the Big Apple, in which city agencies, private companies, and academia will be able to test and analyze solutions. The city is looking to deploy up to eight projects per year to address different challenges, and the program is set to provide access to New York City assets, technical support, and technical support. partnerships and guidance as well as feedback from city agencies and residents we wanted to find out more about this opportunity so we talked to paul rothman director of smart cities and iot at new york cities oti to bring you the necessary information to decide if this program is for you whether you're a vendor looking to pilot a solution or a city representative eager to learn about what other cities are doing paul i the first question has to be because we're all wondering what is this project and why did you choose to launch it sure yeah so the new york city smart city testbed that we just launched is a new opportunity within the office of technology and innovation and you know across new york city agencies to be able to pilot and deploy emerging technologies in a faster pace and to be able to gather new insights about what those technologies can do for city agencies as well as an opportunity to bring those technologies to our residents, understand how they might impact residents, as well as develop an evaluation that can be shared across city agencies so that when we are testing these new technologies that knowledge is shared broadly uh we've run different pilots at different times a lot of agencies run pilots but this was really an opportunity to try to formalize a process and to increase visibility of what that process looks like i've seen that your first pilot is going to involve the use of drones to find through ground penetrating radar sensors thermal find faults and city owned so that you can repair them and make those buildings more efficient but what type of solutions or projects are you looking to pilot and also what type of company can apply to this test bed yeah so in terms of the the types of projects that we're looking for here um you know we're focusing on emerging technology technology that has some sort of connection to the public realm um and so you know for example we're not talking about you know back-end software or things like that we're we're looking at things that are going to be touching physical infrastructure that are going to be touching our public spaces things that residents either directly or indirectly um are going to get a benefit from and so uh Yeah, those are sort of the areas that we're looking to tackle and, you know, it could be anything from mobility to, you know, building energy efficiency, environmental sensing, things like that. The requirements, you know, we're not specifying startups or U .S. based companies. It's really, you know, I think that the message that New York City's put out. under Mayor Adams is that we're interested in, you know, the best of the best. So, you know, if there's technology that's coming from, you know, any corner of the globe and it's the best in class, then that's what we're going to be interested in. So one of the goals of the test bed is to see the speed at which solutions can be up and running. So you're not looking to make big changes to the infrastructure. So no construction heavy. which means that the companies that have been selected to pilot their solution wouldn't need to make infrastructure investments. So in general, how is the funding going to work for the test bed? So on the funding question, we're looking for the companies to self fund their pilots as much as possible. We are trying to make that as easy as possible, I guess, by keeping the duration short. short. We're not asking for companies to provide their technology for two years or something extensive. Six to nine months, you know, there's also, you know, be looking into grant opportunities and things like that. And, you know, if a city agency that is the agency sponsor has some funding that can go towards this, if it's a priority project or things that they've already allocated funding for, there might be an opportunity there that, but, but, but. OTI doesn't have specific funding that we're putting into this. I'd like to finish with what will happen with the pilots that prove successful. So technology that proves that it's mature, that it's useful. Is there any chance of full implementation there? Yes. So really what the test bed is, is an opportunity for agencies to understand what technology is out there. what it's capable of, you know, features that they might be interested in. So, you know, we see the pilots as an opportunity to be able to test and understand emerging technologies that then agencies can make decisions about whether or not they want to work on a wider procurement. So that component is going to really come down to the individual agencies that are interested in that technology. New York City's OTI is looking to help agencies navigate the vast sea of solutions and technologies that are out there so that the use cases become clearer and they can decide what might be useful for them. The testbed seems like an incredible opportunity to test new solutions or to even get involved in the New York smart city market. Because as Sinatra said and Rothman reminded me, if you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere.