Dive Brief:
- The City of Las Vegas and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) announced last week an expansion of the city's Accelerate Smart project to include two new locations: the city's Community Healing Garden and a portion of Las Vegas Blvd.
- Accelerate Smart, which launched in December 2018, uses high-definition video cameras, sound sensors and IoT devices to monitor the city, particularly in the downtown Innovation District that serves as a proving ground for emerging technologies. The sensors enable an automated system to notify law enforcement and city personnel of everything from gunshots to wrong-way driver detection.
- NTT will expand its service to provide real-time alerts of safety conditions and maintenance issues for improved public safety. The city hopes to deploy sensors in 14 total locations, including 10 parks, by the end of 2020.
Dive Insight:
The city's partnership with NTT was sparked by a desire to understand how residents and visitors use the city's roadways, particularly through a safety lens, said Michael Sherwood, director of IT for the City of Las Vegas, in a short video describing the partnership.
As solutions to implement such technologies become ubiquitous offerings from providers, Sherwood said NTT was aligned in helping the city identify and rollout practical data-based solutions. "The uniqueness of their expertise is really in design and data flow," Sherwood said in the video.
NTT's "uniqueness" in this area and its work with Las Vegas garnered recognition at the 2019 Smart Cities Connect Smart 50 Awards, where the Accelerate Smart project was recognized for "Smart Public Safety."
Outside of this project expansion, the City of Las Vegas has kept a steady focus on innovation, even as it grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic. The city has updated its GoVegas mobile app, has provided streaming services to boost civic engagement and most recently launched a "virtual inspection" service to support remote inspections of at-home systems like water filters, Sherwood told Smart Cities Dive on a recent call.
"There's all types of ways to connect work with already commercially available systems that are very inexpensive compared to trying to do something yourself internally," he said.
Automated systems like those in the Accelerate Smart project will be crucial moving forward, Sherwood told Smart Cities Dive.
"Automation is king," he said. "We will continue to push automation as much as we can in areas that will help us gain a competitive advantage and help us service citizens more efficiently."
