 Smart Cities Connect Spring 2025: Driving Innovation in Urban Transformation The Smart Cities Connect Spring 2025 Conference & Expo was held in San Antonio, TX, from April 14–16, 2025 and convened with over 200 city leaders, technologists, and innovators to explore the future of urban development. Key Themes and Sessions:
As part of my personal view and attending sessions, here is my highlight! One of the first sessions I attended was listening to how Skydio uses UAS drones for high mass light tower inspection and is working with Texas Department of Transportation saving time from what took 95 minutes that is now whittled down to only 16 minutes. Skydio also mentioned we have moved to a 1:1 relationship for managing drones in cities to a 1 to many relationship where UAS docking and preprogramming is advancing drone operations within cities. Additional use cases are event driven including those for public safety, rail inspection, bridge inspection, and building management. Another session I enjoyed was listening to University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA, and my MBA alma mater) and the team share more about their digital twin research project for City of San Antonio. The digital twin was built using geospatial, AI, machine vision, large language models (ChatGPT), 3D visualization, and NVIDIA Omniverse. The team also mentioned using the electric utility network for distribution to showcase CPS Energy data and information. Some of the primary use cases for the city included heat island identification, flood monitoring, and in the future planning for EV charging infrastructure build out and predicting the overall impact to enterprise fleets. A highlight of the event for me was the workshop, "Immersive Experiences Driven by Intelligent Data for the Modern Urban Environment. Here is my summary of that workshop. How Smart City Leaders Are Powering the Future with Real-Time Data and Integrated Solutions This workshop event held at Smart Cities Connect focused on advancing smart city innovation, with a panel of industry leaders from NVIDIA, AMSYS Innovation Solutions, True North Software Solutions, and Ipsotek shared insights on how technology is reshaping urban infrastructure, public safety, and city services, and in the end citizen or patron experiences. Laying the Foundation for Smarter Cities Bill Pugh of True North Software Solutions kicked things off by outlining the key steps cities should take to begin their smart city journey. He emphasized the importance of leveraging operational dashboards and digital twins—not just to analyze historical data, but to harness real-time information. By doing so, cities can make critical, data-driven decisions that directly impact public safety, transportation, and municipal services. True North’s approach goes beyond the typical “reactive” data model. Their operational dashboards integrate live data streams, enabling secure dynamic decision-making that supports a range of city department and agency services in real time. Frisco, Texas: Scaling Innovation Across Departments Wade Medlock from the City of Frisco, Texas, shared how their SAFER initiative has grown far beyond its original scope. What began as a modest goal has evolved into a wide-reaching program supporting multiple city departments and agencies. Today, Frisco has roughly 85 applications running across its network—each playing a role in making the city more efficient, secure, and responsive to residents’ needs. Wade discussed how it is working with AMSYS and the rest of the partner team to elevate SAFER to the next level for the city. Smarter Surveillance with Intelligent Cameras Sean Grimm of Ipsotek brought attention to the capabilities of smart cameras—many of which are already deployed on city streets. Far from being limited to traffic monitoring, these cameras can now provide advanced insights into public safety and city operations. This tech represents a massive opportunity to extract more value from existing infrastructure. NVIDIA Blueprints in Action Jumbi Edulbehram of NVIDIA helped define AI for the audience and gave a great example (You had to be there!). In addition he shared how NVIDIA is working collaboratively with AMSYS and their partners to provide the blueprints so execution of these services for applications such as intelligent traffic management and public safety response become a reality and scale efficiently. Bringing It All Together with “The Collective” John Rohrer and Jacque Istok of AMSYS Innovative Solutions described their role as a master systems integrator, highlighting their collaboration with a network of trusted partners known as “The Collective.” Their mission: combine best-in-breed solutions to transform how cities function. They discussed how getting started with AMSYS is a conversation and mutual relationship in learning, collaborating, and bringing the right solutions to the table. From elevating campus experiences and improving patient care in hospitals to streamlining city services, their integrated approach is delivering powerful results. They shared examples of projects across a variety of industries and use cases. Final Thoughts - Smart Cities Should Work For You, Not To You: Traffic management has long been the flagship use case for smart city technology. But as IoT, artificial intelligence, and intelligent data systems evolve, the potential use cases are expanding rapidly. These technologies are now enabling new services and experiences that go far beyond simply managing congestion. The message from these industry leaders is clear: smart city solutions should empower communities, not overwhelm them. As cities continue to adopt cutting-edge technology, the focus must remain on practical, people-centered outcomes—solutions that work for the city, its workers, and its residents.
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The TrueNorth team will be attending Smart Cities Connect in San Antonio this April. Along with attending to engage, learn, collaborate, and be a part of this amazing event, we will also be conducting a workshop alongside some amazing partners including AMSYS, Frisco Texas, and NVIDIA. Please reach out to schedule a meeting.  WORKSHOP: Transforming Cities - Immersive Experiences Powered by Intelligent Data & The AMSYS Collective Blueprint
- April 15, 2025 - 1:15-3PM CT - Room 210B Experience the Future of City Living through immersive engagement and intelligent data. Imagine a city where technology seamlessly enhances the human experience, creating a safer, more engaging, and vibrant environment for all. This is the promise of immersive technologies and intelligent data, and it's closer than you think. Join AMSYS and a collective of solution partners including Lenovo & NVIDIA. We have built solutions using NVIDIA NIM™ Agent Blueprints including NeMo, ACE, RIVA to enable our customized Computer Vision, and Agentic AI solutions. Through this foundational technology and workshop we explore how immersive experiences are transforming cities: Enhanced Public Safety: Experience how real-time data and AI can create safer streets and faster emergency response. Thriving Commerce: Discover how immersive technologies can revitalize businesses and attract investment. Engaging Entertainment: Explore the potential of immersive experiences to create vibrant cultural attractions and entertainment districts. Elevated City Services: Learn how data-driven insights can optimize city services and improve quality of life for residents. The Success Story of Frisco, Texas: Sharing compelling metrics, and providing a practical BLUEPRINT for cities to implement their own connected community solutions. Discover How To: Benchmark your city's readiness. Harness the power of urban data. Transform your city into an engaging and safer destination. Don't miss this opportunity to discuss the future of urban living! John Rohrer, VP Enterprise Sales, AI Platform Leader, AMSYS (Moderator) Jumbi Edulbehram, Global Business Development Director, Smart Cities and Spaces, NVIDIA (Moderator) Wade Medlock, Assistant Director, Enterprise Applications, City of Frisco, TX (Moderator) Jacque Istok, Field CTO, AMSYS (Moderator) Bill Pugh, Co-Founder, True North Software Solutions (Moderator)
Bill Pugh, a technologist and entrepreneur, discusses the importance of AI policy creation and violation tracking. He explains how his company, True North, uses distributed ledger technology to capture and secure data related to traffic incidents and other events. Pugh emphasizes the need for responsible data analysis and implementation to make data actionable for entities. He also highlights the significance of mentorship and networking in the tech industry, encouraging individuals to find mentors and build diverse networks. Bill shares his journey as an entrepreneur and the importance of ownership and accountability in business. And he tops it off by discussing the responsibility to invest in the future and engage across the generations.
 So, what does Bill’s shoe collection have to do with fleet management? Pretty simple if you ask me, nothing! Actually, that’s a joke…everything! You see, Bill didn’t just wake up one day to find 999 pairs of shoes under the Christmas tree…the collection started 20 years ago.
He cleans them regularly, in fact he has a “Preventive Maintenance Schedule” for his shoes with very specific products which he performs on defined intervals. How is that for a similarity to fleet management? Pretty good huh! Ok, let’s get to the point, the key take away is this: if you are looking to achieve something significant overnight, play the lottery…and good luck. If you want to take a chance on something a little more practical, start building your foundation towards that significant achievement brick by brick, #perseverance.
Testing next generation distributed ledger technology (DLT) for secure, accurate tracking of dual-use chemicals, detection of discrepancies, and mitigation of proliferation risks.
Behind every chemical transfer is a story, and too often, that story includes discrepancies in reported data. The Stimson Center’s MATCH project team has completed development of an updated DLT prototype and is demonstrating to CWC National Authorities and other stakeholders how it traces these narratives and creates a clear, immutable record of each transaction, aligning records of national authorities and industry while maintaining data confidentiality, reducing risks of misreporting, and enhancing nonproliferation by enabling faster reconciliation of discrepancies in the annual reporting of chemicals covered by the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).  IntroductionWithin the city construct there are a lot of considerations to delivering "Smart Solutions and Services". In this white paper we will explore the opportunities and benefits from a foundational perspective of connectivity strategies that leverage Fiber as the backbone for “Smart” service delivery. Executive SummarySince the initial use of Fiber Optic Cable in the mid 70’s to connect US Government computers, we have seen an increase over the years in the use of fiber networking. However, it has not been as broadly recognized until recently just how integral the fiber backbone is to reliable, resilient broadband communications infrastructure is for the future of cities and municipalities alike.
While fiber networks are not new, the technology has continued to advance, and they are indeed the catalyst to just about every use case where “Smart” is included, supporting critical infrastructure and beyond. Fiber networks are not just for the purpose of faster internet, but think about latency sensitive solutions such as traffic monitoring and general multi-modal transportation, first responder services in the city and likewise utility distribution services to improve utility reliability and outage management. Pre-pandemic, cities across North America were deploying Municipal Wi-Fi as a means of improving connectivity and access for citizens. These municipal networks often times leverage city deployed fiber but were typically only in the metropolitan downtown areas. This was shown to be an oversight, as with a bit more consideration, additional investment and partnership, the thousands of underserved citizens could have benefited from connectivity where there was none. Distance learning and the huge uptick in bandwidth utilization due to the pandemic have caused cities to rethink their connectivity strategy. Fiber networks, again, are the supporting foundation to service delivery to the cities and communities at large Smart city solutions across the board depend on reliable communications infrastructure. For each application there is an endpoint that then requires the data to be backhauled to the cloud. Data analysis for any real-time insights depends heavily on receiving the data in a timely fashion, edge computing and the analytic insights will falter without the speed and throughput delivered by a fiber backbone. Smart Grid solutions, likewise, depend on reliable networking solutions that often times have latency requirements that can, in aggregate only be supported with fiber network connections. In large, 5G (5th Generation Cellular Technology), LPWAN(Low Power Wide Area Network) and WAN(Wide Area Network) technologies all depend on fiber networks to deliver their services and even more so if there are SLA’s (Service Level Agreement) associated with them At the foundation of all of this, fiber networks are hugely important to delivering on the promises of Smart Cities, Smart Grid, Smart Building augmented with other wired and wireless technologies to improve cities and municipalities operational efficiency and improve the livability of citizens across the board. “This groundbreaking partnership removes data silos and forges a unified process view – a single, trusted source of truth – that will revolutionize how government agencies operate. Knowing that your data has provenance, governance, and an immutable trust ledger is transformational in the most critical use cases” said TrueNorth CEO, Bill Pugh.
  TrueNorth is not just a company, it is a movement. We are a community of passionate individuals who believe that technology has the power to make our cities more livable, sustainable, and equitable. We invite you to join us on this journey of discovery, as we chart a course towards a brighter future for all.
Together, let's harness the power of data, software, and AI to illuminate the path towards a better tomorrow. Serving states, cities, and utilities customers across North America. |
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