The City of Atlanta and its partners, including Georgia Tech, will showcase their vision of a smart city at "Experience SmartATL" on Friday, September 15 at Ponce City Market.

The event includes interactive exhibits demonstrating individual projects, products, and initiatives. Visitors will learn how Atlanta is developing as a smart city, how partnerships and collaboration are essential, and how they may be able to become more involved in smart city efforts in the future.

There will be two sessions showcasing smart city technology, one in the morning at 10 AM to 12 PM and another in the afternoon at 1 PM to 3 PM.

Both sessions will have the same content, and registering with Eventbrite for only one of the two sessions is required for entry on the day of the event.

REGISTER

Featured Georgia Tech research projects:

Crime correlation detection from large-scale Atlanta Police Department police report data

Yao Xie, assistant professor, School of Industrial and Systems Engineering

Description: Yao Xie is collaborating with the Atlanta Police Department to develop machine-learning tools that can help police to process police reports more efficiently, and detect hidden correlations among crime incidences. This task is difficult because the reports are written by different officers, usually in haste, and there’s no standard format. Currently, the police officers have to sort through reports entirely by human power. The new tools Xie’s team developed can automate the process and process the reports to extract useful information and detect hidden correlations. The researchers have already demonstrated promising results for analyzing both the police reports.

Cycle Atlanta

Chris Le Dantec, assistant professor, School of Literature, Media and Communication

Kari Watkins, assistant professor, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Description: The purpose of this project is to identify environmental factors that affect the level of bike rider stress. Over the past year, researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a bike-based sensor platform with three constellations of sensors to detect road conditions, traffic conditions, and environmental conditions. These data will enable us to sense and model Atlanta’s road network to better understand where specific on-road changes can reduce rider stress to create a safer and more appealing city for bike transportation.

PARSE: A participatory toolkit for designing smart city services

Carl Di Salvo, assistant professor, School of Literature, Media and Communication

Description: PARSE (Participatory Approaches to Researching Sensing Environments) combines design and social science methods to investigate the technologies and services of “Smart Cities.” By working together with communities, municipal government, and industry, the goal of this project is to collaboratively explore the issues and possibilities of distributed sensing in urban settings. The outcome of this research includes comparative case studies, frameworks for analysis and assessment, and use cases to inform engineering, policy, and strategy.

Downtown Atlanta 2041: Autonomous Vehicles and A-Street Grids

Ellen Dunham-Jones, professor, School of Architecture

Description: Research commissioned by the city and done by Georgia Tech urban design grad students describes a 25-year vision of Downtown Atlanta that leverages autonomous vehicles to make our streets safer, quieter, and more livable; to allow us to build on top of our surface parking lots without adding any additional parking; so as to construct a complete network of class-A, walkable streets downtown.

Smart City Virtual Reality

John Taylor, professor, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Description: We have developed a virtual and augmented reality application that collects citizen input on smart and sustainable buildings. The app is run on an iPad and the user can input feedback into the application during a demonstration. We also have a fully immersive virtual environment that we may be able to bring (using OCULUS Rift Headsets) if the location supports it. It is currently being deployed to study the living building on Georgia Tech’s campus.

Interactive Beltline Display

Eric Thompson, Georgia Tech graduate student researcher

Description: Recent controversy surrounding the development of the Beltline is causing tension between Atlanta Communities. Higher property values have priced out many lower income residents and some ATLiens assert this gentrification is not beneficial to all, concerned about creating a discriminatory environment rather than the inclusive one Atlanta strives to exude. We want the Beltline to represent all the unique qualities of the city, melding the industrial past with the wide array of current cultures through a colorful, creative, and technological future; therefore believe in the use of technology and art to help unify Atlanta and make it a beltline for all parties involved. Our primary goals are promoting social change by fostering curiosity and shared information in a developing urban environment. Users will benefit from connected communities through informative and ever-changing displays. These living displays will feature static information about the pathway in the form of a traditional map but also feature constantly changing and flowing information from each individual neighborhood, highlighting local culture and current events, such as music, sound level, and activity types in the area.