“This is our inaugural Speaker Series between the City of Atlanta and Georgia Tech and it’s an example of some of the really interesting research that we’re doing at Georgia Tech and its application to city-wide operations,” said Debra Lam, Georgia Tech’s Managing Director for Smart Cities and Inclusive Innovation.

The speaker series kicked off in July with Georgia Tech researchers Christopher Le Dantec and Kari Watkins presenting their research on “Sensing Traffic Conditions to Model and Predict Rider Stress.” Watkins also discussed “Mobility as a Service.”

“The city can continue to do what it has done historically the same way, but by bringing this research capacity to bear, the city can do things smarter and better,” said Kirk Talbott, the City of Atlanta’s Executive Director for Smart Cities. “Helping the employees understand these new emerging solutions and research that’s coming out of Georgia Tech, there might be better ways to solve problems that we’ve struggled with for decades, so making them aware of what’s possible is very, very powerful.”

Earlier this year, IPaT awarded the first Smart & Connected Communities Data Pilot Grants to provide funding to further interdisciplinary research within the area of Smart & Connected Communities. The result of the program will be new collections of smart city data that can be made available to the Georgia Tech research community and new prototypes for working with data.