Contributions to this post were provided by CCC Executive Council member, Daniel Lopresti from Lehigh University.  The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program (NITRD) Smart Cities and Communities (SCC) just released a Task Force Guide on “Connecting and Securing Communities: A Guide for Federal Agencies Supporting Research, Development, Demonstration, and Deployment of Technology for Smart Cities and Communities.” The purpose of this document is to guide and coordinate ongoing Federal activities that enhance the efforts of smart cities and communities and private sector partners. It describes recommended practices and approaches for research, development, coordination, and engagement by Federal agencies in support of U.S. cities and communities expanding their […]

US Ignite, a nonprofit whose mission is to push the creation of next-generation applications and services that utilize networking technologies to build smart communities, recently released a video showcase of select US Ignite Smart Gigabit Community application teams from their 2017 US Ignite Application Summit. The videos include: Compute for Cancer: Compute for Cancer is where the Internet of things meets distributed computing. The world is full of unused or underutilized computing power. Using the Berkeley Open Infrastructure Network Computing, these application developers are working to collect idle computing power from any device such as a phone, computer or data center and donate it to cancer research supercomputers. 
Watch the video or learn more. […]

On October 23-24, 2017, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will hold the Computing Research: Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs Symposium in order to address the current and future contribution of computing and its role in addressing societal needs. The two days are organized around four main themes: Intelligent Infrastructure for our Cities and Communities: Intelligent infrastructure is already transforming our nation’s cities and communities, but the technological revolution is just now beginning. This session will highlight some of the major advances taking place now, while at the same time emphasizing the substantial body of research, much of it crossing disciplinary boundaries, that still needs to be done. Security and Privacy for Democracy:Computing research […]

The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program, an interagency Federal coordinating group, recently posted a draft of the Smart Cities and Communities Federal Strategic Plan for public comment. The co-chairs of the NITRD Smart Cities and Communities Task Force distributed the following email to help raise the visibility of the request to the research community: Dear Colleagues, The draft Smart Cities and Communities Federal Strategic Plan was released January 12th for public comments by the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program, an interagency Federal coordinating group. Access to the plan and information about how to submit comments can be found at NITRD Blog Post or the Federal […]

The Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC), a collaborative platform uniting local governments, nonprofits, academia, and industry working on Internet of Things (IoT) applications within a smart city, has announced the next phase of GCTC collaboration, the GCTC SuperClusters! The GCTC, convened by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and US Ignite, consists of project teams or “Action Clusters” working towards Smart City IoT innovations. The SuperClusters will combine multiple, existing GCTC Action Clusters into singular teams to pursue common objectives. The SuperClusters will likely be based around the areas of: Emergency Preparedness, Disaster Recovery, and Resilience Energy, Utilities, Water, and Microgrids Environment and Healthcare Municipal Dashboards Transportation To […]

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is offering up to $40,000 to two communities as part of their Smart City Air Challenge in order to help the communities create and implement plans to deploy air quality sensors and share the subsequent data. To qualify, communities will need to submit their plans detailing how they will deploy hundreds of air quality sensors and how they will manage the data they collect. The award money will not cover the entire program costs – communities will need to partner with sensor manufactures, data management companies, and other necessary industry partners in order to fully realize their plans. After a year the EPA will evaluate […]