Echelon recently participated in two events that will lead to more highly connected cities and nations. Ron Sege, CEO, joined Gavin Newsom, California’s Lieutenant Governor, and other state and business leaders in the Connected Cities event hosted by Ericsson and the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto, California, earlier this month. Also in December, Echelon’s CTO Bob Dolin participated in the White House’s first SmartAmerica Challenge workshop, in Washington, D.C.
Connected Cities
At the Connected Cities event, Gavin Newsom led a discussion on how technology innovations have changed the way people communicate and find information—and how government needs to change in response. Today’s cities are evolving into interconnected hubs of networked devices, infrastructure, and institutions. The Connected Cities gathering discussed what government can do to foster these innovations. They explored, what is government’s role when faced with the rapid-prototype schedule of innovation in the 21st Century?
As California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom said in his book Citizenville: “The world is changing too quickly for government to respond with tiny incremental changes. It is time to radically rethink the relationship between citizens and government.”
At the Connected Cities event, Newsom also talked about the need to build ‘platforms’ that can be leveraged across various applications to make smarter cities and more engaged citizens.
“I was very interested in this platform idea because our newly announced IzoT platform enables cities to use their streetlighting and other infrastructure to run a variety of smart city applications, from security to traffic efficiency apps,” said Echelon CEO Ron Sege.
SmartAmerica Challenge
The goal of the White House’s SmartAmerica Challenge is to demonstrate what can be done today with cutting-edge communications technology to improve safety, sustainability, efficiency, mobility, and overall quality of life in the United States. Echelon’s CTO Bob Dolin participated in the first SmartAmerica Challenge workshop, which was to assess the possibility of interconnecting multiple Cyber-Physical System (CPS) test beds from different industry segments.
Echelon described its engineering of a smart street lighting system that supports both wireless and wired communications; works with both LED and induction lights; and can be integrated with other smart city systems for safety applications such as:
- Illuminating roadways to guide emergency vehicles to an accident
- Oscillating roadway lights to warn drivers of upcoming traffic slowdowns or accidents
- Using signals from lights’ motion detectors to guide law enforcement personnel when searching for criminals in a parking structure
- Lighting emergency evacuation routes
Echelon will work with a Department of Transportation project that has already been formed to set deliverables and a development schedule. The overall SmartAmerica Challenge program calls for participating projects to be demonstrable in late March 2014, with final reports completed in May.
You might also like:
- http://www.echelon.com
- http://www.echelon.com/applications/street-lighting/ for background information on Echelon’s smart street lighting system
- http://www.nist.gov/el/smartamerica.cfm SmartAmerica Challenge
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Posted by: Automotivebatterymanufacturers.wordpress.com | 12/30/2013 at 03:23 AM