Here’s What Happened at Smart Cities Connect Fall 2024

By Chelsea McCullough, Editor at Large, Smart Cities Connect

The Fall 2024 Smart Cities Connect Conference & Expo marked an important milestone as the event returned to the city of its origins – Austin, Texas! Smart Cities Connect launched in 2016 in response to the US Department of Transportation’s Smart Cities Challenge as cities large and small rallied to explore how data and technology may support government decision making.

Many years later, and in the midst of massive change, some things have remained constant. Our mission to gather smart city leaders still rings true. We welcome everyone from the movement’s earliest pioneers to those who are attending for the first time. We carefully blend a wide range of perspectives and experiences from the public sector, from industry, and from academia. It is this unique subjective experience that creates the richness of this conference. 

Smart Cities Connect is dedicated to enabling a collaborative exchange between public sector leaders and smart city innovators to support human-centered smart cities. 

As Marc Coudert with the City of Austin noted in his remarks on day one of the conference, we all benefit from exploring new tools to address traditional challenges and that by coming together, we can better understand how issues affect us as a community. 

Top conversations at the Fall 2024 event focused on the intersection of technology and society. 

For example, several key panels reviewed how AI, digital twins, smart lighting may positively impact issues that are paramount to people and planet including climate change, extreme heat, and natural disasters:

• Demystifying the AI Journey for Cities featuring the Honorable Michael Hancock, Former Mayor of the City of Denver, the Honorable Steve Adler, Former Mayor of the City of Austin, Jumbi Edulbehram with NVIDIA, and Randy Lack with Dell Technologies.

• Where There’s Fire, There’s Smoke. Using AI and Digital Twins to Prepare for Climate Change featuring experts from the City of Austin and University of Texas at Austin.

• Too Hot To Handle: Technologies and Organizational Structures to Help Manage the Impacts of Rising Temperature featuring Ruthbea Yesner with IDC, Marc Coudert with the City of Austin, Michael Hammett with the City of Phoenix, and Mariela Alfonzo with State of Place.

Other major topic trends focused on the importance of cybersecurity and data privacy:

• The Security of Things with experts Dasha Davies and Robert Davies of Stealth ISS Group, Dean Iniss with Dynamic Strategic Consulting, and Paddy Parvin with Total Security Global.
• Building a Risk Resilient Smart City featuring Laura Hershon and Christian Lowry with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Nelson Gonzalez from the City of Coral Gables. 

And as always, the agenda always highlights ways to increase education, awareness, and involvement of residents and citizens to drive local decision making. 

• From Small Beginnings to Award-Winning: The Sacramento Story of Redefining Community Engagement in a Real Way featuring the important work of Lynette Hall, Elizabeth Boyd, and Mikel Davila from the City of Sacramento 
• Meeting Residents and Tourists Where They Are: Multi-channel Engagement for Inclusive Experiences with Melissa Kraft from the City of Frisco, Jumbi Edulbehram from NVIDIA, John Rohrer and Jacque Istok with AMSYS, and Bill Pugh with Smart Connections Consulting.
• Addressing Community Violence Through An “All Hearts On Deck” Approach featuring Devine Carama, Tiffany Brown, Kenneth Payne, and Larry Johnson from the City of Lexington.

Also, one of the distinguishing aspects of this conference agenda also highlighted common areas of attention between smart cities and smart bases that also included the Smart Cities-Smart Bases Innovation Challenge. There are so many ways to envision a smart future by working together. 

Finally, we also enjoyed a really cool walking tour of downtown Austin led by Austin Energy that highlighted the many innovative projects that bring the community together while implementing sustainable and energy efficient programs including an award-winning electric vehicle charging platform! 

As we celebrate a successful Austin conference and the end of 2024, we turn our attention to the Spring Smart Cities Connect Conference and Expo in San Antonio from April 13 – 15. The panel picker is only open a few more days so be sure and submit your ideas that you want to see guide the future discussion! 

As a reminder, we build our program based on panel picker submissions so that we are always reflecting the issues that are most important to all of you. Even though the content is constantly refreshed, our five tracks have remained the same since day one – Digital Transformation,  Urban Operations, Mobility, Infrastructure, Community Engagement. 

So please submit your ideas, let us celebrate your wins and lessons learned. We’ll see you back in Texas in 2025!