IEEE Smart Cities Workshop: Crossing Discipline Boundaries for Smart Cities (Kansas City Kickoff)
When: February 8-9, 2016
Where: Sprint Accelerator (210 W. 19th Ter)
Registration: By Invitation Only — Apply
In late 2015, the IEEE Smart Cities Initiative chose Kansas City and Casablanca as its fourth and fifth global Core Smart Cities. The beginning of Kansas City’s engagement with IEEE coincides with several other national smart city initiatives with a local footprint, along with the upcoming launch of Cisco/Sprint Smart City Corridor in downtown Kansas City.
Kansas City’s commitment as an IEEE Core Smart City is to help lead the discussion and develop content for the IEEE Smart City Network, and to engage potential Affiliate cities and other smart city networks we participate in the US.
IEEE is holding a Kickoff Workshop Feb 8-9 at the Sprint Accelerator to officially launch KC’s participation in the IEEE network and begin to develop a framework for fulfilling our commitment. The specific areas for inquiry that Kansas City has outlined are:
- Public Safety: How do we evaluate the tradeoffs between personal liberty and responsibility and the widespread abilities for data collection and surveillance that smart city technology make possible?
- Mobility: How do we begin to understand mobility as inclusive of both transit and ICT systems in a way that connects physical and social mobility, i.e., the ability to move around a city from place to place and the ability to improve one’s economic position?
- Regionalism: How do we bridge the innovation ecosystem that embraces an entire metropolitan area with all the individual municipal and county jurisdictions that are the traditional movers of government policy?
- Education: How can we infuse smart city infrastructure into education to modernize learning systemically, and to catalyze personalized, lifelong learning capable of connecting learners to 21st century tools, skills and instruction designed for interacting with the digital world?
- Entrepreneurship: How do we translate educated, engaged citizens into the creation of businesses and programs for economic and social development?
Over the two day workshop, interested parties from Kansas City, potential Affiliate cities, and the IEEE Smart Cities Initiative leadership will hold focused sessions on each of these topics. These sessions will be facilitated by Dazza Greenwood, a lecturer and research scientist at MIT Media Lab, and regular collaborator with the UMKC Law School on civic tech projects.
The workshop is soliciting short papers from a policy, legal, or a technical perspective on the themes listed above, as well as additional smart city topics.
This workshop is intended for:
- Smart city/digital city community stakeholders in the Kansas City metro
- Civic and government officials across the region who want to participate in the smart city conversation
- Experts, practitioners, academics and specialists in the topic areas listed above
- IEEE members
- Participants from other cities who are interested in the IEEE Smart Cities Initiative
The IEEE Smart City Initiative in Kansas City is coordinated by
- City of Kansas City, Mo. (Core Smart City participant)
- University of Missouri-Kansas City (academic partner)
- KC Digital Drive (organizational lead and sponsor)
- Think Big Partners (project management and support)
- IEEE Kansas City Chapter (IEEE representative)