Ken Hays, president and CEO of Chattanooga’s Enterprise Center, and UTC’s Mina Sartipi, director of the university’s Center for Urban Informatics and Progress, accept the Horizon Award given to Chattanooga’s “Smart City” initiative.
UTC’s Mina Sartipi was in Denver on April 1 to accept the Horizon Award at the Smart Cities Connect Conference.
Chattanooga’s new research partnership, the Chattanooga Smart Community Collaborative, earned the award for demonstrating “foundational and inspiring groundwork for future smart cities projects,” according to conference officials.
Chattanooga’s Smart City initiative was selected as one of the Top 50 projects for 2019 by US Ignite, an organization that connects cities and private companies on “smart city” projects.
Sartipi, director of UTC’s Center for Urban Informatics and Progress, or CUIP, has been a major participant in Chattanooga’s push to become a “smart city,” an urban area that uses electronic data-collection sensors to supply information to monitor and manage traffic and transportation systems, power plants, water supply networks, waste management, law enforcement and other city services.
UTC recently created CUIP to help drive the Smart Community Collaborative as well as push forward other local projects. The Collaborative designated Reinhold Mann, UTC’s deputy vice chancellor for research, as the chief scientist of the initiative.
EPB’s fiber-optic network has created the nation’s fastest internet capabilities and is used by computers at UTC’s SimCenter to quickly crunch and interpret massive amounts of data for the Smart City initiative and other projects.
Smart Community Collaborative members include UTC, the city of Chattanooga, EPB, Erlanger Health System, Hamilton County, the Co.Lab and The Enterprise Center. Chattanooga has attracted researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Vanderbilt University, Georgia Tech, the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Vermont to conduct studies.
