

Much of this has been facilitated by public-private partnerships NIST has dubbed "superclusters." Rhee said nine of these are currently ongoing and are focused on subject areas like transit, cybersecurity and agriculture. “Over the past five years, we have seen some best practices emerge - some of which are being adopted across multiple cities,” Rhee said. The initiative has been especially productive in guiding technical standards for smart city development. 40% of which are outside the U.S.," Rhee said. The project’s output has already proven fruitful - creating “200 projects across 200 cities. The initiative is a NIST-led project focused on building intra-agency collaboration toward the development of smart-city technology, with a special focus on codifying best practices.

This question was the primary motive behind the Global City Teams Challenge, an initiative Rhee currently oversees. NIST’s central role, he said, rests in finding a way to codify best practices for developing smart city technology. “How do we find the momentum to create a consensus?” he added. “Every city is doing their own thing,” said Rhee. This nascent field has led to range of methodology. “When I first started working at NIST, we asked what exactly are the standards for smart cities,” Associate Director of the Cyber-Physical Systems Program Shokwoo Rhee said Wednesday at the ACT-IAC Networks and Telecommunications Community of Interest and Federal Insights Exchange event.īroadly defined, smart cities are large population centers whose essential functions - public transit, traffic management, water supply and waste management, among others - are guided by large-scale analytics enabled by the implementation of internet of things devices. The National Institute of Standards and Technology hopes establishing guidelines for smart-city technology will allow the agency to become a leader in large-scale "internet of things" implementation.ĭefining the best practices for developing smart cities has been one of NIST’s foremost challenges and fundamental to the technology's long-term success.
