US Ignite Recognizes 4 Cities for Smart, Connected Applications (Broadband World News)

1/23/2020
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WASHINGTON, D.C. -- US Ignite is pleased to announce that four community partners will receive substantial awards to expand the geographic deployments of successful applications and services developed as part of the National Science Foundation-funded Smart Gigabit Communities project. Those grant awards will go to teams in Austin, Texas; Chattanooga, Tenn.; Eugene, Ore.; and Lafayette, La. 

Austin, Texas
Startup organization Augmented Training Systems will extend the use of a virtual reality Mass Casualty Incident training system from Austin to other large urban areas in Texas. The tool is based on EMS industry-standard START (Simple Triage and Rapid Treatment) protocol and allows emergency responders to train for mass casualty events with 3D avatars in a simulated environment. 

Chattanooga, Tennessee
In collaboration with Hamilton County Schools, the city of Chattanooga will expand a program using 4K microscopes and remote instrumentation capabilities to five new schools and two new communities in the SGC network: Jackson, Tenn. and Lafayette, La. The program will provide immersive experiences to students not possible without advanced networking, and include real-time collaboration across these schools, allowing students from the original host site to serve as lab assistants and contribute with their teachers and peers to the STEM curriculum. 

Eugene, Oregon
The Technology Association of Oregon will deploy a Digital Town Square (a resilient, local interconnection point) to reduce application latency and increase civic digital resiliency in the cities of Eugene and Springfield. Specific applications expected to benefit include seismic monitoring for earthquake alerts, new regional multimedia coding classes, digital platforms for countywide community engagement, and more.

Lafayette, Louisiana
The University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the local Lafayette city government will collaborate on a Louisiana Smart Community Cloud Platform that migrates an existing system of hardware and software developed for research purposes to a regional platform that provides for high bandwidth/low latency community application access. The Community Cloud will easily extend to nearby regions and major cloud providers. Among the applications supported by this are the Lafayette Engagement and Research Network (LEaRN), the NIMSAT Business Emergency Operations Center, the LA Flood Modeling Project, and more.

Over the last several years, the National Science Foundation has invested in fundamental research that is enabling smart and connected communities throughout the U.S., including identifying pathways for scaling and sustaining the results that are emerging," said Erwin Gianchandani, NSF’s Acting Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. "We look forward to seeing how US Ignite’s Smart Gigabit Communities project will further NSF’s objectives in collaboration with their community partners in Austin, Chattanooga, Eugene, and Lafayette."

US Ignite