Hoboken to be the next smart city

Recently, the concept of "smart cities" has come into discussion with the growing popularity of things such as cloud computing, the Internet of Things, smartphones, smart meters, and real world-user interfaces. Basically, a smart city (in my definition, which is similar to most common definitions) is a city that uses these technologies in order to monitor things like infrastructure (traffic, people congestion at a train/bus station, provide alerts to citizens about potential related issues, send data to the city government about the same. In fewer words, a smart city integrates the people, the government, and the physical city itself with a collection of digital networks.

This idea seems like it could be very useful. Imagine getting a notification on your phone or email or what have you telling you to wait an extra few minutes/leave a few minutes early for you train because there are so many people at the station that you wouldn't be able to get your usual train. Or that Washington Street is so backed up that you should take an alternate route to work. Seems pretty cool. Smart cities could also use things like motion sensitive lights in public places in order to reduce electricity consumption (recently I saw these same type of lights in target freezer sections that turn off when the freezer door is not open, just like your home fridge, and I wondered what it would be like if all stores were like that, but with their entire lighting system). It could also monitor things like water pressure in various manes to alert the city to potential breaks, really anything you can think of could probably be incorporated into the capabilities of a smart city.

Now, despite how cool and useful I thought all of this sounded, I couldn't help but think it's also a little strange. Yeah, at first the motion sensor technology would just sense edge flow and use an algorithm to convert that data into a rough number of people present in a certain area (that's how the current technology actually works). But how long would it take before the potential case of the city/tech companies/whoever to try to integrate personal devices like a smartphone gps or a fitbit into the system, which would allow for the smart city to know where individual people are as opposed to just a person density in a given area? Would it then just be impossible to be totally off the grid? I'm sure Ron Swanson would be pretty upset about this.

So I bring this up because one of my roommates, an Art&Tech here, recently gave a presentation (along with the rest of his group) to the mayor about this edge flow technology which Stevens students recently helped Bell Labs integrate into an interactive ad at the W hotel. They gave this presentation because the Mayor (and her people) are interested in using the technology to make Hoboken a smart city, as was made apparent in her address prior to their presentation.

So what do you guys think? Smart cities: Kosher? Not so much? Would it be weird/exciting/invasive feeling to live in one? Is the government going to take over like in '1984'? Did I use a solid gif? Find out next time on DragonBall-Z.

...but no, comment below iff'n ya like.