 to make the glyph for the logo of Bluetooth. So you're connected to Harold, Bluetooth. Now he was quickly dethroned by his son, who was known as Schwen's Forkbeard. So it wasn't a safe job. But the connections this building, when we conceived it, it's the convergence building and we wanted to bring people together. The pandemic was quite a challenge, but we're so glad to have people gathering today and to talk about connections. So the panels we're gonna have, we're gonna talk about smart cities and how they connect individuals, devices, technologies, et cetera. We're gonna talk about the connections that can come from new technologies that are leaving the lab and are going into actual work that we're seeing out here, whether it's a lawn mower or an autonomous vehicle, lab to life. And then talk about the next generation of connectivity and what that will require to make it happen and what it will do for the world. To get started, I'd like to turn it over to Mike Klein. Mike Klein is responsible for so many things I probably can't list them all. He is responsible for many administrative functions, the safety at Purdue University and all facilities. So I'd like to turn it over to Mike Klein. Thank you, Brian. It's great to be here. Good afternoon. My name's Michael Klein and I'm the Senior Vice President for administrative operations here at Purdue. And as Brian mentioned, there are a number of things that falls into my responsibility of my great team and I'm just so pleased to have the chance to say a few words as we get started today. I want to introduce Stephen Goldsmith. Before I get to the paragraph that's prepared for me, I just wanted to acknowledge it. Many years ago, as a young engineer, Purdue graduate, I worked for the city of Indianapolis under Mayor Goldsmith's administration at the time and it was a great place to get started and I learned an awful lot there that has helped me cascade forward throughout my career. So Mayor, thank you for that opportunity. And as we think about today, the mayors have so many job responsibilities in what they must do and then they have choices to make. And I think I'm guessing today on the panel we'll hear some of those things. So without further ado, I'd like to say that Stephen Goldsmith is the Derek Bach professor of the practice of urban policy and the director of the innovations in American government program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He currently directs Data Smart City Solutions, a project to highlight local government efforts to use technologies that connect breakthroughs in the use of big data analytics with community input to reshape the relationship between government and citizen. He previously served as the deputy mayor of New York and mayor of Indianapolis where he earned a reputation as one of the country's leaders in public-private partnerships, competition, and privatization. Mayor? Very few folks who worked for me ever admitted in public. I was really, this is quite interesting, Mike. Did Mitch know that before he hired you? I have three distinguished mayors. Let me invite them to come up and have their seats here. We have Mayor Faddis and Fishers and Mayor Linhope from Columbus and Mayor Muller from South Bend in no particular order. I'd first, I guess. I'm just gonna lead a discussion. It's great to be here. Purdue does such remarkable work in a general area, engineering generally, but in the world that I work in, Smart Cities, Purdue is the leader as well. My little project at Harvard, I've frequently asked for Purdue professors to make presentations to the mayor's groups that I bring together from around the country. So thank you for all in particular. Glad to be here. I've got a slide presentation that takes about 75 seconds just to set the stage. And then we're gonna have a discussion with these three mayors. So you guys have a deck back there. Let me just, I just wanna frame the conversation in the following way. So we are talking about Smart Cities, particularly in the heartland because we're in the heartland. But I wanna just start with a quick framework. One, and we'll get into this with our three distinguished mayors. It's easy to talk about technology and I write a lot about it, but we ought to start first with why do we care, right? What are we trying to accomplish? And so this slide doesn't tell you anything you don't already know, but I just wanted to begin with it because the mayors that are here and the mayors that we work with around the country are mayors because they wanna do X, right? And the X is maybe a more livable city or more sustainable city or a healthier city or a safer city or more prosperous city. And then the question is how do we use technology and analytics to accomplish those goals? So I like to start with this slide just to kind of say, this is the so what. And too many times we get embedded or involved with city officials and they're less excited about technology until they think about the so what. Okay, next slide. We're quarter done with the slide presentation. I'm not gonna read all of this. There is no real definition of smart city, so I made up one just to have a frame of reference and for those who actually care about this sort of thing, it's on our website, but basically it covers how do we use the digital tools to work smarter? How do we create digital platforms that bring together systems? How do we use those systems to protect to produce public value? And then how do we protect the systems that we're building privacy and security, which are obviously huge issues as well. So there's a little definition of smart city to begin with on the issues of connectivity. Next slide. So this is the last slide and just to frame the conversation, I know the panelists can't see it, but we could think about the advantages of smart cities in any one of these four quadrants. So up on the left, how do we create digital platforms for asset management? How do we manage our assets better? The speakers will have examples of that and of course Purdue is known for that as well. But assets don't just mean the physical structures, right? There's a lot of assets in the city that can be brought together through better platforms. On the bottom left, how do we operate better? How do we use digital tools and technology to produce more public value per dollar spent in our cities? Cities are under a lot of pressure to do more things. And so how do we operate better? Up in the upper right-hand corner, how do we use smart city tools analytically, right? How cities, that was the mayor of Indianapolis, the same is true with the mayors behind me. We have a parks department, we have a street department, we have a police department, we have a solid waste department. But people don't live in the solid waste or parks department, they live at 10th and main, right? And they need to organize activities and solutions around where they live or where they work. So how do we create analytical opportunities from digital tools? And at the bottom right is the goal of the exercise isn't just to see how smart we can make the people who work for the three folks behind me, it's to say we also can create platforms that allow for more community engagement so that individuals in their communities and neighborhood leaders have tools, have visualization, can see things in order that they can have more input. So the conversation today is about asset management, it's about operating through systems, it's through analytic capacity, it's through citizens at the center, and we have three distinguished mayors who are gonna solve all those problems in the next 47 minutes, thank you very much. All right, so with that, we were having a little conversation out before we walked in, and so, well, first of all, this has to work with first names, it cannot work with mayor, mayor, right? So there's no sign of disrespect, but Scott, you've made an interesting comment, I thought really interesting comment, which is before you get to technology, you've gotta have the data structure correct. So talk a little bit about what you're doing in Fishers, I may call them cultural issues or you might call them data integrity issues, but how are you preparing the data to allow it to be more utilized? Then we'll go through, you know, South Bend and Columbus are gonna dump a lot of data through sensors on top of what you have today, but start first with, well, how do you get your team to use it? Well, thanks, Steve. So four or five years ago, the technology was actually outpacing what our organization was capable of consuming. And so we were getting hit up by vendors to put a device on this and a device on that and a device on this, but we really didn't have the organizational structure or the capacity to take that information and turn it into something meaningful for us. And what we realized is we started in our journey is that we actually have thousands of points of data already existing within city government today, but we didn't have the architecture in place to be able to take that data process and turning it into something meaningful from an information standpoint. So we had to really look at enterprise software applications that really focused around the centers of data creation in city government. People like HR, there's lots of data points for the people you have. Money, finance, lots of data points for that. Infrastructure, law enforcement and land use were really kind of the core principles. At the time that we evaluated this, we had probably 200 software applications doing a variety of things, none of which were complete or providing the information that we needed to really make informed decisions. So our work on, I guess for lack of a better term, the smart cities initiative didn't start at the end point. It started back with, okay, how do we put an architecture in place that allows us to gather that data in a way that people can pull it together and say, okay, now we can make informed decisions. When we got to that point, we realized we don't have the people to do that actual part of it. So we had to go hire a team of people that are what we call a business solutions group. They are data analytics people. They're informed in data manipulation, data understanding, and then they also work on software implementation. So for us, the journey started and it's been a long, hard battle to get to that point, started there. And honestly, the biggest challenge was taking that group of people with those tools and convincing all of the other departments that the interaction with those individuals were of value. And I think we've made a lot of strides there. We have a lot of different projects going on in a variety of departments, but Steve, to your question, it really started there for us. This issue of shifting a workforce, so that it's both, you have to move the data and the workforce to do these things. Mayor, I can't do Mayor Jim because there's two of you. South Bend, let's start with South Bend, then we'll go to the other Mayor Jim. So there was this mayor before you, I can't remember his name, right? Then South Bend developed a reputation as being very advanced as cities go with respect to using data. I remember you were one of the first to have sensors in your wastewater systems for CSO purposes, but talk to us a little bit about we're in the home of the country's preeminent road engineering school. Talk to us a little bit about how you're using robotics and analytics and sensors with respect to pavement and streets first, please. All right, well, thank you. And it's good to be here and join you here in Lafayette. But yeah, my predecessor immediately was a good friend of mine, the Mayor Pete, now Secretary Pete and the sewer system that you mentioned actually predated his tenure too. And it was really our public works director that took it on to start innovating in our sewer systems. And we claimed for a while there to have the smartest sewers in the world. And getting to your slide that you mentioned, the why, we were under a consent decree for combined sewer overflows. And it was gonna be very expensive on our ratepayers. And fortunately, because of those sensors, we were able to renegotiate that agreement. Well, I mean, agreement with the EPA and the federal government's a little different. It's kind of, you will do this and you're signed up. So, but the agreement, we came to an agreement and the new plan we can save, we'll save ratepayers over $400 million and will lead the better environmental outcomes over 12% reduced E. coli outflows into the river per year. So that's an important part. And then going, I served in Mayor Pete's administration as chief of staff and really Mayor Fadness is about building the infrastructure and the team. There are a lot of stories, there's a case study online about how we built the innovation and technology team in the city of South Bend. But like a lot of cities I imagine, there were IT people scattered throughout different departments and they didn't have a lot of specialty or expertise, they kind of were just there to help people, whatever Windows operating system you're on like some employees, how do you do that? We didn't have Microsoft Office, we didn't have any cloud storage or our server was underneath, there's a story of our server was had a tarp above it with a leaky pipe. So, the level of where we started and where we are today, really building this team and building the business analysts to both analyze and keep track of the data but also figure out how to successfully implement software solutions. So, those are critical and then just quickly you mentioned about the streets. Let me interrupt you just for a second. Because we want to get to the fancy stuff but before I do, under Pete, the city had one of the countries, your city had one of the countries preeminent CIO CDOs guy named Santi, who came originally from Notre Dame. I just for a second before we go on, how do you think about university city partnerships in smart city, right? I know you're working on one with Purdue, you've had long had one with fellows or interns from Notre Dame. Just address Scott's comment about people in the sense of how you partner with the university. Well, that's been a critical story for us, the last 20 years or so, the University of Notre Dame, for most of my lifetime, I kind of had an inward look and over the past two decades started a little bit before Mayor Pete but really took off in the past 10 years, started to engage the community and formed that partnership. We're proud to be part of the Metro lab network that was founded about 10 years ago or so to establish that relationship further and share best practices with the city, university partnerships across the country. You mentioned Santi, another good friend of mine and yeah, so in Focus was a program that we set up in South Bend to help retain talent from our university and he had been a graduate of Notre Dame's esteem program which was science, technology and management, entrepreneurship and management program, co-founded that institution and then ultimately became the city's first chief innovation officer and that's when I moved back home to South Bend in 2015, he was chief innovation officer with Office of Two and the scattered department and so we had to figure out how do you bring all these pieces together and build up the infrastructure to do what we wanted to do. And then he moved to Pittsburgh, he actually came back in my administration to be economic development for me and then now he's off to Boston under Mayor Wu to be Boston's, I forget exactly, but chief innovation officer. So I'm gonna, let's get the other mayor Jim and then I wanna come back to your robotics, you worked with your roads, but you've made a number of Jim operational improvements using smart city tools, GPS and the like, would you tell us about those? Yeah, just to follow on with, like you talk about pavement, I mean, one of the things that we realized early on was that we canvas every inch of city streets once a week. It's called a garbage truck or a sanitation vehicle. So we drive every mile, every inch of the city once a week and so we've got eyes on the whole neighborhood and part of what we wanna do is have a little device up here on the ceiling where the driver sees something, pushes a button, drops a pin. It might be a tree, it could be a chuck hole, it could be a car that needs to be moved or hasn't moved for a while, but sends a message back so that we've got somebody to come out and take a look at that. And the comparison is that if we don't do that, say for instance, with respect to chuck holes, what we've gotta do is send a crew out to drive the city and look for chuck holes, okay? So it gives us an opportunity to be much more focused. And I can't tell you right now, Columbus has got about 425, 430 full-time equivalents. We're down about 20 people. We've got about 20 open positions right now, 5% of our workforce. And so anything we can do that will make us a little bit more productive, a little bit quicker, we're gonna be all over. We've already had our guys looking at the automated moors that were outside and we're gonna do that kind of thing because we've only got 30 baseball diamonds, right? We've got about 20 soccer fields. And so to the extent that we can employ that kind of technology to make those people more productive, well that'll take care of our personnel shortage. A few of the other things that I talked to Mayor Goldsmith earlier about was in Columbus we've got a very diverse population. About 20% of the city of Columbus is either foreign born or second generation. And so the language spoken at home is not English. The school corporation tells us that the number of languages spoken at home unique in Columbus is around 54. And so if you're running a police department or if you're running a fire department or first responders, you need to be able to determine right away what the language is that you need to communicate. So we use a software called Language Line and it allows us 24 hour access to, I wanna say it's about 75 different languages because we can, we'll encounter, we've got Spanish speakers on staff but we don't have Mandarin. We don't have Pashto. We don't have Hindi, you know, those kinds of things which is what we need to be able to serve those people. Just to real quickly, one other thing that we use, I mean, we've got a lot of projects going on around town. And it's very easy for us to drop a yard sign or put a little placard up that says, would you like to know what's going on here? You know, would you like to know what's coming? And what we can do with that is put a QR code on that placard so people hold their phone up there and voila, you know, they've got access to our website where we explain whatever it is that they're standing in front of. And we found that cut down on the number of calls that we get at City Hall but also just better inform the public. So it makes life a little bit easier as well as making us more productive. Thanks, let's stay on the operation piece for a second and then we'll go back to assets. So we can think about operations in two ways as a question to all of you but we'll start with Scott. One is how data, when delivered, a person in the field helps him or her work better, right? How they get more information on their tablet, how does it configure their routes, that sort of thing. And another is the autonomous more garbage truck, robotic inspection of roads. So Scott, let me start with you on the people side and then Mayor Jim from South Bend, you want to go back to kind of how you're inspecting your roads. Well, I think the people side is about empowerment and the ability to solve issues or become more efficient at the point of service delivery. And that can be as dramatic as a police officer having the mental health emergency plan for someone who suffers with chronic health or mental health issues so that they can have a better outcome in a very intense situation all the way through to frankly an inspector in the field being able to fill out a form on an iPad and do that very quickly or look up a particular piece of information that they need. So empowering that frontline person to accomplish the task either more efficient or with a better outcome is always a key component. Then on the backside, I would tell you, I mean, there's like these very interesting questions of why and the ability to answer them that you never even knew you had to ask these questions before like in Fisher's, I was just talking to our people at DPW the other day, they now track every acre that they mow. They mow like 1200 acres of grass a week. And the simple question you could ask yourself is why? Why do we have 1200 acres of grass and does it make logical sense to spend taxpayer dollars mowing the same strip of grass over and over again when you could plant it into some sort of native planting and not have to mow 1200 acres of grass? I mean, it's the basic why question, but those were elusive prior to having the data to understand that that was a question you should even ask. Mike Klein. So back in the 19th century when I was a mayor, we were into performance contracting. And so we let out these contracts and one was for mowing the right-of-ways. You were probably responsible for this story. And the team insisted, let's see, that we measure performance. So we required them to mow the right-of-ways every week, right? So think about this for a second. Do you really want your right-of-ways mowed every week during the drought? This is your question, like, what are we trying to do? So people would call in and complain to 311 that these guys are out there cutting the dirt, right? And so why are you paying them to do it? But as contrasted to, I don't know, what the amount of moisture is and you want the grass to only be two inches high. So that's an interesting story. Scott, I hadn't thought about that in some time. Mayor Jim, the same subject. How do you determine the priority for repaving a road? How do you use AI and robotics? How do you create your priorities for what you do on the roadside? Well, you know, the one thing that we, I think every mayor in Indiana does, but we already have, for a long time, gone out and have people measure the conditions of the roads every segment of road. And it's called a paisa rating, one through 10, one being the worst, the 10 being brand new, the best. And we're having people go out there and look at every section of the road. So we did work with a company called Robotics to use AI. And you drive with a camera and take images of the road and they can then do the same thing, rate each segment of the road. Now, the challenge, and I'm sure other mayors up here and you probably never encountered this, but the state tells you what you have to do. And so we have to do the paisa rating. So it'd be nice if we could work with the state to allow this technical solution to, you know, maybe you still do some spot checks or something to make them feel comfortable. But you know, we haven't found any significant difference in quality of data from physically going out there and assessing versus this automatic, the solution from Robotics. So then that's you have your data, you have your whole city, what the conditions of every segment of street is. And then you have to figure out how to prioritize and the funding you do have and make sure that, so one of the things we're doing in part of our rebuilding our streets plan is make sure that we're having equitable, you know, there are some neighborhood streets because road to funding, you know, hasn't kept up with the needs, whether you're talking about gas tax or any other sources of infrastructure funding, we haven't had enough to cover our full infrastructure. So what happens is those streets that are most traveled and break up faster, those get repaved, you know, every few years, but some neighborhood streets haven't been touched in decades. And so we wanted to make sure in a concerted way that we were having equitable quality levels of our streets across the city. And so we're starting with the worst and moving up with the funding we have and that also having this data helps you just hide how much instead of saying, oh, we're getting this much from gas tax or we're getting this much from the state, we say, well, how much does it take to get our ratings up to a level of service where there are no failed streets in the city of South Bend and where there are quality that our residents expect. So that's what data can do, but it can't produce the, fortunately it can't produce the money for you to actually get it done. Not so far. Mayor Jim Columbus, how are you thinking about sensors, robots, drones with respect to operations issues? We do, you know, to tag on a little bit to what they do in South Bend. I mean, not only do you gather the data that rates the roads, but now you've got data that you can share with the citizens. And so when a citizen wants to know why their street hasn't been repaved, I can point to the 12 streets that need to be repaved first before we get to you. And it just makes it a little bit easier argument because it's not my decision, it's the software or the engineer. But you talk about ways we use sensing. We've got about 26 miles in Columbus of what we call people trails. These are bicycle and pedestrian pathways and we're always trying to measure how well they're used. Do people really like this amenity that we have? And so we've got a variety of sensors that are either infrared, you know, they're on the trail side or they're in the pavement, it's asphalt most places. And it can tell us which direction a person is going. Or you can tell us whether it's an individual or a bicycle and it can give us a little information on speed. And so we begin to understand a little better how we design these trails and in particular, maybe where some of the blind curves are that we need to watch out for. Another place that we talk about this is with respect to just enabling remote workers, you know, allowing people to work from home. I mean, a lot of what we do is interaction with citizens. And so it becomes important for us to be able to make our people accessible. And so just something as simple as forwarding calls to a person's cell phone or to a person's home phone. We don't disclose, you know, the number, but being able to facilitate the communication is critical and being able to allow the employee to work remotely. Any of the three of you using bots to answer those phone calls? That they just use IVR system so far. How about drones? Jim and then Scott. We make pretty extensive use of drones. We bought them initially about five or six years ago for our fire department. And the selling point was that you don't always know when a fire is out. You know, you can walk, you can look at it and you can think that it's out, but there are still hotspots, you know, often inside the building and you're trying to identify those to make sure that it doesn't rekindle. What we realized really quickly was that these drones could also help us identify people. And so we've had several examples where we found young kids who were hiding either in a wooded area or in a cornfield. We'll take them out into the county. We don't stop at city limits, but we could also find bad guys, you know, who are trying to get away from us. And I think we've had in the, I'd say in the five or six years we've had the drones, we've had probably double that number of people we've been able to locate with their use. And again, and I hate to say it this way, but they're kind of fun, you know. So if we have a celebration in Columbus, you know, we fill the street with a bunch of people. It's nice to have a drone up there to let us know how big the crowd is and be able to put that on social media and just let people understand that you can have fun in Columbus. And here's an example. Yeah, I would just tell onto that that public safety has certainly been a frequent user of it. You know, being able to literally, we flew a drone into a home where there was a murder suicide and they weren't sure whether the individuals were deceased or not. And instead of a guy going through the door to figure that question out, they broke the window and the drone flew into the home, maneuvered and found the, unfortunately the two people were deceased, but without that, you're knocking through the door and putting someone's life at risk. So that was probably the most unique application I've seen of a drone so far. I have more questions for the panel. I'm not sure whether I'm allowed to ask audience questions, but if you have a question, raise your hand. Is Luna out here somewhere? I'm your guest, so I doubt I can call on you, but you know that the country's most interesting experiment on materials, driving sustainable results is the US 30 project in Fort Wayne. No, we have Fort Wayne and Allen County. I think you are one of those folks ought to summarize that for three or four minutes. It is really a quite remarkable project. The US intelligence highway by using zero carbon materials and AI technology for smart intersection. And we're also using the IoT sensors for traffic leveraging and AI guided algorithm for accident prediction. So the objective is to ensure we achieve four things, right? Sustainability, mobility, safety and security at the same time. It's really a remarkable project. Why aren't you doing that? Well, you know, it's a great question. I'll have to follow up. I need, but you know, Steve, one thing that brings to mind that I'd be interested to get your thought on as the kind of the originator of public private partnerships in the world of infrastructure and smart cities. I think one of the innovations that needs to continue to evolve is this interaction between the private sector, the educational components and then the cities because that's a clumsy interaction oftentimes and how our cities are living laboratories under the right regulatory framework and under the right interactions. There could be a perpetual state of innovation that's occurring and frankly entrepreneurship to create new companies and innovate in an area that to be honest with you, infrastructure has been ripe for disruption for a very, very long time. So I'd just be curious to get your thoughts and I'll reverse moderator here, but I mean, what are your thoughts about the evolution of that relationship? I don't have to answer this question. Well, we're in a place that's trying to demonstrate that so that's a great question. Let me make the answer more complicated though. So as all the mayors know and any of you who have ever tried to do business with a city know that the procurement process in cities is pretty archaic. Currently it's designed so that you can procure just about the same time that the technology becomes obsolete. So if you start today, you finish the procurement. So there's a procurement problem but there's also an asymmetry problem in the following sense. This even goes back to the old days when Scott mentioned I did maybe 80 or a hundred of these things when I was mayor, which is what these mayors wanna do is purchase from the private sector innovation. They don't wanna purchase yesterday's asphalt or yesterday's contract concrete. They wanna purchase innovation. The problem is they don't really know what that means. So there has to be a process that solicits ideas and turns them into a formal purchasing contract. The problem with that is that there is an asymmetry between the vendors and the city. They know more about their technologies than the city does. When I was deputy mayor of New York, I had somebody come in and pitch me a new technology every single week and they all sounded great and I had no idea which ones were real and which ones weren't. And so if we were really gonna support innovation at the city level with smart technology, there needs to be some way to provide the consulting or advisory services to the cities which will advance the speed and process. Think about the conversation that Scott started and my story about the lawnmower. The issues I asked Mike Klein about, right? Which is how you measure performance. How do you measure performance with these technologies when you don't quite understand the technology? How do you build those service level agreements into the contract? So it's more than you wanted. It's actually an issue that I write about a little bit. This is the defining issue, right? The technologies are out there. The applications need to be done. The applications have creative mayors like the three that are up here, right? You can just hear by the way they talk that they're open to those things. But it's not an easy process if you raise your hand and say, well, I've got a solution to X for any one of the mayors to know, well, do you really? And I'm going to take a risk with your company but how do I know? And so I think we need to change that. The state might be able to help, Purdue might be able to help in the sense that it's a little bit Cranard school plus the engineering school. I mean, it's more than kind of one area. It would make a remarkable difference, I think. It was a great question. One question for you, then we'll go back through the others. If any audience members have questions, let me know. We've got a little bit of time on. Scott, you've led in the state. I know the other mayors have done this as well, but you've got a reputation of leading in terms of economic development built around digital and tech jobs. Explain how you've gone about that. Well, it's been intentional and it's been a long, long process. We started with really creating the infrastructure. So we view public infrastructure very differently than maybe it was 10 or 15 or 20 years ago. Co-working spaces and IoT lab, all of those things we view as modern day infrastructure. It's not a seaport. It's not a railway, but it's a necessary infrastructure for innovation and the type of economy that we wanted to drive in our city. And then we're very intentional about recruiting the types of companies and the types of frankly, entrepreneurs and tech entrepreneurs that we thought once you got a critical mass of those individuals, it starts a flywheel that really is self-perpetuating. On top of that, we really did try to put our money where our mouth is as a city. And we told all of those innovators and entrepreneurs, view our city as a living laboratory. So if you're an individual with a new edge device that's for firefighter location in the middle of a fire, and you want to try to run that prototype through our fire department, we'll work with you. If you have a new technology for software regarding EMS, we'll work with you. We've done it in public works and we will continue to have that open door philosophy when it comes to working with entrepreneurs where we're willing to take those risks because as we talked about earlier, maybe we're not ready to write it in a bid document and maybe INDOT isn't ready to write it as a standard, but somewhere in between there has to be this area for innovation and back and forth collaboration that leads to entrepreneurship and frankly, better products. I mean, we're still talking about asphalt with the same life cycle that it's been for, I don't know how long, like at some point we have to disrupt these industries and hopefully through that environment, we can do that. You know, the one thing that the convergence effort could do if they could connect their due diligence to INDOT's purchasing agreements, right? Any city can purchase off an INDOT agreement. So if there might be ways to think about this at scale. Jim and South Bend, let me switch up just a little bit. So one of the problems here is that this stuff's not free and so there's a little upfront cost which may extend the life cycle of the asset but that's for your successor to benefit from, right? Not necessarily you. Pretend the audience is your budget director. Make the return on investment. Use your sewer example about how much, how you saved money, right? So that there's a language out here why this upfront investment produces savings. It'd be great to hear you kind of talk that through. Well, yeah, that's obviously a limitation of our political system in general is long-term investments usually get enjoyed by not the individual that's deciding to, or the individuals that decide to make them. So whether it's climate change or any number of our long-term issues, whatever you wanna talk about, that's a challenge with the incentive but I think the other mayors would agree with me too is as mayor you do have a little more ability at the local level to break through and explain why long-term investments, why we're making these investments, why they make sense. On this particular one, some of it was like I mentioned our public works director seeing this challenge and kind of squirreling away dollars over the years to invest in this tech, just slowly build that, not necessarily a big splash, not a big initiative, not necessarily a big line item in any particular budget. So it started kind of incrementally and then when the first consent decree from EPA came for our combined overflow, everyone was outright, this is gonna cost us a billion dollars and city of South Bend is just over 100,000 people. So you can do the math, that's a lot of money to be investing in cleaning up our river because of just this specific issue with our sewer system. And so then the public mandate was there, obviously once you saw this giant price tag, like is there anything we can do to save dollars? And working with the federal government, they asked questions and asked questions some more and we had the sensors, we had a model and it still took a number of years to get them to agree that this was a better way forward. How do you think about that in Columbus? Yeah, I would add one component, it's not just all financial, but some people are scared of the technology. And in particular, I will tell you that we have license plate readers. If you come to Columbus, we will know. But the whole notion is to try to find people who have stolen a car or created a crime in another place and now they're here. And so we can begin to look for them. There's pushback among the community about trying to adopt that kind of a technology that exceeds the cost. The cost is almost secondary. With respect to cameras, we've got cameras throughout our downtown area and several public buildings and the question becomes again, it's second to cost is, is that really something we want folks to do, to have that kind of eyes on what we're doing? And I was really interested in the display earlier about the drones being able to swarm above a group of people because candidly we live in a world today where we have demonstrations, we used to call them protest marches, but can those be maintained civilly? And so far in Columbus, we've had several of those but they've all turned out really well. But how do we make sure that that continues to happen? And I've often believed that people behave a little bit better when they know somebody's watching. So we embrace that technology, but yeah, it comes not only at a financial cost, but sometimes you've got to have a long conversation with a group of people as to why it's okay to go ahead and do that. How are you in Columbus or any of the three of you using a signalization sensors for safety purposes or traffic smoothing? I mean, we pretended for a long time, we've done a good job with that, but really it's not quite what you'd call real time, right, the sensors get installed and how many of your residents call to complain about long waits on the signals and the like. So how are you thinking about using analytics and more advanced sensors in that regard, any of you? We actually integrated, so every signal in Fishers is integrated into the same software platform and allows us to manipulate those signal timings real time. And then to your point about complaining about traffic, we also make value judgments. Prioritization of, you know, at 430, there's a certain road that we need East West traffic to have the majority of the green time. So that you make these priorities decisions and say, if you're a side street, you're gonna spend more time on the side street because it's a more efficient way to get traffic through. And we've had that now for three or four years. And then you can use it as simple as there's a parade or there's an event, you can change those signal timings just from a laptop in the engineering director's office. Jim? We've not really had too much trouble with that. I mean, Columbus is 50,000 people, the rush hour lasts about 40 minutes, you know? So it's just really not been a problem for us, but we do have those kind of signals and yes, they do get out of whack so to speak because they're not very smart. And so when the power goes down, we've experienced some difficulties, all those have to, somebody has to go back out and reset all those and it's a little troublesome for us. You're not having bike safety issues that are related to this signalization? No. Yeah, Jim? Yeah, I mean, we have some signal actuators but generally traffic is not a huge problem in South Bend. We've done a lot of complete streets work that's changed the traffic patterns and it doesn't, maybe it's a couple more minutes. I mean, I see our former meteorologists from South Bend, Mike Hovey maybe can attest that when we made those changes, it may have added a couple minutes, but traffic you can get from one end of South Bend to the other with 20 minutes. It's not a, traffic is not a big issue in South Bend. So it's not one of the issues that we've been looking to invest in solving because it's not a huge priority for us. Makes sense. Questions from the audience? Right? Just to speak up just a little bit. You've done a great game about and potentially what your vision is for that IoT lab in the future? Yeah, so the question is about the story behind the IoT lab in Fishers. So as we tried to push the entrepreneurial movement and attract the next generation economy to Fishers, we started with the co-working space which is your traditional coffee shop, backpack, idea, skinny jeans, the whole cliche. And that was going well, but we saw a pivot or an evolution of that movement into the internet of things. This idea that edge devices are going to transform the economy. And we really thought Indiana being the most intensive manufacturing state in the country, that there was an opportunity to develop companies that would either help in the process of manufacturing by implementing edge devices in the manufacturing plant or the development of devices that would be a part of the product that the manufacturing plant is making. And so we really wanted to link those types of data scientists, those types of technology to this economy that is kind of the foundation of Indiana. The folks over there, they're entirely different than your software as a service developers. They're wonky, they're about wires and gadgets and things. And it's a longer process to get to a product. It's been really fascinating to see, we have folks working on alternative energy methods, we have people working on security cameras, we have Bluetooth enabled technologies. We see this lab continuing to grow. It's frankly, the lab space itself is full, which we're excited about. And we're hoping to see our first graduation if you will of these different companies into the local economy shortly. How are you thinking about the deployment of 5G technologies for purposes of, we'll go back to the last question, right? So you have edge and you have 5G and let's say you have a detection system that lets you see a bicyclist or a pedestrian coming along the way. Are you explicitly connecting 5G, IoT and city services? Well, for any of us mayors, 5G technologies is a whole different conversation around small cell towers and what that all looks like from the deployment standpoint. That's a difficult thing as they start to show up in neighborhoods. This is the architecture piece that I think we gotta spend a lot of time really thinking through. I'll share this, I had a mayor recently from Indiana. He came to me and said, you know, we're all in on the smart city stuff, we're gonna put all these sensors in the road. And I said, well, what is it that you're attempting to do? It'll tell us the weather conditions on the road. And I thought, well, I mean, there's, you can kind of know what the weather is relatively easily. And it's cloudy, it's gonna rain 52 degrees. Well, later on he came back to me and he said, Scott, that was a disaster. And I said, well, why was that? He goes, did you know you had to pay for a cellular service for each one of those devices? And this is where I think we gotta take a step back and to your point about the partnership with folks like Purdue or others, that asymmetry can be really dangerous too. I mean, local governments, state governments have wasted billions of dollars on technology and software that were poorly executed and poorly implemented because it just weren't thought through completely. And so this 5G technology, what is gonna be the standardized component of that? So if it's going to be a component of transportation, is there a set of standards that we should be looking at? I mean, all of that needs to be vetted out and thought through or otherwise become kind of pet projects that are kind of leaders or kind of glamour projects, but I don't know that they actually substantively move the needle one way or another. If you have a question, raise your hand. Do you introduce yourself and ask your question, please? Okay, yeah, I'm Shamali Shashi, assistant professor in ag and biological engineering and I had to talk on drone swarms this morning. So I was wondering when you have these traffic lights, should be relatively straightforward technology wise to learn from these traffic patterns? So do you actually have to manually go in and change based on what you perceive as the traffic patterns? Another nice extension of the drone swarm technology which is now funded by my NSF courier is that you can actually have swarms of drones see some of these traffic patterns and actually play sort of, even if you have like sparse network connectivity, they could be like sort of ways of extending the network in very creative ways. And it's not new technology, we are applying some of that in our labs. I'm wondering how smart are your traffic lights and traffic pattern enables traffic lights? I would, in Fisher's, the real-time signal system that we have feeds real-time data in terms of queue length, time at the signal, any malfunctions of the lights and your ability to manipulate that timing is there on the keyboard with a laptop. I think where the technology that you're talking about, the idea of using drones for some of this would be even more exciting and appropriate where lights don't exist. So the rest of the community, so with real-time signal systems, you can understand what's happening in that moment at that intersection. What you don't know is where are those cars coming from and where are the originators of that traffic and where are they going? I think some of that which is done traditionally through like traffic counts and modeling, it might be interesting to see how that would work from a drone perspective moving forward. Jim, going back to the comments you made about South Bend earlier to pick up on the question of Scott's answer. So, many cities, most cities today are concerned about equity issues, you mentioned this before. And I'm interested in having you talk to us a little bit about how you're visualizing infrastructure investments using spatial GIS A and B. There is an interesting way to think about this last exchange, which is getting lots of cars through poor neighborhoods faster, maybe good for the cars driving through faster but not necessarily for the people who have asthma or near carbon emissions. So how are you thinking about equity and infrastructure? Then we'll go to the other two mayors for that same question. Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned before, on the streets side of infrastructure, we're looking at what are the ratings of our streets and going from the worst first and going up the list. And so what that does is, I mean, equity doesn't mean equality, so that means some investments are gonna go in areas that have been neglected for decades. So right now, it's not an equal distribution of infrastructure dollars on streets, but to raise it to the same level of service across the city, that means we're gonna have to invest more in some neighborhoods that have been neglected. I was a prosecutor before I was a mayor, so let's do a little cross examination just for a second. So you've got your robotic AI thing or Jim has his garbage trucks and you see a hole, does that go into it? So I'm gonna type in my address that night into your open data GIS platform. Can I see that? Yeah, so I mean, this is all, so there's a couple of things that are, one, the potholes is the stopgap measures to fill that. So we try to do that within 24 to 48 hours of being reported. Those go online, 311 data is open data online on the website, but also our whole PASA rating and robotics ratings are also on a dashboard. Every segment of street you can go on the map and click as a resident and see, and that's good because then we ask residents to say, if you think this is wrong, let us know and we'll take another, we'll make sure that this rating is right. So it helps us too when residents say, hey, I don't know, you have this as a six and it looks more, this is one of the worst roads that we travel on. So it helps to have that feedback as well. Great, Jim, everybody? I would add that the data, we talk about the PASA system and the rating helps us diffuse the questions about equity, because again, we're not taking care of Columbus, we're not taking care of Tipton Lakes, or we're not taking care of Riverview. We do it based on the numerical grade that the pavement has, wherever it happens to be. I'll offer a slightly different example. Right now in Columbus, we're contemplating an investment in broadband. We've got a company that's coming to town that wants to build a broadband network throughout the city, one gig up, one gig down. And part of what we've talked to them about is digital equity. You can't cherry pick your neighborhoods. If you're gonna come in here and get a tax abatement, or you're gonna get some kind of government assistance, whatever it happens to be, you got to service 90% of the neighborhoods. And so, they've been receptive to that, but we try to make sure that we tie that somehow to the project that they're undertaking. Scott? Well, we had a really embarrassing component of this around snow removal, where we were trying to be equitable, and we were plowing in every corner of the community doing snow removal, because we thought, well, if we touched every corner at the same time, or generally, everybody got basically the same poor level of service, then we'd be equitable. And then, we were showing this to our Mayor's Youth Academy, these high school kids, and asking them, how would you do this? And some student raised their hands to go, well, wouldn't it be best to just figure out where the densest populations are, or where the most people are? And if you plowed there, you would affect the most people. That would be the most effective way to get people out of their neighborhoods. Didn't even don us that it's probably the approach, that's the framework we should look at, is how do you, what is the most efficient way to get the most people out of their neighborhoods the quickest versus trying to just be equal to everyone? So, I mean, that's a component of, I guess, equity that we were embarrassly stumbled upon. Maybe a lesson in humility, too. I have a question in the back. Nick Hamilton with Cisco, I'm actually on the following panel. Curious with all of this innovation, how are you thinking about cyber security in the context of the House bill last year that was passed for cyber reporting? I'm from Maryland, we recently just passed some legislation just last week or two weeks ago, but just curious in how you're approaching that and rallying teams in the context of staffing challenges and all of the complexities that come with that. Well, this is a fascinating asymmetry question. And there's some really interesting work being done. There's a group out of knowledge services, which is technology company in Fishers, and they're doing the equivalent of a state ramp versus fed ramp scenario in this professional association that would really tell all of the folks that are selling technologies to local governments what level of cyber security are you guaranteeing that you're going to provide? Because so much of us, so many of us now are moving to the cloud and we're software as a service. So my IT director can talk to me about my network security, but does he have any clue with the 400 vendors or the 200 vendors that we now work with, what their security looks like? And do we have the horsepower to do that internally? Absolutely not. And so I do think this nonprofit organization where peer to peer review and creating those standardization that says, well, you're at this level, I think is a really interesting approach to trying to deal with that moving forward. Other questions? All right, so in the last five minutes, we'll start at South Bend and we'll come this direction. Pretend you're here 10 years from now. How are you then going to be a better mayor as a result of deployment of IoT sensors, technology, digital tools, what will be different in the way you provide services to your city? Well, that's a great question. And I think it goes back to your intro slides, is what are our biggest problems in South Bend? And public safety is one of them, and we're looking to implement a cloud-based real-time crime center here in the next year. So we would like to see public safety outcomes go in a better direction and utilize technology. I think, and on that point of speaking to what are the problems of the city, I think this is good for private vendors. As you said, when you were deputy mayor of New York, vendors come all the time. So both the companies come all the time and also researchers at the university come all the time. And a lot of times it's not a user-based interaction. It's a, I wanna try to figure out how to get funding to do whatever I wanna do. So I have this thing. I have this technology. Can I sell it to the city? Does it work for the city? I don't know. Does it solve a city problem? I don't know. I just need someone to buy my product. Or similarly, a researcher saying, I wanna get money for my research. This is what I care about. Does it really solve or does it address the issues of the city? So when we're working with cities and working together, it's gotta take that user-based design of what are the problems we're actually trying to solve and how might we be able to work together to do that? And not to criticize the question about the traffic, but we just said, we don't have a traffic problem in South Bend. And so if vendors come and try to pitch us traffic solutions, we're gonna say, well, this isn't our priority, but crime is. And so if there's something you can offer on that front, we would love to talk. Good, thanks, Jim. Yeah, that's a great question. You think about 10 years. We try to think that Columbus is gonna grow 2%, 3% a year, so 10 years from now will be 20 to 30% bigger than we are. I don't want our workforce to have grown by that much. I wanna be able to measure the fact that we have grown the workforce at a lesser rate than that we've grown the population. And the way we're gonna do that, hopefully, is increase productivity. My friends at Cummins can tell me how many hours it takes to make a diesel engine today. And that's like 10% of what it was 20 years ago. And so I wanna be able to find that kind of productivity increase into what we do, in particularly with respect to crime. And as I mentioned before, people tend to behave a little better when they know we're watching. I had a conversation with one of our neighborhood watch captains a couple months ago, and all he wants us to do is to trim the trees so that the street lights will illuminate the streets a little better. And it's a great example of what we're talking about in terms of being able to put detectors, whether they're a motion or a visual or whatever, around the city. What that in turn allows us to do is to create what we call heat maps. It tells us where the crime is occurring and where we need to focus our resources in terms of our police. It's an 80-20 rule with respect to crime, you know, 20% of the crime, excuse me, 80% of the crime is done by 20% of the criminals. So we wanna be able to find those folks, go where they are, you know, and take them out of there. But it's a little hard for me to tell you exactly what this is gonna look like, but I think I understand how to measure it. And it's just that we're gonna be able to see growth in our communities without a corresponding growth in the personnel that's required to serve them. Good answer. Scott, last one. Very brief. I think it's market improvement in the empowerment of our employees, market improvement in the empowerment of our residents with information and data. And then frankly, a broader category is Indiana, I think at times we suffer from a very kind of folksy or anecdotal approach to public policy making. And I would love to see a market improvement in the level of sophistication behind which we make our policy decisions. That was a great panel. And before you thank them, maybe let's have your Starship guy thank them first. This is your refreshment as a result of your hard work. Thank our panel, please. There you go. You're allowed to get in there and get something out if you're a boiler maker, it says on the side.