Helping empower Atlanta’s smart-city transformation
We were delighted to join the City of Atlanta at the Sept. 15 SmartATL event at Ponce City Market, where attendees had the opportunity to:
- Experience examples of how our trusted cloud is helping cities solve complex government, safety and other challenges in our Microsoft Digital Transformation Showcase.
- Get behind the wheel of the Microsoft patrol car, which is helping law enforcement improve incident response and create safer communities. We offered hands-on demonstrations of robots, dash cams, automatic license plate readers and other cloud-based, connected technologies.
Even more important is our ongoing work with the City of Atlanta as it transitions to become a best-in-class smart city, focused on the five core pillars of mobility, public safety, the environment, city operations and efficiency, and public and business engagement. With the goals of improving citizen services, increasing city government efficiency and revenue, and reducing operating costs, Atlanta is using the power of our Azure and Azure Government cloud platforms, Power BI data analytics and other Microsoft technologies to move forward on a number of smart-city initiatives, including:
- North Avenue Internet of Things (IoT) Corridor: Running between Atlanta’s midtown and downtown neighborhoods, the City will be leveraging a vast amount of data generated by devices mounted on the corridor’s infrastructure, including streetlight poles, waste receptacles and city vehicles. After gathering information from sensors, license-plate readers, motion detectors and other IoT devices, the City will turn the data into visually rich Power BI dashboards to help reveal predictive insights and foster proactive decisions. Digital citizen kiosks along the corridor also will ensure that relevant, geocentric data sources are available to the public, from real-time public transit arrivals and business locations to emergency information and local event details.
- 21st Century Policing: The Atlanta Police Department (APD) is addressing its No. 1 priority of public safety and reducing violent crime by utilizing data-driven information. APD is aggregating data from previously disparate systems and enabling officers to use mobile devices to access real-time Power BI dashboards that identify repeat offenders, juvenile arrest records, neighborhood crime, gang-related information and more. By empowering officers with this improved situational awareness, they will be better able to target and monitor perpetrators, and make real-time decisions to prevent violent crime.
- Operation Aware: Built on the Microsoft Digital Policing and Safety solution, Atlanta’s Operation Aware will leverage the City’s state-of-the-art Video Integration Center to combine all video sources as well as sensor, relational and social data into a single, real-time repository. The Azure Government-based Operation Aware will enable APD to quickly analyze all data into actionable intelligence, which can be shared with crime fighters, external stakeholders and APD commanders to make an informed first response. Microsoft Digital Policing and Safety is currently used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and deployed in New York, Washington, D.C., and other U.S. cities.
It was exciting to join our friends in Atlanta to discuss these initiatives and many other smart-city innovations. Microsoft CityNext and our partners also look forward to helping your city modernize with cloud-based digital transformations that empower people to lead safer and healthier lives, enriched by high-quality education and improved environmental sustainability. Please learn more about Microsoft solutions for smart cities at:
