USC and City of Los Angeles Form IoT Consortium to Drive Smart City Innovation

In November 2017, USC’s Marshall School of Business and Viterbi School of Engineering announced that it was forming a consortium to design, develop, test, and deploy an IoT system to benefit communities such as the surrounding city of Los Angeles. The consortium will engage with government agencies and industry experts in order to develop community-based IoT networks composed of individuals from both the private and public sectors. The goal of this collaboration is to generate substantial amounts of data from applications such as energy use, transit, garbage collection, air quality, parking, or leak detection that can then be used to make better decisions that affect and improve the quality of life for members of the surrounding community. James Ellis, the Dean of USC’s Marshall School of Business, stated that initiatives like the I3 Consortium leverage data that provides better understanding of the convergences between businesses, consumers, and governments in “this age of data.”

The city of Los Angeles is no stranger to smart city initiatives like the I3 Consortium. LA is one of the smartest cities in the United States in terms of deployments of smart cities projects. It has the highest deployment of smart parking, connected LED streetlights, and solar photovoltaic technologies. Additionally, LA is committed to the Guidelines for the Internet of Things, a set of smart city guiding principles that puts particular emphasis on privacy, security, sustainability, resilience, equity, and efficiency. The point of the consortium is to use USC’s resources to test IoT projects that local governments or companies want to develop and to provide operator feedback. The campus itself functions like a miniature city, and this will allow the consortium to test ideas beyond the engineering test bed criteria of it either works or it doesn’t. 

Smart city initiatives like USC’s I3 Consortium demonstrate the growing deployments of smart city projects and the value that is expected from these new knowledge networks. Connections facilitate ideas, and USC’s I3 Consortium serves to create a network where ideas from the education, private, and public sectors can be combined and diffused in new smart city innovations. ABI Research has been analyzing system integrators, value-added resellers, and partner program members who are operating along the IoT value-chain to see what IoT components they are offering and what vertical markets they are targeting. The report is updated semiannually, and in the most recent edition for 4Q 2017, there was a 105% increase in the number of companies who are offering smart city products and services. More companies were offering healthcare and manufacturing services than any other, but it’s important to identify the vertical markets which are growing the fastest in terms of companies who are actively deploying solutions targeting that industry specifically.

While it is impressive to see the collaboration between the education, private, and public sectors, all parties need to embrace the guidelines for the Internet of Things such as privacy and transparency as well as security. Privacy and security should not be jeopardized even when these deployments are just tests. By addressing these concerns during the testing phase of these solutions, the I3 Consortium can ensure that privacy and security will not be an afterthought during any subsequent stages of solution development. The reality of the IoT market today is that manufacturers are still selling unsecured devices to both enterprises and consumers. City-wide deployments of devices cannot have security gaps that enable intrusions. Additionally, any entity involved with the deployment of an IoT solution needs to be open and transparent about the “who, what, where, when, and why” for the data that is being collected. The students at USC need to be informed if their data is being collected or used in any sort of test-bed or actual deployment. The Viterbi School of Engineering has developed early protocols that enable device owners to opt-in or out of providing specific data streams to application developers. While it is essential to have as much data and input from the members of a community in order to determine how best to improve the members’ quality of life, community members need to have the option to not be a part of the initiative or at the very least understand what data is being collected from them and what it is being used for.