Mike Spack: 0:07

Welcome to the Public Works Nerds podcast. I'm Mike Spack And I'm Mark CUlver, and today's episode's gonna be a little bit different. Yeah, we don't have a guest today, but we're going to be talking about the Smart Cities Connect conference Mark just got back from, so with that, Mark set up. what is Smart Cities Connect? What was the conference like for you?

Marc Culver: 0:27

Well, even before that, i just want to talk a little bit about like what is Smart Cities, you know, and what is the definition of Smart Cities, because I think different people think different things, and we'll get into this a little bit more as we talk about this conference and what I was trying to get out of it And, like Boltman Mank, my employer, boltman Mank's vision on Smart Cities and that.

Marc Culver: 0:50

But you know, one of the things that we're going to be talking about today is artificial intelligence, ai. So if you actually type in to chat GPT, what is Smart Cities, it's gonna tell you and I'm gonna read this for you. So chat GPT will tell you that Smart Cities is a city that uses technology and data to improve the quality of life for its residents, enhance sustainability and increase efficiency in its operations. This is achieved through the use of various digital technologies, such as the Internet of Things, iot, sensors, data analytics and artificial intelligence AI to collect and analyze data from various sources. The goal of a Smart City is to use this data to inform and improve decision making all across aspects of the city, from transportation to energy management to public safety. That is a really good definition.

Marc Culver: 1:43

That is a good definition, and it's kind of scary that you know it came up with that.

Mike Spack: 1:47

but Yeah, and with kind of GIS technologies and asset management systems. Most of our cities have been smart for quite a while now then.

Marc Culver: 1:56

You know, and that's a really good point You know, we've started using this Smart City moniker now and it was interesting One of the panels that I sat in on one of the gentlemen very well-spoken gentlemen they kind of challenged that Like I don't like this Smart Cities name because it doesn't necessarily focus the attention in the right place And to your point. You know we've been doing smart things for a long time. We've been doing, we've been implementing technology for these purposes, as Chad GPT pointed out, for you know, for a long time. I think what's different about this initiative, i guess, or this new industry, is the desire to try to integrate as much of that as possible, to try to, you know, better manage it and to create some frameworks and best practices for particularly managing the data that you're gonna get out of all of these different things. You know we can put all the sensors in the world that are out there in our city and implement them and activate them and start collecting data from them and we can be literally buried in ones and zeros from that data. But what you do with that data is the important thing, and I think that's where the Smart City part comes in is how we're kind of wrangling that, all of those different applications and all those different technologies and how we're managing that data, and that's what gets into some of the key words and phrases and topics that came out of the conference that I saw out of the conference.

Marc Culver: 3:54

So, kind of moving into that, i would say, from the very start, from the keynote, which was the mayor of Denver, where this conference was, in Denver, which I think is a really great location for this, by the way, because they have for five years they have had something called the Colorado Smart Cities Alliance, which has been an organization that creates these events and tries to bring in private industry, these innovators, to come in, meet with public agencies, figure out what their issues are like, what problems do you have and how do we help you solve them, and so it's kind of a little bit of an incubator from that perspective of connecting those two things of okay, here's all the technologies, here are the actual problems, how can we connect?

Marc Culver: 4:44

how can we find some funding, some grants and some things like that. So, anyway, colorado's got a really well-advanced program for that thing and Denver has taken advantage of that with some things, and so the mayor of Denver gets up there and he's talking about that very thing about managing their data, about some of the initiatives that they've been using, particularly from the perspective of air quality monitors, and how they're using that data and some things like that From panels of other agencies, airports and things like that it all really came down to. Most of the conversation came down to data how they are managing that data, what some of the mistakes they made by not thinking about that data upfront, like how to manage it, where is it gonna be stored? Who's gonna be in charge of it? How much of that data is going to be available to the public? How are we using that data? How long is it gonna be stored? We have most of public agencies now have well-defined data practices for how long you have to keep data stored.

Mike Spack: 5:59

I actually don't know. Is that seven years?

Marc Culver: 6:03

Well, and it depends on the type of data, and I should know more about this because when I was at Roseville. But there are some of them are just guidelines and some of them are hard and fast rules about how long you need to keep data. But for emails, if it's not something that you have to keep, they want you to get rid of that within a year, and I think that's more of a policy than a hard firm or a guideline versus a hard firm policy or law on that. But I think it's like from a law perspective, you have to keep most of that public data around for at least three years.

Marc Culver: 6:40

Okay, and so that gets into. This is a little bit of a tangent, but on that data practices side, it's a liability perspective that if you're not disciplined in getting rid of your data and somebody asks for something and you say, well, we don't have that, and then they actually do a search, like they come in with a warrant or something and they actually do a search and they find it well, then now you're in trouble. Now they're gonna go through a much more deeper dive because you have something you said you didn't have.

Mike Spack: 7:15

Or they find out you purged it the day they requested it, coincidentally, which probably far-fetched, but having a standard that you're purging on a cycle is the most defensible. Yeah.

Marc Culver: 7:30

Yeah. So anyway, that's a factor to consider as we're putting in more and more sensors, as we're collecting more and more data and we're using it well, having those guidelines, those rules of how you're collecting it, storing it, analyzing it, what you're making public, how long you keep it, things like that. And one topic related to data because we don't necessarily think of this as data is video, and I heard more and more from vendors and practitioners that they really don't want the video. They don't wanna store the video And they're huge. Besides the amount of storage that it takes. It's the requests that people want for that data. Once they know you have the video, then they're gonna request it because oh, there was an accident here, i wanna look at the video. Or we think there was a person here. We wanna see that video to see if they were there, or we wanna try to track this person, this or that. So there's more and more reasons for not keeping that data.

Marc Culver: 8:37

Now that video data can be important I mean, it's used in real time for detecting vehicles And we're doing more and more with video in real time Or immediately post-processing it to look for different events or different things out of that video.

Marc Culver: 8:57

But in order to do that, we don't need the license plate numbers, we don't need to see faces of people. We're more interested in just people as a number, how many people are going through here, what those people are doing in that intersection versus what that person looked like Or what they're wearing, or this, that or the other. And so we don't want that data. We don't from a privacy perspective and from the perspective of people wanting to get that information from us later. So there was quite a bit of conversation about that and certainly something to consider as you're thinking about some of those applications, and so I think that's that was probably the biggest benefit of the conference was really framing a lot of that, those big picture things, more policy type of things, more strategic things. As we're contemplating implementing this new technology, how are we actually gonna manage this? What are we gonna do with this data And how does it fit in from that? So that's big picture.

Mike Spack: 10:04

So that's thinking about more the architecture of the system, before you end up with just a rat's nest of a system, being thoughtful of how to build it and how to keep the closet clean Right right, Absolutely absolutely.

Mike Spack: 10:20

So what does this conference look like? And maybe I assume a lot of our audience has been to PWX conference, public Works Expo or some of the other big trade shows. How does this smart cities compare? I assume there's different folks there, different companies, different vendors, different levels of staff, even what kind of cities are showing up to this conference?

Marc Culver: 10:50

Yeah, and I would say mostly the cities that are represented at these conferences are cities 100,000 population or more. Clearly, because we were in Denver, there was a really good representation from Colorado cities, but there certainly was a good representation from your Dallas, your Austins, your Nama a larger city in California that's not LA, but some good representation from those cities. And I would say most of those people weren't even necessarily Public Works Directors. They may be sustainability people, they may be GIS professionals, i don't know that. I saw a lot of city engineers or Public Works Directors, planners, saw quite a few planners there. Now there were some Public Works Directors there. I was surprised by that mix of probably more planning level or sustainability level professionals that work for cities than more engineering staff. So that was kind of interesting.

Marc Culver: 12:15

And then, from the vendor side, or the private sector side, there are some well-defined and established players in this market that are trying to get into more of the integration market, and so they were there. There's one firm in particular that always pops in my mind called Ubiquira And this isn't a sell or a pitch for them, just as an example And they're a company that again is more of an integrator And their hook is they develop products to fit in. There's on every light, almost every like 99% of the light standards that are out there in the public space. On top of those light standards is a little NEMA standard plug that you can get power off of from there And it's like I said, it's an industry standard, so anybody can. It's like there's the screw in for a light bulb. Anybody can make that interface And you can put cameras on. You can make an adapter or a device that fits into there. That is a camera, that is an air quality monitor, that is a wifi antenna. That is just a variety of different.

Mike Spack: 13:34

A little weather station, any kind of any kind of monitoring device. You have fixed power you can tap into. I didn't know that.

Marc Culver: 13:41

Yeah, and so that's their hook is making connections with whether they're developing it or they're working with third parties that are developing those little things, but then integrating all of that data into a more you know, a single interface or a common interface to help manage all that stuff, and that you know that hub could also be as part of that. Wifi or some other radio communication can then also pick up internet of thing devices within the right away. You know. Whether that's a waste basket or a park bench, i don't know what data park bench is gonna tell you, but you know there are all sorts of ideas that are popping up about how do we make you know our traditional right away devices or our traditional public works things smart and what data can we get out of them. That will be useful, and I think that's the key is, and there will be a whole slew of new ideas and things like that. It's a question of kind of testing those out and what actually is a useful piece of data, what is a useful application for your typical public works department? And again, you know just kind of what this framework of this conference is.

Marc Culver: 15:01

I do think it's much more geared towards larger organizations, larger agencies. You know that are. You know a couple hundred thousand people or more. And you hear a lot from the really big cities. You know the million plus metro areas or cities and metro areas. But you also hear things like there was a couple panelists from airports Like the Dallas airport was Dallas Fort Worth Airport. Was there talking about some things that they're doing, because an airport is like a little city. You know, military base.

Marc Culver: 15:35

There was somebody there that was talking about some things going on in a military base because, again, a military base is kind of like a little city. You know, from that same concept you can think about university campuses. You know they're doing smart city applications As a matter of fact. You know I mentioned the kind of a smart waste basket. I've seen that on a couple of college campuses, as we've toured around with my daughter looking for colleges, you know where I've seen waste baskets that clearly have some intelligence to them. They're doing something, they're telling something, and usually that is I'm full or I'm not full, so then they know whether they need to empty that basket or not. And so from that perspective those university campuses are kind of becoming incubators for potential larger applications.

Mike Spack: 16:27

You know, in cities, Yeah, and just to take that benefit forward from the trash can idea of okay, maybe you need half the staff running around in the golf carts emptying out the trash to because of the sensor and routing them around like, where else can we that parallel idea? take that to our cities? and what is the manual effort? our public works departments are doing that. We could reduce the person hours doing that by using data. I think that's the promise of what a lot of these companies are talking about.

Marc Culver: 17:12

Yeah.

Mike Spack: 17:12

But the cost, the cost benefit has to be there, and a big part of it. Did they talk much about just the connectivity? because if you have to put in full wireless communication nodes into each one of these devices, that's adding hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to that little widget you're plugging into the light pole. But if these devices can ping off of kind of the mothership communication device, then you only need one of those devices for $500 or $1,000. Did they get into that?

Marc Culver: 17:50

just the communication, Not that level of detail. But I think you'd be surprised at and I know you have developed your own, you know product and so you're keen to the cost of individual components of things like that and such. But most of these devices are probably working off of either a really low power radio frequency and maybe similar to what you might see on your water meter if it's a radio water meter, or just a simple Wi-Fi connection. You know, because, like you, going back to the example of the universities, most university campuses they're blanketed with their Wi-Fi, exactly.

Marc Culver: 18:40

So if you have devices that can simply just communicate through that established Wi-Fi network I mean that can be that's very low cost then You know, maybe you have a private channel for those devices to communicate on that's separate from the public channel and there are ways to do that pretty simply, then you know you can do that very cost effectively. And that's again that's where you know a firm like Ubiquita is trying to, you know, set up that communication network that works, you know, more seamlessly And because you've got that infrastructure with all the light poles already. So just build off of that for not only the device, the, you know the air quality sensor, but also the communications component of it. So yeah, and whether that's cellular or Wi-Fi depends on, you know, the city that they're in for that.

Mike Spack: 19:36

So what were the? so you're at this conference and do you have people talking about things that we've been doing for 20 years in the industry, really, with asset management and GIS, and were there gaps? Like what came to your mind of like, hey, that's a great idea, but what came into your mind of like they're missing. They're kind of missing half of the picture here. Did anything come to mind?

Marc Culver: 20:01

Yeah, what's what was really interesting about the conference and the gap that I saw specifically came from starting with what was at the conference was really primarily focused on mobility. You know we I saw a lot of applications there around traffic, about collecting traffic data in real time or post-processing it for, you know, planning purposes and things like that, and we'll get into a couple of specific examples of that in a little bit. You know to even talking about transit operations and you know autonomous vehicles and and you know self-driving shuttles and things like that, and I think that's because that's the visible part of it. You know that's, that's what people can see and what we have really easy access to. But what? what I wasn't seeing much conversation about. Even being in Denver, which is a high altitude desert, which, in Colorado, water conservation, water rights is a huge issue there Is, i didn't see a lot about that, about the things below ground. You know How, how are we using this technology to help us with our you know monitoring our water infrastructure, talking about sanitary sewer or things like that?

Marc Culver: 21:26

I'm not saying it wasn't there and I didn't go to every session, you know, and that that was.

Marc Culver: 21:32

I think this is a common concern about a lot of conferences we go to is, you know, there'll be six concurrent sessions going on at once and I want to go to three of them, you know, but I can only go to one and sometimes I'll go to part of one and then move over to another one, but so it can be hard as one person trying to cover a lot of that information, but I didn't really I didn't see any specific examples at least that were spotlighted about the things that are happening below ground with our storm sewer, with our sanitary sewer, with our water distribution, and so I think that's really some opportunities there to expand the concept of smart cities, particularly for the integrators, is looking beyond the mobility perspective of it.

Marc Culver: 22:21

I had one conversation outside of the conference, at a reception with a really big consulting firm you know about. Well, what is smart cities to you beyond transportation and mobility? And and she kind of like, just like, thought about, well, i'm not sure you know, because that's their focus. You know this, this is a big transportation ITS type of consulting firm and that's their focus is on the mobility side. So I, right now, those conferences I think are heavily focused or biased maybe, on that mobility side of it. It's good to you know, bounce around and see different things that are going on in different parts of the country. But it'll be interesting to see how this, this conference, evolves and expands a little bit on that scope And if we can get past more of the mobility, more of the mobility things.

Mike Spack: 23:17

You brought up with being in Denver and you brought up kind of the consortium of cities that are kind of banded together. How did that come about?

Marc Culver: 23:27

Yeah, and, and actually one of the podcast guests that I'm working on lining up right now is the director of the Colorado Smart Cities Alliance, tyler Svitek, who actually had a really big role in this, this conference.

Marc Culver: 23:42

He was on a lot of panels and such And, you know, i think we will dive into that more when we have him here talking about that, about the role of these organizations. But one very common thread that I saw again on the panels and the general sessions in the set and the other was these organizations across the country, and it's like the Colorado Smart City Alliance. There There's a North Texas Innovation Alliance, there's a Virginia Smart Community Testbed Organization, there's another organization in Florida, i'm pretty sure. But these are all organizations that have popped up that have been a conglomeration of public agencies and private sector companies that are, you know, funding this joint organization to show advancement and readiness for these Smart Cities applications And then they're using that to apply for federal funds or other grants in order to, you know, test new technologies and new applications. And so that's kind of the interesting and I compare that to that movement, i don't know, 40 years ago or 30, some years ago, with the, you know, the ITS organizations that are very similar Intelligent transportation systems Yep thank you, Mike.

Marc Culver: 25:08

You know so, like you know, ITS Minnesota locally, which was an arm of ITS America Here in the Twin Cities area, we had, well, in Minnesota in general, we had something called GuideStar, which was something that our DOT actually formed to try to be more competitive for federal grants, you know, targeted at ITS, And again it was a conglomeration of private sector, mostly Minnesota companies and Minnesota agencies to you know, again, raise their hand up and say, hey, we're ready here, we wanna partner with people, we wanna try some technologies out, we wanna advance this market, And so that same thing is happening at the smart cities level And I look forward to having that conversation with Tyler about, well, how did this start up, Who you know, who came up with this idea And how has it helped you guys?

Mike Spack: 26:00

Well, and the benefit I see, especially from when Mark and I were beginning our careers this ITS America and ITS Minnesota since we started out as traffic engineers was a really big deal, but what it allowed by having the big national organization to the local organization, most of the practitioners didn't have to live in that world but there were a couple of people who were kind of the lead guides in that area And I could see, if you have your consortium of, if there was cities in Madison, wisconsin kind of around there, they could send one person to the smart cities, connect and that person could come back and report on what they learned and their perspective And also bring in kind of the local needs. Like Texas versus Minnesota has some pretty different climate environments. We're a little bit more similar to Colorado but they don't get as cold like we do. So at least covering the different climates for this technology to make sure they're robust, and we have different public works issues around the country.

Mike Spack: 27:14

So I could see the value in having kind of eight spread out around the country eight, 10, 12 of these consortiums to try to build the public private partnerships, because I think what you're pointing out in the gap of everything's about mobility. Well, that's what the consultants are focused on, that's what the vendors are focused on, because they don't necessarily know any better that now that we're talking to more and more public works folks through the podcast and our networks. Well, a lot of our concerns are about things underground, because that's really the catastrophic stuff of okay, yes, we don't like car crashes and we don't necessarily like congestion, but the calls with the sewer backups going into somebody's basement or a water main break and not having water, those feel like a lot more acute crisis situations that we sure would love help with as an industry. Yep.

Marc Culver: 28:15

Hey everyone, I just wanna take a quick moment to thank our sponsor, Bolton Mink, who is producing and editing our podcast.

Speaker 2: 28:23

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Marc Culver: 28:44

So you know, just kind of zeroing in on a couple of specific items that I talked, that I saw and I actually had some conversations with some vendors. You know, getting back to that whole ubiquity ubiquita firm, you know they actually make street lights and they also specialize in, you know, making the street lighting system better. But then on top of that, you know they're getting into what else can we do with it? How can we make use of that hub? How can we expand it beyond the? we use the street light as like a hub for everything else. But you know that's another big application is, you know most cities, if they haven't already, are going through a conversion of their lighting system to LED and which opens up the opportunity to do dimming.

Marc Culver: 29:42

You know, have a little better control over your lighting system, make it smarter. You know you really you should have a system that will tell you when the light is up. You know you don't have to go look for it, you don't have to wait for somebody to tell you. You know a good smart lighting system should tell you that. But that involves, you know, an infrastructure, a communications infrastructure. Then for that street, like to talk to something? Yeah, you need a dashboard.

Marc Culver: 30:11

Yeah, yeah. But then, beyond that one interesting, i had a really interesting conversation with a vendor, a LiDAR vendor. So it's a LiDAR product And LiDAR I don't know exactly what it stands for, but essentially it's the sensor that emits like a light pulse around and it uses it's kind of like a radar, but with light, and you know it gets that bounce back and it draws a picture of its world around it And it's sending out, you know, millions of those pulses within a minute And it's drawing that picture continuously in real time. And it used to be a really expensive technology and you know most automated vehicles now have a LiDAR sensor on it And so it's becoming more and more common And with that, as technology is adopted, it gets cheaper. And so you know this product is becoming more cost effective to the point where it now makes sense. It actually competes with, like, video detection from a cost perspective, so you can use it for detection purposes. What's really interesting is because it's emitting its own light, it's drawing its own picture. You know it's not reliant on ambient light. It does a really nice job with, you know, at least according to the vendor.

Marc Culver: 31:43

I just wanted to point out that I don't have any practical experience with the use of this or I've not done any evaluation of the accuracy of LiDAR, but you know, theoretically it is much better at detecting pedestrians and bikes and smaller items which are much harder to see in all light levels using, you know, purely video And other technologies. Have you know issues? like you know, some technologies can only detect the object if it's moving or this, that and the other. And so you know, lidar theoretically goes beyond some of those other limitations. Now it has its own limitations. It's still pretty expensive, particularly if you have to put more than one sensor at an intersection. And so then if you're only using one sensor, you know at some point you have a blind spot. You know, and they're pretty good at installing it so that it's got, you know, maybe like a 300 degree view of the intersection. So you know, you just put it strategically so you're not missing anything vital behind you.

Marc Culver: 32:52

But what was really interesting about it is not so much the detection of the data, because again it can detect things in real time and work with a signal controller to do that. But it can measure speed, it can track vehicles, it can track pedestrians, so it can tell you where the pedestrians are moving from point to point. It can tell you where the vehicles are moving from point to point, so you could do turning movement counts on it and things like that. What was really interesting is what the companies are doing from a post-processing perspective on it. And there are video applications of this as well, where they're doing post-processing and this gets into the other buzzword of artificial intelligence. And so now they're taking this raw data of LIDAR and video and this, that and the other, and they're doing this post-processing and applying artificial intelligence to figure out where you have near misses, like almost conflicts, where two objects are too close to each other in a certain period of time.

Marc Culver: 34:00

So now you get to a point where and you can have thousands of hours of this data and no human can process thousands of hours of that data to figure out where the near misses are.

Marc Culver: 34:14

So if you plug it into a machine or computer that has the artificial intelligence to figure that out and process all of that data, well now, instead of just doing, you've got to experience with this of redefining how we use turning movement counts.

Marc Culver: 34:29

But instead of just doing it over even a day now, you can do it over a month or a week or a month or even a year, and get much better averages and means of that data than just one day's worth. But, more importantly again, from a planning perspective, instead of just focusing on where we've had crashes and fatalities and things like that, you can now look at the near miss data, like we've seen this near miss a hundred times in this one spot, this turning movement, with this conflict point, with this pedestrian It's. We really should consider turning that in, you know, converting that to no turn on rad or doing something else to eliminate that conflict point, because at some point that near miss isn't going to be a near miss, it's going to be an actual collision, and so it just really opens up the opportunity to make much better decisions on what's really happening out there. But this data that we couldn't collect before, Yeah, it all comes down to dollars.

Mike Spack: 35:35

It's the money of processing the raw data stream into something that is actionable. And that's the thing that is great about the LIDAR, as I understand it, is they're being built more and more into vehicles. So there are millions of these sensors being built now, whereas if there's only thousands of the sensors being built, they're orders and orders of magnitude more expensive. So in some ways our industry because it's a lower use case numbers wise needs to keep an eye on what is the bigger picture happening in just the popular culture And then saying how can we utilize that as that cost is getting driven down, instead of coming at it from the reverse and saying here's this brand new technology way to solve our problems, but that's going to be so crazy expensive to build that bespoke solution for the public works industry, the cost come down by saying, okay, here's all these Internet of things out there.

Mike Spack: 36:46

How can we tweak them just a little bit and use them? and sure, it might not be perfect and it wouldn't be what we would design from the ground up, but because we're taking it off the shelf, we can afford it. So that's. I hope that perspective is starting to be built into the smart cities thinking of. We're all cost conscious. None of us has the funds we would like in our budgets, so we can't just throw money at technology solutions and the hope it's going to fix it. We need real, proven solutions that are cost effective.

Marc Culver: 37:24

Yeah, yeah, and I think that's a really good point and I think that actually lends into the next point that I want to make is, for me, as the director of smart cities initiatives at Boltman Manck, like what is smart cities and what do I want to do with this? And to your point of the vast majority of our clients are smaller cities that don't have a budget to just try things out. I mean, if they're going to implement something, it's got to actually solve a problem, it's got to be useful for them and it's got to make a difference. They have to get something cost effective out of that investment. And so as I go to these conferences and I'm going to start going to some other more industry specific conferences, like a water industry conference, because I want to go walk the exhibition floors of those conferences and I want to see what new applications, new technologies are there.

Marc Culver: 38:30

They're not being targeted or marketed as smart cities right now, but I want to go see what those technologies are and I want to see okay, let's take that application, you've got this sensor that does this really cool thing. Let's take that. Let's talk about this how can we help vet that product, that vendor, that application? How can we maybe add some value to it? How can we maybe create a dashboard that integrates that sensor for water with this sensor for sanitary sewer, with this sensor for stormwater, into more of a common dashboard for our clients? That's a lot more scalable, that's a lot more approachable to them, and so that's kind of our vision for smart cities is maybe it's like smarter cities, like how do we help our clients implement and use these newer technologies and new applications in a safe way?

Mike Spack: 39:22

Yeah, in a reliable, cost effective way, because none of us can throw away tons of money. So by you being out there on the forefront and seeing what works like if the smart street light system, all of a sudden they can dim the lights and there's a nine month payback and it's also better for the environment on top of the money, then you can start rolling that out to communities with 5,000, 10,000 people in them, because the payback is just there and it's almost immediate. But those communities the city manager with a community with 10,000 people, where they don't even have their own staff city engineer they're not keeping up on this. So this is the value you're able to take what's being done at the million plus population cities and bring it down to the smaller communities where even that increment of saving $100,000 on your street light system a year like wow, that becomes really impactful funds for a smaller city that has that smaller budget. Yeah.

Marc Culver: 40:34

And I need to have more conversations with these larger companies that are marketing the integration of all these devices and everything else like that, and figure out where their sweet spot is and how marketable they are to smaller cities and smaller communities, for the very reasons that you just mentioned, that we can't just spend a bunch of money on this And maybe again we find those gaps and again where we as a company can Bolton and Man can say hey, rather than having to buy.

Marc Culver: 41:13

It's almost like the asset management conversation we have, as far as you've got all these asset management software pieces that wanna do everything And you're trying to put into a city and they're trying to adopt their operations or customize this software piece to fit their operations, whereas at some, in a lot of cases, it might just be smarter just to build something up from their GIS system. So applying that same thinking to this smart cities world of instead of bringing in some and I'm not saying that there isn't value in the larger integrators, because I think there is if you're big enough But how can we provide that value, that dashboard, that simplicity, but still integrate a bunch of these technologies into one? So that's what we're working on, that's what we're trying to figure out And that's where I'm working on developing some of those relationships, to figure that out and build up that portfolio, so to speak.

Mike Spack: 42:17

Okay. So at the conference talking chat GPT Google's new Bard system did anyone bring up the Spacetop by Sightful announcement? The Spacetop by Sightful? Yeah, so Sightful is an Israeli company And I just heard about it and I think this could be a game changer for all of our lives.

Mike Spack: 42:41

But even at the public works level, it's augmented reality. But instead of being like a Google Glass augmented reality for all conditions it is a pair of glasses with a little keyboard and it allows you to have like a Star Trek system where it just pops up a monitor and you can make the monitor as big as you want in front of you. So instead of trying to figure out all the different lighting conditions and background conditions, it's taking a little niche of it. But all of a sudden, we wouldn't need smartphones, we wouldn't need iPads, we wouldn't need computer monitors, we wouldn't need televisions.

Mike Spack: 43:24

And where I think this could really revolutionize public works is every truck has one of these systems and every guy is wearing these glasses. So you get out to the site and you can just pull up, instead of trying to figure out on your smartphone the GIS system, the work order system. You and the guy in the truck with you wear the glasses. You can pop up the same monitor and it can be as big as a sheet of plywood and you can drill into the maps and the 3D models of what you're supposed to be doing. And I think there's so much more there for our industry and talking and all of our infrastructure, so it would allow us. We have all of these systems, but how do we tap into them? and how do we tap into them while we're out on the street and be able to look at the same things at the same time? so I'm excited. When I heard about that, i was it kind of really got buried in the announcement of the chat GPT, but I think it could be just as impactful for you're in my lives and you're in my work lives as the chat GPT stuff could be.

Marc Culver: 44:34

Yeah, and even maybe expanding on that, i could see where, if you have a maintenance worker or even a surveyor or whatever or an engineer, if they can put on that set of glasses and you have this overlay.

Marc Culver: 44:49

You talk about augmented reality. So not only do you see the street, but now you see the pipe underneath the street and where you see the valve. You can see that valve, but the glasses that you put on it has the valve number on top of it, so you can just like, virtually, you tap on it and it pops up the information about that valve when was last maintained, what issues we have, how old is it to set in the other, rather than looking on a map and trying to figure out okay, which valve am I looking at here or which hydrant am I looking at, am I looking at the correct hydrant? If you can do that overlay in the real world that I could see being huge. And again, like seeing the pipes underneath the ground And you have to be worried about accuracy and some things like, just like we are now with our locates, but just think about how differently, how much more easily you could interact with that infrastructure than if you could do that.

Mike Spack: 45:49

And then, while you're out there working on it, you would just be immersed in the asset management system, so if something wasn't correct, you would be correcting it easily, that's. It's just taking the friction out of maintaining these data sets, because nobody wants to be just typing in data, and yet that's what many of our staff are getting reduced to.

Marc Culver: 46:17

Yeah, and a lot of our staff, let's be honest. I mean interfacing with a phone or a tablet or even a computer. Isn't it really as intuitive as the computer companies think? they've become? still not very intuitive. No, you know, and particularly depending on what generation you're from or what your background is or what your hobbies are, you know, it can be really challenging to get to the information that you want, when you want it, where you want it. And if we could somehow improve that interface. So it was really as simple as putting on a set of glasses and you're seeing everything And you can instantly see oh, this is not in the right place, let's move this over to here. Or you know, when was the? what was the reflectivity of retro, reflectivity of this sign, you know, and you could just, you know, touch something and it'll tell you That would be, that would be really cool, and that actually gets into the one of the other buzzwords that was at this conference, which was digital twins.

Mike Spack: 47:19

I haven't heard that before.

Marc Culver: 47:20

Yeah so that's a whole nother industry, i guess, or segment and that's where, and to some extent, asset management and GIS can be considered a digital twin. It's basically a digitized version of a real world thing. All right, so I think the easiest example that people can think of from a digital twins perspective is like taking a building, you know, instead of looking at blueprints or something like that, you actually digitized the whole building, like the floor plans, where the lights are and the doors aren't, everything like that And then you look at a computer screen or a virtual reality world and you see a digital twin of that building and you can go in and like zoom in and turn around and things like that. You can interact with it virtually to better understand what that infrastructure is, what is your asset. And again, gis is kind of like, i think, a low grade example of a digital twin. But as we get into more augmented reality and things like that, you can really understand the benefits of that digital twin. And that's, you know, when I'm talking about being in a put the glasses on and seeing that overlay in the real world. That's like overlaying the digital twin on top of the real world and seeing where the differences are, or being able to see underground that you can't.

Marc Culver: 48:42

And, yes, so there's a whole industry of how are you collecting the digital twin data, what are you doing with that digital twin data, using the digital twin data with artificial intelligence to do additional analysis and things like that with it too? So there's a little bit of convergence with those two things. So it's a really exciting time. I still wonder if what is this whole smart city umbrella supposed to encompass? And sometimes I think we put too much under the smart city stuff and sometimes the umbrella is just way too big in our heads And so sometimes it's kind of hard to kind of focus in on what we're really trying to do. But it's really an exciting area And thinking of it just from the perspective of everything that you can do within the city's operation to make it better with technology and sensors and AI and digitizing things, that's really exciting to think where we're gonna be in like 20 years, you know.

Mike Spack: 49:46

Yeah, it's hard to fathom where we'll be in 20 years And it's also gonna be an interesting challenge to retrain our workforce in public works around all this new technology and how to utilize it. So kind of the user experience, user interface, is gonna need so much work just to make sure it's simple and frictionless. Even more so than other industries, i feel like our industry needs even more attention to that design.

Marc Culver: 50:20

No, and I completely agree. And again, i think that's where Boltman, manc and other firms and companies like us have that opportunity to help with that, that interface and make it as simple as possible. And maybe, like you mentioned this when we were talking at the coffee shop, you know the red light, green light, yellow light. You know. If it's red, get out there and pay attention to it. If it's yellow, somebody should probably check in on it. If it's green, don't worry, it's all good And just like having that dashboard for all sorts of different things you know, right, so it's a simplify.

Mike Spack: 50:56

Ties back to the smart trash cans. but if you had all of your system overlaid and you could see the red, yellow, green for all of your different systems, well, okay, there's one red but there's three yellows around it. they're different issues, but hey, while you've got a couple people out there in the work truck, check on all of the yellow issues while you're out there. And those are the kinds of efficiency gains And that's really, i think what the public expects of us is we're supposed to be ahead of this on the maintenance side. We're they're not that tolerant to water, main brakes and sewage backups that were bridge collapses or things like that. We have to stay on top of our maintenance And that's the promise of the smart cities is helping us be more efficient at that maintenance and catching things before they turn to the red glaring problem. Yeah.

Marc Culver: 51:52

All right. Well, i think that's been a long time. I don't know how long we went there, but I think that was a great conversation on that. Thank you for pulling that out of me, mike.

Mike Spack: 52:03

It sounds like a fun conference to go to and so much different than going to a PWX and walking a giant floor with dump trucks and all that kind of stuff. So thanks, mark. And one last thing before you go. Although we don't charge for the PDH you just received by listening to the podcast, the Public Works Nerds is not free If you've listened to more than one episode. The cost to you is to tell one colleague about the podcast to help us grow our audience. Thank you, aika.