The Smart City Hub platform aims to bring together students, companies, researchers and public authorities with an interest in smart city solutions
Smart City and big data are making waves in Denmark. City of Knowledge & Urban Development is therefore launching a common platform for the development of smart city projects and solutions. The platform is called Smart City Hub, and invites researchers and students to solve challenges in cooperation with businesses and Lyngby-Taarbæk Municipality.
“Smart City Hub is an informal platform for everyone who enjoys developing ideas with others in a relaxed after-work atmosphere. The hub aims to bring the many players together in a light-hearted forum where they can work together to create some different and useful solutions,” explains Alfred Heller, Associate Professor at DTU Civil Engineering and the man behind Smart City Hub.
“The hub provides a range of infrastructure, such as an Internet of Things (IoT) platform, a data cloud and a computation platform, which participants can use to realize and demonstrate ideas,” explains Alfred Heller. He encourages people to bring along their robots, sketches, tools, prototypes, algorithms, and data, and test them in contexts they were not originally designed for.
Outlandish input
Smart City Hub was held for the first time at DTU on Thursday, 9 February. Stig Brinck, Expertise Manager at NIRAS, presented the day's topic: Smart City Network. He is in no doubt about what NIRAS gets out of spending a Thursday evening in the company of students from DTU and representatives from Lyngby-Taarbæk Municipality.
“It’s very valuable for us to hear fresh input and crazy ideas from students who may think differently to the way we do. We draw inspiration from being here too. Afterwards we can contribute by taking a commercial approach to the outlandish ideas and develop products that can be used in industry,” says Stig Brinck.
Smart City Hub also provides the opportunity to link up companies looking to solve a challenge with students looking for an MSc thesis topic. Researchers and lecturers at DTU form a natural bridge between these groups and thus fit nicely in the hub. This interaction provides all parties with a sounding board and allows a greater degree of interdisciplinary thinking,” says Stig Brinck.
Smart City Hub is hosted by City of Knowledge & Urban Development and facilitated by Alfred Heller, Associate Professor at DTU Civil Engineering. The plan is to hold a hub with a new topic every 14 days.