The Department of Transportation’s 2015 Smart City Challenge meant different things for different applicants.

For the winner, Columbus, Ohio, it was maybe best described as exciting, but overambitious. For Pittsburgh, one of six finalists, it was just the beginning of a long road to building out smart traffic-management infrastructure.

Zoom in: And for Portland, Oregon—another contest finalist—it sparked an eventual shift in the city’s posture toward smart-city projects, according to Kevin Martin, the current head of Portland’s Smart Cities program, who also worked on the 2016 proposal.

• Specifically, the city has tried to become more aligned with what experts say is now becoming conventional wisdom: Cities should prioritize the functional over the flashy.

In recent years, the city has kicked off programs that invite city residents to participate in its tech policy-making, at times even paying residents to get involved. Pam Dixon, founder and executive director of Oregon-based World Privacy Forum, told Emerging Tech Brew that the city has really “gone the extra mile” to engage its citizens and collect their input when developing data and tech policies that will affect them.

• At the center of this is Smart City PDX, a group created in 2016, after the Smart City Challenge, to manages Portland's smart-city programs and projects.
• Smart City PDX is housed within Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, and today, it has three staff members and a FY 2021–22 budget of $616,461.

Big picture: The city has used the program to help gain input on initiatives like its surveillance-technologies policy, which it is planning to release this summer, after wrapping up a multi-step community-engagement process that kicked off last June.

And in 2020, the office played an instrumental role in the city’s groundbreaking ban of facial recognition both for city departments—including law enforcement—and private business, over concerns the technology would disproportionately affect minority and disadvantaged populations.

Read the full story on Portland’s smart-city pivot.—JM

Smart traffic lights. Smart roads. Smart buildings. Smart...waste management?

Enter: Rubicon, a Lexington, Kentucky-based software company that digitizes dirty work. The company was founded in 2008 and plans to go public via SPAC later this quarter at a projected ~$2 billion valuation.

• In December 2021, Rubicon estimated $577 million in revenue for the year, and has raised $222.7 million in funding since its founding, including investment from…Leonardo DiCaprio.
• The company works with over 70 city governments, from Montgomery, Alabama, to Baltimore, Maryland—to optimize recycling and waste-management practices. It also has commercial customers like Walmart, Best Buy, and Starbucks, through a network of thousands of independent haulers.

How it works: Rubicon collects data through a combination of telematics devices, which track metrics like braking, turning, and engine health, an iPhone or iPad app that drivers use to report issues on the road, like trash cans placed incorrectly, and truck-mounted cameras trained to identify potholes and overflowing trash cans in real time, using image-recognition AI, according to Michael Allegretti, chief strategy officer at Rubicon.

• The outward facing cameras have been deployed on garbage trucks in “around a dozen cities,” Allegretti said, including Washington, DC, Kansas City, Missouri, Fort Collins, Colorado, and Roseville, California.

Last month, Rubicon partnered on a three-year contract with Houston, Texas, and its 2.3 million residents to optimize the operations of its fleet of 391 vehicles.

Zoom out: Using AI, machine learning, and sensors to help cities and large corporations take out the trash could be a lucrative market: The US waste-collection services market in 2022 will be worth $59 billion, per IBISWorld estimates.

Click here to read the full story.—JM

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Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

I provide the bridge from Skipp (an AI kitchen and bath-renovation startup) to non-tech companies from which we source labor, products, and other goods and services. A lot of my role has been explaining how our company operates remotely and how we can be based in Brooklyn, with 80% of our clients on the West Coast, to companies that are manufacturing cabinets, countertops, flooring, hardware, plumbing, and appliances.

What’s your favorite emerging-tech project you’ve worked on?

As a company founded on the basis of AI being the smart way of the future, providing people with answers better and faster than humans, all the projects I work on have been touched by AI. Our proprietary system takes clients’ kitchen measurements and turns them into smart layout options faster than a human ever could. What I get to work on is the procurement of physical material goods and products, after our tech provides our clients with their renovation layout options. Our clients pick the one that suits their preferences best, and then we get to work.

What emerging tech are you least optimistic about, and why?

The metaverse is what I am least optimistic about. We all stare at screens enough already [between] work, streaming at night after work, and apps on our phones, and we need to interact in real life more than ever. We’re human!

What’s the best piece of tech-related media you’ve read/watched/listened to?

Vox’s podcast Land of the Giants. There have been some enlightening stories about Apple and Amazon.

Stat: Ever wonder how much, uh, every company in the world combined spends on tech? Gartner estimates it’ll be $4.4 trillion this year. BTW, if you want more stats like that, sign up for our forthcoming IT Brew newsletter.

Quote: “I don’t yet know the conclusions we will reach, but we must be clear that issuing a CBDC would likely present a major design and engineering challenge that would require years of development, not months.”—Janet Yellen, last week in her first speech on digital assets

Read: Could we see a quantum leap in battery research?

For (potentially) super-fast 3D printing: Consumer electronics company Anker announced its first 3D printer last week, which it claims is 5x faster than competition. Check out the Kickstarter.

For restful nights: How to pick the best sleep tracker for you.

For a futuristic traffic stop: Cops recently pulled over a fully driverless Cruise robotaxi.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• The one IPCC climate-tech chart you need to know
• Can quantum computing fuel a leap in battery research?
• Report: AI investment more than doubled to $93.5 billion in 2021