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San José implements Intel technology for a smarter city

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Soma Tah
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SAN JOSE, USA: The city of San José and Intel Corporation are collaborating on a public-private partnership to further the city's "Green Vision" goals. The project, known as Smart Cities USA, is expected to help drive San José's economic growth, foster 25,000 clean-tech jobs, create environmental sustainability and enhance the quality of life for residents.

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The pilot program in San José is Intel's first smart city implementation in the United States. The scalability of Intel architecture enables the intelligence and flexibility necessary for cities across the country to quickly deploy a range of smart city solutions for everything from air and water quality to traffic and parking management to communications systems and other city infrastructure.

Scalability Meets Sustainability

Today's cities consume two-thirds of the world's energy. To address the escalating demands of existing and future residents, cities are looking for ways to introduce more technology to become "smarter" about the use of limited resources and more flexible in responding to residents' needs.

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The Smart Cities USA pilot project will give San José residents real-time, local data that can inform their personal decisions. For example, the community will better understand how they can help "Spare the Air" on poor air quality days. When there is a local air quality alert, residents can choose to take public transit, bicycle or carpool to get to work or school and thus reduce emissions and improve air quality.

San José, known as the Capital of Silicon Valley, is installing a network of sensors to create a "sustainability lens" that uses Intel technology to measure characteristics such as particulates in the air, noise pollution and traffic flow. Such measurement data will produce meaningful insights that will lead to improvements in air quality, noise, transportation efficiency, environmental sustainability, health and energy efficiency.

"To help improve quality of life in San José, we're exploring new ways of capturing and sharing localized information to our residents," said Kerrie Romanow, director of San José's Environmental Services Department. "With better information, we tend to make better decisions. We're optimistic that the real-time air quality data will help our staff understand how we can positively influence the environment right here in San José as well as regionally and globally."

Intel Technology for Use in Smart Cities

The city of San José has installed a sensor demonstration platform using Intel Gateway Solutions for the Internet of Things with an Intel Quark processor and third-party sensors. Each gateway incorporates Wind River Intelligent Device Platform software with McAfee security features connected to Intel's Hadoop distribution in the cloud.