NTT DATA's Smart City Solution for Las Vegas Receives Two Smart 50 Awards

Plano, TX – March 14, 2019 – NTT DATA Services today announced the company’s Smart City solution for the City of Las Vegas was recognized by the Smart 50 Awards, which honors the most transformative “smart projects” of the year.

In the Urban Operations category, NTT DATA’s solution was recognized for “Smart Public Safety,” as the solution was designed to reduce response times for first responders during public safety incidents. In addition, the company’s initiative was also honored as a “Safe City” for helping to improve situational awareness and provide insights for public safety decision makers through early notification of potential and active incidents.

“Las Vegas is at the forefront of technology, and we’ll continue to leverage the most recent innovations to provide safe, reliable and efficient civic technology that stimulates economic growth,” said Michael Sherwood, CIO, City of Las Vegas. “These awards exemplify our commitment to exploring emerging technologies to maximize opportunities and benefits for our community, residents and visitors.”

Designed to improve safety, NTT DATA’s Las Vegas Smart City solution uses Internet of Things (IoT) devices, high-definition video cameras, and sound sensors to monitor a public area within the City’s Innovation District. The solution creates a secure, distributed platform using micro data centers located near sensors in the designated public area to expedite analytics and improve situational awareness. Video and sound data inputs from the area, integrated with publically available, historical data sources (such as crime, weather and social media data) allow the cognitive foundation embedded in NTT DATA’s Smart City solution to apply advanced analytical processing to facilitate safety decision making.

By leveraging cognitive analytics, including artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, the Smart City solution also learns normal patterns of activity occurring in public places and can detect and alert the authorities of those patterns that appear abnormal to reduce response times for first responders.

“We are proud our Smart City solution been recognized to enhance the safety and quality of life for citizens, while also improving the efficiency of state and local governments,” said Bill Baver, VP, NTT DATA Services. “This successful project demonstrates the growing benefits and use cases of a more connected society, and we are constantly exploring new opportunities to leverage this technology with our current and future clients.”

The Smart City solution in Las Vegas also enables real-time alerts for public crowd density, number of vehicles, sound alerts and more, which allows predictive alerts, validation of critical alerts and a reduction in the amount of data required to be processed by the City.

To design and implement the Smart City solution, NTT DATA partnered with its parent company, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), as well as its operating companies Dimension Data, NTT Communications, NTT COMWARE and NTT Security.

In addition, through an ongoing partnership between NTT and Dell Technologies, the solution incorporates Dell EMC’s hyper-converged infrastructure and IoT gateways, as well as VMware’s virtualization software hosting predictive analytics applications. The two companies announced their expanded partnership in May with an initiative to develop Smart City solutions for municipalities worldwide.

The City of Las Vegas will begin its initial use of the solution in early 2019 with the consideration of full-scale services beginning in the coming months. To learn more about NTT’s Smart City initiative in Las Vegas, visit our website and watch the case study on YouTube.

The “Smart Public Safety” and “Safe City” projects will be honored at the Smart 50 Awards Gala on Monday, April 1 in Denver, Colorado. The Smart 50 Awards, which annually recognize global smart cities projects, are hosted in partnership with Smart Cities Connect, Smart Cities Connect Foundation and U.S. Ignite.