Pioneering a unified system for innovative tech pilots in New York City

Paul Rothman is the director of smart cities and internet of things at the New York City Office of Technology and Innovation. In this role, Rothman draws from his experiences in the private sector and academia to oversee the Smart City Testbed Program, which facilitates technology-driven pilot projects that can help city agencies plan for future innovations. Examples of pilots that have come out of the program include an New York University-originated project that used drones to map buildings to identify any efficiency defects and a project with the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to deploy air quality monitors and improvement devices to track air quality in real time. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What does a “smart city” mean to you? Is New York City a smart city? How could the city improve on that front?

A smart city is one that is providing a high quality of life and creating an accessible and seamless experience for residents and visitors as they go about their daily life. More tangibly, that means effective and timely public services, having freedom of choice in terms of your housing and transportation options (and) having a safe, clean and healthy environment. Those are all the macro elements of a smart city. Now, all of those things aren’t necessarily tied to technology. I think a lot of times when people think about smart cities, they think about technology. Here at OTI, that’s really what our focus is on: How does technology enable those kinds of goals? We work with our agency partners and create digital public services to try to make that accessible, seamless experience for folks and to leverage technology- and data-based decision-making to try to improve city services and conditions within the city for residents and visitors.

I would say we definitely do fit that definition. I think we could look toward the city’s PlaNYC, which looks at that macro view of housing, public safety, health, climate, sustainability, transportation, education and more, coming up with plans and policies to address all of those issues. More on my team’s smart city and IoT work: We worked on environmental sensors with agencies; we did a pilot recently around traffic flow data and just any kind of technology that could really improve efficiency. Thinking about force multipliers for things that agencies are already doing. How do we improve efficiency and service delivery?

We’re always shooting for the highest quality of life for our residents. There’s always room for improvement. I think a lot of the programs that I mentioned are making strides in that direction and are continuing to use data to make decisions, listening to constituents about issues that they have. Those are the ways that we continue to improve and make the city smarter, safer, more affordable for folks. Every process that any of our agencies are currently doing can be made more efficient and faster.

Can you give a brief overview of the New York City Office of Technology and Innovation’s Smart City Testbed Program? What’s its mission and how long has it been in place?

We launched the Testbed Program in October of 2023. It’s a piloting program that’s got a rolling admission for applicants. We’ve got an application up on our website. Anybody in any company or any researchers who are working on urban technology who are interested can comment and see if they’re a fit for the program. We look at applications and then we try to matchmake applications with city agencies to test new and emerging technologies. We have relationships with folks that are in the policy and innovation space across agencies. A lot of times we make new connections to this program as well. We just try to serve the needs of our agency partners, so we work as a matchmaker and a connector. We also do project management: We’ll get an application, we’ll present it to an agency, if they think that something has potential, we’ll have a discussion with the vendor, sort of thinking what the scope of the pilot might be. From there, if we have that consensus, we go into the piloting phase.

These are no-cost pilots. We as a city put our time and assets forward and we ask that the vendors do the same with their technology, whether it’s a software or a piece of hardware. They loan us the technology for kind of a “test drive” for a short period of time, a couple of months, enough time that an agency can get a sense of what that technology is capable of doing and how it would fit into their operations. 

It’s not a procurement vehicle. We think of it as an educational program, so that agencies can really learn about what technology can potentially do. Once that pilot is over, it’s up to the agency to find the appropriate procurement vehicle, whether it’s (a request for proposal) or something else to access that technology, either from that (vendor) or another vendor. There’s no guarantees of contracts at the end of the pilot.

What pilots has the Testbed Program worked on so far?

We’ve had some pilots so far that we launched. One involves drones doing energy efficiency assessments for buildings. We’ve worked with (the Department of Transportation) on assessing street usage using machine-learning-based sensors and computer-vision sensors to understand how our streets are being used in terms of different modes of mobility so that can, in turn, help DOT make decisions about street design. We did a pilot that we hoped would actively improve air quality and real-time monitoring of air quality. We’ve got some more pilots that we’re getting close to announcing.

We also announced a new initiative that we are doing called the Clean Construction Innovation pilot. This was a new sort of framework for the Testbed. The Testbed is an open application, up for any type of urban technology. With the Clean Construction Innovation pilot, we partnered with the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice to put out this specific call for construction technology. Now we’re in the process of reviewing those applications, trying to match those pieces of electric construction equipment with agencies that would be users of that potential equipment. Then we’ll look to do that pilot as well, where the agencies will be able to test that electric construction equipment.

There was an executive order a couple of years ago under Mayor (Eric) Adams saying the city was going to make an effort to start replacing diesel-powered construction equipment with electric construction equipment. We’ve seen progress to that end in Scandinavia and so we’re looking to bring that here to New York City. The benefits are obviously lower greenhouse gas emissions, but I think the things that would be felt more immediately for residents would be quieter construction sites and fewer local pollutants, like diesel. So, we’re going to be hopefully announcing sometime in April or May the pilots that we’re going to be doing as a part of that Clean Construction Innovation pilot. And hopefully in the future, we’ll have more of those very focused kinds of technology calls that we can do pilots for. But aside from that, the Testbed is open to anybody that’s working on urban technology.

How well have these pilot projects performed? Have any pilots from previous years been scaled up?

Well, 2024 was our first full year of the program, so we were actually doing those initial pilots that we launched with. Some of the technologies are going to be continued, and so I think that there’s some benefit there. (We’re) trying to think less about the individual vendors, but more about the technology. The project that we did with DOT around the computer vision, they definitely got a lot out of that. It was really a test to see the accuracy of the machine, of the automated counts. I think that the result of that was DOT having confidence in the computer vision’s ability to do that. We’ll see where that goes in terms of larger scaling up, but beside the initial deployment, I think there’s confidence in an understood knowledge about what the technology is capable of. Similarly, around the air quality pilot, one of the companies that we worked with on that pilot, we’re working (with) on a small procurement to be able to deploy sensors a little bit more ad hoc. We’re hoping to employ some of those air quality monitors for agencies to use on individual projects. I would definitely say 2024 was a building year in terms of the program, launching it, finding our footing in terms of the workflow, how we work with other agencies and how we work with an OTI. We’re looking forward to expanding on that this year.

Is artificial intelligence incorporated into any of the pilot programs? More broadly, what role do you see AI playing in “smart cities”?

Some of the pilots that we have done do use AI, more specifically machine learning. AI is a big umbrella term, but more specifically, a lot of the pilots that we’ve run are using machine learning. The pilot we did with DOT doing video analytics and (the energy efficiency pilot) used machine learning processes to be able to evaluate building facades and energy deficiencies in a building envelope. Overall, it is and will continue to play a role in the work that we do. One of the big things about smart cities is this idea of “big data” and how you manage the data. The machine learning aspect is really what allows a lot of these applications to thrive, because it’s able to process the datasets that are being collected. I would say that’s kind of where we’re at, and I foresee it (will) continue to be in the work that we do. That’s the kind of machine learning subset of AI that has been the focus so far, of the work that we’ve done within the Testbed. OK, one thing I didn’t mention, in terms of the Testbed, is that we’re focused on pilots that are related to the public realm or physical space. So we’re not piloting things like large language models that are used for grant writing, or things like that that don’t (fit) into the kind of Testbed scope. We’re focusing on things that are public realm technologies out in the world, or things that are in physical space versus administrative software and things like that.