Innovation Camp Will ‘Boost’ Fredericton’s Smart City Potential
FREDERICTON – Participants of BOOST Fredericton’s week-long Innovation Camp will get together to come up with innovative solutions to issues facing the city’s adoption of smart technology in the face of 5G infrastructure.
Running from May 31 to June 4, selected entrepreneurs, students, educators, researchers, and developers will gather to collaborate on issues facing the city of Fredericton as the first 5G city in Atlantic Canada.
They will work together to explore and fully develop 5G use cases into prototype ideas. There are two areas the groups will focus on: flood risk preparation and emergency response.
“We’re providing the digital infrastructure using Rogers 5G and the city’s IoT sensor network, and our data we’re making available through the Open Data portal,” said Laurie Guthrie, Civic Innovation Strategist in a presentation to Council last Tuesday. “We’ve packaged this all together as BOOST Innovation Camp so we can solicit prototype ideas based on those 5G use cases.”
Participants will work in groups of five over the course of a week before presenting their ideas in a presentation on Friday, June 4.
“We’re all working towards our vision of becoming Atlantic Canada’s center of 5G innovation,” said Guthrie.
5G technology is considered to be the most transformative technology since wireless services were introduced in 195. It is expected to introduce new capabilities that will potentially reduce the lag between sending a request and receiving a response from the network to one millisecond.
The potential for this technology is wide-ranging and drastically increases the number of connected devices and the range of capabilities for tasks requiring quick responses.
“Last September we launched 5G in Fredericton, a first for Atlantic Canada, and working with the Fredericton Innovation Partnership we’re harnessing this next-generation technology to explore new and transformational solutions to how we live and work,” said Tess Van Thielen, Vice President, Advanced Services in a release.
Partners Innovation camp includes UNB’s Technology Management and Entrepreneurship program, UNB’s Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity, NBCC, Ignite Fredericton, and CyberNB. Rogers Canada, Siemens Canada, and Kognitiv Spark will serve as technology sponsors.
“Through these collaborations, we’re bringing together the right partners to advance 5G smart city technology in Canada,” said Thielen. “We’re looking forward to seeing the innovations that come out of this camp.”
Liam Floyd is a reporter with Huddle. Send him story suggestions: [email protected].