Ep. 21 | Carnegie Mellon's Karen Lightman on the Intersection of Tech and Policy for Smart Cities

"Smart city" isn't exactly an engineering term. And yet engineers are responsible for developing the technologies that take a city from being advanced to being "smart," including wireless communications, sensor fusion, and machine-learning algorithms implemented to serve public life. 

But it turns out the real hurdles in the way of smart city technologies are much more human and complex than we may realize.

In this episode, Dave speaks with Karen Lightman, the Executive Director of Carnegie Mellon's Metro21 Smart Cities Institute about how engineering and public policy work hand-in-hand in smart cities. Hear about the tragedies of falling in love with a chip design that doesn't have a market, the dangers of avoiding standards in the tech industry, and the importance of testing smart city technologies in real-world "living laboratories"—or "living sandboxes," as Karen prefers to call them.