Every day, leaders of large cities grapple with knotty, complex problems like decaying public transportation infrastructures, aging utility lines, urban blight, neighborhoods that are vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and other multi-faceted socio-economic challenges. Increasingly, municipal leaders are turning to urban analytics, data collection, and advances in sensor technology to help solve the problems of modern cities in bold, transformative ways.

So-called smart city initiatives are getting lots of attention in the marketplace as well as from the federal government. Many visionaries have asserted the transformational power of the Internet of Things, marked by the increasing ubiquity of sensors that collect and in some cases share or communicate data that can be used in almost infinite ways.