Over 200 students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) across the nation tackled real-world problems from North Carolina cities like Charlotte and Winston Salem, delivering creative tech solutions to urban challenges.
As I discuss regularly in this column, every industry is going through a digital transformation from established, static systems built upon legacy information to automated, continuously optimizing systems based on real-time data. Local government is no exception. Each time you learn of a “smart” city solution, you can rest assured that it is based on new principles rooted in IoT, AI and automation.
A challenge is that municipal governments, large and small, have insufficient staff, budget and expertise to lean in to these new solutions at the pace we see in private industry. That is not to say there are not talented engineers, developers and program managers in the public sector. My experience says the opposite. Many of the most talented and creative technologists I’ve met are dedicated to work in the communities where they live. But rarely does any city or county have enough of them. And most small towns do not have enough budget to even have a single IT employee on staff.
For the past 3 years, RIoT has been privileged to be able to support a creative approach to accelerating digital transformation projects, while reducing the burden on cities and inspiring the next generation of public sector technologists. The concept I’ll describe below, is championed by Pathway Community Foundation, a North Carolina nonprofit working at the intersection of IoT, civic infrastructure and the HBCU community.
HBCU Smart City Challenge
I was able to join the HBCU Smart City Challenge final pitch event, hosted at Winston Salem State University. At this event, six teams of HBCU students presented solutions that they had ideated and prototyped for problems sourced from three North Carolina cities. At stake was more than $10,000 in prizes for the students. But the much bigger impact is the relationships they built and the experiential learning they received from taking on real-world problems and building functional solutions.
More than 200 students from HBCUs across the US applied for 25 spots to work on a municipal-guided project over two semesters. Twelve HBCUs were represented in the 25 finalist teams this year. The cities of Charlotte, Winston Salem and Rocky Mount each submitted challenges to real needs in their communities and volunteered staff time to work with the students. Students visited these cities to meet with staff and conduct on-the-ground research and relationship building.
Over nearly a year, these student teams met weekly with volunteer mentors and facilitators and stayed in close touch with municipal sponsors. They spent time in workshops that included diverse topics like the fundamentals of IoT, data analytics, municipal operations and product development. Each team self-organized their work, roles and responsibilities. They researched potential technologies to deploy into solutions, prototyped them and then presented their findings back to the cities.
Here is a quick summary of the six projects from this year’s challenge:
- Team Anchor Point – Developed an application to identify and track homeless populations and connect housing-displaced individuals to support services, while maintaining appropriate privacy and security.
- Team CityPal – Created an AI model and data sources for analytics related to pedestrian safety. Their tool advises mitigations and solutions (e.g. new crosswalks, signage, speed limits, sidewalks, etc) to deploy to maximize impact.
- Team Fireproof RM – Addressed a goal to reduce cooking fires by analyzing associated population behaviors. From this analysis they advise fire departments of the best times/places to conduct fire safety education.
- Team PYRA – Created an ESRI-compatible dashboard tool that enables greater numbers of stakeholders in the city planning and fire departments to collaborate. This leads to smarter planning of new developments, securing future safety is baked in from the start.
- Team Smart Win – Applies cameras to buses to monitor street signs and other “non-smart” assets in real time. Greatly improves maintenance and pedestrian safety, issuing tickets to local/state/federal agencies to address problems (visibility, missing sign, dirty, etc) as soon as they are identified.
- Team The Pipe Census – Created a digital process that leverages vision AI and industry software APIs for mapping water system pipes. Addressing a requirement at the NC Department of Environmental Quality to address water pipe type for all residents and businesses, with a focus to replace lead pipes and other health hazards.
Before I share who won, I would be remiss to not recognize the impact for these cities. The problems listed above are high priority issues that are not getting addressed with the speed or attention they deserve, simply because there are not enough resources to spread around. Rocky Mount was the challenge sponsor for the Pipe Census team, who learned that the city had only been able to map 0.1% of the pipes they need to map in the next three years, primarily because the time-intensive current process is creating extensive overtime, which is expensive to approve. The team’s solution took a 30+ minute per measurement and error-prone manual process to under 5 minutes, including AI layers to verify accuracy.
While Pathway Community Foundation’s process is novel, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Corporate sponsors and community volunteers have rallied around the concept, helping it to grow every year. MasterCard has been a title sponsor all three years, bucking the trend so many companies are making right now that are pulling back from community and nonprofit support. At a dinner after the contest, I was speaking to one representative who noted that he is able to fill all his open computer science, software development and product management positions with the absolute best talent by being out in the community. In fact, most spring positions are filled by the prior November, before top students even learn of other opportunities.
As one of the competition judges, I was part of deliberations to hand out awards. The organizers had to give us a 15 minute extension, since the quality was so high that we had difficulty selecting who to award. While the program is not architected to drive entrepreneurial outcomes, as someone who runs an accelerator I can attest that every team had a solution worthy of a new tech startup. And further evidencing just how competitive it was, the audience also gave an award for best project, selecting a 4th team that wasn’t in the first, second and third positions that we awarded.
In the end, the results were:
- First place – $5,000 – The Pipe Census
- Second place – $3,000 – PYRA
- Third place – $2,000 – Smart Win
- Audience choice – Fireproof RM
Congratulations to all the students for an outstanding achievement.
In a time when the federal government is pulling away from supporting organizations that are providing authentic help to the cities and towns in which we live, I hope learning about the good work at Pathway Community Foundation may inspire you to get involved in your community. This digital transformation is real. Cities that don’t adopt “smart” solutions will fall behind, akin to a digital rust belt. But not all communities know how to move forward. With technology, and incredible talent like what we see coming from the HBCU community, we have a chance to make the places in which we live safer and more vibrant - even with limited resources.
If you would like to get involved and are not sure how, feel free to reach out to me directly at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and I can connect you to Pathway, or suggest alternatives in your community. If you are in local government, I’m available to connect you to resources as well. Thanks for reading.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Tom Snyder
Quelle/Source: WRAL News, 05.05.2025
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