Most of us—54 percent of the world’s population, in fact—live in cities. They offer great opportunities in terms of jobs, education, healthcare and public resources. However, they also come with significant challenges related to transportation, energy, pollution and disaster response. In the cities of the future, machines and systems linked and coordinated by Internet-style networks will enhance the opportunities cities offer and help us meet their challenges.

If you’d like to see a glimpse of this exciting future as it arrives, please join us at the Global City Teams Challenge Expo on June 1, 2015, at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.  Whether you’re a civic official, interested member of the public, or corporate leader, you’ll have a chance to experience firsthand the future of Smart Cities and Internet of Things applications.

The Expo, sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and US Ignite, will showcase more than 65 Smart Cities projects that will be deployed this year in communities around the world. Each is a collaborative effort between businesses, university researchers and communities to harness Internet of Things technologies in ways that address the needs of the world’s rapidly urbanizing population.

The projects will demonstrate how connecting smart devices and systems—in sectors such as energy, healthcare, education, disaster response and transportation—will enable communities to improve services, promote economic growth and enhance their citizens’ quality of life.

Presentations will highlight projects from around the world, including smart water leak detection and public lighting control systems in Los Angeles; a multi-app platform to reduce congestion in public transportation for Nashville, Tenn.; and an air quality sensing network for Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

In addition to the dozens of specific projects, federal leaders will provide an overall picture of where these technologies can take us. I will be joining Department of Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and Tom Kalil, Deputy Director for Technology and Innovation at the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, to deliver keynote remarks.

Among the international participants who are scheduled to appear are the King and Queen of the Netherlands, who will visit the Expo in the early afternoon. Several of the projects involve companies and communities in the Netherlands, which has long focused on sustainable urban design and finding clever solutions to water- and energy-related problems.

We believe that the successful deployment of the specific projects that you’ll see at the Expo will demonstrate that these technologies can deliver tangible everyday benefits. But it’s also important that, at the end of the day, we end up with more than just a collection of individual success stories sprinkled around the globe. 

We need to take these particular experiences, find commonalities, establish standards and make them useful for others. It is critical to develop smart cities solutions and models that can work together, are repeatable in different places and can be scaled for communities of different sizes.

That’s exactly why my agency is involved. NIST works to enhance economic security and improve our quality of life by promoting U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness.  And helping industry and our cities smooth the way for this emerging Internet of Things world promises to reap tremendous rewards for the private sector and all of our citizens.

Please join us for this inspiring Expo on June 1. Details, including an agenda and a link for registration (which is free), are available on the US Ignite website.