Launching Smart City Tracker

I’m excited to announce the public launch of my CHI project, Smart City Tracker (https://caimeng2.github.io/SmartCityTracker/).

Smart City Tracker is a web-based and open-source platform where users can track and explore local governments’ smart city implementation in the United States. It uses Google Custom Search API to systematically search the official websites of 322 cities with a population of more than 100,000.

Smart City Tracker features an interactive map with a time slider. If a city mentions “smart city” on its official website, Smart City Tracker drops a pin at its corresponding location. So, Smart City Tracker simply maps out which cities are talking about being smart. When users click on a marker, a popup window will display the city’s name, a bit of text returned by Google, and a link to the city’s official website where it mentioned being smart. The one-page website has four tabs, “about,” “map,” “data,” and “contact,” each connecting to a section. “About” provides a short description of background information on this project. “Data” shows the full dataset used in mapping in a JSON format and allow users to download it for their use. The map and datasets are updated monthly starting from January 2022.

Moving forward, I’d like to add a virtualization summarizing the trend of smart city implementation. And if I receive external funding, I’d like to expand it to all the cities in the US, including both bigs cities and small towns. I will continue working on collecting data every month and update this website. By doing this, it eventually serves as a living archive of smart city prevalence.