Heinz College Students Bring Smart City Thinking to Pittsburgh's Road Projects
Students from Heinz College's MS in Public Policy & Management program worked with the City of Pittsburgh to bring smart city thinking to their infrastructure projects and to develop a strategy for progress. The process that the students created would allow the city to better coordinate its projects and to create maps of Pittsburgh's underground. This could result in millions of dollars saved annually.
The project was advised by Anna J. Siefken, associate director for Innovation and Strategic Partnerships at Carnegie Mellon’s Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation and Grant Ervin, the City of Pittsburgh's chief resiliency officer.
“Rather than thinking of it as just an engineering problem, or a data science or computer science problem, they saw it as a people problem,” Siekfen said of the Heinz students who worked on the project. “This really took an understanding of what would influence people [with different perspectives] to move in the right direction.”