(PRESS RELEASE) After 24 hours of designing, collaborating and ideating towards better transportation and quality of life in Lafayette, more $10,000 in cash and prizes were awarded to 360 Fuel.
Students, city and state leaders, along with members of the tech community and local transportation community groups, came together during the LUS Fiber Smart City Challenge civic hackathon to commence a new era of innovation, economic development and Smart City initiatives in Lafayette.
Civic hackathons are immersive, human-centered design sprints with focused efforts to solve some of the most complex social challenges.
"Creating this civic hackathon was an important step towards paving the way for Lafayette as a Smart City. We wanted to showcase and connect our local talent in order to unleash the potential of our city and introduce technological innovators to our community. This step opens up the doors to innovation and
economic development as Lafayette hacks its way into a smart future, with an accent," explained Mayor-President Joel Robideaux.
Over the 24-hour event, competing teams came up with solutions to the growing toll traffic and transportation are taking on Lafayette’s quality of life. Projects such as these reiterate the importance of creating spaces that allow for multi-disciplinary collaboration in order to come up with the solutions that
will create the biggest impact in an inclusive way.
The winning team from 360Fuel developed Geaux, a sensor, mobile, cloud, and artificial intelligence (AI) driven platform for smart cities. Geaux incentivizes transportation options like carpooling, bike-sharing, bus-riding and walking while enabling the quickest directions and fastest parking times. Geaux’s
application program interface (API) opens enhanced real-time data sets and traffic diversion capabilities to mapping engines and mobile applications like Uber, Waze and Lyft. Geaux’s simple solution paired with LUS Fiber’s sophisticated infrastructure paves the way for the implementation of this smart city
solution to improving transportation and providing capability of the vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications in Lafayette.
"We are proud to present the Smart City Challenge, an innovative platform for technology partners to compete to conceptualize the next citizen-centric solution for the city of Lafayette," shares Grant McLarnon, CEO of Adoxio. "As a leader in the smart city space, we encourage other cities to look to the
city of Lafayette as an example of progressive thought leadership and city planning. By beginning with a connected community and infrastructure, the city has created an environment of citizen service only limited by creativity."
LUS Fiber, in collaboration with Adoxio Business Solutions & local community partners, reached their goal of highlighting and inclusively connecting regional and local talent into space where, together, human-centered solutions were found.
"We live in a technology-driven world, and this is an exciting time where access to fiber technology is enabling innovators to significantly impact our quality of life. LUS Fiber plays a vital role in Lafayette’s growth into a Smart City, and we are excited to support initiatives encouraging community solutions for
our data-driven, connected society," explained Terry Huval, Director of LUS Fiber.
