CURIOSITY LAB The Blueprint for Smart Cities Worldwide

Once a vision of hovercrafts and floating cities, the future is now here, and Peachtree Corners is at the forefront. Curiosity Lab, the City’s smart city ecosystem, was founded in 2019 to help. In four years, Curiosity Lab has facilitated the development of products and ideas to propel our cities into a future of environmental conservation, diligent public safety and unprecedented efficiency.

The feature that gives Curiosity Lab its cutting edge is its ability to offer any business, from startups to worldwide conglomerates, a free, real-world testing environment. Any company with an idea and willpower can create, test, invent and reinvent their products in the City to prime them for the real world before launching.

“A lot of times, when innovators first test technology, it’s done in a closed environment with controlled variables. Once it’s introduced to the real world, they may find gaps that weren’t obvious in the controlled testing environment. Curiosity Lab acts as the middle ground, where companies who want to test their technology in a real-world environment before full-scale deployment can continue to develop their technology while exposing it to real-world factors before a full-scale launch,” explains Kelsey Neely, Curiosity Lab’s PR and Strategy Specialist.

The City has forged partnerships with dozens of organizations and adopted countless innovations now used daily. Companies from T-Mobile and UPS to startups like SkyMul and Beep have all become partners, permitting the City to use their technology and making an even broader tech landscape available to future innovators.

So, what exactly sets a “smart city” apart from the rest? It uses technology to make key economic sectors of the City, like transportation and healthcare, more efficient.

With its “City Street of the Future,” Peachtree Corners stormed the transportation scene. The three-mile roadway surrounding Technology Park connects residents and vehicles using 5G connectivity, courtesy of T-Mobile. Bosch cameras and LiDAR sensors use 5G to transmit traffic data to the City’s IoT Control Center, allowing Peachtree Corners to constantly monitor traffic patterns and improve traffic flow.

Additionally, the City operates autonomous shuttles with startup company Beep on their autonomous vehicle test track. Using various technologies, the shuttles learn from their surroundings each day. The City has worked with Beep and a number of other partners to demonstrate how various C-V2X technologies can be used with the autonomous shuttles to improve roadway safety and efficiency.

Curiosity Lab, through its partnership with T-Mobile, features technology in the T-Mobile Executive Briefing Center that taps into the needs of the healthcare industry. One of T-Mobile’s 5G solutions enables emergency responders to asses a patient while they are on the way to the hospital, decreasing emergency response time.

Curiosity Lab has also housed the start-up company Sanguina. Sanguina is committed to empowering people to act on their health, through the creation of accessible science and technology. The company helps individuals achieve optimal wellness with personalized blood health diagnostic and screening tools, including AnemoCheck, the first-ever mobile app designed for instant, non-invasive hemoglobin level estimation to help those affected by anemia.

Committed to keeping the City and the world a green place, Curiosity Lab also fosters green space and works to reduce the human footprint. City partner, Trellis, has designed soil sensors offering farmers and agriculturalists a deeper understanding of the soil they work with to alter farming practices and maximize yields.

Other companies like Urban Canopee, a French startup, are geared towards generating green space. Urban Canopee aims to cool down urban areas like Atlanta, where vegetation growth is nearly impossible, by implementing greenery with an irrigation system that helps clean air and provide shade.

Many drone-centric startups are underway at the lab, promising an alternate future run almost entirely by drones. SkyMul, a startup housed in Curiosity Lab, works to create drones that autonomously tie rebar and will help to mitigate one of the most dangerous parts of the construction process. These innovations, among others like robot delivery systems, self-driving scooters and more, make up just a few of the creations Peachtree Corners facilitates at Curiosity Lab. But it wouldn’t be possible without the culture of open-mindedness and the City’s “ yes” people in its corner.

This attitude of determination and willingness to bend over backward to make things happen for all businesses, big or small, has earned Peachtree Corners a spot in smart city history.

summer Flicks on the Green Night Music

Sports on the Screen

Summer Concert Series

Peachtree Corners Festival

Bark in the Park

Light up the Corners Run fall

Flicks on the Green Night Music

Sports on the Screen

PTC Decathlon winter Sports on the Screen

Veterans Day Ceremony

Holiday Glow

PeachtreeCornersGa.gov.

In 100 years Snellville has gone from a simple intersection at highways 124 and 78 served by a store founded by one of its founders to the home of the second-busiest commercial corridor in the county. And now The Grove at Towne Center is nearing completion – a $100 million mixed-use project featuring luxury apartments, the new Elizabeth Williams Gwinnett County Library, and restaurants and entertainment options set for completion by the end of the year.

Centennial events will take place all year with a big celebration in August on the Towne Green.

www.snellville.org

Snellville began as a place of commerce. The City’s co-founders ran the Snell and Sawyer Store more than 100 years ago at what used to be the crossing of two horse trails that are now the intersection of highways 78 and 124. Its proximity to the two major highways makes it a desirable destination to call home. Today, that history continues as Snellville anticipates celebrating 100 years as a city this August.

A great revitalization effort will mark Snellville’s centennial as the City inches closer to the completion of a brand-new residential and commercial project in the heart of Snellville. The Grove at Towne Center promises to bring new life to the City with unique restaurants and diverse housing options.

Recent accolades include:

Governor’s Cup winner, Governor’s Office of Highway Safety

Law Enforcement Award: Cpl. DeVries, Veterans of Foreign Wars

Law Enforcement Public Servant of the Year for the state of Georgia: Cpl. DeVries, Veterans of Foreign Wars

Tree City USA, Arbor Day Foundation

Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting, Government Finance Officers Association