Thomas Breen photo
City Controller Daryl Jones (right) and city GIS Analyst Alfredo Herrera at Friday’s City Hall meeting.
Yale University plans on building out a new fiber optic internal communications network for its 500 facilities. Thanks to a new working relationship between the city and the university, the Harp administration sees the school’s infrastructure upgrades as an opportunity to learn best practices and achieve economies of scale for developing its own new fiber-based communication system sometime in the near future.
That update came Friday from Controller Daryl Jones, who also heads the city’s information technology (IT) department, during a biweekly meeting of department heads held in the mayor’s conference room on the second floor of City Hall.
The primary subject of the hour-long meeting was the city’s next interdepartmental neighborhood sweep, this one planned for the Hill North on Wednesday, Sept. 26 and Thursday, Sept. 27.
City department heads gather for biweekly neighborhood sweep update in mayor’s conference room.
The fourth such city-led sweep, following up on similar endeavors in Newhallville, Fair Haven, and the Annex over the past year, will see economic development officials, anti-blight and building inspectors, and a variety of other city personnel comb through around 10 square blocks between Congress Avenue, Ward Street, Sylvan Avenue, and Winthrop Avenue in the Hill. They’l look out for blighted homes, broken sidewalks, unlicensed businesses, and other quality-of-life concerns.
Friday’s meeting, chaired by Mayor Toni Harp, brought together two dozen department heads and other high-ranking city officials to review a wealth of carefully plotted, block-by-block statistics about Hill North in an attempt to use the geographic information system (GIS)-plotted data to inform where city officials should focus during the latest neighborhood walk. Some of the data reviewed included automobile collisions going back to 2015, owner-occupied homes vs. properties run by absentee landlords, and locations of SeeClickFix reports.
As the department heads planned for the walk ahead and discussed follow-up items for previous neighborhood sweeps, Jones also updated the group on new developments in the city’s IT department.
In particular, he mentioned a new working relationship with Yale’s IT department. City officials will now meet with Yale tech personnel on a quarterly basis to discuss the university’s planned upgrades to its internal communication network.
“For them to announce that they’re redoing their entire fiber footprint for Yale,” Jones said, “is a really big win for us.”
The reason, he said, is that the city can learn about best practices for how to establish its own internal communications network,for internet connections to phone lines and camera recordings, based on fiber-optic cables rather than copper cables.
Fiber optic communications use pulses of light sent through thin strands of plastic or glass to transfer information at speeds 10 to 100 times faster than cable internet’s current methods of transferring data through electricity sent through copper cables.
Jones and Mayor Toni Harp.
“When they go underground, we can go underground,” Jones said about city IT officials and Yale IT officials. “When they drop fiber, we can drop fiber.”
He said the city is interested in building out its own high-speed internal communication system connecting all 44 government-operated buildings.
“It causes us to be more efficient,” he said. “It also drives down cost.”
He said that the city currently spends between $10,000 and $15,000 for Comcast service for its nearly four dozen buildings, which include police substations and parks department buildings.
“More importantly,” he said, “we’re looking down the road because we’re setting ourselves up to get fiber, internet, public wi-fi to our residents. So this is just our first stage.”
Jones clarified after the meeting that the city will not be using the university’s new fiber communications network.
“We will share best practices,” he said about the potential city benefits resulting from Yale’s planned upgrades to its internal infrastructure. He said that the city may also be able to lay down its own fiber network when Yale opens up a street for the sake of building out its own system.
“More importantly,” he continued, “it’s the collaboration between the city and Yale on a project that will benefit the residents of New Haven.”
“The university will not be directly supporting the city’s network,” said Yale Deputy Press Secretary Karen Peart, “but as we work on our own networking projects, there might be opportunities for collaboration at some point. We welcome those opportunities and will remain in close communication with city representatives throughout our projects and theirs.”
Artificial Intelligence and Blue Lights
Allan Appel photo
One of Yale’s blue boxes, on Park Street between Chapel and Edgewood.
Jones also updated his colleagues on Friday about two other city tech developments that may improve public safety and enhance how the city interprets the trove of neighborhood-specific data it currently collects.
The city controller said that his IT team plans on meeting with customer representatives from Microsoft soon to discuss how best to use the Microsoft Azure Artificial Intelligence (AI) service to process, and even predict, blight and traffic collision information.
He said that the city already partners with Microsoft and uses Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Cloud, and the tech-company’s voice-over IP phone system.
He said that the city is interested in using Microsoft’s AI technology to recognize blight based on analyzing pictures of homes and city streets, and to help focus the city’s traffic calming efforts by analyzing past crash data.
“The city would train AI [about] what blight is,” he told the Independent via email after the meeting, “and then LCI can literally snap pictures of buildings and determine if there is blight.” Similarly, he said, the city wants to train AI to determine how clean a street is and then use “predictive analytics” to determine best methods for cleaning the street.
“This will allow us to deploy resources in an efficient manner that can reduce costs to the city,” he said.
Jones told the group that the city will be meeting with Yale Police Chief Ronnel Higgins to discuss how to improve the city’s “blue light” system, which plans to place emergency phone lines within blue boxes at well-trafficked public spaces throughout the city.
Jones said that the city currently has non-operational blue light boxes at Grand Avenue and Ferry Street and at Grand Avenue and Blatchley Avenue, as well as several operational boxes (donated by Yale) on the Farmington Canal.
He said the city is currently “slow walking” its blue light boxes because the current ones are not adequately weather0proofed, and because the city wants to add more amenities to them like wi-fi and surveillance cameras in addition to their direct access phone lines to 911.
“We are going to slow walk everything,” he said, “and work with Yale to get right before deploying fully.”
How is Jones qualified to be IT director? He has a BA in psychology and a Masters of Public Administration. I feel like a conversation between him and Yale's IT people would be like me discussing brain surgery with my neurosurgeon brother-in-law.