Newlab member company and participant of The Circular City program, Numina, launches their latest product, which will deliver new data streams for city planning and urban development.

Numina is building the API for streets. The Brooklyn company, led by founder and CEO Tara Pham, is on a mission to empower cities with data to become more responsive, efficient, and equitable.

This city-focused mandate made Numina the perfect collaborator for Newlab’s The Circular City program, first announced Spring 2018. The Circular City includes civic partners such as Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, startups, and university innovators, led by the Applied Research for Change consortium (ARCx), to develop new strategies that address increasingly urgent urban challenges, such as mobility, resiliency, and diversified economic development.

Today, The Circular City reached an important milestone: deploying IoT in New York City.

For the next six months, Numina’s newly released second-generation sensor, which was manufactured locally in Long Island City, Queens, NY, will be collecting real-time data about the streetscape using a proprietary computer vision system. The units, eye-catching in bright yellow, are installed at the intersection of Fulton Mall and Flatbush Avenue, where one of the busiest thruways in Brooklyn meets an increasingly pedestrianized retail corridor undergoing drastic development. The pop of color reflects the program’s intent to keep the public curious and engaged as The Circular City accelerates the development of urban tech that’s built, tested, and proven to meet real needs.

“Today’s urban challenges offer new opportunities for public-private partnerships and approaches to harness emerging technologies to define the future of our cities,” shares Columbia University’s André Corrêa d’Almeida, the founder and leader of ARCx. “We can’t wait to use Numina’s data to draw new insights on how to structure B2B, B2G and G2B data sharing and circularity.”

Numina delivers unprecedented information about the flows of people, bicycles, different types of vehicles, and other activity in streets. By processing all imagery on the device itself and never collecting any personally identifiable information, Numina provides intelligence without surveillance and has designed this commitment into their technology since day one.

“We are excited to work in our own backyard with Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and Newlab in this rare and important opportunity for us all to think more experimentally about our shared spaces,” says Pham. “This collaboration is about demonstrating the value of more data-driven, multidisciplinary approaches to managing the public right-of-way — so cities can be more proactive, rather than reactive, about planning toward people-first values.”

Downtown Brooklyn Partnership has led the charge in transforming the Brooklyn Tech Triangle (as the area of Downtown Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and DUMBO are known) into a place where new technologies are not only planned and created, but also piloted and refined.

“Downtown Brooklyn has become a living lab for the innovative, data-driven solutions to the operational and quality of life issues facing modern cities. By harnessing the tech community right here in our neighborhood, we can find smart ways to improve everyday life in cities around the world,” says Regina Myer, president of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership. “We are thrilled to welcome Numina to our Living Lab program and work with them to enable more efficient management and strategic programming of the public realm.”

The deployment of Numina’s sensors in Downtown Brooklyn represent the type of speed-to-market approach and partnerships Newlab is catalyzing through The Circular City program. Collaborators will have access to Numina’s data as they work together to answer questions of how such information can be used to inform urban resilience.