Levi’s Stadium, successful host of Super Bowl 50, and home of the San Francisco 49’ers.  Photo by Marcus Siu

Article and photos by Marcus Siu

SANTA CLARA, CA – MAY 10, 2016:  For the 111 million television viewers who enjoyed this years Super Bowl 50 in the safety and comfort in their own home, it was a great entertaining show from beginning to end, with or without commercials.  This years Super Bowl between the AFC champion Denver Broncos and the NFC champion Carolina Panthers, turned out to be the third most watched televised event in American history.

Indeed, the NFL sure knows how to throw a great show; from the introduction to all of the living Super Bowl MVP’s from 1967, to Lady Gaga’s mesmerizing rendition of the National Anthem, the Halftime show featuring Coldplay, Bruno Mars, and Beyonce, and to the final conclusion of the Vince Lombardi Trophy presentation to the victorious Denver Broncos, with Quarterback Peyton Manning getting much of the spotlight.  It was pretty memorable as a spectator.  More memorable if you were a Denver Bronco fan.

In addition to to the big game, San Francisco also hosted nine days of pregame NFL festivities such as “The NFL Experience” at Moscone Center, “Super Bowl City” along the Embarcadero, along with concerts by Alicia Keys and Chris Isaak, which drew over 1.1 million visitors.  Pretty impressive numbers, since the population of San Francisco is only 800,000. In addition, there were many festivities in nearby Santa Clara and San Jose.

With all of these massive crowds, can you imagine the public safety concerns for security for the 70,000 fans, A-list performers, dignitaries and celebrities within the stadium, as the million plus as outside the stadium?  Hosting the monumental NFL “Golden Anniversary” Super Bowl 50 this year would be a true test for any major city when it comes to public safety.

Luckily, San Francisco and Santa Clara are not your typical major cities, but very smart ones, as well.  San Francisco is one of the top five connected cities in the US and Levi’s Stadium is the most technologically innovative.

A booth at The Internet of Things World promoting Smart Cities and Public Safety.               Photo by Marcus Siu

Since 9/11, stadium security have been beefed up all around the country, so now it is a typical everyday occurrence for fans to go through security scans and metal detectors, just like the ones at the airports. Once they’re in, security is hopefully the last thing on their mind, which is probably a good thing.

For the people working behind the scenes, it’s quite different. With its massive security issues along with its many logistical nightmares, imagine the stress on the whole entire Bay Area during the events leading up to the Super Bowl.

Not only does IoT need to work closely with the NFL, the personnel at Levi’s stadium, and with the cities of San Francisco and Santa Clara, but also with up to 50 or so of the other law enforcement and government agencies.

Luckily, with digitalization, it has made it much efficient for those working behind the scenes at Levi’s Stadium.

Digitalization is driving massive transformation in every aspect of business and society, and is fundamentally changing the way that businesses interact with their customers and governments interact with their constituents. The macro trends of IoT and Big Data are transforming business, industrial and urban landscapes globally through the continued convergence of our virtual and physical worlds.

For Super Bowl 50 at Levi’s Stadium, there were approximately 750 surveillance and facial recognition cameras that were used, along with sound and heat sensors with video analytics looking at the queues and lines.  There were all sorts of drones used, detection software, and you even had the detection of drones detecting them, as well as controlling them and tracking the actual controller of that drone within minutes.

Jack Domme, CEO of Hitachi Americas explains how digitalization is driving massive transformation in every aspect of business and society, and is fundamentally changing the way that business interact with their customers and governments interact with their constituents.     Photo by Marcus Siu

CEO of Hitachi Americas, Jack Domme, spoke about digitalization at the Internet of Things World in Santa Clara at a morning keynote on opening day.

“Behind the scenes, you have the IoT (Internet of Things) going on.  You’ve got layers and layers of public safety solutions coming together with many public safety agencies coming together to try to orchestrate a safe event.  This is real and this is based on IoT, (the Internet of Things), which is based on extreme deep learning, machine learning, a lot of software to correlate the layers and layers of public safety systems, all of those inputs coming in, the video streaming that’s coming in and correlating that’s coming in and correlating so you can imagine one camera one facial recognition actually gets a hit; it’s a bad target; it’s a bad person; where has that bad person been?

Let’s go back on to the data platform, lets bring up the tracking of that person; where have they been?  Who have they been with? Let’s look at their twitter feed. This is real. This is what happens. Now you start to look at the implications of IoT in our real world, and we didn’t even know half of this was happening. So now you have to correlate all these inputs; layers and layers of different systems coming in together, to create an actionable item based on an event.”

This is a great example of how the IoT has gotten to be so vital to cities and agencies to protect the people around the city and stadium who were involved in these events.

“And the outcome: no major events, no major incidents, and a pretty happy Denver fan base, and all the people of Santa Clara that held the event. Thousands of attendees enjoy the event; millions of fans, visitors and city residents kept safe.”

This is how we are all connected.  At least in San Francisco and Santa Clara.