What is a "Smart City?" How can technology help St. Petersburg and other communities address challenges like transportation, water, safety, and education?The new Sunny Side Up Speaker Series, sponsored by the St. Petersburg Downtown Partnership and USF St. Petersburg Kate Tiedemann College of Business, tackled this and other questions. The event speaker Bill Wallace, Executive Director of US Ignite, shared guiding principles for smart cities and examples of what other cities are doing.To see Bill Wallace's presentation go to Bill Wallace - US Ignite - PowerPoint presentationTo read more about the event check out the articles by The Catalyst, Tampa Bay Business Journal and 83 Degrees.
Photo left to right: Jason Mathis, St. Pete Downtown Partnership; Sridhar Sundaram, USFSP KTCOB, Bill Wallace, US Ignite; Martin Tadlock, USFSP.
The graduation of the CodeBoxx AI Literacy and Applications Bootcamp was held on Saturday, August 9th at the ARK Innovation Center. The celebration included a tour of the ARK building, a sneak peek at the Vu Studio, and a hackathon. This bootcamp is designed to give participants a competitive edge in the job market by teaching practical ways to use AI. AI literacy and tech communication are more important than ever, and we're incredibly proud of this graduating class for taking that step forward.
A joint venture by Tampa Bay Wave and USF, the 2025 cohort of the nationally recognized FinTech|X Accelerator kicked off on August 4th, supporting high-growth fintech startups through an intensive 8-week program. This year’s class includes St. Petersburg-based innovators HappiNest.AI and Congruit Inc. The program leverages USF’s world-class faculty, research, and business networks to help founders scale impactful technologies.
Our neighbors at the ARK Innovation Center, MADTECH.AI, are doing some seriously impressive work. As a Marketing Decision Intelligence platform, they’ve built a system that takes the headache out of data wrangling and lets teams focus on strategy. Their tools unify, transform, and visualize data in one AI-powered hub—saving time and uncovering insights faster.