A record crowd of 13,000+ kicked off eMerge Americas 2017 with featured speaker, Apple co-founder, Silicon Valley icon, and philanthropist Steve Wozniak, affectionately known as ”the Woz”. Other featured speakers were Waze co- founder Uri Levine, Malala Fun co-founder Shiza Shadid, and 500 Startups founding partner Dave McClure. Day one ended with the unlikely duo of financial guru Suze Orman, known for her directness, and Mr. 305 himself, Armando Christian Perez aka ”Pitbull.”

The University of Miami showcased research on the environment, healthcare, sensor networks, and smart cities under the theme “Preserving Our Future.”

The Office of Civic & Community Engagement presented on the Miami Affordability Project (”MAP”).

Presenters included an interdisciplinary group from IDSC working on sensors that use sound to measure foot and bicycle traffic around the city. ”From a computer perspective, there’s not a lot of difference between a dog barking and a bird calling,” said Joel Zysman, director of IDSC Advanced Computing. By teaching computers to differentiate between the different amplitudes and frequencies that make up sounds, Zysman said, the sensor could offer cities a low-tech option to measuring traffic flow and density.