On May 17, 2018, Scott D. Yost of the Rhino Times covered the new UNCG-Guilford County MetroLab Collaboration:
“The county, in collaboration with the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) and MetroLab Network, is taking a very deep academic dive into numbers, stats and other data in an attempt to solve problems facing the county. Homelessness and substance abuse are the first two targets of the new program, but plans are to expand the initiative to address many other county issues in the future.
“The Guilford County/UNCG partnership is only the fifth county-university collaboration in the country that’s been accepted into the MetroLab Network – a program launched in September 2015 with 21 initial city-university pairings as part of the White House’s Smart Cities Initiative. That network of partnerships is designed to use analysis of “big data” to provide brand new – often tech-based – solutions to problems faced by local governments. The federally funded Smart Cities Initiative program that includes the MetroLab Network was begun under the Obama administration in 2015 with $160 million in funding, and currently some support comes from private partners such as the MacArthur Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation.”