The smart city concept has been around for a long time, but many cities end up offering only isolated services, such as bike-sharing systems or smart containers. In reality, a truly smart city involves much more. It requires a well-designed IT infrastructure capable of managing a variety of functions, from traffic management and water services to administrative tasks. For a city to be truly smart, its infrastructure must be built to deliver these services effectively and leverage AI to improve collaboration between various departments within the city government.
Achieving this vision is not always easy. It requires careful consideration of the actual needs of residents and the technology needed to meet those needs. A successful smart city depends on having a clear, forward-looking plan and establishing the right technological infrastructure from the beginning.
Edge IOT/IIOT Ambassador of EMEA Edge Computing at Lenovo.
A unified strategy
What’s stopping cities from adopting “smart” technology? Financing and cooperation are often an all too familiar problem. It takes many different departments working together, sometimes in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. For example, if local governments want to improve their transportation network, they may also need to consider electrical and Internet connections to handle the city’s new infrastructure. Usually all of these belong to different domains. However, if cities adopt the right infrastructure, AI has the potential to integrate information from isolated departments and foster cooperation, giving cities the technological coherence necessary to drive innovation.
Dubai’s smart city project uses AI to break down barriers between departments and between citizens and government services. The team is taking the right approach when it comes to urban development, with more than 130 smart projects and 1,000 smart services, including completely eliminating the role of Government, and aiming to build “the happiest city on Earth” . Dubai authorities have effectively deployed AI to enable these departments to integrate and restructure, and intelligently deploy applications to eliminate paper forms and lengthy manual processes.
In this Dubai example, it is not about making the city smart, but about making the processes smart. Taking this approach offers efficiency, whether you use the city’s features as a tourist or resident. Whether you are processing your visa, paying your water bill or transferring your telephone contract, everything is much easier than before. Dubai is now looking for a generative AI assistant to help people find the government services they need in real-time, providing a personalized touch to citizens.
Contrary to AI scaremongering, breaking down these barriers does not take away people’s jobs, but rather allows their time to be used more efficiently. In Abu Dhabi, sensors are used to monitor the level of water stored in the city’s tanks. This IoT implementation already replaces a previously manual process in which inspectors were sent to perform a visual assessment. Using data collected from tanks across the city, AI algorithms can have a service team on site to refill them via real-time readings, as well as suggest when tank maintenance may be required. This has meant that inspectors who previously had to spend time checking tanks can focus on creating change and working on other important tasks, such as assessing water quality or enacting regulations.
Build trust in AI innovation
AI can provide public safety, but it is key to building trust around this technology, highlighting important benefits, and ensuring residents and visitors don’t feel “watched.” With traditional surveillance cameras, there is a huge amount of data that goes unused and never analyzed. Applying AI to this mass of data, with privacy in mind, has helped cities make people safer and even save lives. In fact, half of government officials say public safety is the primary reason for adopting smart city technology, according to 451 Research.
Denmark’s railway authorities have carried out investigations using artificial intelligence and machine learning to monitor station platforms and alert station staff if someone is about to step onto the train tracks. For example, people who have dropped their phone on the line are often so obsessed with getting it back that they forget the risks involved and put themselves in serious danger. The AI “learns” patterns that show when someone might be about to put themselves at risk and triggers an alert. With this technology, people need to be assured that their privacy rights are respected, and when it is shown that AI can increase security, without being intrusive, people are happier with the idea. Smart cities can find a balance in providing services without feeling like “Big Brother,” communicating that when using computer vision systems, people’s privacy is always respected and people’s safety is paramount.
Data on the streets
In a smart city, cabinets and street lights become cutting-edge data centers that process everything from whether a parking space is empty to when there are dangerous levels of pollutants in the air. But the secret ingredient is the overall design and implementation of the computer where the data is generated. Cities can then capture street-level data, whether it’s a car moving from a space to a traffic jam forming. Using AI and machine learning, they can filter what is relevant and what is not at the street level, discarding irrelevant information and creating very robust and clean data pipelines.
The key is orchestration. With traditional computing, where an application is on a single node, a “smart parking” system would require many, many nodes, making it inefficient and expensive. But if you use more modern techniques for containerization, you can deploy multiple applications on each compute node, virtualizing them. Where orchestration comes into play is how to allow it to scale so that you can power applications across the city, manage them, monitor them, and protect them. Once those components are planned properly, you can layer applications on top of them and place them in those cabinets on the street. This infrastructure, this technological coherence, is essential to building an effective smart city.
Cities of the future
Success in any smart city depends on several key factors. First, it requires a clear vision and commitment to providing services that truly improve residents’ quality of life, whether by streamlining government operations, improving security, or maintaining a strong emphasis on privacy. Departments must collaborate effectively to serve citizens, a task in which AI can play a crucial role by breaking down barriers and facilitating data sharing between various departments. Most importantly, a smart city needs a strong and cohesive technological infrastructure that allows city leaders to continually deliver and refine services for its residents. This requires careful planning and consideration from the beginning.
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