What is a Smart City ?

A city can be smart when it takes advantage of all the available technologies like IoT(Internet of Things), Information and communication technologies (ICT) and resources in an intelligent and coordinated manner to achieve all the domains of the smart cities like Smart Government, Smart Transportation & Mobility,  Smart Home, Smart Building, Smart Healthcare, Smart Education, Smart Energy, Smart Security, Smart Environment, Smart Culture & Tourism, Smart Infrastructure, Smart Farm & Smart Park and other smart domains to increase the general standard of living for residents and build a sustainable, prosperous future.

As each of the domains mentioned above is linked to an out-and-out implementation of deficient functionalities that exist in traditional services, they can and will undoubtedly make a city smart. For example, 

• Smart Government to employ innovative technologies to improve all the government operations.
• Smart Healthcare uses technology to improve healthcare services like tele-medicine(helpful for remote patients) and healthcare IOT.
• Smart Home employs mainly IoT technology to connect all the home appliances like lights, doors,alarms etc.. which can be controlled remotely.
• Smart Education is using technology to enhance the learning experience, METAVERSE can enable learners to attend virtual classes remotely while experiencing elements of the real classroom. 
• Smart Infrastructure involves using advanced technologies to improve the existing infrastructure systems in the cities. This can include using sensors and data analytics to enable a smart transportation system.

Collaborative and collective implementations of all these domains is what makes a city smart.

What is Smart Government and Community ?

Smart Governance is a critical factor in successful implementation of smart city, with non-trivial focus being on better management of data,​​enhancing the transparency, accountability, sustainability, integrity of planning and decision-making and the physical safety aspects of the city, Real time reporting, smart sensors, open data, and digital democracy, creating opportunities for citizens to participate in decision making, all by leveraging innovative technologies like Big data, IoT, Data analytics, cybersecurity etc.. making all the traditional services more accessible, flexible, effective and smart.

To achieve all the above listed features, Smart Governance consequently requires the cooperation of different levels of government as well as business and non-government organizations, information sharing, and stakeholder involvement in the decision making process.

Citizen engagement, Collaborative leadership, Community engagement, Digital democracy, E-government, Multi-sector collaboration,

Open data portal, Stakeholder engagement, Urban innovation are some of the main characteristics of smart governance.

Smart governance is critical for smart cities as it is the enabler domain for the other five(smart economy, smart environment, smart living, smart mobility, and smart people) smart city domains; therefore, smart governance has a special importance as it aligns closely with the planning, development, execution/implementation, and management of all smart city policies. When smart governance is achieved in the cities, the gap between public and private sectors is narrowed, smart industries are boosted and thus, the economy is revived.

Smart Government Projects

DECODE(Decentralized Citizen-owned Data Ecosystems) – Barcelona, Spain 

Objective

Losing control over personal data does not just mean the erosion of privacy and autonomy, it’s also bad for the security of people’s online identity and DECODE is a response to people’s concerns providing total control over personal data. DECODE is an experimental project exploring how to build a data-centric digital economy where data that is generated and gathered by citizens, the Internet of Things (IoT), and sensor networks is available for broader communal use, with appropriate privacy protections.

Project’s Goal and Description 

DECODE project’s main focus is to remove the “centralization” of data and its manipulation and commercial exploitation and provide decentralized, privacy-enhancing, rights preserving tools to give back data sovereignty to people and enable citizens’ digital rights. This project uses “Blockchain” technology to store the data in a secure(decentralized) way and provide the required tools necessary to put individuals in control of whether they keep their personal information private or share it for the public good.

Here are some of the decentralized digital applications(tools), developed as a part of the project,

DECODE OS(Secure operating system) : 

• DECODE OS is a private and anonymous peer-to-peer network for getting DECODE up and running.
• The DECODE OS is a brand new GNU+Linux distribution designed to run on servers, embedded computers and virtual machines to automatically connect micro-services to a private and anonymous peer-to-peer network cluster.

Zenroom(Human-readable smart contracts) :

• Zenroom is the smart contracts engine powering DECODE.
• Zenroom is a tiny secure execution environment that integrates in any platform and application, even on a chip or a web page. It can authenticate, authorize access and execute human-readable smart contracts for blockchains, databases and much more.

DECODE App(Authenticated anonymous identities) : 

• DECODE App provides anonymous authentication for digital democracy applications and can be easily customized.

BarcelonaNow(Data commons dashboard) : 

• BarcelonaNow empowers citizens with interactive dashboards to explore, interpret and share urban data on their terms.

Important features/characteristics of the project DECODE includes : 

• Modular and interoperable
• Free and open source
• Decentralised & blockchain-enabled
• Privacy enhancing
• It is based on cutting edge research

Thoughts and Ideas 

• We have evolved or entered into Web3.0, where the main focus is about “decentralization”(owning the data).
• “Data” is what defines/operates/controls the digital world, even a minute problem/vulnerability in the management of that data would cause irrevocable losses. So, one of the possible and most secure solutions is to use decentralized storage technology “Blockchain”.
• The way “DECODE” uses the technology is interesting as it developed multiple platforms or tools to manage different functionalities like its own Operating system for booting/running up the system, platform to create programmable logic, customized applications and interactive dashboards to explore, interpret and share the data on their own terms.
• Regular or frequent updates to all the tools mentioned above, security analysis of the applications and feedback from the community and also from people using it can help improve the existing applications and their features drastically.

“NYC OpenData” – New York City, USA

Objective

NYC Open Data is an opportunity to engage New Yorkers in the information that is produced and used by the City government. The Open Data team at NYC works with City agencies to identify and make data available, coordinate platform operations and improvements, and promote the use of Open Data both within government and throughout NYC. City employees use open data to drive their analytics work and find chances for cross-agency collaboration. Open Data is used by researchers to identify patterns and generate new ideas. Above all, any New Yorker can use this information to learn more about their neighborhoods and the services that are offered to them.

Project’s Goal and Description 

The aim of the NYC Open Data is taking the complex data generated from the operations of the largest municipal government in the country and making it accessible to anyone. As the data has proliferated(approximately 3,000 datasets from more than 90 different City agencies and offices), it’s possible to learn about virtually every facet of City life, from health and transportation to the environment and finance, in just a few clicks.

The quality assurance checklist acts as a “self-assessment” for agencies to review datasets internally to verify its quality and integrity/reliability. NYC Open Data priority was to build up our inventory by making more data available and doing so quickly. To achieve this, “self-assessment” checklist prompts everyone to pay attention to elements that make data accessible and ensure the data is published responsibly: 

• Does the dataset have a single level of aggregation? 
• Is the information as granular as possible? 
• Should the data be integrated with an existing dataset on the same topic?
• Does the dataset contain any duplicate records?

The data dictionary template is intended to capture richer and more complete context about each dataset as Data documentation is as crucial as the quality of the data itself to ensure that Open Data datasets can be interpreted and used by the public. Particularly given the scale of NYC’s government and the variety of its responsibilities, each dataset needs clear documentation that communicates the intricacies behind it in plain language.

City staff at each agency who are responsible for identifying, structuring, documenting, publishing, maintaining, and sharing their agency’s public datasets are the integral part of NYC Open Data.

• For example, 
  • Real-World Fuel Efficiency : 
    • Real-World Fuel Efficiency dataset comprises the analysis of potential environmental and financial impacts of City’s expected transition to an all-electric fleet and actual fuel efficiency of City fleet vehicles.
    • The Real-World Fuel Efficiency dataset reports both the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) expected and actual fuel economy of more than 4,000 non-policing fleet vehicles, including both hybrid & conventional gas vehicles and covering 106 vehicle makes, models, and years.
    • One of many observations they inferred was “hybrid vehicles were expected by the EPA to be 118% more fuel efficient than non-hybrids, they were actually 155% more fuel-efficient in the City fleet”.Similarly, generating and maintaining such valuable data will assist the public in understanding and reaching conclusions on some important issues, such as “fuel efficiency” in this case.

Thoughts and Ideas 

• To publish reliable data to the public for accessing, there are few things to consider, 
  • Where exactly is the data coming from ?
  • Is it reliable(Data Source) ?
  • Is there any unwanted data in the datasets ? 
  • Is there any possibility to remove unwanted data ? 
• Implementing strict/regulated validations for the listed conditions above will help any Open Data organizations in providing more reliable data.
• Integrating validation checks for data quality and integrity verification will improve data reliability.

“Urban Object Detection Kit” – Amsterdam, Netherlands

Objective

One-third of total waste generated is handled unsafely, and waste is disposed of illegally, mostly in unattended landfills. Population growth has resulted in a rapid increase in the generation of solid waste, as well as a rapid increase in the consumption of natural resources, whose reserves are rapidly depleting. As a result, the global rate of waste generation is increasing. Providing a more efficient waste industry using technology and data is the main focus of this project.

Project’s Goal and Description 

This project’s focus/goal is to create various AI models for solid waste management. Each model can be used for a variety of purposes, including optimizing waste collection routes for garbage trucks, locating waste management facilities, estimating waste generation patterns, and simulating waste conversion processes.

The AI application automatically maps objects and identifies garbage on the street. Once garbage is detected, the information will be shared with the Amsterdam garbage management services for them to pick it up, helping the municipality keep the streets of Amsterdam even cleaner than before. The City of Amsterdam developed a system that can recognize rubbish bags and other undesirable objects lying around in the street. Based on machine learning, the system can spot the objects in real time.

The Urban Object Detection Kit uses machine-learning technology to scan streets and other aspects of the public environment at a low cost and with maximum efficiency. This could be a solution to a number of “blind spots” in the City of Amsterdam’s current methods. The system developed by the City of Amsterdam provides a low-cost, generic solution which employs smartphones linked to vehicles via an app that generates images. These are sent to the server to be recognized as objects. The Council employs the YOLO (You Only Look Once) real-time object recognition system, which can process images very quickly. The results are then compared to reports from the neighborhood.

The following diagram illustrates the development approaches used to create the framework for the City of Amsterdam’s “Urban Object Detection Kit” :

Thoughts and Ideas 

• Data as a whole is the critical aspect for any project to succeed in developing and using AI models for smart waste management or any other similar use case because it is the foundation of every action performed in the system.
• “Urban Object Detection Kit” employs reliable methodologies for gathering data, processing it, and taking appropriate actions based on it, which is the most critical component of the system.
• Periodic system analysis and security audits can ensure the system’s long-term performance.

References

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