Why Synthetic Data Is Key to Paving the Way for Smart Cities

Good thoughts here for other applications as well

Why Synthetic Data Is Key to Paving the Way for Smart Cities

By Spiceworks, November 18, 2022

Illustration of a futuristic smart city.

Gartner predicts synthetic data will overshadow real-world data in artificial intelligence (AI) models by 2030. It saves valuable time and energy while also providing the opportunity to counteract incumbent bias in the base data.

Of course, model training should not be limited to one data source or the other. Synthetic and real-world data can be complementary in efficiently progressing training at a lower cost, with greater applicability and without privacy or bias issues. But, it stands that synthetic data is essential for developing smarter AIs capable of recognizing and preventing corner cases in smart cities.

The potential for uniting synthetic and real-world data in the pursuit of smart cities is highly promising for the future of smarter AI.

From Spiceworks

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Hint at Dystopian Futures

Expected direction?

‘Dystopian world’: Singapore patrol robots stoke fears of surveillance state

Trial of robots to police ‘undesirable’ behaviour such as smoking or breaching social-distancing rules   in The Guardian

Singapore has trialled patrol robots that blast warnings at people engaging in “undesirable social behaviour”, adding to an arsenal of surveillance technology in the tightly controlled city-state that is fuelling privacy concerns.

From vast numbers of CCTV cameras to trials of lampposts kitted out with facial recognition tech, Singapore is seeing an explosion of tools to track its inhabitants.

That includes a three-week trial in September, in which two robots were deployed to patrol a housing estate and a shopping centre. Officials have long pushed a vision of a hyper-efficient, tech-driven “smart nation”, but activists say privacy is being sacrificed and people have little control over what happens to their data.

Singapore is frequently criticised for curbing civil liberties and people are accustomed to tight controls, but there is still growing unease at intrusive tech. The government’s latest surveillance devices are robots on wheels, with seven cameras, that issue warnings to the public and detect “undesirable social behaviour”. .....' 

Columbus Ohio as a Smart City

 Recall the anncement and  labeling, but not very much during the effort.   Looking for final report.   Learnings and more. 

Experiences in Smart City Challenges Such as in Columbus, Ohio, Sobering   By AI Trends Staff  

Four years ago, the first international AI City Challenge was conducted to spur the development of AI to support transportation infrastructure in a smarter way. Teams representing American companies or universities took the top spots.  

Last year, Chinese companies took the top three out of four competitions, and in June, Chinese tech companies Alibaba and Baidu swept the AI City Challenge, beating competitors from some 40 nations.  

The results were a payoff of investments in smart cities by the government in China, which is conducting pilot programs in hundreds of cities and has by some estimates half of the world’s smart cities, according to a recent account in Wired.  

China is investing more than the US in areas of emerging technology, according to Stan Caldwell, executive director of Mobility21, a project at Carnegie Mellon University to assist smart-city development in Pittsburgh. AI researchers in the US can compete for government grants, from the National Science Foundation’s Civic Innovation Challenge, or the Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge.   

“We want the technologies to develop, because we want to improve safety and efficiency and sustainability. But selfishly, we also want this technology to develop here and improve our economy,” Caldwell stated in the Wired account.  

Final Report on Smart Columbus Cites Some Promising Endeavors 

The first Smart City Challenge sponsored by the US Department of Transportation selected Columbus, Ohio, to receive $50 million to be spent over five years to reshape the city’s transportation options by tapping into new technology. A final report recently issued by the city’s Smart Columbus Program described the effort as promising and falling a bit short.  

Part of it was bad luck. Several programs set to get off the ground hit just as the pandemic led to lockdowns in 2020, reducing demand for transportation options. “It was not supposed to be a competition for who has more sensors, or anything like that, and I think we got a little distracted at a certain point,” stated Jordan Davis, director of Smart Columbus, to Wired.   

His organization is charged with continuing the work of the challenge. He said the focus will be, “How do we use technology to improve quality of life, so solve community issues of equity, to mitigate climate change and to achieve prosperity in the region?”  

The selection of Columbus led to a flood of proposals from companies that proved difficult to manage. “A lot of people were expecting a lot from this project, and perhaps too much,” stated Harvey Miller, a geography professor and director of the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis at Ohio State University, who helped plan and evaluate the challenge. “What Columbus did was test revolutionary ideas,” Miller stated. “They learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t work.”   

Japanese Smart City Offers Residents Quake, Privacy Protection

Makes much sense given the higher likelihood of natural disasters in Japan.

Japanese Smart City Offers Residents Quake, Privacy Protection  By Thomson Reuters Foundation News

Digital tools launched in a Japanese smart city that can send disaster alerts to safeguard residents are part of an optional technology push aiming to overcome social and economic challenges, while also allaying privacy fears.

March 8 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Digital tools launched in a Japanese smart city that can send disaster alerts to safeguard residents are part of an optional technology push aiming to overcome social and economic challenges, while also allaying privacy fears.

The smartphone alerts were introduced in Aizuwakamatsu city, Fukushima prefecture, last week by consultancy firm Accenture, which has worked with researchers to revitalise the city using technology since a devastating earthquake in 2011.

Aizuwakamatsu residents can choose to subscribe to the digital services - a markedly different approach to the mandatory initiatives in other smart cities that have been held back by data privacy and surveillance concerns, said Shojiro Nakamura, co-lead of Accenture Innovation Center Fukushima.

"Opt-in is the fundamental approach in our smart city initiatives," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.  ... 

Drones of all Types in the Smart City

Good general piece on the topic.  Inevitable.  Their form, security, management and capabilities are still to be worked out in sufficient detail.   Also the further specification of how autonomous these systems should be.

How drones and aerial vehicles could change cities   by Paul Cureton, The Conversation in TechxPlore

Drones, personal flying vehicles and air taxis may be part of our everyday life in the very near future. Drones and air taxis will create new means of mobility and transport routes. Drones will be used for surveillance, delivery and in the construction sector as it moves towards automation.

The introduction of these aerial craft into cities will require the built environment to change dramatically. Drones and other new aerial vehicles will require landing pads, charging points, and drone ports. They could usher in new styles of building, and lead to more sustainable design.

My research explores the impact of aerial vehicles on urban design, mapping out possible future trajectories.

Already, civilian drones can vary widely in size and complexity. They can carry a range of items from high resolution cameras, delivery mechanisms and thermal image technology to speakers and scanners. In the public sector, drones are used in disaster response and by the fire service to tackle fires which could endanger firefighters.

During the coronavirus pandemic, drones have been used by the police to enforce lockdown. Drones normally used in agriculture have sprayed disinfectant over cities. In the UK, drone delivery trials are taking place to carry medical items to the Isle of Wight.

Alongside drones, our future cities could also be populated by vertical takeoff and landing craft (VTOL), used as private vehicles and air taxis.  ... " 

Activ Surgical Joins with Qualcomm Smart Cities

Intriguing connection for healthcare in the smart city.

Activ Surgical Joins Qualcomm Smart Cities Accelerator Program
Participation to include a collaboration with Innominds to develop next generation surgical sensing capabilities that will reduce preventable surgical errors and complications across the U.S. and globally ... 

BOSTON, June 30, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Activ Surgical, a digital surgery pioneer, today announced that it has joined the Qualcomm® Smart Cities Accelerator Program and is collaborating with Innominds on the development of next generation surgical sensing capabilities that will usher in a new era of visibility and insights for surgeons around the world. As part of the Qualcomm® Advantage Network, the Qualcomm Smart Cities Accelerator Program is designed to connect cities, municipalities.... '

Smart Columbus Connects Everyday Vehicles

Yet another example of using more sensors and connections to build intelligent management of vehicles within large systems.   Just underway.

Pilot Test Begins for Tech to Connect Everyday Vehicles
IEEE Spectrum
Sandy Ong
June 19, 2020

Columbus, OH, will launch a connected-vehicle pilot program in July, with up to 1,800 public and private vehicles fitted with special onboard units and dashboard-mounted head-up displays. These vehicles will be able to receive messages from traffic lights at 113 intersections. The goal of the project is to study the impacts of connectivity on safety and traffic flow. The pilot is part of the Smart Columbus initiative, which was rolled out after the city was awarded $40 million through the U.S. Department of Transportation's 2015 Smart City Challenge. The University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute's Debra Bezzina said connected-vehicle technology could save billions a year by preventing as much as 80% of unimpaired car crashes. It also could result in more efficient traffic management and greener commuting.  ... "

Street Lamps as a Platform for the Urban Smart City

Considerable piece on using Street lights as a platform for the urban smart city.  Have seen this posed a number of times, greet place to start, how often has it been successfully done?

Street Lamps as a Platform
By Max Mühlhäuser, Christian Meurisch, Michael Stein, Jörg Daubert, Julius Von Willich, Jan Riemann, Lin Wang
Communications of the ACM, June 2020, Vol. 63 No. 6, Pages 75-83
10.1145/3376900

Street lamps constitute the densest electrically operated public infrastructure in urban areas. Their changeover to energy-friendly LED light quickly amortizes and is increasingly leveraged for smart city projects, where LED street lamps double, for example, as wireless networking or sensor infrastructure. We make the case for a new paradigm called SLaaP—street lamps as a platform. SLaaP denotes a considerably more dramatic changeover, turning urban light poles into a versatile computational infrastructure. SLaaP is proposed as an open, enabling platform, fostering innovative citywide services for the full range of stakeholders and end users—seamlessly extending from everyday use to emergency response. In this article, we first describe the role and potential of street lamps and introduce one novel base service as a running example. We then discuss citywide infrastructure design and operation, followed by addressing the major layers of a SLaaP infrastructure: hardware, distributed software platform, base services, value-added services and applications for users and 'things.' Finally, we discuss the crucial roles and participation of major stakeholders: citizens, city, government, and economy.

Recent years have seen the emergence of smart street lamps, with very different meanings of 'smart'—sometimes related to the original purpose as with usage-dependent lighting, but mostly as add-on capabilities like urban sensing, monitoring, digital signage, WiFi access, or e-vehicle charging.a Research about their use in settings for edge computing14 or car-to-infrastructure communication (for example, traffic control, hazard warnings, or autonomous driving)6 hints at their great potential as computing resources. The future holds even more use cases: for example, after a first wave of 5G mobile network rollouts from 2020 onward, a second wave shall apply mm-wave frequencies for which densely deployed light poles can be appropriate 'cell towers.'

Street lamps: A (potential) true infrastructure. Given the huge potential of street lamps evident already today and given the broad spectrum of use cases, a city's street lamps may obviously constitute a veritable infrastructure. However, cities today do not consider street lamps—beyond the lighting function—as an infrastructure in the strict sense. Like road, water, energy, or telecommunication, infrastructures constitute a sovereign duty: provision and appropriate public access must be regulated, design and operation must balance stakeholder interests, careful planning has to take into account present and future use cases and demands, maintenance, threat protection, and more. Well-considered outsourcing or privatization may be aligned with these public interests.

The LED dividend: A unique opportunity. The widespread lack of such considerations in cities is even more dramatic since a once-in-history opportunity opens up with the changeover to energy efficient LED lighting, expected to save large cities millions in terms of energy cost, as we will discuss, called 'LED dividend' in the following. Given their notoriously tight budgets, cities urgently need to dedicate these savings if they want to 'own' and control an infrastructure, which, once built, can foster innovation and assure royalties and new business as sources of city and citizen prosperity ... "

Carmakers Move From Cars to Building Cities at CES

Hardly a complete move, but handling transportation efficiently will be a major part of any smart city.

Carmakers Move From Cars to Building Cities at CES
Financial Times
Patrick McGee; Song Jung-a; Peter Campbell

Automakers announced future technologies at CES 2020, with Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda stating his company would construct a 175-acre hydrogen-powered smart city near Japan’s Mount Fuji as a “living laboratory” to see how up to 2,000 residents will live with next-generation technology. Toyoda said the project aims to keep Toyota abreast of society-transforming megatrends like urbanization, 5G wireless connectivity, and the role of artificial intelligence in evolving consumer devices. Meanwhile, Hyundai announced a partnership with ride-hailing company Uber under which it will build electrically-powered driverless air taxis. The companies said test flights are planned for this year, and commercial operations to begin within three years. The goal is to help Hyundai compete with rivals in emerging technologies.... ' 

Smart Cities Based on Good Models

Here energy is the starting point, but other aspects of city resource use, transportation processes, risk analyses and other goal and future predictive models should also be included with a base foundational descriptive model to work from.   

Modeling Every Building in America Starts with Chattanooga
Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility
Rachel Harken

A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has developed a building energy model that automatically extracts high-level building data from publicly available information. The team demonstrated its new approach by using the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's (OLCF's) Cray XK7 Titan supercomputer to model the energy usage of every building serviced by the Electric Power Board (EPB) of Chattanooga, TN. The supercomputer found the electric utility could save between $11 million and $35 million a year by adjusting electricity usage during critical peak times. Said ORNL’s Joshua New, "We're not just creating these models and doing what-if analyses in the blind. We have an error rate for every building on how closely we're matching that 15-minute energy use."  ... "

Examining Smart City Backlash

A look at how people are reacting to 'smart' and trust, and surveillance and privacy stretching that are parts of smart city plans and implementations.  Is it best to see these ideas as primarily cost saving and life improving?  Or addressing outliers like solving and preventing crime in city spaces?     Both are happening today.

https://penniur.upenn.edu/  Penn Institute for Urban Research

What’s Fueling the Smart City Backlash?

A new phase of pause and double-check assumptions seems to have gripped the three-decades-old global movement of overstressed urban centers transitioning to so-called smart cities with innovative, technology-led promises. The latest phase is marked by scattered, local-level resistance by residents to smart-city programs in big cities like Toronto and New York to small towns such as Ross, California — near San Francisco — with less than 2,500 residents.

Other cities have banned specific technologies such as facial recognition software, amid doubts over its accuracy or concerns over cities stealthily collecting such data on their citizens through video surveillance. In some cases, they see technology companies forming opaque partnerships with city-level agencies to profit from projects at their expense, using public resources such as land and development rights.

Fears over privacy intrusions in today’s digital age and unbridled development compromising the public interest have been heightened by the erosion of trust between residents, city administrations and private companies leading “smart” projects. With increased transparency, and stronger citizen engagement, the smart-city movement could regain lost credibility and continue its growth, according to experts who spoke with Knowledge@Wharton.

For the most part, residents are wary about how city governments and big technology companies involved in the projects will track and collect data about their daily activities while not compromising their privacy and security by selling data without their consent. In several cases, legislators in many U.S. states have enacted or are considering laws to ban or limit the erection of 5G cell towers because of health concerns.

Data privacy and security issues are more sensitive in some settings than others. “Smart cities mean different things to different people, but big data is intrinsic to these initiatives and thus privacy concerns arise,” notes Susan Wachter, Wharton professor of real estate and finance. “However, some initiatives such as coordinated traffic lights are high on efficiency and low on privacy issues — and they are no brainers. Others, such as tracking people — much as is done in private places such as malls — provoke a backlash because they undermine the anonymity privilege of public spaces.” ... '

Cisco On IOT in New Orleans Preventing Crime

Used to spend quite a bit of time in New Orleans.  Never thought of it as particularly low crime, based on what I saw in the papers.   Like to see that change.  But aims to be better yet with IOT as Cisco outlines in their blog.  How much this will be bashed with bias implications remains to be seen. 

Keeping the City of New Orleans safe with Cisco IoT

While the Big Easy has long been famous for letting the good times roll, New Orleans is increasingly recognized for good times AND less crime. In fact, since the 2017 launch of its Real-Time Crime Center (RTCC), the City has become a leader in using Cisco IoT solutions to support public safety.
Core to the City’s IoT solutions are hundreds of IP cameras installed on nearly every corner. These cameras – powered securely by a wireless network of ruggedized Cisco ISR with the Cisco IR829 integrated service routers (ISR) – stream live video to the RTCC. In a matter of minutes, the RTCC processes and shares relevant footage with officers in the field. It also gathers and analyzes video footage as part of longer-term investigations of criminal activity and quality-of-life concerns.

“The Cisco IR829 has supported everything we’ve asked it to do. It has been extremely reliable and very robust in every aspect of every solution we’ve thrown at it.”   Richard Couget, Network Manager, City of New Orleans

Imagine it: Rather than showing up at a scene with little or no background information, police arrive armed with critical insights. In the past, it might take an officer 20 minutes to interview both parties involved in a car accident. With accident footage in tow, the officer can handle the situation and return to the field far more quickly.

In other cases, the City’s IP cameras catch crimes in progress. Within minutes, the RTCC sends footage to nearby walking-beat police officers who can quickly identify and arrest the culprits. And whether responding within minutes or days after a crime has occurred, having concrete evidence in hand enables greater police efficiency when interviewing witnesses and suspects.  .... " 

Secure Cloud Architecture for Smart Cities

Having seen how municipalities are being attacked by malware, this is becoming essential.

A Secure Cloud Architecture for Smart Cities
Government Computer News
Stephanie Kanowitz   Syracuse University
July 11, 2019

Syracuse University researchers have issued a new blueprint designed to help smart cities and communities create a hybrid cloud architecture that upholds confidentiality, access control, least privileges, and security of personally identifiable information. The Smart City and Community Challenge cloud privacy security rights inclusive architecture action cluster developed the framework, which is designed to back up critical systems in the event of attacks. The architecture employs a three-tiered data/risk classification scheme, with workflows applied to data depending on its classification. Officials then assign probability, impact, and overall ratings to each risk, and install mitigation controls. The researchers first tested the architecture by applying it to a network of city-owned smart streetlights in Syracuse, NY; other projects under consideration for the architecture include catch-basin monitoring and water-metering projects, in addition to others involving the ethics of artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and machine learning.  ... " 

Planning Cities of the Future with AI

Like to see much more about this.... planning is tough, and rarely done completely.    Analytic and AI methods require considerable attention to detail and process.  Doing planning well with these methods is probably difficult.  Visualization does help.

AI, Robots, Data Software Helping Create New Approach for Planning Cities of the Future 
Purdue University News in ACM
By Chris Adam

Purdue University researchers have developed a unique strategy to plan future cities, by streamlining building information modeling software through new approaches to data. Purdue's Jiansong Zhang said the methodology facilitates full software development based on data from industry foundation classes, "for any task in the life cycle of an [architecture, engineering, and construction] project." Zhang added that the researchers created a visualization program deployed via the new technique. Said Zhang, "The new method can help eliminate missing or inconsistent information during software development." The data encompasses all sectors, functions, and life-cycle stages of software development for construction projects. .... "

Sony Launches IoT Chip

Low power, 60 mile range, but just in Japan for now.  Seems would be ideal for Smart city applications.  Most notable a new means to gather data and deliver applications remotely.

Sony built an IoT chip with a 60 mile range
It will use Sony's proprietary low-power wide area (LPWA) network launching this fall.   By Steve Dent, @stevetdent in Engadget

Sony is quietly launching a chip that could change how e-bikes, cars, street lamps and all kinds of other connected devices can relay information. The module, when installed on any IoT object, will allow it send data to Sony's proprietary low-power wide area (LPWA) ELTRES network launching this fall. It can transmit up to about 60 miles and work in noisy urban environments on objects moving at high speeds, opening up a lot of new applications in security, monitoring, tracking and more. ... "

Infrastructure Monitoring

Hands free,  clear place for monitoring applications in the smart city.

Swarms of drones will soon keep tabs on our aging city infrastructure  By Luke Dorme in Digitaltrends

When it comes to the future commercial applications of drones, it seems that inspecting the world’s aging infrastructure may be one task where UAVs can corner the market. The latest demonstration of this? A project from researchers from Sweden’s Lulea University of Technology who have been testing how teams of autonomous drones can be used to keep tabs on wind turbines: potentially alerting authorities of any impending problems. .. "

Smart Cities

A toolkit, here just the abstract,  good view in  the whole article: 

Smart Cities: A Toolkit for Leaders
In collaboration with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Jan 02, 2019 in K@W:

The definition of a “smart city” is changing. While it refers to a community that adopts technological tools to become more efficient, the term also increasingly encompasses ideas of sustainability, compassion and equity for all stakeholders. As cities embrace initiatives to become more connected, data-driven and resilient, mayors and other leaders often must prioritize various needs because of budget constraints. The key is to pick strategic projects that will bring the most impact to a city and result in increased well-being. To help mayors and civic leaders make meaningful choices on these issues, Knowledge@Wharton is pleased to offer this special report in collaboration with the Digital Software and Solutions Group of Tata Consultancy Services, which includes interviews with experts as well as examples from cities in the U.S. and Europe.

The topics include:  ... " 

Human Presence Sensing for Smart Buildings

In  RDMag.

NSF Grant Awarded for Smart-building Sensor Research  by University of Hawai’i

The National Science Foundation has awarded University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa researchers a $750,000 grant to develop a low-cost sensor capable of detecting human presence and monitoring occupants for energy-savings and smart-building applications. The Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II grant was awarded to UH Mānoa in partnership with technology company Adnoviv.

Olga Borić-Lubecke, professor of electrical engineering in the College of Engineering and a co-principal investigator on the grant, co-founded Adnoviv in 2013 with electrical engineering Professor Victor Lubecke. The company focuses on research-driven technology, developing innovative sensors and systems for industrial, medical and security applications, including its centerpiece product, True Presence Occupancy Detection Sensors (TruePODS). Adnoviv is a Phase I graduate of the XLR8UH start-up program and has already hired four UH graduates. ... "

Smart Cities and Blockchains

Never thought of this particular kind of approach.  Security of Why versus good database architectures?     Intriguing  thought. 

10 Ways Blockchain Is Revolutionizing Smart Cities
By Sergio.  (Excerpt) 

Blockchain will transform smart cities of the future. #p3smartcity
Blockchain technology is boosting the bottom line of private and public sector

It’s touted as the “secret sauce” that will transform smart cities of the future, establishing trust and transparency in government through an immutable digital record — one that’s able to connect sky’s-the-limit endpoints while being virtually hack proof.

Blockchain technology took the digital world by storm in 2009, when it debuted as a digital ledger book for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Since then, it is being used to reshape the way business is done in industries ranging from finance and healthcare to manufacturing — and, of course, government.

In a nutshell, blockchain is a new kind of encrypted database that is decentralized, distributed, and unassailable. It creates a digital record that is amazingly secure and is easily accessible to the public.

Smart cities worldwide are using blockchain as the foundation of plans to enhance urban living. Headlines are filled with innovations from locations like Dubai, which aims to cement its status as a global leader in the smart economy as the first blockchain-powered government, and Moscow, which recently became the first city to use blockchain in an e-voting system designed to eliminate corruption and voter fraud.

But the public sector isn’t the only segment of a smart city that stands to benefit from blockchain technology. The private sector is also realizing its potential to reimagine key business processes and help companies of all sizes compete on a more level playing field and therefore advancing their ability to be strategic partners to smart city projects.   ....  "

Smart Connected Consumer Products

A topic we often worked on in in the innovation center, excellent infographic overview when connected
to the smart city.  Smart at all sorts of levels.  (full clickable graphic at the link)

Reimagining Smart Cities with the Arrival of Smart Connected Consumer Products  Posted by Aarti Sharma in IOT Central

We are fast moving towards a future where cities will feature hundreds and thousands of smart connected objects, talking to each other, exchanging and producing meaningful data and insights, basically reshaping the urban landscape into intelligent and autonomous systems. Internet of Things will be at the heart of this technological transformation, as sensors and digital tags will find their way into various physical city infrastructure, monitoring traffic, weather, crime and even rat infestations! However, it’s not just hardware IoT and sensors that will provide city planners and authorities to gain more visibility into the working and management of a city. Smart connected products or ordinary consumer products tagged with digital ID’s and digital twins can open up new dimensions in how we imagine Smart Cities to function.

For the sake of painting a picture of the role of connected products within Smart Cities, let’s consider a pharmaceutical company supplying critical drugs to a city. Enabling every drug product at batch and serial item level to have a digital twin of its physical self will allow for exchange of product related data to happen between manufacturer, the supply chain, the city authorities, end consumers and the products themselves. Read on to see how the pharmaceutical industry could look like in the not so distant future.     ....   "  (excerpt, much more at the link)  .... '