Smart Cities World Hosts Data Proliferation & Enhanced Connectivity for More Livable Cities Panel Discussion

On May 26, 2022, Metro21 attended the Smart Cities World panel discussion "Data Proliferation and Enhanced Connectivity for More Livable Cities" to hear about public safety and data proliferation, data in the post-pandemic world, data transparency and citizen engagement.

Key takeaways include:

• Data proliferation is a challenge. Massive amount of data is being generated, and has moved from on-prem resources.
• Earlier, people were generating data, but now with IoT, Machine and Real time streaming, the amount of data has grown exponentially.
• Discovering, understanding and cataloging data is a challenge.
• It is important to find a happy medium between accessing necessary data and protecting privacy, specifically in the departments concerned with public safety across organizations.
• The pandemic has unearthed the importance of how data needs to be dealt with. It has necessitated dedication of human and monetary resources for data analysis, protection, and visualization.
• Programs like the National Digital Twin Program in the UK / Digital Twins Las Vegas has been introduced to test changes before they are enacted in the real world. Digital twins help enhance efficiency and better implement sustainability initiatives and monitor progress.
• Interstate 15 (I-15) used the data available from all vehicles to identify anomalies in vehicle movement, to preposition law enforcement, tow trucks and responders and to ensure the deployment helps ensure arrival on scene is more accurate, and succeeded in doing so.
• Plan to extend to the California-Arizona border and eventually monitor to prevent accidents using signs/boards based on the data.
• The City of Las Vegas embarked on an initiative where every city department would determine goals, KPIs and identify data sets that would help populate KPIs to monitor progress.
• It is essential to balance between data sharing and privacy, which continues to be a challenge.
• When control is given to the owners of data, there is more willingness to participate in collaboration.
• It is important to be more active in terms of communicating with communities and people on benefits of technologies, before the technology is rolled out, in order to prevent backlash and to address concerns.
• Citizens are the eyes of the world in real time and hence citizen engagement is critical.
• Whenever there is innovation, there will be failures. It is just a learning process : try, fail fast if you are going to fail and move on. Industry is very keen to partner with cities.
• It is important to build partnerships between the public and private sector to launch pilots and projects to have an impact on the livability of cities and at individual level.