Nowadays more than 50 per cent of the world’s population lives in urban areas and this number is expected to increase to 68 per cent by 2050.
Urbanization brings a lot of benefits for society, including better access to health care, opportunities for education, better jobs and higher salaries. But from the other hand it also associated with societal and environmental challenges such as: pollution due to poor collection of waste and traffic congestion, greater poverty and consequently higher crime rates and price of living in big city always higher that in rural areas.
How to overcome these challenges?
Across the globe cities are using smart city technology which is used to manage assets and resources efficiently. The technology is mainly based on data collection from citizens, devices, schools, hospitals, information about traffic and transportation systems, using huge number of physical devices connected to network. Smart city technology generates giant amount of data. But this technology is just a tool which supports city officials during decision-making process.While artificial intelligence is able to turn this data into insight.
In general, machine learning based tools can change smart cities to even smarter and it can play a key role in various applications.Firstly, it can help to reduce driving time in a city using adaptive signal control, it uses real time data to change the timing on traffic lights to adjust to the flow of traffic. Adaptive signal control is expected to improve travel time by more that 10% in some areas by 50%. Furthermore, the technology can reduce amount of wasted fuel and increase productivity.
Secondly, AI can be used in video surveillance for recognizing humans, vehicles and different objects. For instance, it may help police to spot crimes and accidents faster. Moreover video surveillance with AI can help find stolen cars, check whether your insurance is expired or not by reading licence plates only and it can check 1800 number plates in one minute across four lines of traffic and inform police almost immediately. What is more due to AI technology, predictive policing becomes more sophisticated nowadays. Based on simple predictive patterns like payday+ alcohol=problems, predictive systems can play important roles in crimes prevention and fighting gang violence.From economic point of view automatization in cities can save governments more that 40 billions USD
In conclusion, all this innovations can extremely improve quality of live in our cities and make them more sustainable. But we should be aware that AI is relatively new technology and it is might be unpredictable.
Would you like to live in a city run by AI ?
Sources
- https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/the-urbanization-solution
- https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/23/16907238/artificial-intelligence-surveillance-cameras-security
- https://www.governmentciomedia.com/ai-predictive-analytics-stop-sex-offenders
- https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/19/urban-explosion-kinshasa-el-alto-growth-mexico-city-bangalore-lagos