MAking SmARt cities persONal

(Intro)

As Our cities prepare for an even bigger rOle in the future of humanity.

the way we interact with them is About to change in incrediBle ways.

More than four billion people, or just over half of all humanity, live in urban areas according to the UN – a number that is expected to increase by 2.5bn to two thirds of the global population by 2050. The vast majority of that growth is expected to take place in Asia and Africa where, alongside long-standing megacities, new metropolises will emerge almost from scratch.

This urban growth may present substantial challenges for humanity in terms of climate and natural resource management, but it also meets opportunity; in the past two decades, technologies including artificial intelligence and robotics have led to unprecedented levels of automation in industry. As these technologies are built into new cities, they have the potential to deliver a leap forward in quality of life for urban dwellers.

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From Smart to Cognitive cities

Since the start of the century, ubiquitous data connections and Internet of Things sensor technology have allowed devices to feed data back to a central system and be remotely operated by it. In industry, where large investments in greenfield projects are common, this has resulted in giant factories where different processes and machinery operate all together, often coordinated by AI.

So far, however, the same level of automation has not been trialed at scale in lived environments. “Smart city” initiatives that capture data and adjust services in real time have emerged from Paris to Shanghai but applications are limited to specific use cases, such as monitoring weather conditions or traffic levels. The cost of retrofitting technology to existing infrastructure is one obstacle, while the variety of private and public organizations that run urban services limits the scope for coordination.

But now, in a vast stretch of desert in northwest Saudi Arabia, a more ambitious “cognitive city” model is emerging that will allow data-driven decision making to operate at a previously unimagined scale. By 2045, THE LINE – a 100-mile long, 200-meter wide skyscraper city – will host around nine million residents in the Kingdom’s newly created NEOM region.

“THE cognitive city is able to leverage more than 90% of resident consented data.”

Joseph Bradley // the chief executive of TONOMUS

Joseph Bradley is the chief executive of TONOMUS, NEOM’s technology subsidiary, which is pioneering this new technology-centric urban model. “Smart cities collect only 1% of the data generated by residents,” he says, “whereas the cognitive city is able to leverage more than 90% of resident consented data.”

This will allow the city’s AI to achieve a far deeper understanding of changes in the city and not only coordinate real-time responses, but also proactively undertake predictive measures to forecast changes and plan responses to them in advance.

“Rather than observing a traffic surge and increasing public transport provision in response,” says Bradley, “a cognitive city will be able to make adjustments to avoid it altogether.”

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A Conversational City

While factories are optimized for output, cities need to not just work efficiently, but also improve the quality of life of their human residents. The second plank of the cognitive city is therefore personalization.

Rather than aggregating anonymous data as in a smart city, a cognitive city can undertake a process of personalized learning and use it to assist in smarter decision making that is tailored for every single citizen. It could, for example, re-route journeys based on live information and slot them into an individual’s schedule, removing the need for apps and diaries. Over time, this level of personalization will result in reduced friction as the city gets to know each resident, freeing up time for individuals to spend as they wish and increasing wellbeing.

Bradley characterizes this new level of functionality as a conversation between the resident and city around them. Like any conversation, it becomes more meaningful – and the measures the city can take more effective – the more the participants share.

TONOMUS acknowledged at the outset of their planning that for the relationship between the city and its residents to work, it had to be built on trust. The first product they began working on therefore, was a consent management platform giving each resident complete control over when and how much of their data is used, and who uses it. People can grant and withdraw consent for specific uses at any time.

More broadly, NEOM will be protected by TONOMUS’ cognitive security platform, able to review millions of events per second, monitoring threats, detecting and analyzing any potential breach, identifying countermeasures, and applying them in a fraction of the time it currently takes. Quantum key distribution and quantum safe encryption are among the cutting-edge solutions being deployed, with its Cyber Security Operation Centre already operational and moving towards full capability.

At a social level, cognitive city models will also seek to avoid some of the inbuilt biases around issues such as race and gender that have bedeviled early machine learning models, which are trained on specific data sets and therefore absorb their blind spots. The cognitive city’s learning will be drawn from the entirety of the ever-growing stock of data generated by residents on a day-to-day basis, meaning the preferences of new residents will be encoded into the city’s evolution. The more diverse the city becomes, the more diverse the city’s solutions for its residents will be.

In the twenty-first century, smartphone and social media technology has transformed the way humans interact with each other – but our homes and the cities we live in have not kept up with this pace of change. As it plans the world’s first cognitive city, TONOMUS is pioneering a truly technology-based approach to city building – rivaling the efficiency of the most advanced industrial processes while also allowing for unprecedented levels of personalization.

The blueprint for the future of urban living could be on the horizon.

MORE FROM TONOMUS // MORE FROM TONOMUS // MORE FROM TONOMUS // MORE FROM TONOMUS // MORE FROM TONOMUS // MORE FROM TONOMUS // MORE FROM TONOMUS // MORE FROM TONOMUS // MORE FROM TONOMUS //

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