When it comes to smart cities, it's all about its citizens

Dubai - Only way to ensure success is to have everyone and everything work together in harmony

You can aim to be the most technologically-advanced smart city in the world, but at the end of the day, your main motivation has to revolve around your citizens, experts stress.
Speaking in a panel session at the ArabNet Digital Summit, Simon Sylvester-Chaudhuri, managing director of Smart Cities NYC, highlighted that a cognitive city should be designed around the needs of its citizens.
"We should look at collaborations between various organisations when making this vision for a cognitive smart city come to life," he said, adding that it is only through a merging of interests between the public, private and educational sectors, that we can arrive at solutions that improve the lives a city's residents.
Speaking about how smart city technologies are already at work in different sectors today, he pointed to the examples of autonomous vehicles that are already being tested in various parts of the world, as well as artificial intelligence units that are helping bring organic food from the farm straight to your table.
Ussal Sahbaz, innovation leader for Turkey at GE, spoke about the importance of integrating data into different cycles across the board. "You can have the best technology out there, but if the various institutions in your city aren't working together to properly utilise the data, then you will have problems. There needs to be a culture where the different organisations are working together to come up with solutions to different problems."
Chaudhuri agreed with Sahbaz, saying: "What often gets lost in data collection is the generation of solutions for a problem. There is a bridge gap between the data and the analysis of the gathered data." He also stressed the importance of fostering an ecosystem where companies, especially small private companies, are encouraged to use the gathered data to create potential solutions for problems. "One very easy thing to do is to make the data available on the cloud. This way the data can them be used by everyone and you have a greater chance of having a solution generated," he said.
Speaking on solutions that can save both time and money in an organisation, Daniel Merege, founder of CityTech, pointed to smart machines that can learn on the job and then use the gathered data to make decisions. This, he said, is an alternative to programming a machine completely to do everything on its own.
One issue that was brought up during the discussion centered around privacy. All three experts agreed that the threat of cyber-attacks had put many companies on edge, especially since there have been a string of recent ransomware attacks. This has led to many users questioning the merit of sharing data on the cloud.
Sahbaz noted that there is a distinction between personal and industrial data and that users need to understand this. He also noted that many smart machines being developed today will need different privacy systems, compared to traditional IT systems that are responsible for personal data in companies.
- rohma@khaleejtimes.com