AI opens new avenues for smart cities

The pandemic has dealt a body blow to many of the world's cities. As they seek to recover from the economic and social fall-out from COVID-19, municipalities are stepping up efforts to deploy big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve urban life. Equipped with a real-time view of what is happening across a city, municipalities hope to be able to make timely interventions, while spurring the development of innovative services. "We are using AI to become the eyes of the city," Maarten Sukel, AI lead at the City of Amsterdam, told a recent Science Business webinar entitled: How will real-time data reshape our cities? Although municipalities generally lack the granular behavioural data available to the major Internet platforms, advances in AI are making it easier to analyse the growing volume of data being captured by street level cameras and other sensors.