Abhijit Shanbhag is CEO of Graymatics, a cognitive media processing company, providing AI-powered solutions for multiple sectors including security and surveillance, digital marketing, telecommunications and IoT. He believes that many more cities can and should improve their safety and efficiency by engaging in Smart Cities projects, and here shares how the use of AI in the Smart Cities scheme can help to create a safer society. How can Smart Cities detect and track criminal activity? Smart Cities largely leverage Smart CCTV's to keep the city safe by employing powerful AI-based solutions, such as Graymatics, applied to the CCTV feeds to automatically detect various kinds of suspicious and/or criminal activities anywhere in the city. Any instances of criminal activity such as assault, brandishing of weapon, fire, vandalism, and/or suspicious behaviour will immediately be detected by the AI platform linking to the CCTVs, at which point an alert is created and assigned accordingly to law enforcement officials.

Armies of content moderators are working to scrub social networks of the worst content humanity has to offer -- violence, gore, hardcore sexual imagery -- and they can't keep up. The disturbing litany of murders, suicides and assaults have already become macabre technological milestones. These include Robert Godwin Sr., the 74-year-old father of nine and grandfather of 14 who was selected by a gunman at random and then murdered in a video posted to Facebook in mid-April. One week later, a man in Thailand streamed the murder of his 11-month old daughter on Facebook Live before taking his own life. The beating and torture of an 18-year-old man with intellectual and development disabilities was live-streamed on the service in January, and the tragic shooting death of two-year-old Lavontay White Jr. followed a month later on Valentine's Day.

Companies from Singapore to Finland are racing to improve artificial intelligence so software can automatically spot and block videos of grisly murders and mayhem before they go viral on social media. None, so far, claim to have cracked the problem completely. A Thai man who broadcast himself killing his 11-month-old daughter in a live video on Facebook this week, was the latest in a string of violent crimes shown live on the social media company. The incidents have prompted questions about how Facebook's reporting system works and how violent content can be flagged faster. A dozen or more companies are wrestling with the problem, those in the industry say.