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.

Less than a quarter of UK consumers claim to be aware of the term'smart cities', according to a report by out-of-home and location marketing specialists, Posterscope. Smart in the City surveyed more than 5,500 consumers about their opinion on smart cities and their key features. Deeper analysis into the research report, however, shows there is more understanding and interest when respondents were questioned about specific initiatives. When asked which smart city features were deemed to be the most useful, those initiatives that provide a real-life benefit that people can easily relate to were rated the highest: smart water (89 per cent), smart construction (85 per cent), smart energy (81 per cent) and smart health (79 per cent). Features considered the least useful were smart tourism and leisure (59 per cent), smart retail (57per cent) and smart finance (57 per cent).