The AI Leap Forward: Elevating Smart Cities to New Heights

The concept of a smart city refers to a modern urban environment that integrates various technologies and data to optimize the management of city services and infrastructure. By leveraging these technologies, smart cities aim to enhance residents' quality of life by improving efficiency, promoting sustainability, and providing innovative solutions to urban challenges. With the recent breakthrough in artificial intelligence, we are witnessing a technology that holds the potential to open the door to a brand-new era of intelligent cities. Drawing on sophisticated algorithms and real-time data, AI is taking urban spaces to new heights, transforming them into responsive entities capable of anticipating, understanding, and responding to the changing needs of their inhabitants. The smart city market size is expected to grow by more than 23% and reach 3,84 trillion dollars¹. Faced with a revolution of this scale, SPIE is already taking this major technological step forward and supporting cities through large-scale AI-powered projects that will enable considerable progress to be made, particularly in reducing the carbon footprint of cities.

AI enables the processing and analysis of vast amounts of data in just a fraction of a second, surpassing human capacity in every respect. This technology is SPIE’s best ally in ensuring greater efficiency in the intelligent and frugal management of our cities. Consider a crucial safety issue such as traffic lights maintenance: manually checking them in a city may uncover some issues, but some malfunctions could go unnoticed, and it is particularly time-consuming. However, by training AI to detect and report faults using specific data patterns, we are significantly improving the efficiency of the process and, most importantly, we significantly improve road safety. And while AI can handle and automate some tasks, human involvement remains critical. In the foreseeable future, our teams’ expertise will be crucial to define AI objectives, interpret complex results, provide oversight. Their creativity, intuition, and empathy are uniquely human qualities indispensable for problem-solving and decision-making., a new era is dawning and I think it's very exciting to embrace it, to make the most out of revolutionary tools that will enable us to succeed in our mission to serve more sustainable and smarter cities.

The urban population is expected to reach 5 billion by 2030, and 6,5 billion by 2050. With this pace of growth and the increasingly pressing environmental challenges, cities must find ways to prosper while preserving resources for future generations. Sustainability is more than ever the most imperative issue to be tackled to ensure resilience and quality of life in urban environments. For example, facing, an estimated 300,000 people in Europe suffer premature death every year as a result of air pollution², AI has the potential to become a decisive tool for success as it can optimize the use of resources, reduce waste and emission, and improve energy efficiency of urban infrastructure. Take light, for example. Since 1989, 80% of Europe's insects have disappeared, amongst other things because of the increase in light pollution³.  Indeed, city lights tend to disturb the sleep of certain animal species. With the help of AI, we are now able to detect periods when road traffic is so low that these lights can be safely switched off, minimizing disruption to species such as butterflies and spiders. AI is also of interest when it comes to reducing CO₂ emissions. For example, it can optimize a vehicle's route by effectively coordinating when traffic lights turn green. As a result, cars brake less often, their speed fluctuates less, and their CO₂ emissions are reduced.

¹ Mordor Intelligence 
² https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/air-pollution-in-the-eu/ 
³ https://www.ompe.org/en/the-impact-of-public-lighting-on-biodiversity/