| |December 20189TOWARDS SMARTER CITIES cally flag violations. The backbone of these smart solutions is data ­ enormous amounts of it ­ and it's processing. Information and Com-munication Technologies (ICTs) play a leading role in acquiring, and then processing this data into actionable solutions.Cities that are Getting SmarterSmart city technology and pro-grams have been implemented in various towns across the world including Southampton, Amster-dam, Barcelona, Madrid, Stock-holm and multiple cities in the US, Japan and China. In China's Yinch-uan, local buses have facial recog-nition software that has replaced the fare box. Just like a fingerprint can unlock today's smartphones, passengers' faces are linked to their bank accounts to instantly transact. The city also boasts of dustbins that run on solar pow-er and double as compactors, al-lowing them to increase their capacity five-fold. Barcelona has been a lead-er with respect to how it has ad-dressed drought. The city ran out of water a few years ago. As a re-sult, it has developed a smart city sensors system for irrigation. Sen-sors in the ground analyze rain alongside the predicted level of rain forecasted to occur and mod-ify the city's sprinklers according-ly to help conserve water. The Technology behind the EvolutionAlthough cities have been using data in various forms for decades, the modern practice of using ICT for aggregating and processing civic analytics has only taken off in recent years. This is majorly due to evolutionary technological changes that have taken place in the 21st century.To enable smart city infrastruc-ture, there are two main system architectures that need to work together: mobile network architec-ture and ICT, or enterprise and In-ternet-based system architecture. For successful rollout of smart city applications and services, these two competing technical architec-tures need to find some common ground. In particular, this is nec-essary when it comes to protecting the data privacy of end users who, knowingly or not, are providing information to the development of these applications and services.Issues Affecting Smart City Roll-OutThis brings us to the largest haz-ard that concerns the development of smart cities ­ citizen privacy. Researchers, practitioners, and administrators must take into ac-count the privacy concerns that come with the inescapable nature of ICT in smart cities. Aware of this concern, many cities are now designing policies to safeguard citizen privacy and prevent the release of information that might identify any one individual. Even when publicly available data is stripped of personally iden-tifiable information, tech-savvy users can combine it with other data sets to extract a lot of in-formation about any individual. Widespread use of sensors and vid-eo can also present privacy risks unless precautions are taken. It is, therefore, vitally important that citizens are taken into confidence with awareness and due consider-ation before projects are launched.Opportunities for Business-es and LeadershipWith cities around the world look-ing to invest in smart city projects, there is increasing demand for programming, data analytics, IT consulting, system and network integration services. It is likely that large companies will provide the initial tools for cities to create more data and open up data sets. However, smaller organizations and developers will also be needed to create applications that will tru-ly affect citizens on a daily basis. Indian smart cities will need to create leadership roles (the City of Stockholm has a CIO) that should attract the best talent to supervise the creation, preservation and upgradation of smart infrastruc-ture and solutions. C IINFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES (ICTS) PLAY A LEADING ROLE IN ACQUIRING, AND THEN PROCESSING THIS DATA INTO ACTIONABLE SOLUTIONSRupinder Goel
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