 Welcome to the AI for Good Global Summit 2018. I'm delighted to be joined by Francesca Brea, who's the CTIO at Barcelona City Council. Thank you very much for joining us. A pleasure. Francesca, can you tell us about your work with the Barcelona City Council? For me, cities have a really strong role in democratising artificial intelligence and data. First of all, cities are very close to citizens, and we always say we should not start from technology. We shouldn't start from the technological challenges. We shouldn't start from sensors, AI, big data connectivity, but we should start from real citizen needs. And we can take on a more participatory approach, a more democratic approach, and work from citizen needs into the technological solution so that if you look at all the challenges that artificial intelligence bring us, but also the more disruptive application that we see from automating industry and manufacturing, connected cars, the use of artificial intelligence for cyber security, the use of AI or deep learning, machine learning in healthcare, or even precision agriculture. These are all disruptive applications that present a lot of challenges from a social, economic, legal standpoint, and really challenging our institutions and our governments the way we do things with citizens. And so in order to make sure that artificial intelligence will be picked up and diffused throughout society and throughout the economy, we need to start from trust. And we need to regain the trust of citizens and doing it together with citizens. Start from citizen needs and then together with citizens, we can find out the best way to apply this kind of technology in particular in cities. Trust is a very important aspect of your job. I haven't mentioned the fact that you are also the leader of the Decode project in Europe. What is it all about? So the Decode project is a big project funded by the European Commission, it's 5 million euros investment and 14 partners. There are two city collaborating, Barcelona and Amsterdam, and we have technology expert more on the privacy and security side, but also sociologists, economists and people that do work with citizens group. And what we're doing is we are creating a privacy announcing, rights preserving, decentralized data infrastructure to give back control of data to citizens. So we want to democratize data and get the citizens to be the one that decide what kind of data I want to keep private, what kind of data I want to share, when, with whom and on what rules. So we are using the distributed ledger technologies or so-called blockchain with a layer of attributes-based cryptography. This means encryption. This means that data can be anonymous, that it's not linked to your identity. And the citizens are the one that can set the degree of anonymity of the data. And when citizens can share data with ethical standards and privacy and security by design, then our ambition is to create data commons. What data commons are, are shared resources on top of which we can really build together the application for future services in healthcare, mobility, transportation, education, and then really solve the big challenges. But we want to create a democratic way to control data giving the power back to the citizens. And this is very important because at the end the data is about communities understanding what they can meaningfully do to have a better life. For instance, I have some stories to tell you about how we are applying the Decode project in Barcelona. One case is on democratic participation. So we have a platform, it's called Decidim Barcelona. Over 40,000 citizens used it to propose ideas to government to be implemented in our government agenda. 72% of the proposals that today are our government plan came from citizens. And now the Decidim Barcelona platform through the Decode project is privacy enhancing so people can sign petitions and use it for participatory budgeting. But they're secured that their data is kept in, they have the ownership of the data and the data is secured. So they're the one that can decide what data they want to share with whom. So we can basically avoid data manipulation for elections or political use that we saw very much present in, for instance, in the Cambridge Analytical Scandal. Another very good use of this Decode project is the pilot round IOT Citizen Sensing. So we are collaborating with a project that is called Desmar Citizen and this group of citizens that are putting open hardware in their home to measure noise pollution and air quality because they want to improve the air quality in their neighborhood and also they want to have less pollution, noise pollution. And so we are there using the Decode project in order to have some data that they can share but also making sure that they're not sharing all the data in their homes, for instance, because they don't want that some of the data gets to an insurance company, for instance, without their consent, without their awareness. So basically you can trust the way you share the data. You can have this data that is used to target some meaningful urban problems and then create collective actions by citizens but also you are avoiding the accumulation of power in the hands of few players, which is something that worries us as policy makers that today only few players, only few big companies have all the power to aggregate and extract data and then to do machine learning and deep learning and artificial intelligence on that data. And so the problem is disparity, is polarization. So we want to have some competition there. We want to make sure that the data is adequately controlled and also that more players, more companies, social entrepreneurs, citizens themselves can access that data on third terms and then build the kind of applications that they need to solve their own problems. It's very interesting to hear you describe your work with all the stakeholders of the Smart Cities movement because that's everyone, isn't it? Government, citizens, obviously you mentioned that they are at the core of the proposition of what you're doing really. You mentioned academia, technology companies as well, the private sector and I suppose that our summit, that's taking place, Karatheen, Jennifer, is the ideal platform to meet all these stakeholders and to discuss solutions with them, isn't it? Absolutely. I think that partnership and work in an ecosystem with the right stakeholders, public administration that work together, cities that work together but also with national governments, with global governments, working with companies, small companies but also the big companies and then academics, experts and citizens at large is really important to achieve a human-centric vision for artificial intelligence and make sure that really AI and data will be serving the public good, will be serving the people, which is the objective that we all have. For instance, in Barcelona we are collaborating with the Barcelona Super Computing Center. They have really high computation capacity, data scientists, lots of talent. They also work with startups. They have the talent to come up with the new ideas, the new application and then through the city we can make sure that the challenges that we pose are the ones that interest citizens. So we have mission-oriented vision but then work with all these stakeholders to achieve this goal. And then, of course, we need multi-disciplinarity. I mean these are issues that cannot be dealt only to the technologists. Of course we need the expertise of the technologists, the scientists but we also need the ethical expertise, the economics, the policy makers. So we need multi-disciplinarity and then we need an alliance because I think we have this vision of technology serving the public good but of course we need the right regulation. We need to have the right enabling rights-preserving infrastructure. We need the funding to do that and we need to bet on artificial intelligence as critical industry of the future. So this requires a lot of investment and also a lot of talent to understand how we can all together solve these challenges and then really use the technological capacity to build a better future. Francesca Brillo, thank you very much. Thank you.