 Good afternoon. So I'm very pleased to be with you this afternoon, not only because my flight has been delayed by two hours and it was challenging to make it, but also thanks to the beautiful weather we are having today. So unfortunately I had not the opportunity to see other previous sessions and but I suspect what one of the main theme today was about data and how people are using data to do analysis and to try to do predictions or to create new models that will help to shape the future. So today I will I will talk a bit about smart cities but not only not from let's say high level perspective but more on a pragmatic way. So the purpose of a conversation today is to describe how we make that happen and one of the I was saying one of the main issue we are having today is the amount of data that everybody has to collect and to manage today. So if we look at what is happening today around smart cities so there are lots of things happening around let's say the urbanization that accelerate we are seeing more and more people coming to live in the cities and the city is becoming bigger and bigger and that creates lots of issues in terms of housing of transportation so you have congestion everywhere security as well so you know as the more people they have the more it's a problem there might arise and the main topic today and we are seeing that everywhere is around let's say reducing carbon footprint and sustainability so how do we make the cities more sustainable and able to continue to grow and to host more citizens. So there is lots of let's say technology behind that so I will not go deep into all of those technologies but just in fact smart cities it's not rocket science it's mostly around what we call you know more generic IoT so the Internet of Things so the capability to collect data everywhere in the city to analyze them and make smart decisions and we are not let's say making city smarter just for the sake of technology but at the end of the day the goal is to make the life of citizens easier in the city so to shorten transportation or things like that so I've just put some buzzwords there just to do some let's say I would say education but just to talk about those technologies so 5G we have heard about that it's just a way to accelerate the collection of data and to have more devices connected Lora is another let's say network dedicated to capture data from from devices and sound source and they are all let's say technologies that enable to collect data and to connect objects at the end of the day the IoT is how we connect the physical world with a digital world and around that you have things like in the smart cities we can benefit from these technologies by using the data that is going to be generating by the sunsores the people the cars that everything here are in the city digital twins so this is a term that has been coined for the industry 4.0 as we call it so it's the capability to to create a digital model of something physical and to to use it to try to predict how the physical model is going to react so we see that in factories and things like that but we also begin to see that in cities so for example if you look at Singapore so Singapore has done a partnership with Dassault system to create a digital twin of Singapore so Dassault system has been modellizing the complete city to to have a digital model all hold the city so Singapore authorities can make smarter decision in terms of creating accommodation new building works transportation and so on and then let's say how do we make that happen is thanks to technologies around the big data so we will talk about that AI so why AI is important as well is that given the amount of data we are going to collect so we are talking not on but terabytes but terapetabytes or even exabytes of data that we are collecting so it makes difficult for human beings to manage those data so this is when AI comes into play because if we are to take decision in a real time only let's say a computer is able to analyze the data crunch it and let's say provide useful information back to the devices of the people in a timely manner and in terms of technology so you have two kinds of technology so what we call any directional so just collecting the data and analyzing them and then but be directional when you send back data to the devices in the smart city and this is especially important for autonomous vehicles or let's say connected vehicles because the more autonomous they are the more let's say quick the decision is and has to be communicated to the car so when you have let's say non-critical devices having a response time in one second that's okay but when you have a self-driving car I think that people would prefer to have let's say a couple of milliseconds instead of long latency so all these technologies are just there to make cities smarter and to improve the quality of life of citizens so there are different challenges behind that so in order to enable this technology so we have some technical challenges so multiple components to integrate how we collect and store and manage this huge amount of data challenges around organization so because building these models and this technology requires lots of money and as you know the money from the city is coming from the taxes and not all the people are willing to pay more taxes just to have more technology so there has to be compelling use cases where people are satisfied by the service or there's a partnership between public and private in order to fund those projects and this is one of the main issue we are facing today in terms of part cities is so what is let's say the benefit for the citizen and who is going to fund the project and make it work in terms of integration you know we are talking about sensors and one other thing that it's basic but if you have a sensor for example with temperature that is giving you the temperature every minute the information itself is not that useful and so in order to build a decent model you have to know where this sensor is located in the city so you you do not only have to collect the data but also to add metadata to make the thing more interesting and to create models and have let's say algorithm that are going to provide good results to the smart city and the last ones are really around security and let's say ethic because smart city are let's say collecting so much information and not only about devices but also about people so cities today in cities you we have a capability to know where you are not only just with your phone and smart beacons because you can locate people with our phones and we know where they are but also if you have digital cameras everywhere in a city with technologies like facial recognition we are able to identify people where they are all there let's say over where they are traveling within the city even when who they are meeting in the city so that creates issues around security so all this data is available we have to ensure that it is used in a good way for the benefit on the people and not to threat their privacy and we also have to protect this data to ensure that only the authorized people are able to access it but also to protect the devices because the more connected other devices the more let's say temptation it is for hackers to try to go in and to and to use them maybe in a bad in a bad way so if for example you have a city with where the traffic lights are all connected and you try to optimize the traffic by using the data of the cars and everything if someone acts into their system and modify how the traffic lights behave that might become quite dangerous for everybody so how do we collect all this data and manage all this data so today you have let's say different parties of the networks the people who are actually connecting the devices to have infrastructure so all this data has to flow somewhere where you will you will collect these petabytes of data so you have to store them somewhere so you have lots of interesting features in the cloud providers like Azure IWS and so on but you might not be willing to put all your private data into those clouds so one of the things that you can think of is have a dedicated infrastructure that you control where you can store all your data manage it and own it and one of the benefit of interconnection platform that that we are managing today is that we give a capability to create very innovative models so for example you can have all your data stored in a dedicated environment but still you can use features in the cloud providers because they are connected through private interconnection with very high bandwidth and very low latency so you can have the benefit and the scalability of the cloud providers while you keep the control on all your data and it gives also flexibility so you can really create a kind of hybrid environment where all the you can let's say decide to do something in a house or use cloud providers or use partners or anybody else who is it's a close to where you are operating so you can recreate hybridization not only between you and the cloud but also maybe between different providers if you want to use different features and so on and what I was just explaining today is just something we are doing only for Dublin not in other cities but we do operate globally and we have recently done let's say interesting projects so not only in city but in the transportation area so for example in Germany we are working with Siemens and we are trying to do predictive maintenance on the trains in order for the trains to run let's say more efficiently and to have less outages so what we are doing with Siemens is that we are collecting all the data so every time a train stops at the railway station all the data is uploaded so we can analyze it use a kind of digital twin a model when you can modelize the behavior on the train and then potentially do predictive maintenance so the train can be let's say running more often in a more reliable manner to better serve the citizens so thank you very much for your attention today I don't know if there is any question coming it was an abrupt ending apologies thank you very much that was a fantastic talk yeah fascinating to hear about smart cities that's a term that's really only come into awareness in the past few years and how we're looking at cities and trying to see how we can incorporate technology as you as you share with the devices all the all our smartphones all the data that we have how we can use this I'm just wondering a quick question now what would you consider to be the smartest city is there someone that is there a location that's leading the way in this in implementing that in their in their city sorry the as in is there a leader in this is there a city you would consider to be leading the way no there is no real leader today so there are lots of let's say experimental things happening some cities are trialing things by themselves some are doing partnerships with people like for example GCDoco you know all the furniture within the city that's a good place to put sensors or to enable say wi-fi for everybody wi-fi for everybody but now there is no clear leader and even in the from the technology perspective all the system integrators our cloud providers are working on this area but there is no clear leader yet okay maybe Dublin thank you