Making a smarter city

Whenever we talk about smart cities it is normally inferred that a smart city involves adding technologies to the infrastructure of the city. The goal is to make it more efficient in a certain aspect be it traffic, processes with the city/government, city’s basic services, or access to information. In reality Smart Cities is a much broader topic that includes several key aspects. They can be separated into: Smart cities infrastructure, the power of the government with smart cities, the citizens abilities to use a smart city, and the ethics of smart cities.

Smart Cities Infrastructure

All cities need infrastructure in order to be able to adopt and develop a smart city. Most approaches to this topic need the implementation of some technology to make the transition into a more efficient evolution of whatever they are trying. Traffic is one common example that almost all cities try to make better. A very good insight in how smart traffic is moving foward can be found here.

Infrastructure not only involves physical advances but also logistical advances from governamental processes to services. With the use of new technologies it is possible to do smarter better portals for the citizens of a city. There is a current trend to move into this area and streamline most needs thorugh a web portal. This wouldnt be possible without adjustments to the logistic of current processes.

Ethics of Smart Cities

Smart cities involves gathering data from the city and the citizens that inhabit it, this obviously creates the issue of how to gather and what should we gather from the citizens as their data should be their own at the end of the day. I’ve talked a little about it in this blog post. With smart cities it is incredibly important to take in consideration how we use the data as it can easily be exploited for others advantage.

The Power of the Government with Smart Cities

Most of the initiatives that involve smart cities involve in some manner the government be it approvals or using resources from them. When we have a section of the city’s organization which is the one that decides most of it and oversees it, we can have an abuse of the information they are getting. They could use it for personal gain or to “automate” a process in which their eyes will make it easier but might be a very biased system, this has happened in china where the citizens are categorized base on their internet usage.

The Citizens Abilities to use a Smart City

Perhaps the most important reason why smart cities should be implemented and what should be at its core its that they should serve to empower and facilitate the life of a citizen. A citizen should be able to use or gain a benefit from the systems that are implemented into their city. One of the most important obstacles the topic of smart cities should address is how to teach their citizens to use this systems and get the most out of them. There is no benefit in creating a web portal to do all the processes for issuing guvernamental documents if only 5% of the population will use it, due to their knowledge of the platform or their ability to acess it. In order to develop a good Smart City it is necessary to first tackle the issues of accesibility the vast majority of the citizens will face when introducing new technologies to their ecosystem.

Sources:

View at Medium.com

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/fbi-algorithm-mit-muslim-spy-report-operation-vulgar-betrayal-assia-boundaoui-illinois-a8844306.html

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5124065/

http://www.alearnedhand.com/smart-cities-big-data-where-is-ethical-framework/

Testing Citizens (Review)

This semster I took both the course of quality and testing and smart citizens. All in all they were very good courses I was able to learn a lot from both courses in different aspects. Smart citizens, while it started out to seem as a technical course, I liked the ethical view it took later on, discussing and learning about the details of what and how a smart city is created was a very good way of approaching the topic.

In the other hand Quality and Testing was a more hands on experience. While in the end there wasn’t a project for the course, with the various things I learned from it I was able to apply a better judgement about how to go when developing software. The course had a good approach, going on different topics each time.

Although both courses were good there are some things that can be changed to make them more solid, smart cities by having a bigger emphasis in the ethical implications and what ifs?. Quality testing can do away from blogging about a topic which is more follow the instructions and less content to discuss.

Week 9 should we be doing this?

When we talk about creating smarter cities we think of ways we can improve the way we live, the way we do things, or what things we can stop doing by the use of technology. Initially we think of ways to use technology in order to meet a need or accomplish something that can be used for the good of the community. But often we never stop to think, how can this new technology can be used, in what ways will it end up being used.

Our advancements in technology eventhough they are mostly designed in a mission to create something good. In essence is a double edged sword. More so the technology we create is agnostic and it is the way we use it that defines if it is good or bad.

This use of technology is not new, every time something is invented someone will find a way to use said invention in a negative way or in a way for personal gain without any regards for others. When we go back to he topic of smart cities the most gray area that comes with it is surveillance which can be as easily used for good as for bad.

We should always thread carefully whenever we are designing a system to take into consideration the effects introducing this can cause in the community. Could there be a conflict of interests? Can a negative outcome come out of it? What happens if the people overseeing this affect the purpose of the tech or if they use this for their personal interest?

Smart Cities, the right approach?

Smart cities is all about how to tackle problems in a city with the use of data and technology. Due to the involvement of technology in how we use said data it is very important to know the boundaries of the things that are essential for smart cities to work, data. Data can be gathered from many different sources and can direct us in a variety of directions as to what this data means, but depending on what data is gathered and how it is interpreted may change the outcome of the actions based on them.

Take for example Waze which allows users to see other user data of their speed in a certain area. We can take this information as this certain area has congested traffic due to an anomaly or high traffic times. That is only one approach but when you take more data in a bigger scope a different approach may be how can user traffic data can tell us how the city can change road infrastructure to allow for better handling of traffic. like changing an intersection or stoplights sincronization.

 

Sources:

https://statetechmagazine.com/article/2017/09/smart-technology-makes-managing-traffic-breeze-transportation-departments

 

View at Medium.com

Surveillance in smart cities

When talking about smart cities, data collection is deeply involved, as it allows for a lot of different analysis that can be useful from traffic propagation to air conditions. Smart cities directly involves itself with knowing what is happening in a determined area be it small or big. As useful as data can be most of the times said data comes from citizens as they are the one who live in it and interact with it.

The big issue is that when this data comes from the citizens, rightfully so it really belongs to them and they can decide if said data can actually be used, which is creating issues for cities government as they cannot fully assure that the data that is recolected will only be used for that specific purpose. Some governments have even decided to create independent bodies that would regulate the data so no third party can use it for an unintended purpose.

While these are some views on how smart cities have challenges to overcome to be able to use data in its fullest potential and good ways to go about it there is always an outlier to how things are and should be done, cue China.

So, at the moment China is going through a period where they are integrating the concept of smart cities more and more every day. The problem is the reasons behind the data they are collecting. Straight from “Nosedive” an episode of the series Black mirror, a show where each episode explores a what if sccenario of technology and how it reflects in society, China is attempting to rate their citizens based on different criteria that is gathered from their actions in order to determine if they are an active member of society and if they should be granted certain privileges.

Just analyzing China’s actions it can be easy to understand why most citizens are against unregulated collection of their data as it can define how they are seen as a person in an objective measurable way which skips actually evaluating people as how they are. It might be faster but its definitely ugly.

Week 6

We have decided that after looking at how steps is implemented it will be more of a hassle to try and adapt it to our project than what it is worth. We instead decided to use go in the back end and communicate it directly with arcgis. I created an ARCGIS map in order tosee in what ways we can store data and it seems that we are able to create points of interest and attach a description to it as well as an url so we will have to host the images of each place elsewhere and reference them from there.

This week the progress we did wasn’t tangible due to being occupied with partials week. But this week we will be able to advance more in the tasks we have designated for the project.

Blog Week 4

This week we finally have a clear sight of what we need to do and how we are going to do it. Below there is the preliminar arquitecture for our project with the different technologies we are going to use.

We are going to use heroku to host the whole of our project. Postgress for our DB. Go for the API and VUE for our web client. Travis is used for CI and solid still has a grey area defined for it as we dont know exactly how much we are going to implement.

We are also going to be splitting our work load so thateach of us focuses on the different areas, Martell will be focused on data analysis, Lucia on front-end design and implementation and Jesus on API integration. From the other courses we will have a group focusing on creating tests for our project. The go API will probably have a TDD focused approach. while front end tests will be developed after those parts are done. On the Web development course we are focusing on the Go API and postgress integration as well as mounting the services on heroku.

We will begin work on the project next week with a basic iteration of the project.

Blog Week Three

After having our first meeting with the team of alberta we now have a clear path as to what we have to work towards, despite the technical difficulties that presented during the meeting. We have discussed with the canada team and we will be focusing primarily on the development of the web application. while trying to develop a similar product in terms of requirements.

With our current knowledge of certain technologies we have decided to use Vue for the web app and go for the back end services. We are still considering which database to use. We still need to delimit the role of Solid pods in our project and on how much content will the user be able to control. Should user generated content towards the platform be able to be removed by said user, eventhough that content is essential to the platform?

Once we start developing the project we can start creating test cases for the project to ensure functionality and be able to have proper continuos integration.

Blog Week 2

We got communication from the team from alberta which we are going to work with during the semester. They are planning to meet with their client on monday and they have invited us to participate on said meeting via google mee. This way we can have direct involvement with the project as well as voice our doubts about the project which we gathered.

We found the pitch about YegAR which actually gave us a clearer understanding of the elements of the project. From what we gathered it will consist in two platform which work to accomplish the same goal. A web platform to register geotagged and link them together in walks, and a mobile app which allows to access information about those palces.