On 27 November, Kashif Sharif, Associate Professor for Research at School of Computer Science & Technology of Beijing Institute of Technology and Senior Member and Associate Editor of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, delivered a keynote speech at the Technology Innovation and Smart City Forum of the Asia Youth Leaders Forum 2021.

The full speech is as below.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Dignitaries,

Guests,

Young leaders,

Good afternoon. The topic of my talk is technologies needed for super smart cities.

I sat down three days ago to make slides for this talk, and my wife asked me, “What are you going to do? Where are you going?” I said, “It’s a young leaders forum.” She said, “Are you going to teach them or talk to them?” Because, as a professor, I am always teaching. That’s a really good question, which made me change all of my presentation. 

The first question is: How do you define a smart city? What makes it smart? Can you describe it? Is it a collection of many technologies? Are technologies enough or sufficient to make it smart? And then, when you say smart technology, what really is the definition of smart? Just using blindly any new technology or jargon? Or really, you have to pick and choose that this technology is really providing you a service that is going to be smart for the people? Or is it just going to be just another innovation in the long line of technologies? 

You can make everything smart. You can have smart governance to smart amenities to smart buildings. Putting just “smart” with everything really makes it smart? Or, do you have to really ask the real question of what is making it smart? This list can go on and on, and there is no limit to it, what you can make smart. But the real question is this bottom one: is the city smart or its components smart? Does making different industries smart really lead to a smart city? Or do you have to ask some other question that is going to really make a city smart for the people that live in the city. 

In my understanding, a smart city is a city that integrates everything and integrates all those technologies that we have for different industries. Technology is not just there for automotives, aviation, or medicine. Actually, it is integrated into every aspect of your life, starting from your smart lock at the door to the way you get down through the elevator, to the way you get into your vehicle and reach your destination. It doesn't matter what you're doing, it has to be done in an efficient way.

That leads to a question. If you're going to integrate different technologies, how?

From a technical perspective, I start to think this technology is going to talk to that technology. But the fundamental question is how or why. Can technologies just evolve in isolation? Or can industries evolve in isolation? Not really. Any smart element in a smart city should be able to smartly talk to any other element. The biggest example of that, we have seen in COVID-19. We have smart transportation systems to a great extent. We can make them smarter. But can they help fight the pandemic? Can they help track how people travel and how the virus travels with them? That is an integration of medical application with a transportation application. Unless these two technologies talk to each other and interface with each other. In isolation, these technologies cannot become part of a smart city.

Challenges of a smart city, I refer to them as objectives. These are some of the questions that we need to ask or the young leaders in the future would also need to ask. Use of technology, is it the only thing? Will there be more than one technology? Technologies keep on changing. Every few months, we have a new jargon that we started using. Previously, it was IoT. Then we had sensors. Then we have AI, machine learning, and robotics. Five months from now, there will be something new. So, should we just keep on adopting these technologies, using them blindly? Or should we be able to pick which technology will really provide the service to the people? Integration, to what extent? Can we integrate everything with everything else? Not really. Making large centralized system, people in IT know that they are bound to collapse or fail over time. They do not stand the test of time. Disintegrated systems or distributed systems would be the way to go, but with distributed systems, you still want to have collaboration, talking to each other. So, to what extent can we integrate?

And then, the biggest question of the stakeholders. Every industry is a stakeholder. People of the city are stakeholders. The government is a stakeholder. With so many stakeholders, integration becomes a big challenge. Everybody wants to capitalize or optimize their performance. Hence, coming to a common ground becomes a big challenge, and that should be the objective.

Coordination among them, macro to micro level coordination among the transportation to the pandemic control to how we distribute food, etc. And then, privacy and security, fundamental question. Hence, it has to be a part of the overall solution in a smart city.

And the test of time. Will it be evolvable or not? You put in a technology now, five years from now it's obsolete. Will you replace it? Will you be able to replace it? Can you replace it at all? Or are you going to start from scratch again? So having systems that evolve over time and are flexible enough to change is the big question of how will we achieve that in a smart city. 

And then, educating people to actually use it becomes very crucial. For example, my mother holds a master's in botany, but she will never use a smartphone. She does not like to use a smartphone. So, educating people to adopt the technology and then use it becomes another challenge when you get to smart cities or super smart cities.

From a technical perspective, from my perspective as a researcher in technology, what I want is all the technologies to be inter-operable. They talk to each other seamlessly. They should be unified. From one point, I can control any aspect of the smart city. Independent and isolated systems should have enough interfacing among them that they are able to exchange data with each other and cooperate among themselves. And the diversity of technologies and the distinct objectives and services of all of these individual components, or all of these smart systems within the city, should be unified to collaborate to really make a smart city.

Now, the next question that we have is what is the fundamental thing that you have to integrate or mix together or make collaborative when you are building a smart city with all these smart technologies? Two things: one is the communication; the other is the data itself. No matter what the industry is, it has to communicate. It has to communicate all the time. In modern world, if you are not connected, if you are isolated, it won't work. The other thing is when you're communicating, you're communicating data. You're not really communicating one airplane to a train; you are exchanging data. That data exchange has to be done very effectively. When I was making this particular slide, my intention was to put in the actual technology, the technology for 5G, the technology to exchange data. But then I started talking there are so many technologies to do that. If you try to make a list of all the technologies, you can just keep on making this list that is there. These are recent technologies and there can be many, many, many more. Many of them deal with robotics; many of them deal with IoT; many of them deal with material sciences. They're all there, and you can be tempted to use all of them at once. But you cannot. For the communication and data exchange, you really have to first understand the infrastructure itself, not individual technologies.

From a smart city's perspective and from people's or community leaders’, you need to understand the infrastructure is going to be smart itself. There is this concept of Infratech, that the infrastructure is not just a bridge or a train or a car, it's basically a data generation system. It's an information system in itself. When treating that physically inanimate object as live dynamic information system, you can really appreciate that it is going to generate data that is going to be exchanged among those entities. The biggest example could be that if you want to make a bridge between two banks of a river, you're not actually just putting a physical bridge, you are providing a complete service to the people to cross the river. That includes the dynamic passing of the tool to automatic lane shifting to the ability to communicate, or the Wi-Fi or wireless communication services on it to the sensors and IoT devices on the bridge for its maintenance. Part of it could be drone inspection. So, you are basically building a complete solution that will have all those technologies plus the physical infrastructure. It's not just the infrastructure, and the example list can keep on going on. You can have all of these services that provide you with different solutions, but not in isolation. It's not just one technology: it's not just robotics, or AI, or machine learning, or a single element. It is always going to be very quick.

Quickly going over, some of the three major factors in building smart cities would be that there has to be a lot of focus on the goals rather than on the technologies. And then, government initiative becomes very important, starting from the outcome to planning to goals and the thought behind those goals. And then, you can start talking about technologies, that this technology is going to be fit for communication and this for the data processing. My field is blockchain and distributed ledger communication, and there is a lot of challenges within itself. I'm not going to go into too much detail about blockchain or anything. The benefits of blockchain are to integrate the data. Once we start to understand at that level, we can start to understand how blockchain can help us in the development goals of UN. There are many others that can be can be fit into that.

At the same time, one needs to understand that one technology is not a solution to all. This actually is from one of my research articles last year. The key thing is that technology is never a silver bullet. AI today may not be the same AI as tomorrow. So, we have to understand that using just one technology right now as part of the smart city may not be the best idea. The final thought on this is the stakeholders in a smart city. That is where the actual challenge is. Standardization of blockchain systems, that is where the leaders should be concerned about. Finally, there are many other technologies that we should be looking at, e.g., non-IP systems and software defined content centric systems.

I'm just going to summarize that this is a great platform for training the young minds on how to ask the real questions when it comes to picking technologies for the smart city. It is not just a city that has to be smart. It is a group of cities that collaborate with each other to make them super smart. I'll stop over here. Thank you.