From traffic control and waste management to biometric surveillance systems and predictive policing models, the potential uses of artificial intelligence (AI) in cities are incredibly diverse, and could impact every aspect of urban life.
In response to the increasing deployment of AI in cities and the general lack of authority that municipal governments have to challenge central government decisions or legislate themselves London, Barcelona and Amsterdam launched the Global Observatory on Urban AI in June 2021.
The initiative aims to monitor AI deployment trends and promote its ethical use, and is part of the wider Cities Coalition for Digital Rights (CC4DR), which was set up in November 2018 by Amsterdam, Barcelona and New York to promote and defend digital rights. It now has more than 50 cities participating worldwide.
Apart from city participants, the Observatory is also being run in partnership with UN-Habitat, a United Nations initiative to improve the quality of life in urban areas, and research group CIDOB-Barcelona Centre for International Affairs.
According to Michael Donaldson, Barcelonas chief technology officer (CTO), the Observatory is designed to be a space of collaboration and exchange of knowledge where cities can share their experiences both positive and negative in developing and deploying AI systems.
He said that by sharing best practice in particular, cities will be able to avoid repeating previous mistakes when deploying AI systems.
We know the benefits AI can give us in terms of having a more proactive administration and better public digital services, but at the same time we need to introduce that ethical dimension around the use of these technologies, said Donaldson, adding that Barcelona is currently undertaking public consultations to define exactly what is and is not ethical when it comes to AI work that will be shared with the Observatory when complete.
Londons chief digital officer (CDO), Theo Blackwell, said his team is taking a similar approach by developing the emerging technology charter for London, which will also be fed back into the Observatory so that were not doing this in isolation and were learning from each other.
Blackwell said that as CDO for London, the opportunity to learn from, and be in active dialogue with, his peers in other cities is the most valuable information that I get because it is informed by on-the-ground, practical experience of deploying AI in an urban context, rather than the more legislative focus of think-tanks and government committees.
We dont have any powers to legislate here, but we do have powers to influence, he said. Cities are often at the coalface, with our staff directly talking to these technology firms, and thats some way away from the people who make the laws. We can come to the party with that lived experience, and try and shape them in a way that guarantees people safeguards on the one hand, but also promotes innovation in our economy.
Guillem Ramrez, policy adviser on city diplomacy and digital rights at Barcelona City Council, told Computer Weekly that this approach will help cities collaborate internationally to see what ethical means in different cultural contexts, and to build a common understanding of what it means to develop AI ethically.
The first thing that were doing is identifying the principles of what should be considered ethical when it comes to AI, said Ramrez, adding that the Observatory hopes to have a report finalised on this in September.
Weve been discussing with the cities that are part of the Coalition, and weve identified some of these principles, which includes non-discrimination and fairness, but theres also cyber security, transparency, accountability, and so on.
Then what were doing is to operationalise them, not in terms of super concrete indicators, but in terms of guiding questions, because at this point cities are not even developing complex AI systems, so the idea is to lay the ground for scaling up in an ethical way.
Donaldson and Blackwell both stressed that many of the cities taking part in the Observatory are at very different stages of their AI journey, and that anything produced by the Observatory is meant to help guide them along a more ethical path.
At the moment, many of the AI-based technologies and tools being used in urban centres are not the products of the cities own development efforts, but are instead developed in the private sector before being sold or otherwise transferred into the public sector.
For example, the facial-recognition system used in the UK by both the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and South Wales Police (SWP), called NeoFace Live, was developed by Japans NEC Corporation.
However, in August 2020, the Court of Appeal found SWPs use of the technology unlawful a decision that was partly based on the fact that the force did not comply with its public sector equality duty to consider how its policies and practices could be discriminatory.
The court ruling said: For reasons of commercial confidentiality, the manufacturer is not prepared to divulge the details so that it could be tested. That may be understandable but, in our view, it does not enable a public authority to discharge its own, non-delegable, duty under section 149.
Asked how cities can navigate the growing closeness of these public-private collaborations, Barcelona City Councils Ramrez said that while cities will need to strike a balance between sensitive company information and public interest, the city will need to understand how the code is working, and have procedural transparency to understand how decisions are made by the algorithms.
He added: The functioning of these systems needs to be able to be explained, so that citizens can understand it.
Donaldson said cities will need to develop a set of checks and balances to figure out how to safely navigate public-private AI partnerships in ways that also benefit citizens.
We might not really know whats going on because your technology is far beyond our knowledge, but what we know is how to deliver public services, how to guarantee the rights of our citizens, and if your technology is going against that, were going to tell you to stop, he said.
Responding to the same question, Blackwell said the application of AI in cities will happen in many different settings but that, from the examples he has seen, the most useful applications are based on very narrow use cases.
I think the challenge with city authorities is actually that these technologies can be incredibly useful in narrow use cases, he said. Sometimes we might be approached by big companies that say there is a wide range of things this tech can do, and I think the art here is to basically say no, we just need these things, and its not something that builds towards an all-singing, all-dancing universal system, which I think is the kind of default position for many large technology companies.
Blackwell said London plans to let organisations publish data protection impact assessments in the London Data Store so that they can become less of a risk management tool for information governance professionals, and more of an accountability tool that says, this is how Im dealing with the questions that were asked about this technology thats a key provision in the emerging tech charter.
More:
Cities worldwide band together to push for ethical AI - ComputerWeekly.com
- Classic reasoning systems like Loom and PowerLoom vs. more modern systems based on probalistic networks - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using Amazon's cloud service for computationally expensive calculations - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software environments for working on AI projects - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of my NLP toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Semantic Web: through the back door with HTML and CSS - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Java FastTag part of speech tagger is now released under the LGPL - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Defining AI and Knowledge Engineering - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Great Overview of Knowledge Representation - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Something like Google page rank for semantic web URIs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My experiences writing AI software for vehicle control in games and virtual reality systems - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The URL for this blog has changed - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- I have a new page on Knowledge Management - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- N-GRAM analysis using Ruby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Good video: Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using the PowerLoom reasoning system with JRuby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Machines Like Us - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- RapidMiner machine learning, data mining, and visualization tool - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- texai.org - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- NLTK: The Natural Language Toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My OpenCalais Ruby client library - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Ruby API for accessing Freebase/Metaweb structured data - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Protégé OWL Ontology Editor - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of Numenta software is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Very nice: Elsevier IJCAI AI Journal articles now available for free as PDFs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Verison 2.0 of OpenCyc is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What’s Your Biggest Question about Artificial Intelligence? [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Minimax Search [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Tree [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- More AI Content & Format Preference Poll [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New Planners Solve Rescue Missions [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Learns to Bluff at Poker [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Pushing the Limits of Game AI Technology [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Mining Data for the Netflix Prize [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Interview with Peter Denning on the Principles of Computing [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Making for Medical Support [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Creates Music CD [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- jKilavuz - a guide in the polygon soup [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial General Intelligence: Now Is the Time [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Apply AI 2007 Roundtable Report [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What Would You do With 80 Cores? [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software Finds Learning Language Child's Play [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence in Games [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence Resources - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Alan Turing: Mathematical Biologist? - April 25th, 2012 [April 25th, 2012]
- BBC Horizon: The Hunt for AI ( Artificial Intelligence ) - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Can computers have true artificial intelligence" Masonic handshake" 3rd-April-2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Kevin B. Korb - Interview - Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity p3 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence - 6 Month Anniversary - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Science Breakthroughs - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Hitman: Blood Money - Part 49 - Stupid Artificial Intelligence! - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Research Members Turned Off By HAARP Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence Lecture No. 5 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Charlie Rose - Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Expert on artificial intelligence to speak at EPIIC Nights dinner - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Filipino software engineers complete and best thousands on Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Course - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Vodafone xone™ Hackathon Challenges Developers and Entrepreneurs to Build a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence ... - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Packages Up CPG Booster - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- 2 Filipinos finishes among top in Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence course - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- Why Your Brain Isn't A Computer - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- 2 Pinoy software engineers complete Stanford's AI course - May 7th, 2012 [May 7th, 2012]
- Percipio Media, LLC Proudly Accepts Partnership With MIT's Prestigious Computer Science And Artificial Intelligence ... - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Google Driverless Car Ok'd by Nevada - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel and Forrester Research Announce Free Webinar - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Wins 2012 San Francisco Business Times Tech & Innovation Award - May 13th, 2012 [May 13th, 2012]
- Internet Week 2012: Rocket Fuel to Speak at OMMA RTB - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- How to Get the Most Out of Your Facebook Ads -- Rocket Fuel's VP of Products, Eshwar Belani, to Lead MarketingProfs ... - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- The Digital Disruptor To Banking Has Just Gone International - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel Announce Free Webinar Featuring an Independent Research Firm - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- MASA Showcases Latest Version of MASA SWORD for Homeland Security Markets - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Bluesky Launches Drones for Aerial Surveying - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence: What happened to the hunt for thinking machines? - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- Bubble Robots Move Using Lasers [VIDEO] - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- UHV assistant professors receive $10,000 summer research grants - May 27th, 2012 [May 27th, 2012]
- Artificial intelligence: science fiction or simply science? - May 28th, 2012 [May 28th, 2012]
- Exetel taps artificial intelligence - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- Software offers brain on the rain - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- New Dean of Science has high hopes for his faculty - May 30th, 2012 [May 30th, 2012]
- Cognitive Code Announces "Silvia For Android" App - May 31st, 2012 [May 31st, 2012]
- A Rat is Smarter Than Google - June 5th, 2012 [June 5th, 2012]