Sidewalk Labs’ Toronto headquarters is located at 307 Lake Shore Boulevard, right on the city’s waterfront. The building’s exterior is brightly painted in the industrial-gentrification chic style. The interior is part of a community outreach effort, filled with a slew of engaging dioramas and exhibits about technology and cities. But in many ways, the floor beneath is the space’s centerpiece. As visitors move from exhibit to exhibit, they walk across a plywood surface of hexagonal tiles — a system that Sidewalk Labs and designer Carlo Ratti, the director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT, call the “Dynamic Street.”
The real tiles — which will be made of concrete and be capable of housing sensors, signage and heating coils to melt snow — will make up an urban surface system that Sidewalk hopes to deploy across its project area in Quayside, right outside 307’s door. Dynamic Street has been designed to enable the elimination of curbs, introducing one flat hardscape that can change from street to sidewalk to plaza to parking as needed, with tiles changing colors to designate the appropriate usage. Read More
Tag Archives: Smart Cities
Smart Cities and Components in the IoT Era
To cope with the increasing population, hyper-urbanization, globalization as well as to ensure economic and environmental stability, cities are now focusing on becoming smart cities. Smart City is a concept of utilizing technologies and connected data sensors to enhance and become powerful in terms of infrastructure and city operations. This includes monitoring and managing of public assets, transportation systems, citizens, power plants, water supplies, information systems, civil bodies, and other community services. As per the new study from Navigant Research, the global market for smart city services is expected to reach $225.5 billion within the next decade. Read More
Imagining the Smart Cities of 2050
Tomorrow’s cities are reshaping almost every industry imaginable, and birthing those we’ve never heard of.
Riding an explosion of sensors, megacity AI ‘brains’, high-speed networks, new materials and breakthrough green solutions, cities are quickly becoming versatile organisms, sustaining and responding to the livelihood patterns of millions.
Over the next decade, cities will revolutionize everything about the way we live, travel, eat, work, learn, stay healthy, and even hydrate.
And countless urban centers, companies, and visionaries are already building out decades-long visions of the future.
Setting its sights on self-sustaining green cities, the UAE has invested record sums in its Vision 2021 plan, while sub-initiatives like Smart Dubai 2021 charge ahead with AI-geared government services, driverless car networks, and desalination plants. Read More.
Bringing the power of AI to the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things is getting smarter. Companies are incorporating artificial intelligence—in particular, machine learning—into their IoT applications. The key: finding insights in data.
With a wave of investment, a raft of new products, and a rising tide of enterprise deployments, artificial intelligence is making a splash in the Internet of Things (IoT). Companies crafting an IoT strategy, evaluating a potential new IoT project, or seeking to get more value from an existing IoT deployment may want to explore a role for AI. Read More
AI in IoT: 4 Examples on How to Make Use of It
Technologies like Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tell us that the future is now. Remarkably, these technology concepts perfectly complement each other. The number of connected devices will only expand and the mass of data produced by them will grow to head-spinning volumes. AI can help organizations gain meaningful insights from big data that IoT provides. But how do you get the insights? Has anyone already made use of AI in IoT? Let’s take a look. Read More
Combining AI, ML and IoT will establish one complete, interdependent distributed ecosystem.
With a clear blueprint to tap on the tremendous potential India holds as a digitally-enabled smart nation, Ravinder Pal Singh, Director, Digital Cities & Mega Projects, Government Segment, Dell EMC Commercial believes in India’s shinning story. Talking to Manali Jaggi of BW SmartCities, Singh elaborates on the company’s collaboration with the Government under its Smart Cities Mission and the need for a solid digital foundation to unlock the true potential of technologies like IQT, IoT, AI and ML through proper planning and execution. Read More
This ‘Smart City’ in China Is Controlled By An Artificial Intelligence
The idea of smart cities – infrastructure interlinked by software – isn’t new, but it’s undeniably cool. Who wouldn’t want to live somewhere where programs use data and evidence, not intuition, to actively improve their day-to-day lives?
Now imagine that an entire smart city actually exists, but it’s even more advanced than you could possibly imagine, where infrastructural systems are altered on the fly by an artificial intelligence (AI). This may sound futuristic, but one such place can already be found in China. Read More
Five Chinese smart cities leading the way
Across the world, over a thousand smart city pilots have been launched. China is home to half of these cities, amounting to a staggering 500 pilots.
The country’s smart city ambitions have been predominantly powered by private-sector giants, which has enabled cities across China to rapidly enhance their tech and innovation capabilities to meet citizen needs.
GovInsider shares five Chinese cities leading the way. Read More
Google’s “Smart City of Surveillance” faces new resistance in Toronto
THE WORLD’S MOST ambitious “smart city,” known as Quayside, in Toronto, has faced fierce public criticism since last fall, when the plans to build a neighborhood “from the internet up” were first revealed. Quaysiderepresents a joint effort by the Canadian government agency Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc., to develop 12 acres of the valuable waterfront just southeast of downtown Toronto.
In keeping with the utopian rhetoric that fuels the development of so much digital infrastructure, Sidewalk Labs has pitched Quayside as the solution to everything from traffic congestion and rising housing prices to environmental pollution. The proposal for Quayside includes a centralized identity management system, through which “each resident accesses public services” such as library cards and health care. An applicant for a position at Sidewalk Labs in Toronto was shocked when he was asked in an interview to imagine how, in a smart city, “voting might be different in the future.” Read More
Google Is Building a City of the Future in Toronto. Would Anyone Want to Live There?
TORONTO—Even with a chilly mid-May breeze blowing off Lake Ontario, this city’s western waterfront approaches idyllic. The lake laps up against the boardwalk, people sit in colorful Adirondack chairs and footfalls of pedestrians compete with the cry of gulls. But walk east, and the scene quickly changes. Cut off from gleaming downtown Toronto by the Gardiner Expressway, the city trails off into a dusty landscape of rock-strewn parking lots and heaps of construction materials. Toronto’s eastern waterfront is bleak enough that Guillermo del Toro’s gothic film The Shape of Water used it as a plausible stand-in for Baltimore circa 1962. Says Adam Vaughan, a former journalist who represents this district in Canada’s Parliament, “It’s this weird industrial land that’s just been sitting there—acres and acres of it. And no one’s really known what to do with it.” Read More
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