From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

What is a connected city?

From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

Start my 1-month free trial

What is a connected city?

“

(inspiring uplifting music) - One of the great ways of things we're seeing is what's referred to as connected cities now. And the cities that are fully wired, and just can example of this is, well if the city is fully-wired and it has all these sprinklers and everything else, why don't they shut off when it's raining? The same way maybe you should shut off your sprinklers at home if you have a local detector for your house. Maybe you don't want the city to necessarily shut it off. But similarly also, how does a city detect when traffic is too high, and being able to use that information to improve the quality of roads, or saying hey, you know what? Here's a new place where we may want to invest in a certain way, because lots of people look like they want to walk here, well let's make sure it's good. And there is also this other side where there are concerns where people are starting to talk about these ideas of what are often referred to as predictive policing, and how do they use information from these systems to improve that ability of police? And there's a natural question in there, is the data that's being used, that data that currently exists, which is racially biased because of tactics that have been used in how we actually deploy, particularly to minority communities. So how do we take that into account as we build these systems? But the opportunity for energy savings, the opportunity to get better services is unbelievable when we are actually able to deploy it using these techniques and algorithms. - [Man] So, I'm asking for a bold prediction here. Do you think there's going to be a time in which all cities, or a majority of cities in the US are these connected cities? - Yes, I am actually very comfortable saying that the cities in the future are connected. And here's an easy example of this. When you go to take a train now, or a bus, you expect to be able to say, hey, the bus is just two minutes away. You don't actually have to keep saying, well am I late, or did the bus already pass, those things. You just know, 'cause you know exactly where the bus is. And it improves ridership, it improves people's quality of service on there. You know how many seats there are. When you go to a parking garage now, you can see how many parking spots are in there. There's parking lots where they tell you, hey, there's only five spots available, or this is full. Or there's hey, level, go to level four, there's lots of open spots. That's actually happening now. And so, more of that as that starts to take place is going to change how we think about the quality of life on not the crazy bold problems that are out there, but many of the things that we take for granted and probably should take for granted because technology could make that that much easier for us. (inspiring uplifting music)

Contents