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US government urged to ‘jump start’ smart cities

04 March 2021

by Sarah Wray

The US federal government should do more to fund research and facilitate collaboration which helps cities tap the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies, says a new report from non-profit thinktank the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).

“Smart cities offer an important opportunity to address both infrastructure needs and strained state and local budgets at the same time,” the report says, noting the large revenue shortfalls many cities face due to the pandemic.

Cities can use AI in transport, the electrical grid, buildings, city operations and more.

2018 research from McKinsey suggested that a city deploying smart city applications “to the best reasonable extent” could reduce its total emissions by 10-15 percent. Similarly, a 2020 report from Microsoft and PwC found that AI-enabled decarbonisation technologies could reduce the carbon intensity of the global economy.

ITIF’s research outlines several key challenges to deployment. One is that many cities don’t want to bear the costs of “going first” with smart city technology, fearing that the benefits will mainly accrue to others.

ITIF argues that cities have “little incentive to bear all the risk of failure involved in adopting technology fuelled by emerging technologies”.

Further, few cities have the tools to share data with one another, which hampers the development of accurate AI models. Finally, without a federal data privacy law, cities struggle to address privacy concerns.

Funding focus

“The federal government should play a role in helping US cities overcome these challenges. It is able to provide funding and coordination on a larger scale than cities working individually,” the report states.

It acknowledges that the government has undertaken actions to support the development of smart cities but says these have mostly been uncoordinated, and that there is “no strategic vision” for the research, development and deployment of AI and smart city technologies at the national level.

Some of the specific recommendations include for Congress to: double investment in R&D of AI with energy applications across the federal government; fund ten smart city cooperative research networks that bring together industry, universities and national labs; reserve five percent (approximately US$2.5 billion) of the Highway Trust Fund allocated to states for intelligent transport and digital infrastructure projects; and provide at least US$2 billion to fund a competitive smart cities programme. The latter would be similar to the US Department of Transportation’s smart city challenge in 2015, in which almost 80 cities competed for a US$40 million grant. Columbus, Ohio, took the main prize but for many cities, the process spurred detailed plans and new investment for smart city initiatives.

To qualify for funding in any new challenge, cities should be required to open-source the code for applications they develop, ITIF said.

The report also urges the US to learn from other countries on ways to develop and deploy AI. It highlights the example of Singapore, which has developed a digital twin of its island city so that government, businesses and researchers can use it as a testbed to run simulations.

Image: Hugh Han on Unsplash

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