Urban Data Talks #2
Our second Urban Data Talks event covered another interesting set of urban data use cases shared by experts from industry, academia, and public sector. The sector diversity of our speakers shows how relevant urban data use has become across the economy – it cannot be anymore considered an esoteric play from future gazing scientists. Our topics covered public sector innovations during the pandemic, footfall trends on high streets and improving the natural habitat of our cities – all empowered by urban data.
First talk of the evening was delivered by Sven Latham from Noggin who discussed with us footfall on high streets, the trends over the last decade, what we can learn from the last year and what benefits different footfall monitoring solutions provide. It was not a massive surprise that footfall on the high street was in massive decline over the past year, but what did surprise me was that this is a long-term trend already started 10 years ago. A lot of it has been down to shifting behaviours in why people got to town centres. Since the increase in online shopping opportunities, fewer people go to towns for retail. Instead, town centres are becoming increasingly used for leisure. The trend is expected to be accelerated with the post pandemic recovery with many more retail shops to be converted into leisure spaces. Sven also explained the merits of different people counting technologies such as Wifi scanners and camera based counters, with the latter suffering specifically in crowded scenarios.
An interesting development related to Wifi based people counting was a ruling in the Netherlands by the national data protection agency who considered Wifi tracking implemented by the city of Enschede as a serious breach against GDPR. The city was fined 600k Euros, a somewhat controversial fine which will be contested by the city. We’ll keep an eye out for the outcomes of this appeal.
Our second talk provided by Alison Fairbrass from UCL Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research explored how urban data can help bring nature back into the smart cities that we are creating. She talked about how advances in IoT and AI technologies can provide reliable information about the biodiversity in cities and presented several case studies where she was involved. As part of her CitySounds work she created a library of different urban sounds and later developed CityNet - Deep Learning Tools for Urban Eco-acoustic Assessment. Another interesting work was the Nature Smart Cities project in Queen Elisabeth Olympic Park, where novel “Shazam for bats” sensing devices allowed researchers to monitor bat activity and different species across the park. Our very own Sarah Gallacher was also proudly involved in this.
An interesting learning from her talk is that increased urban biodiversity contributes to a better immune system for its urban residents, showing a clear benefit for us citizens in the long run. An interesting observation during the pandemic is that biodiversity is slowly increasing due to reductions in the background noise levels of human activity in cities.
In our final talk we heard from Kurt Frary about the exciting work he is doing on his IoT Innovation Network in Norfolk and Suffolk. By opening up a county-wide LoRaWAN network to different innovators, Norfolk County Council has built up an impressive library of different IoT use cases that they are currently actively exploring with many more in the pipeline. Have a look at the slide deck to get a flavour of these. Several use cases are already in the scale up phase and include road surface temperature monitoring for winter gritting, asset tracking and adult social care. With so much real-time data slowly becoming available through the different IoT deployments, it makes my imagination go wild in what else can be achieved by sharing this data with others.
The session concluded with a zoom networking chat which was a really fun discussion and allowed me to catch up again with a few known faces from the IoT community. I can’t wait again for our next event beginning of June.