Urban Intelligence Research Articles

Decoding Urban Intelligence: Clustering and Feature Importance in Smart Cities

The rapid urbanization trend underscores the need for effective management of city resources and services, making the concept of smart cities increasingly important. This study leverages the IMD Smart City Index (SCI) dataset to analyze and rank smart cities worldwide. Our research has a dual objective: first, we aim to apply a set of unsupervised learning models to cluster cities based on their smartness indices. Second, we aim to employ supervised learning models such as random forest, support vector machines (SVMs), and others to determine the importance of various features that contribute to a city’s smartness. Our findings reveal that while smart living was the most critical factor, with an importance of 0.259014. Smart mobility and smart environment also played significant roles, with the importance of 0.170147 and 0.163159, respectively, in determining a city’s smartness. While the clustering provides insights into the similarities and groupings among cities, the feature importance analysis elucidates the critical factors that drive these classifications. The integration of these two approaches aims to demonstrate that understanding the similarities between smart cities is of limited utility without a clear comprehension of the importance of the underlying features. This holistic approach provides a comprehensive understanding of what makes a city ’smart’ and offers a robust framework for policymakers to enhance urban living standards.

Rethinking the Smart City as an Intelligent City Archway

Urban intelligence is the ability to understand and navigate the physical and digital dimensions of “connected complex urban places”. For example, new infrastructures (e.g., sensors, Internet of Things {IoT} devices like smart lamp posts) are needed to capture and represent places in software platforms and on the Internet. New spatial skills and spatial thinking are needed to navigate these new interfaces and networks of places. This paper aims at understanding urban intelligence by exploring variations in how smart cities have been conceptualized; how citizens have been placed within the smart city; and how Canada’s smart cities initiative has placed on urban (and highly spatial) problems over digital technologies. The metaphor of the Roman arch is used to describe the interdependency of the building blocks of smart cities. Components (building blocks) of the smart city, be they openness, resilience or inclusion, must all be present, and build towards what we argue is the keystone of urban intelligence. We discuss how these components lead to a new consideration of the smart city, the Intelligent City.

Is smart city low-carbon? Evidence from China

Smart cities were originally conceived to address a myriad of urban challenges arising from rapid urbanization, including energy scarcity, congestion, and environmental degradation. The Chinese government has made substantial efforts to advance smart city initiatives. However, the extent to which the integration of smart technologies contributes to urban sustainability, especially within a high-carbon urbanization paradigm, poses a critical question in light of escalating extreme weather events and worsening global challenges. Urgency is underscored in prioritizing low-carbon strategies within smart city frameworks. This paper presents a Multicriteria Decision Making Network (MCDN) approach to assess and rank the low-carbon levels (LCL) of 36 pilot smart cities in China. Findings reveal that overall LCL among these cities remains relatively modest, with significant disparities attributed to varying economic, social, institutional, cultural, and environmental contexts. The study also delves into the nexus between urban intelligence and LCL, highlighting a discernible positive correlation between a city's smartness and its low-carbon profile. Moreover, empirical evidence suggests that advancements in smart technologies are conducive, albeit to varying degrees, to enhancing urban LCL. In light of these findings, recommendations are made to fortify economic and social advancement, bolster management practices, and foster multi-stakeholder collaboration to propel the coordinated development of smart and low-carbon initiatives in China.

Exploiting relation of video segments for temporal action detection

With the development of urban intelligence, intelligent identification of human activities has become imminent. Temporal Action Detection (TAD) is designed to identify real human social activities, which is a challenging task in video understanding. The current methods mainly use global features for boundary matching or predefine all possible proposals, while ignoring the interference of background and the causal relevance of the temporal action, resulting in the generation of more redundant proposals and the decline of detection accuracy. To fill this gap, we propose a novel Dilated Convolution Locate and Action Relevant Score model called DCAR. Specifically, DCAR includes a Dilated Location Network (DL-Net) and Action Relevance Calculation (ARC) block. For the DL-Net, we design a Boundary Feature Enhancement (BFE) block, which enhances the boundary feature of actions and fuses the similar features of different channels by pooling and channel squeeze to reduce the interference of the background. Meanwhile, we also design multiple dilated convolutional structures to aggregate long contextual information in time point/interval after boundary enhancement. For the ARC block, we use the hyperbolic space distance and cross attention to calculate the causal correlation of action proposals classification, which removes the misclassification of action proposals. We conduct extensive experiments on Thumos14 and ActivityNet-1.3, which shows our method significantly improves the performance and achieves state-of-the-art results. On Thumos14, at tIoU 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5, it achieves mAP of 63.2%, 57.0% and 48.5%, respectively; On ActivityNet-1.3 it reaches 9.42% at tIoU 0.95.

An Urban Intelligence Architecture for Heterogeneous Data and Application Integration, Deployment and Orchestration.

This paper describes a novel architecture that aims to create a template for the implementation of an IT platform, supporting the deployment and integration of the different digital twin subsystems that compose a complex urban intelligence system. In more detail, the proposed Smart City IT architecture has the following main purposes: (i) facilitating the deployment of the subsystems in a cloud environment; (ii) effectively storing, integrating, managing, and sharing the huge amount of heterogeneous data acquired and produced by each subsystem, using a data lake; (iii) supporting data exchange and sharing; (iv) managing and executing workflows, to automatically coordinate and run processes; and (v) to provide and visualize the required information. A prototype of the proposed IT solution was implemented leveraging open-source frameworks and technologies, to test its functionalities and performance. The results of the tests performed in real-world settings confirmed that the proposed architecture could efficiently and easily support the deployment and integration of heterogeneous subsystems, allowing them to share and integrate their data and to select, extract, and visualize the information required by a user, as well as promoting the integration with other external systems, and defining and executing workflows to orchestrate the various subsystems involved in complex analyses and processes.

Digital blueprints for the urban future: a study on the transformation of urban planning with examples from China and Singapore

Digital technology is one of the most important topics of research today. The rapid development of digital technology has caused major reforms in urban planning and other fields. This digital method is widely used in data collection and artificial intelligence, helping urban planners collect and analyze data more efficiently, thereby making the city operate and develop better. It also enhances citizen participation through online platforms and mobile applications, helping to build a more inclusive and sustainable city. This study mainly evaluates the impact of the combination of digitalization and urban planning, especially in terms of traffic management and public life. This article aims to explore how a combination of digitalization and urban planning can be used to create a more efficient, democratic, and sustainable urban environment. This study uses case analysis and systematic review methods to explore in depth the impact of digital technology and urban planning on urban traffic management and residents' lives. The research results show that a good combination of digital technology and urban planning transforms the efficiency of urban operations and the quality of life of residents, improves the sustainable development of the city, and enhances the efficiency and democracy of urban intelligence. This combination is expected to continue to affect the future development of the city and will bring more opportunities and challenges to urban planning.

Navigating Uncertainties in the Built Environment: Reevaluating Antifragile Planning in the Anthropocene through a Posthumanist Lens

Within the vast landscape of the Built Environment, where challenges of uncertainty abound, this paper ventures into a detailed exploration of antifragile planning. Antifragility, a concept rooted in the capacity of systems to not only withstand but also thrive in the face of volatility, stands as a beacon of resilience amidst the uncertainties of the Anthropocene. The paper offers a systematic examination of antifragile planning, specifically by concentrating on uncertainty as one of its key theoretical tenets and by exploring the implications of these principles within the context of the Anthropocene. After offering a systematic and comprehensive review of the literature, the analysis delves into several important themes in antifragile planning, including the recognition of limited predictive reliability, critiques of conventional responses to shocks such as urban resilience and smart cities, and the strategic elimination of potential fragilizers through a unique planning methodology. Furthermore, the paper discusses three key arguments challenging the efficacy of antifragility: the systemic approach, the classification of responses to perturbations, and the validity of adaptivity and optionality theses. Specifically, the gaps identified in the antifragile planning methodology reveal its shortcomings in addressing the complexity of cities, its failure to recognize the variety of responses to shocks and perturbations, and its neglect of broader urban relationalities, especially in relation to climate-induced uncertainty. Thus, it is asserted that antifragility remains urbocentric. For these reasons, the paper contends that rectifying the gaps detected in antifragility is necessary to address the uncertainty of the Anthropocene. By aligning largely with emerging posthumanist planning strategies, the paper emphasizes the significance of adopting a proactive approach that goes beyond merely suppressing natural events. This approach involves fostering urban intelligence, contextualizing urban materialities within broader planetary dynamics, and embracing exploratory design strategies that prioritize both the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of planning.

Theoretical model of "smart" urban planning as a cyber-physical complex

A theoretical model of "smart" urban planning is presented. The model demonstrates the possibility of integrating modern universal and specialized information platforms with appropriate planning programs and methods, "digital twins", and modeling automation technologies into the methodology of advanced spatial planning of complex urban systems. The methodology of strategic urban planning for regions and macroregions is based on a system of laws and principles of dialectical unity in goal-setting, forecasting, programming, and design and implementation of solutions for their development. In total, ten paired groups of principles are presented, taking into account five patterns, each of which includes three principles. Within the framework of this study, a synthesis of specialized concepts is used in the areas of strategic urban planning and information planning and modeling, and the notion of strong artificial urban intelligence is defined. The composition of urban planning information platforms includes heuristic, simulation, software, design, and implementation automonitoring platforms, as well as their most important modeling functions based on the "digital twin" of the object planned, introduction of appropriate advanced scientific and technological knowledge, integration of successful practices, and mechanisms for diagnosing and monitoring the implementation of solutions for the development of regional settlement systems. The theoretical and diagnostic structure of criteria for assessing the territorial and spatial development of regions is demonstrated.

Next-Generation Urban Intelligence: Integrating 6G Communication and Blockchain Technology for Smart City Advancements

The process of modern urbanization necessitates significant advancements in social, environmental, and economic aspects to enhance the overall quality of life in cities. This evolution has given rise to the concept of "Smart Cities." The incorporation of cutting-edge technologies such as blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT), and other innovative communication systems has accelerated the progress towards the establishment of the sixth-generation communication intelligence, commonly known as 6G.Connected to the blockchain in smart cities is a crucial key, and researchers conducted an in-depth analysis of prior research to elucidate the pivotal contributions, ensuring a clear understanding of the state-of-the-art in sixth generation blockchain for smart cities. This study aims to pave the way for future research by examining key technologies, scenarios, challenges, and associated issues. Exploring the obstacles in deployment that require resolution before the implementation of block intelligence in 6G networks, this study aims to establish a foundational understanding for forthcoming advancements in blockchain technology within this generation. The paper outlines prospective research areas critical for the evolution of blockchain in the 6G era. Additionally, it addresses the challenges associated with integrating blockchain amidst the advancements in computing and mobile communication technologies, offering insights into the complexities that need to be navigated for a successful efficiency.

Research on the Impact of Smart City Development Taking Amsterdam as an Example

The Smart City is the highest stage of urban information development and an emerging model of sustainable urban development. Currently, the predominant focus of smart city research lies in the domain of construction, while there exists a dearth of discourse and theoretical underpinning pertaining to the sustainable development of smart cities with regards to conceptual standards and practical necessities. This insufficiency in comprehensive discussion and theoretical support may hinder the progress of Smart City research and impede the long-term effectiveness of implementation strategies. In order to address these concerns, this study chooses the most typical Amsterdam Smart City and investigates viable options for sustainable urban growth. A comprehensive definition of a smart city is formulated through a thematic study, this study adopting a prototype theory as the basis. The study also presents reference strategies for establishing a sustainable development model for smart cities in China, utilizing case studies. The findings indicate that the continued development of the Smart City model can contribute to the progress of urban intelligence, information systems, and modernization in the long run. Besides, this paper provides a case study of smart cities for in-depth investigation, with development factors influencing the selection of subsequent urban development plans.

Data Augmentation Method for Pedestrian Dress Recognition in Road Monitoring and Pedestrian Multiple Information Recognition Model

Road intelligence monitoring is an inevitable trend of urban intelligence, and clothing information is the main factor to identify pedestrians. Therefore, this paper establishes a multi-information clothing recognition model and proposes a data augmentation method based on road monitoring. First, we use Mask R-CNN to detect the clothing category information in the monitoring; then, we transfer the mask to the k-means cluster to obtain the color and finally obtain the clothing color and category. However, the monitoring scene and dataset are quite different, so a data augmentation method suitable for road monitoring is designed to improve the recognition ability of small targets and occluded targets. The small target mAP (mean average precision) recognition ability is improved by 12.37% (from 30.37%). The method of this study can help find relevant passers-by in the actual monitoring scene, which is conducive to the intelligent development of the city.

Retracted: The Relationship between the Degree of Urban Intelligence and the Performance of Enterprises in the City Based on Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing

Retracted: The Relationship between the Degree of Urban Intelligence and the Performance of Enterprises in the City Based on Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing

Application of Blockchain Technology in Electric Vehicle Charging Piles Based on Electricity Internet of Things

With the continuous development of urban intelligence, as traffic, power grids, and electric vehicles are new ideas to solve energy shortages and air control problems, they have received widespread attention from the society and strong support from the government. The charging pile is a key hub for data exchange and has typical characteristics of IoT terminals. However, the guidance of the grid connection of electric vehicles is not standardized, and the security and stability of the power grid will inevitably be affected. The blockchain has the characteristics that data is difficult to tamper with and decentralized. Based on these two characteristics, the information recorded by the blockchain is more authentic and reliable. This paper is aimed at realizing the global unified identification and management of large terminal equipment based on ubiquitous power Internet of Things equipment with the help of blockchain technology and at providing safe, efficient, and stable online management services for a large number of devices in the ubiquitous power Internet of Things. In this paper, we analyze the application possibility of blockchain technology in the current electricity market and apply blockchain technology to the electricity market to solve the drawbacks of the electricity market, as well as adding blockchain analytics to the renewable energy electricity market. The experimental data analysis shows that with the increase of the length of the blockchain, the blocking time of the new area increases correspondingly, but the overall performance declines slightly, so this scheme can meet the practical needs of a large number of concurrent access terminals in the ubiquitous power Internet of Things. It can be seen that the successful application of blockchain technology based on the power Internet of Things in electric vehicle charging piles has greatly improved work efficiency.

Sensing Lights: The Challenges of Transforming Street Lights into an Urban Intelligence Platform

ABSTRACT The technological transformation behind intelligent infrastructure systems requires institutional and stakeholder realignment in their development. In this article, we evaluate the challenges for the production of smart infrastructure through an in-depth analysis of the development of smart street lighting strategies. We conduct surveys and semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders and industry leaders in public illumination, as well with public officials from cities in three continents to understand the related challenges they face, the strategies being developed to meet those challenges, and reflect on the lessons provided for the design, creation, and operation of public smart infrastructure systems. We find that there are key barriers. First, differences in vision that reflect a lack of fit between operators of the current infrastructure and the new possibilities afforded by digital technologies. Second, lack of policies that would help facilitate the adoption of these new technologies particularly in regards to privacy and data operationalization. Third, difficulties in public engagement. These barriers to innovation hinder the capacity of cities to maximize the possibilities as well as the social value of intelligent street lights as a future-proof platform for urban knowledge and urban applications.

Transitioning from Wired City to Super City: a review of selected 'Smart City' case studies.

The contemporary technological advancements of the twenty-first century are introducing paradigm shifts in every aspect of life. The “Smart City” concept has also brought the latest emerging technologies and their applications to the urban areas. The integration of Nano-technological devices collecting and transmitting data coupled with the availability and penetration of high-speed internet will only raise this potential by providing an easy way to receive and send real-time data more swiftly. The devices could also be connected with each other via the internet under the Internet of Things (IoT), making it possible to establish the machine to machine (M2M) communication between them. This large amount of urban Big Data can also deploy machine learning assisted techniques to ensure robust and precise urban analysis for getting significant insights and desired simulations ensuring the proper deployment as well as utilization of the phenomenon of Urban Intelligence. As the cities are entitled to become “Smart” in due course of time, these Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) will play a major role in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of urban services and management. Due to their highly versatile and adaptable nature, these technologies can be linked with different components of Smart City thereby enhancing the efficiency and capability of the existing urban systems. This paper discusses the emerging concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) and other associated technologies within the context of contemporary urban scenarios through relevant case studies. It further presents crucial insights based on the influence of these technologies as well as their associated challenges while also exploring the implications of the concepts like ‘Super City’ on the cities of tomorrow.

Urban Intelligence for Carbon Neutral Cities: Creating Synergy among Data, Analytics, and Climate Actions

Cities are critical research subjects in carbon neutrality, considering they produce more than 70% of greenhouse gas emissions and their crucial role in taking climate actions. The pathway towards a greener society requires consensus, intelligence, and actions among global cities as a network of carbon neutral cities (CNC). Considering cities as complex system-of-systems, synergy among various sub-systems can create co-benefits through the progress towards carbon neutrality. Large volume, velocity, and variety of urban data provide new opportunities for quantifying, analyzing, and visualizing environmental–social–technical dynamics in urban systems. Rich data resources, advanced analytics, and climate actions collectively enable urban intelligence by leveraging data from heterogeneous sources with different spatial granularity and temporal frequency. Such intelligence can promote synergy across sub-systems and domains to support more responsive, precise, proactive planning, policy, and managerial actions. With a discussion on future innovation in urban intelligence for CNC, this paper presents conclusions on how urban intelligence can promote a smarter and greener society.

The Relationship between the Degree of Urban Intelligence and the Performance of Enterprises in the City Based on Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing

With the rapid development of Internet technology, artificial intelligence and soft computing are gradually applied in various fields. Through active transformation, many companies use artificial intelligence, software computing, and other technologies to develop sales channels, improve corporate performance, and obtain greater benefits. However, some traditional enterprises have been gradually eliminated by the market because they have not rapidly transformed and improved their intelligence. Urban intelligence is the trend of urban economic development, and the degree of intelligence in a city is closely related to the number and scale of intelligent enterprises. In the context of artificial intelligence and soft computing, this paper expounds the relationship between enterprise performance and the degree of urban intelligence and analyzes the key factors affecting enterprise performance and the impact of enterprise performance on the degree of urban intelligence. The results show that Internet technologies such as artificial intelligence and soft computing can improve the performance of enterprises, thereby improving the level of intelligence in cities.

Research on Optimization of Intelligent Traffic Dispatching Algorithms Based on Big Data in Chinese Urban Internet of Things Platform

The economic development in China has brought about the urban traffic problems such as traffic congestion, long traffic waiting time, and inappropriate vehicle transfer. Therefore, under the technical background of China’s Internet of Things platform, the fusion technology based on big data is studied and an algorithm for Chinese urban intelligent traffic safety scheduling is designed. In this paper, first of all, the urban traffic safety big data is clustered. Secondly, the gray distribution model of the big data is established by extracting the association rule features. Thirdly, the elements in Chinese urban traffic safety big data are fused, including the text, location, picture, audio, and video. On the condition of meeting highly time-sensitive needs of urban traffic intelligence, the video information after data fusion is applied to detect traffic flow parameters, so that an evaluation strategy for urban traffic safety state under the urban traffic speed dispersion is established. According to the fuzzy value of urban traffic drivers’ satisfaction with the waiting time, the effect of traffic dispatching is measured, the convergence formula of urban traffic in the morning and evening peaks is constructed, and the optimal solution of the objective function of dispatching strategy is calculated by the particle swarm optimization algorithm. In this way, more efficient urban traffic safety scheduling in China is realized. As can be learned from the experimental results, the proposed algorithm can reasonably judge the urban traffic safety situation and reduce the time of waiting for urban vehicles with reasonable data fusion results, so it is proved to improve the urban traffic safety.

Transforming Future Cities: Smart City

The primitive elements of city transformation include the integration of urban infrastructure and artificial intelligence and cutting edge IoT technologies [...]

Smart Governance: A Study of the Jakarta Smart City During the Covid-19 Pandemic

This study focused on the problems of smart city governance in Indonesia, especially in the implementation of smart governance during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Jakarta Smart City. Smart governance can help provide information and influence governance in handling COVID-19. This study examined the development of smart city governance in contributing to the handling of COVID-19, especially in providing smart information to stakeholders to improve the effectiveness of policies. This study also investigated the development of technological, institutional and human capital aspects. Data were collected from websites and smart city media in Jakarta such as Citizen Relations Management, Open data, Qlue applications, Jakarta Kini ( Jaki), and the Jakarta Smart City portal. The results showed the technical aspects that influenced the development of smart city governance, in terms of the basis for digitizing government that led to urban intelligence, as well as the institutional and human capital aspects which were also needed to support the success of the smart city.
 Keywords: smart city governance, Jakarta smart city, COVID-19 pandemic