ISJ Exclusive: Powering our cities and spaces with AI
James Thorpe
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Charbel Aoun, Smart City & Spaces Director, Nvidia describes how AI is ensuring the safety and security of people and assets.
There is no doubt that our cities continue to be shaped by global trends. Urbanisation is putting an unprecedented amount of pressure on our resources and infrastructure.
Digitisation is turning our world into data – data we are struggling to process or convert into insights and value in a timely manner, in addition to the significant change of demographics where more than half of the world’s population are digital natives.
Every city wants to be smart about being a great place to live. So, many embrace broad initiatives for connecting their citizens to the latest 5G and fibre optic networks, expanding digital literacy and services. Being smart means using technology that makes cities more self-aware, automated and efficient.
Cities around the globe are turning to AI to sift through data in real time for actionable insights. And, increasingly, smart cities build realistic 3D simulations or digital twins of themselves to test out ideas of what they might look like in the future.
All this is leaving our cities and spaces under pressure, seeking smart ways to be more efficient, to ease the stress on our infrastructure and resources and to deliver a safer and healthier environment. Reconfiguring and understanding the use of spaces, monitoring for safety and efficiency, easing traffic and congestion, protecting our communities and maintaining public services are just some of the challenges we face in our cities and communities.
Leveraging the power of AI
Technology today is offering us the possibility to solve these problems. Enabling us to sense and act differently by leveraging the power of AI and deep learning. Sensing, detecting and processing data incoming from sensors at scale, at high accuracy and in real time changed the game and turned all these challenges into opportunities.
NVIDIA Metropolis is an end-to-end stack designed to process large amounts of data from the edge to the cloud. It makes it easier for developers to combine common video cameras and sensors with AI-enabled video analytics to provide operational efficiency and safety applications across a broad range of industries – including retail analytics, city traffic management, airport operations, automated factory inspections and more.
Turning all this data, videos, images, sounds and environmental data into insight and actionable information makes the impossible, possible – and, ultimately, delivers unprecedented efficiencies and safety to customers and partners.
Whatever your challenge, NVIDIA Metropolis is a one-stop-shop that allows you to put together a full-stack AI solution. It includes a wide range of accelerated compute to meet your use case requirements, a software layer to help you train, optimise, and produce your AI solutions and an unprecedented ecosystem that has developed hundreds of solutions to make our cities and spaces safer and more efficient.
NVIDIA’s mission is to democratise AI, empowering customers and partners to reap the benefit of AI while having peace of mind. NVIDIA’s ecosystem benefits from access to a full infrastructure and solution experts to help optimise, test and validate models for customers to pick and choose, knowing that it will work.
NVIDIA LaunchPad is a full infrastructure that enables customers to easily run a proof of concept at zero cost, allowing them to test before buying and speaking directly with experts to help them understand how to scale.
Now, enterprises and organisations can immediately tap into the necessary hardware and software stacks to experience end-to-end solution workflows in the areas of AI, data science, 3D design collaboration, simulation and more.
Developers, designers and IT professionals can speed up the creation and deployment of modern, data-intensive applications. After quick testing and prototyping, the same complete stack can be deployed for production workflows, so more confident software and infrastructure decisions can be made.
If you are thinking about the idea of using AI or are already in the midst of an AI journey, reach out to NVIDIA experts for free advice and support.
This article was originally published in the June edition of ISJ. To read your FREE digital copy, click here.