Singapore,
City of Sensors
LINDA POON APR 21, 2017
Armed with a
deep pool of tech entrepreneurs and startups—not to mention a government that’s
eager to make the most use out of them—the island-nation of Singapore offers a
wealth of urban innovation.
Today’s
Singapore provides free WiFi inside subway stations, and it’s paved the way for
its first driverless taxis. With limited access to fresh water, the city-state
has also developed technology to catch rain and desalinate some 100 million
gallons of seawater a day. Even its fabled fancy bus stops get a dose of high technology.
Then there
are the sensors, cameras, and GPS devices. They’re on trains, buses, and taxis,
tracking traffic and employing artificial intelligence to predict crashes. You
can spot them around public spaces to monitor safety and crowd density, and
atop buildings to monitor air quality and pedestrian movement. But that’s just
the beginning.
In short,
Singapore is a city—and nation—of sensors, barely noticeable to the average
citizen. But they know they’re there. It’s all part of the government’s plan to
become the world’s first “Smart Nation,” which was kick-started in 2014 with the rollout of 1,000
sensors. In the grand scheme, Singapore wants to build a network of sensors to
collect and connect data from all aspects of urban life—not just traffic and
infrastructure but also human movement and behavior. All that information,
collected across various departments, will then feed into a central platform,
accessible to all governmental agencies. The engineers behind it have dubbed
the plan “E3A,” for “Everyone, Everything, Everywhere, All the Time.”
Already,
developers are working on systems that can detect, for example, if someone is
smoking in a non-smoking area. And recently the government piloted a program using wireless sensor
technology inside private homes to track the movements and sleeping patterns of
older residents, as part of an effort to better safeguard the health of the
growing aging population. It’s even hoping to harness artificial intelligence
to help the government predict what services an individual needs.
“One of the
most important things we want to use AI for is a thing called ‘Moments of
Life,’” Mark Lim, director of product design in Singapore’s new digital agency
GovTech, told the Centre of Public Impact in
February. “The idea behind this was instead of asking citizens to go to
different government websites and different apps, we could anticipate the
services they require at key moments in life by using AI.”
And that
central platform? By the end of this year, Singapore hopes to have launched
Virtual Singapore—essentially a $73 million digital model of the entire city
built by the French company Dassault Systèmes. It looks something like SimCity,
with 3D renderings of buildings, parks, and waterways to help policymakers and
urban planners visualize the data.
In this
simulation, planners can zoom in on actual buildings to analyze their real-world
energy use, or spot trends in, say, noise and pollution levels. They can
simulate emergencies and test out possible solutions or explore the impact of
the built environment on shadows and temperature over a particular area.
Perhaps in the future, it can help planners detect the spread of disease based
on the commuting patterns, or predict manmade disasters, all of which would put
the government one step ahead of any surprises that might crop up.
With such
advanced technology in the works, Singapore is easily the envy of aspiring
smart cites across the globe. It’s even more impressive considering that just
50 years ago, the island was little more than a swamp; the GDP per capita was
$500. “When Singapore became independent in 1965, no one expected it to survive,”
says Simon Chesterman, a professor of data protection law at the National
University of Singapore. “It was a tiny state with no natural resources—it
doesn't even have water.” (Singapore imports its water from Malaysia.)
Meanwhile,
several U.S. cities, especially New York City, Boston, San Francisco, and Los
Angeles, are also working hard to tap into transformative power of big data,
some with the help of universities and organizations like Mapbox, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Knight Foundation. Does
that make Singapore a harbinger of what cities here in the U.S. should look
like?
“Even
Singapore isn't quite there yet in terms of what it aspires to be,” says Kelsey
Finch, policy counsel at the Future of Privacy Forum. “What will hold true for U.S.
cities is that they will aspire to be smarter … and privacy is going to
get balanced with a bunch of public good policies, making sure that city
governments are transparent and accountable.”
The thing
is, Singapore is as exciting for the future of big data and connected
technology as it is unsettling for those concerned about the role of privacy in
a smart city. It’s been successful in providing public services in part because
it can collect vast amounts of data on its citizens without raising much public
concern about mass surveillance—something that U.S. cities would find
difficult.
There’s a
lot that’s helping Singapore realize its vision, namely a strong tech sector, a
proactive government, and a tech-savvy population that can see the results of
this efficiency. But there’s also another factor: The city-state’s strict
government can operate under rather lax personal data protection laws that
restrict company use of private information but largely exclude the public sector. That means
there’s little, if any, limit to how agencies collect and share data for the
benefit of better services. According to Chesterman, that’s because Singapore’s
data-protection laws aren’t about protecting individual rights as much as they
are about creating an environment for big data to thrive.
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