‘We are in a sweet spot with availability of data’

Data from the first smart city programme is now being used to speed up processes and launch Smart City 2.0, according to Suresh K.K, VP & Head – Platform Deployment and Applications at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc).

Speaking at the Mint Digital Innovation Summit on Friday, Suresh said, “We never expected that the basic digitisation that we have done in the first 100 smart cities programme will churn out great results.”

“The intention was to digitise it and once we have the data available, we will do smart city 2.0. We never expected that AI/ML and data analytics would come this far. Five years back, the kind of data we were struggling with, is now on our fingertips,” he said.

“Where the bus is going, how many people are in the bus, kind of data gets digitised and put in the cloud, from there you run applications. People were complaining that these apps are not talking, but they were supposed to be like that. Then, how do we share this data and create AI/ML applications? That is why we built a data exchange, like the Bombay stock exchange. If you have the data, bring it into the data exchange, anybody can then discover the data,” he added.

Noting that there are data providers and data consumers, Suresh said, “Whatever data smart city 1.0 is producing in 100 smart cities will come to the data exchange, called Urban India Data Exchange. It is fully funded by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs.”

He also compared it with Aadhaar saying it’s a similar platform, except that Aadhaar is for personal data, while this is for all the data in the country.

While it is easier to get some kind of data from Google etc, there’s public data which is difficult to get, he said. “Public data now will come directly from the government servers to the data exchange. In 2016, there was no data available in the country. Today you will see traffic data, women security data, all kinds of data,” he said.

“We’re in a very sweet spot. We have the IoT data, we have the farmer data, we have data analytics AIML at our fingertips, so it’s easier to navigate today,” Suresh added.