This project is funded by Research Grant Council, State of the art research in artificial intelligence and ubiquitous city

(RGC UGC/IIDS15/E01/19).

 

About AI and ubiquitous city

AI development over the last decade has genuinely had a transformative impact on several industries. For example, AI techniques developed to play games such as Go have attracted general attention. EmBot used AI to accomplish tasks such as searching for legal precedents in patent disputes and checking for cancer in magnetic resonance images. AI has also been utilised by Netflix in its movie recommendations, Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa, and Google’s mammoth search engine. This has had a direct impact on the growth and praise—and vilification—of these companies. The sudden rise and exponential development of AI has resulted in sectors such as finance, real estate and construction ramping up progress. Staying abreast of the latest developments in the field will give academics an advantage in the search for the latest techniques in 2020 to conduct relevant research and improve teaching methods.

In addition to AI, which is quite clearly picking up steam, the development of ubiquitous technology for u-city is also noteworthy. Derived from the Latin word ‘ubique’, which means ‘everywhere’, ubiquitous is the ability of existing everywhere and being everywhere at the same time’. It has been used in computer sciences in ‘ubiquitous computing’ and elaborated in connection with ‘ubiquitous community’ as the human presence and activity in physical and digital spaces. UbiCom, which marries the physical world (human and social environments) with the world of the internet, data and mobile devices, involving ambient intelligence, has begun to influence health-monitoring transportation, hospitals, education, as well as the workplace. The wide adoption of UbiCom in an “ubiquitous city” like Korea include pressure-sensitive floors in homes for the elderly that can detect when someone falls and immediately call for help. Even small smart-home devices such as the Amazon Echo or the Echo Dot and robots with AI linked with other smart home devices, sensors and actuators are embedded in the physical environment. The most common places for such devices are parking lots, but even regular smartphones come with them now. These ubiquitous devices have begun to pervade our lives on a scale hitherto unimagined.

An overarching application of AI is to develop solutions for u-cities, which are built on convergent systems and provide solutions to the problems of sustainability and pollution, i.e., problems that afflict most metropolitan cities. Ubiquitous cities are often considered advanced smart cities, though smart cities themselves are partly ubiquitous cities (Ghaemi Rad et al., 2018). Ubiquitous information communication technologies assist in sustaining cities and managing them more efficiently, which ultimately improves the quality of life of citizens.

In this series of events, we aim to invite top in the field university professors to share their findings on the above issues.