According to a recent announcement, Samsung SDS, the digital arm of Samsung, and Telensa, a smart street lighting and smart city data company, are working together on smart city projects in Korea, to start with. The two companies are collaborating on smart street lighting and the Urban Data Project, a cloud platform designed to create a trust infrastructure for urban data, with the goal of enabling cities to collect, protect and use their data for the benefit of all citizens. The first collaboration will be in city projects in Korea, with wider deployments following across Asia Pacific and in the United States.
By combining the Telensa PLANet streetlight control application with Samsung SDS Brightics IoT platform, the companies hope to help cities to find energy savings and give them access to an ecosystem of sensor applications. Samsung SDS will provide its Brightics IoT, a data collecting platform specialized to retrieve and analyze big data, powered by AI.
“We've been working with cities around the globe to make millions of streetlights smart, and now we’re providing Chief Data Officers with the tools to protect and use urban data and engage with new technologies like 5G mobile,” said Will Franks, CEO, Telensa. “We are excited to be working with Samsung SDS, who bring global reach, product innovation and deep expertise from IoT to 5G.”
The Urban Data Project collaboration will involve integrating Brightics IoT with Telensa’s City Data Guardian. Urban data is the mosaic of street-by-street, minute-by-minute information that makes up a city’s digital twin. It includes mapping how people use the city, the mix of traffic on the roads, the hyper-local air quality and noise levels. This data is incredibly valuable for designing better city infrastructure, delivering more efficient city services, and making everything more transparent to empower citizens. It is also potentially valuable to industries such as retail, real estate and insurance.
To date the use of urban data has been limited by two barriers. The first is trust – how a city’s Chief Data Officer should apply best-practice privacy policies to data and provide transparency to citizens on how that data is protected and used. The second is the cost of single-purpose sensors and the related cost of moving raw video data to the cloud.
The Urban Data Project aims to solve these problems. The City Data Guardian is the trust platform that enables cities to apply transparent privacy policies, comply with data regulations, and make data available to improve services and drive future city revenues. Multi-Sensor Pods installed on streetlight poles, combine video and radar working together to provide a more complete picture. The pods employ AI and machine learning to extract detailed real-time insights from the raw data.
“We are delighted to be working with Telensa to enable cities to harness and protect their urban data assets on behalf of their citizens,” said Sean Im, SVP, Solution Business Division, Samsung SDS. “Brightics IoT will provide effective data collection and analytics, which will lead to improved quality of life for citizens. By combining the capabilities of both companies, Samsung SDS plans to further explore new possibilities to adopt the latest information technologies including AI and blockchain.”
Edited by
Ken Briodagh
