I was in Austin, Texas, in June to represent Singapore at Smart Cities Connect 2017. I  participated in a panel on Data and Networks with the CIO/Chief Data Architects of San Jose, Orlando and Austin; served as a reviewer for eight Urban Mobility Start-up pitches, and had incredible side-meetings with CTO/CIOs across America. In an interview with Chelsea Collier, Smart City Connect’s Editor-at-Large, I shared some takeaways:

An Interview with Karen Tay, Smart Nation Director, Singapore

By: Chelsea Collier, Smart Cities Connect 

Chelsea Collier [CC]: I’m so happy to have you here at Smart Cities Connect.

Karen Tay [KT]: Thank you, I’m glad to be in your city after you visited Singapore a few months ago.

CC: I was so blown away not only by what you all are doing, but how you’re doing it, and how intentional and collaborative everyone in the government proper is. I was very very inspired by what I saw there.

KT: Thank you, yes it’s not without challenges. I think one of my takeaways from this conference is that we all face the same challenges, and part of it is organizational: how we are set up in a way that gets all the different domains to collaborate on Smart City Projects. That is not something that comes naturally because we are so used to working in silos. By setting up a smart city team (typically within the CIO or CTO’s office), actually many cities in the U.S. are doing similar things to Singapore. 

CC: Good, and I’m so excited that there’s so much progress being made just in the past year. This is the second time we’ve done this conference, the first time was in June here in Austin in 2016, and just in that span of one year I’ve seen so many cities go from intention, and more of an ethereal concept to really launching into strategic conversations and into pilots, and talking about scaling. So I’m impressed by how quickly it’s moving. It might not feel that way on the city side because you’re there day in and day out but from the outside world it’s really exciting.

KT: Definitely and I think it’s also driven by compelling use cases. One of the great people I met at this conference was Rosa Akhtarkhavari, the Orlando CIO. She talked about how the Orlando shootings really brought to the fore some of the technology needs that needed to be met and how they’re now going to build video analytics capabilities. I think it’s always driven by the use case. You cannot build too far ahead without the use case in mind. And I think that’s what driving the speed of progress.

[NB: during the Orlando nightclub shooting in 2016, Rosa’s ideal scenario was if she could pump the secondary shooter’s picture into the system, and analytics at the edge could flag out which locations the secondary shooter was seen. (Rather than to bring all the video feeds in and analyze in the cloud/data center, which would slow things down). However, she found that current capabilities did not allow for that.]

CC: Perfect. So any big lessons learned these past couple of days, or what you’ve learned that can benefit you back at work?

KT: I think one of the dominant themes of a smart city conference in the U.S. is how are you going to pay for this digital infrastructure.

In Singapore we are prudent with how we spend but I think we are fortunate that we have the resources to build some of these things. But what I really took away is that even if you have the resources, you have to have discipline of thinking about the economics of it.

I really appreciated the discussions like Chicago collaborating with the university, or San Jose working with a company that’s willing to sponsor a lot of these sensor deployments, or even companies like Civic Connect, which are saying “well, our funders are okay for us to pay for this free of charge to the city as long as we have a business model which will reap the benefits”. I think in Singapore we will benefit a lot from thinking about this economic discipline, just as the U.S. is forced to do. I think that was one of my main takeaways.

However I also think that the government cannot run away from paying for some of these services. It cannot completely be left to the private sector because of this idea of digital inclusion. Fundamentally, the government needs to be able to ensure that use cases which will not yield economic returns will still be accounted for. Who else could do that in society? 

[Another key takeaway that I did not mention in the interview concerned privacy in smart cities. All cities – especially American – want to change the narrative that lumps “surveillance” with “data collection”. CIOs recognize that if there is the capacity to identify people for serious crimes such as terrorism, there is the capacity to identify anyone else. Hence the issue is not about limiting our capacity to do identify people through video footage, but ensuring predictability, accountability and transparency in how the data is used.

Cities need to give citizens utmost assurance in this regard. I believe Seattle has a good model to learn from: Seattle put in place a privacy “self review” process, where every department seeking to launch a technology solution has to undergo a “self review” according to the 6 privacy principles (which were established a few years ago). Any technology project that collects data also has to pass through the City Council’s approval. “At-risk” cases are flagged up by the city’s Chief Privacy Officer in the CTO’s office. She advises on precautions and typically pushes them to conduct a public consultation.]

CC: I think as the public sector and the private sector get more comfortable working together they can have strategic and very honest conversations about that and everybody can own their piece of it. And there’s just no time to waste, the problems aren’t getting smaller. They’re only escalating and technology has the potential to really help make some headway there.

KT: I think so. I think there are problems like homelessness, inequality, access to healthcare – all these are big problems waiting to be solved and technology can. It’s a matter of having those conversations.

CC: Perfect. So glad you’re here. Thanks for joining us.

KT: Thank you.

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