Harnessing Big Data to Make Cities Smart

Presenter: Dr. See-Kiong Ng at Urban System Initiative, Singapore

Location: EC 427

Time: 04/28(Thu.) 10:30am-12:00pm

Contact: Prof. Vincent S. Tseng (vtseng@cs.nctu.edu.tw, Ext 54722)

Speaker bio:

See-Kiong Ng (Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University)  is the Programme Director of the Urban Systems Initiative by the Science and Engineering Research Council of the Agency of Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). The Initiative seeks to address the new challenges of the rapidly urbanising world through smart city technologies and innovations. See-Kiong has a long-standing interest in cross-disciplinary applied research in computer science. See-Kiong started his research career as one of the early bioinformaticians. He has since been able to apply what he had learned from bioinformatics to a wide array of other application domains.  From using data mining to better understand the biology of the human body, See-Kiong is now using big data approaches to understand the systems biology of complex human cities and the internet of things. He has published widely, with more than 100 papers in leading peer-reviewed journals and conferences.

Abstract:

Since the industrial revolution in 19th century, technology has always been a key driver in the development of cities.  The recent arrival of the Big Data era brings an unprecedented opportunity for us to understand our cities better.  Advancements in information and communication technologies have allowed us to generate, capture, and store vast quantities of data rapidly and easily. In fact, government agencies, businesses, and individuals are increasingly being flooded with data on a regular basis. However, raw data by themselves are not very useful. To turn data into the “new gold”, we need the computer to not only assist us in managing and digesting data from diverse sources, but also help us summarize big data and uncover new knowledge, so that we can use the big data to help predict future trends and make informed decisions.  Today, there are high expectations for cities to be smart – for example, cities are expected to provide an efficient and sustainable transportation system, a liveable and well-planned built environment, with reliable security and safety.  The massive volumes and variety of data generated by the city can be turned into useful insights that lead to new urban solutions for the city to address the new needs.  In this talk, we will present our initial efforts in leveraging intelligent and scalable data sensing and analytics to realise the design and sustenance of smart cities for Singapore.