Smart Dubai: An engine driving the cities of the future

Dubai - Dubai strives to become the world's smartest and happiest city.

Citizen happiness and welfare powered by smart cities is the future of mankind, said Dr Aisha bint Butti bin Bishr, director general of Smart Dubai, at a high profile World Bank's knowledge-sharing event recently held in Washington.
"Smart technology has firmly established itself as the engine driving the cities of the future, transforming human communities and activities - from the most mundane of tasks to the most complex. We are constantly on the lookout for new opportunities to meet representatives from other like-minded organisations who share our vision for a smart, connected future that allows people to enjoy seamless city experiences," added Bishr.
"We are grateful to the World Bank Group for giving us the opportunity to host this special knowledge-sharing event, and providing us such a prominent global platform to share our success and learnings in smart city transformation and showcase our progress on various tech-enabled, smart strategies and services we are implementing to establish Dubai as a full-fledged smart city."
Dubai strives to become the world's smartest and happiest city, and has taken a proactive approach by launching the Smart Transformation Agenda, embodying the ambitions of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE, Ruler of Dubai.
Smart Dubai  made a presentation on the Dubai Paperless Strategy and Dubai Blockchain Strategy to the audience, which included more than 150 members of the World Bank Group and its partners. The strategies will see the Dubai Government go completely paper-free by 2021, and Dubai become the world's first city to be fully powered by Blockchain by 2020. 
Data Science Lab
Recently, Smart Dubai announced launch of Data Science Lab at Chief Data Officer (CDO) Summit organised with IBM. 
"The Data Science Lab acknowledges that starting a city's data strategy with data science is not going to be most fruitful.  It is more important to start with the pain points and opportunities for cities and businesses, identified through a 3-stage 'data challenge process' which builds initial ideas into properly defined use cases through design thinking processes, which are then filtered at a last stage and taken into a final data science stage.  The overall vision of the Data Science Lab is to think differently, and to put data science at the heart of a wider set of skills and to collaborate to demonstrate the true value of data," said Younus Al Nasser, assistant director general of Smart Dubai, CEO of the Dubai Data Establishment.
Smart Dubai has launched an extensive portfolio of ventures and initiatives that have become foundations of the data sector in the emirate today and it includes City Flow - which analyses datasets to study people's behaviour when moving residences, and support governmental city planners, developers, and families.  
The Crowd Management tool can predict sporadic bursts of crowds in a particular place, alerting relevant authorities to ensure the safety and security of the people. In addition, Smart Dubai is working to unlock the power of Blockchain with the Dubai Blockchain Strategy and the Dubai Paperless Strategy, which seek to deliver comprehensive digital citizen-centric customer journeys to make Dubai the first paperless city by 2021.
"We've also outlined an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Roadmap to facilitate the implementing of AI across all government entities. We've also launched UAE Pass to be the first national digital identity, and are working to build the world's most advanced Internet of System (IoT) Ecosystem," added Nasser. 
Smart Dubai's  Dubai Pulse data platform publishes data sets about the city's traffic, transport, the economy, social welfare, healthcare, and education, among others. Dubai Pulse has so far identified more than 2,000 datasets from 35 participating entities, ingesting 279 of them, and with more than 400 GIS (Geographical Information Systems) datasets in reserve. Of the datasets, 271 were published on the Dubai Pulse platform: 137 of which were shared datasets and 134 were open datasets. Additionally, more than 450 data contracts have been finalised, with over 200 data contracts awaiting ingestion. - sandhya@khaleejtimes.com