Q: Hi Sankar, thanks for chatting with us. So, tell us a bit about Arup and your role as Digital Service Leader.

A: Arup is a global company based out of London, and we operate in around 34 countries and 95 cities. We are primarily a total design company, we do our client services for every development, right from the foundation and after the building is completely done. That includes mechanical, electrical, civil and all kind of engineering aspects, including digital.

Some of our very well known projects are “Water Cube – Beijing Olympics Swimming”. And Birds Nest “Beijing Olympics athletics stadium” , as well as projects in Hong Kong, Macau, Zhuhai.

A lot of mega infrastructure. It can be any kind of building development, and we do all kinds of engineering aspects to provide a total solution. We are also a trust owned company, which means all employees are stakeholders. This allows us to be totally independent.

I joined Arup a year ago, and my role is in Digital, which means I focus on clients, and on all of the infrastructure projects where the engineering needs a lot of data and analytics, machine learning. I look at how we can apply the latest technology and engineering design, and how you can leverage the data and analytics to improve our future designs.

Apart from that we are also exploring new services in digital, for example the facade on a building. Traditionally it is all inspected manually, so we are exploring how to apply machine learning to facade inspection using all the latest IOT trends, sensors, visual analytics, and then apply a machine learning model so that in the future, we can have a new kind of services that can automate 70-80% of the analytics work.

Today this kind of thing takes several weeks to do manually, but what we want to do is explore if we can do it in 2 days, and use a machine learning model instead of a human. This would be really independent, and every individual would make their own judgement. We are applying similar machine learning models on bridges, so that we are applying 3,000 sensors collecting data from those bridges and creating new machine learning models to analyse how safe is the bridge, what is the structural capacity, or analysing ropes and their strength. These are the data we collect and are trying to develop those into software. We are still an engineering company, but we are trying the latest of machine learning models.

Q: How do you define a smart city? What kind of characteristics do you think define a smart city?

A: I might have a controversial answer, because last week I was in Hangzhou. My feeling on smart cities, as much as some technologies are needed for our cities to be efficient, it is being converted into a real estate game, because people want to put tech into some “barren land” real estate, so that the value of the barren land becomes exponentially higher.

What happens with that is, the people who live in nearby vicinities would have to face the increased cost of living. You talk about science parks and all of these innovative towns, many a times, just trying to get returns on real estate. So, smart cities, which was originally meant to be helping the citizens to be efficient, sometimes now we are pushing out the common people who used to live there, simply because the price is much higher. It comes with a very big price, and that big price is actually discriminating people due to economic affordability. My thoughts on smart cities is that as much as we want to pursue technology, there must be an equally important perspective about the government to make sure it is not discriminative on economic affordability.

In China, it is a little bit better in some sense. Because the government has a hand in everything, the government keeps close eyes and hands planted there. If you go into other countries where it is a bit more “democratic” with the private sector, they rely more on the private sector or independent banks. It is difficult for those governments to have a say in it, because those investments came from someone else. That’s where property price just keeps booming. When its privately led, there is always the bottom line margins that actually have a bigger say than the common people’s requirements. I believe more in technology for good and sustainability, and I don’t think there is a proper business model for private companies to invest in, so that becomes a government initiative rather than a private innovation driven by profits.

Q: What are some of the most exciting smart city projects you have seen or worked on. What kind of technologies are they utilizing?

A: Recently our team is working on a project near Beijing, and this is a very unique project. Most of the times when we think about Governments, maybe there are 100 or 200 departments that run the city and they all operate in silos. No matter how much technology you put, all of these techonologies are dedicated and duplicated in every department, and data is not being shared.

In this new project, the data is going to be shared. So everytime you talk about smart lamp post or something you see in most modern cities,  if lamppost needs to be installed in a city, we would need approval / clearances from electrical department, the roads department, the civil department, and many of other departments.

In this new project we are working on, anything related to smart cities, you don’t need to worry about anything. You can just visit one department, say I have this new initiative, I want to put a lamp post. They will make sure everything is done for you. It is more like a cloud service, on demand services, so you don’t need to worry about going to 25 different departments. This is a good initiate, because even in the government departments they compete with each other, and it’s so bureaucratic that an initiative by one department will be delayed by the other department. You simply can’t control that. Having a centralised department that makes sure all of the others are doing their job, you don’t need to worry. All you need to worry about is what you want to do, and all of the other things will be handled by the system. This is a good initiative, but it needs a strong and good government. We are also working in Hong Kong on the smart city blueprint, which is in Kowloon. It is basically a testbed for all new initiatives before it is expanded to the whole city. Start small and with something new, make sure it works fine before you go out and expand. They are looking at lamp posts, crowd monitoring, pollution monitoring, electric vehicles, and small citizen projects like illegal parking, which actually causes huge city traffic flow problems. These are very basic, down to earth problems, we test and see how to solve it. It’s not perfect, technology cannot solve the problem. Technology + People + Processes can solve problems. The people are the most important element. It causes culture to change.

Q: Security and Privacy is a big issue in IOT and Smart Cities. Are companies and governments doing enough with security, do you think they need to improve?

A: I think we worry too much. It is definitely an important problem, but then you just keep closed data, nothing gets solved. You won’t have a perfect system, but it is a process of improvements. I think it is very important to have open data, and automatically this will improve the privacy and security. There will be issues as we come along.

Q: What are you looking forward to for the next 5-10 years in Smart Cities and IOT?

A: I think transportation is a serious problem for every city. I was in Shanghai last week, and I was meeting the Pudong Admin Sector, they mentioned that traffic in Shanghai is a serious problem. Average car speed is about 21km/h, but they already said it is actually better than other cities, but still not good enough. Similarly, there is not enough parking, as Real Estate tries to make more and more money, they don’t want to build enough parking, so the parking is an issue as well as traffic. The next will be underground trains, and that is a real serious issue. Climate change and rainfalls, it is going to effect the way we live. Those are fundamental issues that everyone wants to tackle. Interestingly, we want to see how the autonomous vehicles go, will it increase or decrease traffic? How about accidents? That will be an area that will probably change the way we live.

To find out more about Arup you can check out their website and Linkedin page.

Want to hear more from Sankar? He will be one of the panelists at the Future Energy & Tech Investment Forum at Spaces Sun House in Hong Kong on August 21st, 2019.

Get more event info, please visit: http://eventlinker.net/fetiforum-hk

If you’re intersested to attand, please register at https://fetiforum-hk.eventbrite.hk