The Smart City Expo World Congress 2022 was held in November in Barcelona, Spain. The highly anticipated event saw the attendance of 134 countries/regions, 853 exhibitors, and more than 400 speakers. These included city councils, companies, research institutes, social innovators, and public-private consortiums. The speakers presented innovations and plans in advanced energy, infrastructure, information and communication technology (ICT), and environment-related smart city technologies and services, including the prospect of future cities. It attracted nearly 50,000 visitors, both on-and-offline.

For the first time, Japanese local governments and companies jointly exhibited at the Japan Pavilion. NEC, with its strong track record of helping global cities implement intelligent citywide solutions, took centre stage to introduce “NEC City OS”, which will feature the company’s vision of the future and smart city use cases in Japan and around the world.

Across the globe, there have been numerous innovations centred around improving the standards of urban management and living, which include 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions for citizen welfare, disaster prevention, tourism, traffic, waste management, and conservation, amongst others.

The missing link, however, is that there isn’t a robust, horizontal platform that can seamlessly integrate the data and functions of these different applications. Due to the complex nature of these solutions, the solutions currently share very little information with one another.

With “NEC City OS”, cities and people's information can be connected by linking data across the boundaries of fields and regions, which will help to create regional solutions and services. On top of this, a centralized data brokerage platform has also been proposed so that valuable data collected by different parties can be used by other agencies to come up with city-wide policies.

In the “NEC City OS” concept, a centralized biometric authentication and digital ID management can be used across all applications. This simply means that urban dwellers only need to register their biometric data once and be able to use it across platforms such as citizen services, immigration, ID checks, public transportation, and even shopping. Consent management is also a part of the NEC City OS for every personal data registration.

The open concept will be spearheaded by NEC and leverage the technologies of other tech innovators, such as the FIWARE community “iHub Base” and the “Smart City Social Implementation Consortium” which both were recently established in Japan.

Of course, smart city issues and priorities differ depending on each country and city. In Europe and North America, cities are looking to become “green”. In the Middle East and Central and South America, constructing urban infrastructure using technology is the priority. On top of this, technology should focus on improving the well-being of people, as shown in innovations introduced in Japan, Northern Europe, and Belgium.

Another example of using AI to improve citizen well-being is NEC’s collaboration with Virginia Tech Transportation Research Institute in the United States. The project uses AI-based video analysis to detect pedestrians and animals running into traffic intersections. Through 5G network, the system delivers warning and alerts to approaching drivers within 0.5s so that they can avoid an accident.

“Many visitors to the conference learned anew that NEC is deeply involved in the global smart city concept," said Kikuchi. At this year's conference, much attention was on companies that can demonstrate results, such as how much CO2 emissions have actually been reduced through the use of their technologies," said Kikuchi.

The Japan Pavilion was the centre of attraction at the expo. Many attendees were eager to discover the country’s smart city progress. Japan’s unique industry-university-private-government coordination allowed the local governments to implement city-wide initiatives for the welfare of its citizens.