Smart cities and technology

Key Takeaways

[Music] hello everyone welcome to cyber smart conversations with harsha i am so delighted to be joined today by stephanie wood stephanie is an associate at elite partners an early stage venture capital fund focused on the real estate technology in her role she completes a broad range of functions including deal sourcing due diligence and portfolio management outside of elite stephanie is active in the practice community heading the marketing and communications team at crop tech collecting and co-authoring the first ever report on the status of prop tech in canada thank you for joining and how are you doing today thanks so much for having me harsha and i am doing great looking forward to our conversation great to have you today's discussion is about smart cities and technology but before we get to those questions i would love to hear more about you and your background how did you get to this point in your career yeah absolutely so i started out my career in the traditional real estate space about five years ago and when i graduated i guess i joined evaluation group at canada pension plan or cppib as most people know it so i worked in valuations on traditional real estate assets around the world pretty much touching every asset class from small single tenant industrial buildings to trophy office towers malls that had hundreds of tenants and i spent a while there and then i switched over to a special tech project and the tech project essentially was to create a global platform for our real estate portfolio and all of the data and that's when i really realized that real estate desperately needed tech adoption um so at that time outside of work i got super involved in a volunteer organization called proptech collective which you alluded to in my introduction and i guess proptech collective focuses on bringing together real estate professionals and technologists to collaborate share knowledge and build a community so i really loved working in the proptax space and then i eventually left cpp earlier this year to join one of the co-founders of the organization at elite partners so as you as you talked about the latest and early stage bc fund that focuses on real estate technology it's been a whirlwind few months since i joined but i've really enjoyed being immersed in the proptech ecosystem every day meeting founders of bold ideas and being able to dig into trends that really excite me like smart cities yes and and tropic is shaping the real estate industry and one of the foundation for smart cities is the smart building but if we go by the definition it's like connecting things and people both technologically and traditionally and the goal is to help government and help the community to perform better but what's your definition of a smart city or if i would say what makes a city smart smart cities i would say is still a little bit of a buzzword and a lot of people don't really know like you said what makes a city so smart so smart cities leverage the internet of things which most people know is iot to extract data from sensors cameras objects like our phones or even buildings that collect data using wireless technology and then this data is transmitted back and collected in a cloud then the data is used like you said to improve operations where there's previously no information no analytics and no benchmarks so the result is greater efficiency and everything from energy distribution in the building to trash collection to traffic control and there's a lot more applications than just that but at the highest level the way i think about smart cities in smart the smart city ecosystem is that it's made up of different layers so the back end is the technology platform or the cloud that processes the data and generates the logic to make sense of the information that flows into it and then there's a middle layer which is the communication channels that are transmitting this data back and forth between the back end and then the front end and then there's the front end which we can see and that's sometimes called the edge layer and this is made up of all the connected devices that include sensors our phones the buildings cars everything that can connect to the wireless ecosystem so the key to smart cities is really having these connected devices and then ultimately there's people or ai or machine learning that's making the decisions to improve the efficiency of the way everything is operating yes and you talked about components that makes a smart city so there's a middle layer there's a front end and there's a back end so and then there are so many components that together make a smart city and one of the component is sustainability though we talk a lot about sustainability when it comes to buildings energy management water management waste management but if we talk in terms of smart city context it's it it brings so many things and i was having a conversation with one of the sustainability leader in the industry and she mentioned that sustainability not only includes the building it's not only about the environment but it's also about the economic and the political and the social aspect and we have to divide the results into mid-term and long-term so what are some of the trends that you are seeing when it comes to adoption of sustainability in the smart city space yeah absolutely i think smart city tech adoption is definitely increased like you said and it comes in different phases so their short-term goals and long-term goals and but especially lately i think over the last five years we've seen a lot of advances in technology like cloud computing which makes things like collaboration a lot easier i think at the highest level the trends on adoption of sustainability as it relates to smart cities have the same issues as the general adoption of smart city technology and similar to you i've talked to a lot of people that are in the space and there's three common areas i think cause a lot of problems when it comes to the actual adoption of this technology and the biggest is that smart city technology has to go through pilots either at the community or municipality level and often there's not enough funding when they're purely publicly funded so it's better to have some sort of private public model to get projects off the ground but this doesn't always happen the other i would say is people so often governments or anyone on the public side are a little bit more conservative about becoming early adopters of technology so the champions are the technologists in the space who really understand the tech but getting the right buy-in is difficult and then the last thing that i would say is that the actual data in integrating different data sets is really difficult as you're getting information from different places where the information and data isn't uniform and this is a problem across the board in many industries like real estate as well so to actually encourage adoption of any smart city technology be that related to sustainability or efficiency i think these three key areas have to at least be partially satisfied or won't get off the ground and like you said the speed and type of technology being adopted is also going to be different everywhere so ensuring what is being built is flexible enough is really important and i know it's funny that we talk about this but the speed in different areas of the world is also very different i know you used to work in the smart city space in india maybe you can talk a little bit about what you saw there yes and and thank you stephanie for bringing this up what i have seen like i i was involved in the smart city project that was like five six years back and i was one of the solution architect on india's smart city project so um in terms of technology we see an easy adoption there but definitely like you mentioned budgets that all have always been a constraint especially when it comes to government sector but in private sector it's very different but when it comes to technology adoption um back then the trends were more focused on water management and street lighting so we had those modules that were tied to the traditional smart the city lighting and those were remotely controlled so in terms of saving the energy in terms of knowing the device malfunctioning and then auto saving of the energy and then same goes with water management the the pilot was more focused on how to save the water uh and then what are the key areas where they can save energy they wanted to know it's more of a predictive maintenance like before the actual failure predict the failure yeah no i was just going to say i think it definitely it probably has changed a little bit but those are two areas that i think a lot of change is happening and there are important applications there like in in north america i think one of the big focuses is the way that we use energy and like you alluded to the predictive analytics is something that becomes so important to actually managing energy usage in buildings and being able to track and plan our needs versus just having the same status quo the entire time that a building is online and operating yes and we are seeing this trend on building automation system that so many analytics platform are coming up that gets tied to the building automation system that takes the data points from the system apply analytics help to identify the areas where they can save energy plus based on different sensors data to predict any malfunctioning of the equipment same is coming up with elevators like so many elevators company are coming up with their own inbuilt predictive maintenance model where based on these sensors data they can predict the failure of a device so before the system actually breaks down yeah we all have been trapped in an elevator once or twice definitely something that i think everyone would appreciate if it didn't happen so yes yes and and now with technology we are increasing the attack surface which is the the most talk about topic these days cyborg threat so smart cities also with tech adoption are facing cyber threats and one of the reason is use of technology data that's get collected so with sensors with data analytics platform we are opening the back doors for the hackers and because i'm coming from the iot background and i myself was in that space and and i've seen this that so many times in a in a hurry or in a rush to get the product launched security takes a backseat so in some of the cases these devices and systems aren't cyber resilient and they pose a threat not only to the safety of the equipment but also to the security of the citizens uh if we talk about some of the incidents that happen specifically in this smart city like i have a bunch of stories in this smart building space but because today's topic is about smart city and we have seen in 2018 atlanta and baltimore were subjected to the online attack that affected the municipality services ransomware attack is on rise there is so much personal information that we collect so there's pii so what's your advice to the city planners and integrators when it comes to cyber security yeah i think for city planners and integrators there's a really difficult balance between having the right level of openness between all the connected devices but also maintaining individual privacy and protecting from the ransomware attacks so that's probably i would i personally think is one of the biggest challenges facing the smart cities movement so the privacy issues was why sidewalk labs in the city of toronto actually parted ways from the waterfront development in toronto ultimately for planners i think there needs to be a framework for smart city cyber security and there's a few interesting concepts that i've read about in this space and talked about with a few people that can really help balance that openness and the privacy the first is the notion of a digital trust platform so what this does is it manages trusted connections and relationships within a connected ecosystem so in a smart city example cities will be able to identify authenticate and then authorize people as well as devices so tech advancements in everything from microprocessors to blockchain have really helped improve like security measures in the space the other interesting thing is privacy by design so that's another concept that really aims to protect citizens privacy by thinking about it from the start instead of having to innovate and then triage later for the areas there that like enough privacy wasn't built into so that would include everything from restriction of collection of personal personal data to building stronger encryption processes and a few others and then the last thing i would say is probably to have a response plan so we don't know exactly when an attack would happen or what it would look like but it definitely could and exploring this ahead of time to develop the right capabilities to respond is better than having to do damage control as it's happening i think an interesting trend in this area is that there's been a lot of gamification around potential attacks that tech teams are experimenting with i'd be super curious though like what what is your perspective on this as well you work in the cyberspace so you know all about what you've seen in this area you know one of the interesting point that you brought was damage control and incidence response so when the attack happens and how to prepare for that attack so this is what we have seen that many of the real estate organizations they lack when it comes to idea there is an incident response plan if there is a data breach they know what to do but when it comes to building they don't have an incidence response plan like we have plans for if there is a water spillage or if there's a chemical spillage or if there is an accident what to do they have these guidelines but they lack the guidelines that if there is a cyber attack how to respond to that attack and in in some of the cases what we have seen we we get a call once everything is done and then we get a call we saw this and we disconnected the system and we have powered off the system so if the system is powered off you cannot collect the forensics so if the if in case of incidence response plan they know the immediate that you have to contain the incident disconnect the system and then call the vendor so that they can come and collect the foreign seeds to understand what led to that incident so yes incident response plan is important and there's a lack of incidence response plan when it comes to buildings one of the point that you mentioned was privacy by design we follow the same principle security by design so like you said before you know you start on the project it's really important to understand what what kind of data you collect same thing before you decide on the technology understand what the technology what are the implications of that technology and when it will be deployed who all will be users what kind of cyber security practices you follow so really building the security right from the requirement gathering phase to the deployment absolutely and it's it's so important to just have that understanding from the beginning of like what the system looks like and what the different components are so that when or if something happens you're able to like you said turn the switch off quicker and you can track the problem a lot faster yes now coming to the smart city and yourself doing pilots to understand the technology to understand the adoption so performance is very important when it comes to pilot and one of the things that we have seen is difficulty in measuring the performance of these pilots with kobe 19 we have seen crunching budgets so now it's more critical than ever to devise a cost effective solution and one of the benefits we see from measuring performance is to guide the decision makers to set the realistic targets you can adjust the policy you can adjust the pilot to increase the efficiency and the effectiveness so how to measure the impact on success of a solution in the smart city deployment i think there's the obvious ways of measuring impact or success kind of what you spoke about there in terms of like a single point solution in terms of efficiency or reduction from a previous benchmark so if we were to use an energy example if you're decreasing the consumption or peak demand energy being used you're probably succeeding and ultimately being able to measure this is really great and being having being able to quantify it essentially contributes to to different organizations being able to show how worthwhile it was to invest in this technology and it not only improves sustainability of their assets but it also probably improves their returns the area i think that becomes a bit more gray and probably needs more focus is actually on the human side of the equation when we talk about the smart city like we talk a lot about efficiency but ultimately one of the biggest criticisms in smart cities points the negative impact tech has from our interactions so as we innovate in the space i think being cognizant that our built world really does impact the way we interact with one another is really key i don't really have an answer for how we measure that yet but i it's always top of mind for me just because i really am interested in the way that our built world impacts the people in it and the interactions that we all have yes and to add to this like you mentioned the human side of it one of the things that we have seen in smart building we see so many um upcoming technologies so many cool platforms coming up we end up doing the pilot and the end result is oh the pilot failed we failed to use the technology but if we go back and see what happened we failed to put the human side who all are the end users keeping that in mind and then devising the solution that's one of the thing that we have seen leads to the failure of the pilot yeah absolutely and if you're not thinking about who the end user is and the habits of those end users then it's not going to be used and it's not going to drive value so really being able to understand and think about the human aspect of it is like so important absolutely thank you stephanie thank you so much for sharing your insights and thank you so much for inspiring me and other people in the industry thank you so much for having me i look forward to seeing all the tech that comes out and the leaps and bounds that we're gonna make maybe we can have another conversation a year and see see if there's been anything interesting that happens in the space yeah thank you so much [Music] you