Smart Cities Rely on Geospatial Insights from CITYDATA.ai

CITYDATA.ai simulates the presence, density, and movement of people to build digital replicas for smarter cities. They answer the question, “how many people?” Their data-as-a-service platform provides geospatial insights for cities on a budget. Some of these insights include:

• People Density Heat Maps
• People Movement Patterns
• Citizen Impact Measurement
• Place Footfall Visits
• Digital Surveys
• Ground Truth

The Challenge

Like they say, necessity is the mother of invention. The CITYDATA.ai platform was built in response to the pandemic so that movement patterns could be provided to public health officials in metro areas.

Most cities do not know the answer to the question “how many people” in their downtown area, industrial and commercial zones, parks and open spaces, neighborhoods, blocks, and business districts. This data is essential for mobility planning, urban design, IoT site selection, economic development, sustainability and resilience.

The Solution

Using Google Cloud, CITYDATA.ai developed a cloud-based geospatial AI platform, knowledge graph, and visualization application to simulate the presence, density and movement of people. They curate first-party mobility data, combine it with public data and then apply machine learning to infer the number of people in any part of the city.

CITYDATA.ai helps cities to quantify impact to citizens from:

• 311 field incidents
• 911 service calls
• Natural disasters
• Human-caused disasters
• Construction projects
• Infrastructure projects
• On-site hazards
• Air pollution
• Weather conditions

Major cities like San Jose and San Francisco in the Bay Area have used CITYDATA.ai to understand the people counts and movement patterns for the commercial zones, parks, and downtown areas. They also have leveraged the platform to quantify the impact of their slow streets program on equity zones throughout the city. Similar traction is rising in other US cities and around the world.

CITYDATA.ai is an instant-on end-to-end solution for cities. They bring the geospatial crowdsourced data to the cities, the machine learning and geospatial AI platform, and the analytics and visualization tools. City stakeholders simply need to create their free online accounts at CITYDATA.ai and they are ready to start benefiting from geospatial insights.

From an internal technical perspective, Google recommended 66degrees to work with CITYDATA to optimize and fine tune their cloud stack in a secure, sustainable and cost-efficient manner. “The team of solutions architects and client service experts at 66degrees bring deep domain knowledge. They also are very supportive and helpful in working with engineering teams to fix the proverbial airplane while in flight, by identifying the areas for improvement and coming up with an execution plan without disrupting the day-to-day operations,” says Apu Kumar, CEO if CITYDATA, ai.

The Results

CITYDATA.ai bet on Google Cloud from the get-go, and those bets paid off. With Google Cloud, CITYDATA.ai has scaled up from computing citizen impact for 90,000 people in a small city in California all the way to 650 million people in 1,569 cities worldwide and billions of daily data points computed and analyzed. While the data-as-a-service platform is designed and built for cities on a budget, top tier cities are now signing up for the service.

Cost optimization is one of the primary drivers for working with 66degrees. CITYDATA is planning and optimizing the data pipeline by making use of the Compute Engine committed use discounts . The cost savings from 66degrees’ Managed Cloud Optimization package are going to be a huge benefit for CITYDATA as they accelerate into the future.