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Sony brings artificial intelligence to the streets of Rome

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Rome becomes a little smarter, more sustainable and safer. Starting in June, the city will host world premiere an experiment that sees Sony Europe collaborate, le startup Envision e Ttm Group and the Citelum company with 3 different objectives: to reduce traffic jams and emissions due to the search for parking spaces; decrease accidents involving pedestrians; avoid crowding on public transport.

At the heart of the project, the 3 smart Genius tips installed on some traffic lights in the center of Rome, in via XX Settembre, based on the Imx500 intelligent image sensor. Developed by Ttm Group and managed through Envision’s UrbanVision platform, they monitor the territory at 360 degrees, thanks to a neural network that has been trained to perform 3 tasks:

  • report how many free parking spaces are available and where, to power an app that helps people find a place for their car;
  • to warn if anyone is going through the way to activate distraction-proof signs for motorists;
  • count the number of passengers getting on and off buses at stops, to allow public transport management systems to avoid crowding of vehicles, for example by sending new cars when available ones are full.

the budget

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Monitoring, but proof of privacy
Each tip incorporates two specimens of the Sony Imx500: presented last year, is the first image sensor in the world to integrate artificial intelligence, thanks to which it is able to look at the world to collect information useful for a specific purpose, all without the need to save or transmit images (as happens for example with surveillance systems), and therefore avoiding saturating the bandwidth of city infrastructures or putting people’s privacy at risk.

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The credit goes to the so-called Edge AI Computing, a solution that consists in bringing artificial intelligence as close as possible to the data source (in this case the image sensor developed by Sony), so that it can process them where they are collected and share only the metadata, information simplified that serve to make a certain service work. It’s a technology also created to enhance the Internet of Things, the network of connected objects and sensors, which in the case of smart cities become the nervous system of buildings, neighborhoods or entire cities and contribute to making them more efficient, safe and sustainable.

This is just the beginning: “What we are starting up is just a first test, but there are many possible applications and they are just waiting to be identified”, Antonio Avitabile explained, managing director of corporate alliance and investment di Sony.

After all, one of the strengths of Edge AI Computing is precisely that the sensor chips can be reprogrammed at will to perform different tasks: just rewrite the internal memory with a update that takes place remotely, effectively installing a different model of artificial intelligence trained to perform another task, and that’s it. There is no need to replace anything.

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