Sameer Sharma, General Manager, Intel, Smart Cities/Intelligent Transportation

Source: Smart Cities World Published: February 2nd, 2021

Sameer Sharma: This year has been unprecedented in terms of how it has challenged us and the breadth and severity of what we are facing as a global community. A year ago, when talking about smart cities, the focus was on challenges like job creation or how we increase the urban density and how do we get people to move around more effectively?

In February-March 2020, the conversation fundamentally changed to how do we deliver basic services to people? How do we start thinking about getting past the Covid-19 phase and reopening? How do we ensure not urban density, but urban separation in terms of social distancing? It also changed in terms of urgency: we cannot spend forever debating and being in this analysis paralysis mode, we’ve got to move here and now.

My peer who handles healthcare as a market for Intel said we have made more progress on telehealth adoption in the last six to eight months than we did in the last 20 years. A lot of those psychological and other barriers were overcome because of this sense of urgency.

Suddenly, cities were asking us, ‘hey, I’ve got existing infrastructure, I’ve got cameras, can they be used to understand crowding and social distancing, PPE compliance, and even contact tracing. And the good news is some have built their infrastructure to be adaptable so they were able to add new algorithms and capabilities and make it relevant and meaningful to the problems we were trying to solve.

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