In the hit CBS crime show Person of Interest, which debuted in 2011,
the two heroes—one a former Central Intelligence Agency agent and
the other a billionaire technology genius—work together using the
ubiquitous surveillance system in New York City to try to stop violent
crime. It’s referred to by some as a science fiction cop show. But the
use of advanced technology for crime analysis in almost every major
police department in the United States may surpass what’s depicted
on TV crime dramas such as Person of Interest. Real-time crime cen-
ters (RTCCs) are a vital aspect of intelligent policing. Crime analysis
is no longer the stuff of science fiction. It’s real.
The concept of “smart city” is often used implying that the reader has a clear and
common notion of what it means. However, in the current literature it is very hard
to find a precise definition. What is even more interesting, it is not so easy to find a
precise definition of what a city is.
The concept of smart cities emerged few years ago as a new vision for urban
development that aims to integrate multiple information and communication
technology (ICT) solutions in a secure fashion to manage a city’s assets. Modern ICT
infrastructure and e-services should fuel sustainable growth and quality of life,
enabled by a wise and participative management of natural resources to be ensured
by citizens and government. The need to build smart cities became a requirement that
relies on urban development that should take charge of the new infrastructures for
smart cities (broadband infrastructures, wireless sensor networks, Internet-based
networked applications, open data and open platforms) and provide various smart
services and enablers in various domains including healthcare, energy, education,
environmental management, transportation, mobility and public safety.
Indian urbanization is a complex puzzle which is extremely difficult to comprehend.
Yet, as academicians, it is our responsibility to study, comprehend, analyse, assimi-
late, and express on salient happenings in our urban systems. The expressions aim
at the larger sections of the society to disseminate technical evaluation in a compre-
hensible note. This edition focuses on awaking the society on the contextual reality
of urban India and also enabling policymakers with the situational understanding of
Indian cities.
We review the current applications of photonic technologies to Smart Cities. Inspired
by the future needs of Smart Cities, we then propose potential applications of advanced
photonic technologies. We find that photonics already has a major impact on Smart
Cities, in terms of smart lighting, sensing, and communication technologies. We further
find that advanced photonic technologies could lead to vastly improved infrastructure,
such as smart water‐supply systems. We conclude by proposing directions for future
research that will have the greatest impact on realizing Smart City initiatives.
The contemporary view of the Smart City is very much static and infrastructure-
centric, focusing on installation and subsequent management of Edge devices and
analytics of data provided by these devices. While this still allows a more efficient
management of the city’s infrastructure, optimizations and savings in different do-
mains, the existing architectures are currently designed as single-purpose, vertically
siloed solutions. This hinders active involvement of a variety of stakeholders (e.g.,
citizens and businesses) who naturally form part of the city’s ecosystem and have an
inherent interest in jointly coordinating and influencing city-level activities.
One of the very first books published on the social impact of the mobile phone
was Timo Kopomaa’s The City in Your Pocket: Birth of the Mobile Information Society.
The book, published in 2000, was based on research that Kopomaa had under-
taken for Nokia and Sonera as part of his doctoral studies in the Centre for Urban
and Regional Studies at the Helsinki University of Technology. The first line he
writes in the book is peculiar: ‘Mobile communication is not a serious matter’. By
this, we assume he is referring to a view of the world that would regard the mobile
phone as little more than an unremarkable fact of everyday life – a simple play-
thing for the young, or a productivity tool for the business executive and busy
parent.
The idea for this book was born during one of my project-related trips to the beautiful city
of Hangzhou in China, where in the role of Chief Architect I had to guide a team of very
young, very smart and extremely dedicated software developers and verification engineers.
Soon it became clear that as eager as the team was to jump into the coding, it did not have
any experience in system architecture and design and if I did not want to spend all my time in
constant travel between San Francisco and Hangzhou, the only option was to groom a number
of local junior architects. Logically, one of the first questions being asked by these carefully
selected future architects was whether I could recommend a book or other learning material
that could speed up the learning cycle. I could not. Of course, there were many books on
various related topics, but many of them were too old and most of the updated information
was either somewhere on the Internet dispersed between many sites and online magazines, or
buried in my brain along with many years of experience of system architecture.