News from SURE
You can find creating safe and secure cities roundtable in the Smart City Week here:
The project partners have done very good progress in organizing project activities. This year there will be multi-stakeholder simulations and exercises which provide a testing platform for technological solutions and cooperation between public safety and security officials. The real-life exercises will have manuscripts and they are based on scenarios created jointly with the project stakeholders. Citizens will have their say in spring when their opinions on city safety are collected in different occasions. More city CCTV cameras will be installed in early summer and they collect data for different analysis purposes.
Project Manager Anniina Autero was interviewed for regional newspaper Aamulehti and local radio broadcast was done in February about technological solutions in SURE and urban security in general. Aamulehti newspaper article can be found here (unfortunately only in Finnish and only for subscribers): https://www.aamulehti.fi/tampere/art-2000007798859.html.
Insta Group: SURE project offers versatile cooperation with public officials, machine learning and IBA development
The technological backbone of SURE project is Insta Blue AwareTM situation awareness platform and it is provided by Insta Group (Insta). To Insta SURE project enables testing, piloting and cooperation with public officials and other companies. IBA has utilized the city camera network
already earlier by collecting still images but SURE has made it possible to collect also real-time CCTV footage. In addition, other information and data sources are connected to the IBA platform, e.g. locations of different schools and institutions. Insta is currently working on crowd density estimation from video images and utilizes machine learning in the process. Parallel to real data Insta has generated 3D city models.
Insta Blue Tracker (IBT) is one application in the IBA product family and it has been piloted by the first responders of Tampere Region Hospital District. They have actively encouraged and supported Tampere Region Rescue Department to take IBT in use and it is a great example of increased cooperation between officials. Tampere Region Rescue Department will start their first IBT pilot with 58 fire department units before summer. With the help of IBT the fire chiefs are enabled to better monitor the situation and coordinate rescue activities.
Jointly with Tampere Region Rescue Department Insta creates visualisation of Ratina Stadium to help to demonstrate and predict exit of large crowds from the stadium. Nokia´s Scene Analytics will be integrated to the IBA platform. The pilot solutions that are created during the agile experiment phase will be also integrated and tested in IBA platform.
University of Tampere and Tampere University of Applied Sciences opened a website for SURE results
While SURE project is waiting for the new homepages to be renewed, the higher education institutes published their own website for publications and reports created in the SURE project. These websites are available both in Finnish and English with a little bit different contents.
The website can be found here: https://projects.tuni.fi/sure-en/
Companies for agile experiments are selected
Business Tampere received a total of 23 applications to the call for agile experiments. Six proposals were finally selected. Final negotiations are ongoing and the operational activity will start when the contracts are signed. Both portable and fixed sensors will be tested during spring and summer and the analysed data will be transferred to the IBA-friendly mode.
SURE is heading towards the future - Keeping Cities Vital – Public Space and Resilience discussed together with Athens, New York, Israel and Helsinki
SURE project organised Keeping Cities Vital – Public Space and Resilience seminar in the end of November 2020. Approximately 160 participants around the world were listening keynotes related to the post-Covid era, cities´ and citizens´ ability to react in different crises as well as safe events and everyday life in changing surroundings.
In addition to the SURE project partner presentations, there were speakers from Athens, New York, Israel and Helsinki. The key takeaways of the seminar can be read from here: https://www.uia-initiative.eu/en/news/tampere-hosted-keeping-cities-vital-public-space-and-resilience-event
Urban security
