Project SPICECO

The development of cities in the face of increasing global urbanization is closely linked to the economic, environmental and demographic opportunities of society. Cities today need to align support functions to the individual needs of citizens to create dynamic service experience and entrepreneurship of citizens and community. This is especially true when cities increasingly compete on issues regarding the quality of their industrial and citizen ecosystem, workforce and digital skills; their industrial and open data availability; as well as an ambient and sustainable environment.

IoT and smart city are widely used and elaborated during past years. As a result of these efforts there is a vast number of commercial and free products and open source solutions. Hence building up an IoT platform and connecting devices is no longer an R&D activity. Although SPICE will have a platform as a middleware, it is not “yet another IoT platform”.

According to the European Parliament, Smart Cities contain 6 basic components: Smart Economy, Smart People, Smart Governance, Smart Life, Smart Mobility and Smart Environment. At this point SPICE aims to provide platform, services and pilots to serve all of the components listed except Smart Economy.

The advances in pervasive sensor and network technologies have enabled the “datafication” of our everyday environments and this onslaught of ubiquitous technology has put us awash in a vast sea of diverse data. Approaching 5G will make it even more sophisticated but extremely powerful and full of opportunities for the whole community. SPICE (Smart City Platform) is AI based cloud services, providing flexible, scalable, secure ICT infrastructure that will interconnect sensors, people and applications as well as simplify the development and management of new smart city applications. It is integrated with sensors to create Smart Environment by using Artificial Intelligent, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision driven algorithms to be able to control, command and analyze.

With contributions from Turkey, Belgium and Romania, the SPICE consortium is composed of partners that cover the full market value chain of network and network technology providers such as AI engineers and academicians, platform and mobile developers, Authorization and API management experts and smart city service and technology providers. The consortium composition carefully balances the scale and impact of large industrial partners providing and operating major urban infrastructures and platforms with the in-depth expertise of academic institutes and the innovative power of selected SMEs. Moreover, the project will actively engage with citizens and end-user organizations throughout the project to stimulate acceptance, validate scalability and optimize impact.