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Chinese City Hangzhou Tracks Every Single Dweller

Web Desk (October 25, 2017): Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has been collecting up video feeds, social media data, traffic information and other data from Hangzhou city for its City Brain project for the past 12 months.

The stated goal was to improve life in Hangzhou by letting artificial intelligence process this data and use it to control aspects of urban life. It seems to have worked.

The trial has been so successful that the company is now packaging the system for export to other places in China- and eventually the rest of the world.

Using AI to optimise Hangzhou has had many positive effects. Traffic congestion is down, road accidents are automatically detected and responded to faster, and illegal parking is tracked in real time. If someone breaks the law, they too can be tracked throughout the city before being picked up by the police.

“In China, people have less concern with privacy, which allows us to move faster,” said Xian-Sheng Hua, who manages AI at Alibaba, speaking at World Summit AI earlier this month.

Consider the example of traffic flow. Using hundreds of thousands of cameras dotted throughout the city, Alibaba can track almost every car on every road. It can instantly detect crashes, blockages or parking violations, and automatically notify the police to deal with them.

The system can predict the traffic flow 10 minutes ahead of time with 90 per cent accuracy, and responds by changing traffic light patterns to even out congestion. It can even send text messages to people to help them plan different routes. “City Brain is about comprehensive cognition.”

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