Data here, data there... and the city keeps on changing
THE SYSTEM OF BIRDS.AI MUST AUTOMATICALLY DETECT CHANGES IN THE CITY. | PHOTO: EVELINE VAN EGDOM (EDITOR: ANNEKE DE ZWAAN)
Original article from the newspaper Den Haag Centraal written by Mieke van Dixhoorn and the translation by Birds.ai
Artificial Intelligence
From dormer to posts and flowerbeds. In the Hague smart computers must keep track of the city's appearance.
Do you want to dig a cellar? A dormer on your house? Finally, develop that shed to take your crafting hobby to the next level? It just keeps getting easier to get things like this done. At least in terms of bureaucracy. You no longer need to apply for a permit for an increasing amount of construction work. This trend accelerates with the introduction of the environmental law (now postponed to 2022).
An obvious response might be: “Great! The municipality is not involved.” But that is not entirely true. “We are legally obliged to keep track of changes in the city,” says Marloes Graaumans, system director at the municipality of The Hague. Since 2009, the so-called ‘basic registers’ exist for which the government collects information, three of which concern the physical environments and these are (partially) managed by the municipalities: the BAG with all the addresses of buildings, the BGT with the topography of the city and the WOZ with the values of buildings. All this data is used to calculate taxes, but also, for example, by green management and emergency services. Graaumans: “Everything is connected. The better the information, the more efficient the government.”
Alternatives
At the moment, a significant amount of the information for the basic registers is collected manually, among which the permit applications. “We now have to find alternatives for this” explains Graaumans. “We want to keep the same level of information, with less manual work. We think artificial intelligence can help with that.”
So the municipality put out a tender through the ‘StartUp in Residence’ program. Alderman Saskia Bruines (D66, economics) explains: “The public sector faces countless new issues, often in the field of technology, sustainability and digitization. In this program the knife cuts both ways: the municipality is improving its own products and is better informed about new developments. At the same time, we give new companies the opportunity to get started, grow and actually apply their knowledge or products.”
Birds.ai, a company specializing in smart image analysis, had the best proposal and now has an innovation budget of 25.000 euro to develop a new system. The company was founded by a former student team who jointly developed a drone system to protect rhinos from poachers. Camiel Verschoor, CEO: “A drone flew over an area, in this case a nature reserve, and took photos and videos. Our system automatically recognized humans and animals in those images. We then fed that information back to the park rangers.”
Child
The company now uses artificial intelligence techniques to inspect infrastructure. For example, they built a system for a company to detect broken solar panels from the air in a solar plant. Verschoor and his colleagues also applied artificial intelligence for this use case. “Basically what you do is you teach a computer with many examples, what a functional and a broken solar panel look like in an image. Just like you teach a child: that's a car, that's not a car but a truck. Or a bus.”
THE SYSTEM OF BIRDS.AI HIGHLIGHTING THE DIFFERENT MUTATIONS ON THE MAP
IMAGERY: AERODATA INTERNATIONAL SURVEYS AND MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES (GRAPHIC: BIRDS.AI)
Verschoor certainly does not only expect to use images for the project of the municipality. He wants to tap into all sources of useful information. Also outside the municipality. “Think of sales or rental platforms. If you submit your house there, you submit the information that is also relevant for the basic register. Maybe the surface area submitted is 110 square meters instead of 100 square meters. In that case, the municipality can be notified that something has changed. Subsequently, the notification is checked and if necessary an inspector visits to see if the notification is correct. That is a huge efficiency improvement, but people are not completely eliminated from the process. “The question is do you want that? It's an acceptance process. Do we trust the computer?”
Algorithm
The use of artificial intelligence is on the rise within the government. For example, the municipality is already using it to predict Wmo requirements and to detect waste placements.
As with all technological developments, there are opportunities and pitfalls. State Secretary Raymond Knops of Interior and Kingdom Relations, for example, want artificial intelligence to safeguard and where possible strengthen values such as transparency, non-discrimination, privacy and security. "Human control is always necessary." he writes in a VNG Magazine.
Verschoor recognizes the concerns and thinks it is good to think about them ethically. “Look at our original project: we know that there is a human walking in the park. But not whether it is a poacher or a lost tourist. What if the system says it is a poacher, they go there armed and accidentally shoot a tourist? Is that our fault? You have to think carefully about what a system detects. There are classic stories that have been circulating for a long time. Someone wanted to automatically classify Russian and American tanks in photos. The system could do that very well. But when it became summer the system suddenly stopped working. It turned out that Russian tanks were always in the snow. In that case, you think a system works, but actually, it does not. It recognized the wrong pattern. You have to remember: an artificial intelligence algorithm discriminates. By definition. Because we want an algorithm to categorize things.”