Smart cities need ‘big data’ to become ‘big action’

Mischa Dohler, director of the Center for Telecommunications Research at King’s College London, highlights the challenges of making smart cities become a reality.

By Maria Fernanda Ziegler  |  Agência FAPESP – Mischa Dohler, 42, won gold medals in the International Chemistry and Physics Olympics for Germany when he was a teenager. Later, he studied music in Moscow and electrical engineering at the Dresden University of Technology, Germany, specializing in wireless communications. He is now Full Professor at King’s College London, where he heads the Center for Telecommunications Research, and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers and of the Royal Society of Arts. He is also an entrepreneur, helping develop startups that can change the future of cities, and an advisor to the UK government and Carbon War Room. 

In July 2017 Dohler visited Brazil, where he was one of the highlights of the São Paulo School of Advanced Science (SPSAS) on Smart Cities organized by the University of São Paulo’s Mathematics & Statistics Institute (IME-USP).

“Events like this are very important: they make the decision makers of tomorrow understand that smart cities aren’t just about technology, they’re also about the role of human beings in it all,” he said.

Dohler spoke to Agência FAPESP about his expectations for the future of the internet, of work and cities. He said needs and demand have to be brought together so that smart cities leave the drawing board to help change the world.

The good news is that this will happen soon, according to Dohler. “I believe smart cities will become a reality in the next five years,” he said.

Agência FAPESP – In your class at the SPSAS on Smart Cities, you said they’re “still in PowerPoint mode”. They haven’t left the slide presentation. 
Mischa Dohler – Although it is established, the smart city concept is without exception in PowerPoint mode. The reason is that it takes time to introduce new technology. It’s all there – the supply chain, the platforms, standards, chips, base stations, sensors, IT infrastructure – but it’s on the user side that demand has not yet picked up. Big data is confined to meeting rooms: the data accumulated from sensors and from people is transferred to a data platform, you build beautiful graphics and 3D images, but in the end we ask ourselves, “what do we do with all this?” I’ve been arguing that we don’t only need big data, we also need big action. So every time you invest one dollar in a big data project, you also need to invest one dollar in a big action project. And then you will close the gap we have today between demand and need. The need exists; I believe smart cities will happen in the next five years.

Agência FAPESP – We have a problem dealing with data, but on the other hand, there are companies that are worth billions of dollars on the basis of algorithms. 
Dohler – Yes indeed. A hundred years ago, how much time and how many people were needed to build a billion-dollar company? Companies like IBM needed decades and hundreds of thousands of people. Looking at the 2000s, you can see that suddenly the time becomes ten years, and you can do it with 10,000 employees. That’s true of companies like Google, for example. And then in 2014, a company like WhatsApp with 18 people is worth a billion dollars. Innovation is speeding up so much that you want to ask what comes next. In the future, maybe machines will create billion-dollar companies. Maybe in the future, communication among all these elements will be such that we can recreate the way we build infrastructure.

Agência FAPESP – Automation is changing work as we know it. What’s your view on this? 
Dohler – Automation is a tendency. It’s driven by big data, but also by artificial intelligence, which avoids getting fooled by data and can come up with an entirely new insight. However, there’s a big danger, because all of a sudden you can say, “I can replace students” or “I can replace workers.” Well, that may or may not happen. In addition to the opportunity to automate work, we have an opportunity to humanize work. How much time do we waste every day on administrative tasks? These can be taken over by machines. We would save time for being more artistic and more creative, for interacting with other people, for living better.

Agência FAPESP – At the SPSAS on Smart Cities you spoke a lot about 5G. What can it do? 
Dohler – 5G is coming, and it’s incredible. It will enable us to solve problems that have bothered us for a long time. From the technological standpoint, data transfer rates will be faster by several orders of magnitude. If with 4G we can transmit 1 gigabyte per second, with 5G we’ll reach 10, or 100. In terms of delay, 5G will also be much better. And the number of connected devices can be increased to trillions with 5G, which will enable many new things. 5G will solve many of industry’s big problems. One of the things we’re doing is building a new internet, which I call the Internet of Skills. I believe it will be a major transformation that will come after the Internet of Things.

Agência FAPESP – How will this new internet work? 
Dohler – The Internet of Skills is the internet that empowers us as humans. It’s going to democratize work as much as it will democratize knowledge and information. Physical tasks like moving muscles may also be democratized. Our best surgeons can operate on a large number of patients in remote places without being physically there. Engineers will be able to repair aircraft engines remotely. It might even create a new kind of economy in the next 20 years.

Agência FAPESP – How can the Internet of Skills and 5G be applied to the smart city concept? 
Dohler – Think about the case of self-driving cars. Today, people don’t feel comfortable or safe riding in a driverless car. However, and we’re working on this in London, how about something like driving as a service? Imagine a control center with people using videogame consoles but connected to actual cars. As soon as there’s a problem, control is immediately transferred to a human, who takes over driving in safety. The technology must be highly reliable and include ultra-high-bandwidth transmission with low latency. That’s 5G. So I believe the future of the self-driving car isn’t self-driving. OK, it’s self-driving in 99% of cases and driving as a service in dangerous situations. Then 5G will make a big difference.

Agência FAPESP – This is your first visit to São Paulo. In your opinion, what’s the importance of events like the SPSAS in Smart Cities? 
Dohler – Events like this are very important: they make the decision makers of tomorrow understand that smart cities aren’t just about technology, they’re also about the role of human beings in it all. So these events should be structured to talk a lot about technology but also about the demand side, about empathy, about our role in the whole chain.

Agência FAPESP – You’re active on so many fronts – how do you manage to connect it all up? 
Dohler – At the moment, I’m working at the university, I’m an entrepreneur with several companies, I’m also advising the UK government quite a lot, I’m involved in policy work, and I make a lot of music. In fact, I wanted to become a professional musician but ended up by accident in technology. At King’s College, I’m trying to combine the worlds of arts, policy and technology to transform each one of them. This is the 21st-Century way of life, the boundaries between subjects, areas, working hours and so on have been blurred. I’m perhaps the embodiment of all that. 

Agência FAPESP – The students at the SPSAS noticed that your teaching style is very dynamic. Can you explain how your classes are organized? 
Dohler – When I went to university, we were trained to sit in the audience for hours and listen to the wisdom of the professor, because there were no other sources for that information. Students nowadays are empowered. Information is everywhere. The students are on social media. They have followers, they have opinions, they’re being listened to, they’re being liked and unliked. You can’t expose them to a two-hour broadcast. They can’t concentrate on listening to one person for a long time. I’m encouraging them to feed back their thoughts to me, and if they really want to dive deep into knowledge, there’s the internet and libraries, so they can go out and get all that information. What I do is break up the lecture with exercises every 15 minutes, which is the longest I can get them to concentrate without switching activities. So it’s more or less 15 minutes talking, 15 minutes of exercises, 15 minutes watching a video. I’m a coach these days, an information coach, and not any more a knowledge professor.