It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, February 05, 2024
New York bins subway surveillance robot
Credit: Charles Parker from Pexels
The New York City subway has pulled its controversial security robot out of service after little more than five months patrolling the busy Times Square station.
K-5, as the robot's call sign goes, has been retired to a storage lot, The New York Times reported Friday.
Its short stint on the force was reportedly marked by frequent charging breaks, the need to be chaperoned by human officers, and an inability to tackle stairs.
"The Knightscope K-5 has completed its pilot deployment in the NYC subway system," a police spokesman told AFP of the device, which was introduced to much fanfare in September 2023.
The device, part-Star Wars, part-Smart Car in appearance, was equipped with several cameras as well as a help button for commuters at the city's busiest subway station that is also a major tourist hotspot.
"I said this was a trash can on wheels, but it looks like the wheels aren't even working at this point," said Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of anti-spy-tech campaign group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.
"With major crimes down and the mayor mandating budget cuts across city agencies, why are we spending so much money on these gadgets?"
New York Mayor Eric Adams—himself a former police officer—has put technology at the center of his crime-fighting strategy, enthusiastically extolling the virtues of drones, facial recognition cameras and robotics.
In April 2023 the New York Police Department re-introduced a $74,000 robotic dog kitted out with cameras, a two-way communication system and lights to assist in emergency situations.
Officers have also adopted Starchase, a GPS location system allowing police to attach a tracker to fleeing vehicles eliminating the need for risky car chases through New York's packed streets.
"When crime was rising nationwide, we were told surveillance was the solution. But now crime is plummeting across the country, including cities that banned these dystopian devices. If we don't have money to keep the library doors open, we definitely don't have cash for creepy robots," said Cahn.
Adams recently touted the city's declining crime rate, according to official statistics, and credited technology for its part in the drop.
"We've also used technology and tools with (police department) Assistant Commissioner Kaz Daughtry scanning the entire country to find the right technology that's needed," Adams said last month.
A fully autonomous drone system for cinematography and wildlife monitoring
by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore
CineMPC in action. This figure depicts two experiments where CineMPC manages both camera intrinsics and extrinsics to user instructions. The first row showcases the initial experiment, where CineMPC manages both the intrinsics and extrinsics to capture a target (the chair), adhering to the rule of thirds and maintaining focus. In the second row, two frames from the second experiment demonstrate the recording of two targets (car and bottle) meeting various requirements for image focus (initially focusing on the bottle and then on the car) and the positioning of targets in the image (placing them in accordance with the rule of thirds). The drone remains stationary throughout the entire execution of this experiment. Thus, all changes in recording are performed through manipulation of the focal length and focus distance of the camera, its intrinsics. Credit: Pueyo et al
Recent technological advances, such as increasingly sophisticated drones and cameras, have opened exciting new possibilities for cinematography. Most notably, film directors can now shoot scenes from a wide range of angles that were previously inaccessible and in far higher resolution.
Researchers at University of Zaragoza and Stanford University recently developed CineMPC, a new cinematographic system that relies on a fully autonomous drone that carries a cinematographic camera to film multiple targets autonomously, while following a director's instructions. The platform modulates various drone and camera parameters to satisfy these instructions. The team's innovative system, outlined in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, could bring a wave of innovation to the film industry and other sectors that can benefit from high-quality video footage.
"Existing solutions for autonomous drone cinematography revealed a common oversight, namely, none provided automatic control over camera intrinsic parameters (i.e., focal length, aperture, focus distance)," Pablo Pueyo Ramon, co-author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.
"In cinematography, controlling these parameters is essential to achieve different artistic and technical goals, such as a desired depth of field (parts of the scene shown in focus or blurred), or iconic shots like the dolly-zoom or vertigo effect. CineMPC fills this gap, determining autonomously the appropriate camera intrinsics capable of achieving a wide array of user-defined cinematographic instructions."
Pueyo and his colleagues have been developing innovative technologies for cinematography for some time now. The new system they developed, dubbed CineMPC, was first introduced in 2021.
CineMPC essentially consists of software that can be installed in any drone equipped with a controllable professional camera (e.g., a DSLR camera). As part of their recent study, the researchers broadened their software's functionalities and set out to assess its performance in a real-world setting.
Credit: Pablo Pueyo Ramon
"Besides including a better and more advanced control strategy, the new version of CineMPC also includes a perception module capable of identifying relevant information from the scene, like the actors and actresses, making it a 100% autonomous control solution," Pueyo explained. "Finally, we are now releasing the source code so that everybody can use it."
Pueyo and his colleagues have tested the improved version of CineMPC by applying it to a real drone for cinematography and filming various scenes with it. They found that their software achieved remarkable results, reliably estimating the relative poses of filmed targets and allowing users greater control over the footage captured by the drone, for instance adding unique effects, tracking specific people or objects, and so on.
"In our opinion, the implications of our study for cinematography alone are remarkable," Pueyo said. "We are enormously happy to offer filmmakers creative freedom, improved safety, and increased autonomy for real-time decision-making."
More information: Pablo Pueyo et al, CineMPC: A Fully Autonomous Drone Cinematography System Incorporating Zoom, Focus, Pose, and Scene Composition, IEEE Transactions on Robotics (2024). DOI: 10.1109/TRO.2024.3353550
Pablo Pueyo et al, CineTransfer: Controlling a Robot to Imitate Cinematographic Style from a Single Example, 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (2023). DOI: 10.1109/IROS55552.2023.10342280
Window to the soul? Maybe, but the eyes are also a flashing neon sign for a new artificial intelligence-based system that can read them to predict what you'll do next.
A University of Maryland researcher and two colleagues have used eye-tracking technology and a new deep-learning AI algorithm to predict study participants' choices while they viewed a comparison website with rows and columns of products and their features.
The algorithm, known as RETINA (Raw Eye Tracking and Image Ncoder Architecture), could accurately zero in on selections before people had even made their decisions.
"This is something AI technology is very good at—using data to make predictions," said Michel Wedel, a Distinguished University Professor and PepsiCo Chair in Consumer Science in the Robert H. Smith School of Business. He worked with Moshe Unger of Tel Aviv University and Alexander Tuzhilin of New York University to develop RETINA. Their research is published in the journal Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery.
Researchers using eye movement data typically synthesize it into aggregated chunks of information, which can miss some information and certain types of eye movements. With their advanced machine-learning method, Wedel and his colleagues could use the full scope of raw data from the eye-tracking rather than the snippets current methods record.
Unusually, the algorithm is able to incorporate raw eye movement data from each eye, Wedel said.
"It's a lot of data—several hundreds of thousands of data points, with millions of parameters—and we use it for both eyes separately," he said.
The algorithm could be applied in many settings by all types of companies. For example, a retailer like Walmart could use it to enhance the virtual shopping experiences they are developing in the metaverse, a shared, virtual online world. Many of the VR devices people will use to explore the metaverse will have built-in eye tracking to help better render the virtual environment. With this algorithm, Walmart could tailor the mix of products on display in their virtual store to what a person will likely choose, based on their initial eye movements.
"Even before people have made a choice, based on their eye movement, we can say it's very likely that they'll choose a certain product," Wedel says. "With that knowledge, marketers could reinforce that choice or try to push another product instead."
RETINA has applications outside of marketing as eye tracking becomes more ubiquitous in many other fields, including medicine, psychology and psychiatry, usability and design, arts, reading, finance, accounting—anything where people are making decisions based on some kind of visual assessment.
The biggest players in tech, including Meta and Google, having recently acquired eye-tracking companies and are considering a range of applications. With front-facing cameras, it is now possible to track people's eye movements from any personal smartphone, tablet or computer. Such consumer device-based approaches can't yet be as accurate yet, as the advanced eye-tracking hardware that researchers currently use, said Wedel, and there is still the big issue of privacy concerns—companies need to ask permission from users.
The researchers are already working to commercialize the algorithm and extend their research to optimize decision-making.
"We think eye tracking will become available at very large scales," said Wedel. "The processing of the eye movement data typically has been very laborious. With this algorithm, we sidestep a lot of that, so there may be many applications that we haven't even thought about."
More information: Moshe Unger et al, Predicting consumer choice from raw eye-movement data using the RETINA deep learning architecture, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (2023). DOI: 10.1007/s10618-023-00989-7
China's Tencent fires more than 120 workers for fraud
FEBRUARY 4, 2024
The Hong Kong-listed company is the world's top video game maker and the owner of the popular super-app WeChat.
Chinese tech giant Tencent said it last year dismissed more than 120 employees for violating its anti-fraud rules, including for corruption and embezzlement.
The Hong Kong-listed company is the world's top video game maker and the owner of the popular super-app WeChat, which is installed on almost every phone in the country.
Tencent's founder Pony Ma in 2022 described the level of corruption in his company as "shocking", and the firm promised to take action, according to state media reports.
Last year, more than 70 breaches of the code of conduct were reported, Tencent said.
"More than 120 people were dismissed" from the company and nearly 20 were reported to the authorities, the group said in a statement released on Friday.
Some of the sacked employees belonged to the group's PCG branch, responsible for broadcasting content such as news, sport and films.
Others worked in the group's medical services arm, a sector where Tencent's telemedicine applications have a huge market share in China.
One of the employees implicated by Tencent was sentenced to four years in prison and fined 100,000 yuan ($14,000), according to the press release.
The announcements come after years of difficulties for China's tech giants.
After a period of meteoric growth, the sector underwent a broad regulatory crackdown by Chinese authorities that started in late 2020.
As a result, billions of dollars in market capitalization have been lost, and the profits of powerful internet companies have plummeted.
Tencent, which currently has just over 100,000 employees, was not spared.
Restrictions in China to online gaming time for under-18s were also a blow to the group's profitability.
Tencent is now looking for more opportunities abroad, particularly in Europe, where it is strengthening its position by acquiring stakes in major gaming studios.
University of Utah engineering professor Chris Pantelides displays a piece of engineered wood used in mass timber construction. Credit: Mark Draper, University of Utah
We've been using wood to build things for a very long time. According to the recently discovered remains of a half-a-million-year-old wooden structure in Africa, we've been building with wood before we were even fully human. From those early beginnings to the stave churches of Scandinavia to Lincoln's log cabin, wood as a construction material has been favored for its abundance, its workability and its beauty.
Yet in the past 150 years, as cities and skyscrapers have boomed, wood has been eclipsed by newer materials such as concrete and steel. These materials can support more weight, allowing for bigger buildings, and aren't as susceptible to fire, earthquake and moisture damage. However, they cost more to produce, are not renewable and exact a heavy carbon footprint; steel and concrete production accounts for more than 10% of global emissions.
But talk to University of Utah engineering professor Chris Pantelides, and he'll tell you that we shouldn't accept the dominance of the steel-and-concrete jungle just yet. Thanks to the work of civil engineers like Pantelides, our oldest building material is experiencing a revival—one that can even withstand earthquakes.
Wood represents both the past and the future for building
Sitting in his office at the John and Marcia Price College of Engineering's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, he held up a block of composite wood, about 12 inches long and 10 inches wide, and smiled.
"What you're looking at here is the future," Pantelides said.
The deceptively simple piece of lumber is an example of "mass timber" technology, a category of "engineered wood product" set to revolutionize the construction industry, which Pantelides has spent the last seven years studying and developing.
On the desk before him, among other pieces of wood and long metal dowels, sat his latest research paper, titled "Design and Cyclic Experiments of a Mass Timber Frame with a Timber Buckling Restrained Brace," published in the Journal of Structural Engineering. It explores the best ways to build a buckling restrained brace (BRB)—a type of building support that protects against earthquake damage—with mass timber.
As a construction technique, mass timber is defined by its use of columns, beams and boards, made of multiple wood layers or pieces tightly laminated or otherwise bound together. The two mass timber types Pantelides works with are known as mass plywood panel and mass ply lam, which have several advantages, environmental and structural, over the usual building materials.
"The timber that we're talking about, it's very strong. It can take the place of steel or concrete in many building frames, but it's much lighter," Pantelides explained. "A mass timber building is one-quarter the weight of a concrete building too, requiring a much smaller foundation."
Thanks to its super-compressed makeup, mass timber is effectively fireproof, resistant to moisture damage and highly durable. With today's sustainable forestry techniques, using wood is more sustainable and "renewable" than ever.
Wood sequesters carbon while concrete emits it
"It takes only seven seconds for European forests to grow enough timber required for a three-bedroom apartment," Pantelides said. "Canada alone has enough timber to house a billion people in perpetuity, with forested trees replenishing faster than the population."
Every ton of timber grown sequesters 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. A mass timber building could be 25% faster to build compared to a concrete building and result in 90% less construction traffic. Once the structure is finished, the wood goes from benefiting nature to having natural benefits.
"People simply like to be in buildings that have lots of exposed wood," Pantelides said. "The sense of being connected to nature, the biophilic design, makes for healthier living and working environments."
Thanks to its ability to bend and not break under pressure, steel remains the go-to for tall buildings, especially in areas with high risk of earthquakes or hurricanes. Maintaining a building's structural integrity relies on a deep understanding of such properties—an understanding we don't have with stiffer mass timber. This is where Pantelides's research comes in.
With its varied compositions, mass timber is far from one-size-fits-all; the type of wood used, the size and shape of the wood particles, how they're stuck together, or even whether individual layers are stacked parallel or perpendicular to each other will greatly influence how the finished product reacts under stress.
Since he first started investigating mass timber, Pantelides has been troubleshooting and experimenting with different "recipes," eventually arriving at one that calls for shaving dark fir wood into chips, tightly compressing the chips together into planks or boards and then laminating those layers together with ultra-strong glue. The resulting plywood can then be securely fastened to other pieces of wood with joints made of steel dowels and plates.
Using this formula, Pantelides and his team experimented with mass timber versions of earthquake-resistant architectural elements, including the Timber Buckling Restrained Brace (T-BRB)—the focus of Pantelides's most recent publication.
More information: Emily Williamson et al, Design and Cyclic Experiments of a Mass Timber Frame with a Timber Buckling Restrained Brace, Journal of Structural Engineering (2023). DOI: 10.1061/JSENDH.STENG-12363
Overfishing has dire consequences for ocean health and for the millions of people who depend on fish for food and well-being. Globally, catch has been steadily declining since the 1990s. It's a trend that's likely to continue if we fail to act now.
Nearly all governments, including Australia's, subsidize their fishing industries. Financial support comes in many forms, from taxpayer-funded fuel to reduced boat-building costs. These subsidies are harmful because they encourage overfishing. Some of the most environmentally damaging and least efficient fishing activities, such as bottom trawling and distant water fishing, would become unprofitable and cease without government subsidies.
Scientists worldwide are rallying for stringent regulations to eliminate harmful fisheries subsidies, which totaled a whopping US$22 billion in 2018. Safeguarding the ocean will strengthen food security and allow more equitable distribution of marine resources.
Trade ministers from around the world are set to convene later this month in Abu Dhabi at a key meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In an open letter published today, we are among 36 marine experts calling on the WTO to adopt ambitious regulations promoting fisheries sustainability and equity, and to eliminate harmful fisheries subsidies.
A long-awaited agreement
International pressure from scientists helped to broker an earlier agreement on fishing subsidies, which is yet to be ratified.
In October 2021, 300 experts published an article in Nature calling for an end to harmful subsidies in the fishing sector.
Once ratified by two-thirds of WTO members, this agreement will partially address the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal Target 14.6 to eliminate harmful subsidies.
Unfortunately, while this agreement is historic, it is narrow. It only prohibits member governments from financing illegal fishing activities and the exploitation of already overfished stocks. But it's obvious illegal fishing should be banned and the focus on overfished stocks is too little, too late.
Experts argue the agreement fails to specifically address harmful subsidies across global fisheries and as such only affects a trivial component of subsidy-driven exploitation. The subsidies that reduce operating costs and increase fishing capacity, allowing vessels to travel further and remain at sea longer, remain in place.
Fisheries subsidies affect more than just fish
Scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades. Many published studies document the destabilizing effects of fisheries subsidies on ecosystems. In addition to impacting biodiversity and ecosystems, subsidies also increase the CO₂ emissions that contribute to climate change.
More recently, studies have also applied a social perspective to this issue. Seafood lifts millions of people out of hunger, malnutrition and poverty. Yet more people will lose a secure source of food and nutrients if fish stocks continue to decline due to industrial overfishing.
Research shedding light on the concept of "equity" shows subsidies don't just harm the ocean, they also affect human communities. These communities are largely in developing countries which are rarely the source of harmful fisheries subsidies. Rather, their waters are exploited by foreign vessels supported by wealthy governments' fisheries subsidies.
Fisheries subsidies foster unfair competition not only among countries but also between industrial and community led fishing fleets. In the Indian Ocean, the level of subsidies provided to industrial fisheries corresponds to the amount of seafood exported to international markets, largely supplying rich and food-secure countries. This shows governments are deliberately empowering their industrial fleets to fish for seafood largely exported and consumed elsewhere, instead of sustaining fisheries providing food for locals.
The good, the bad and the ugly
While most nations contribute to harmful subsidies, 10 nations are responsible for 70% of this unsustainable financing. Chief among them are China, Japan and the European Union, reflecting the significant size of their distant water fishing fleets that typically access the resources of less-developed nations.
In contrast, Australia contributes only 0.1% of global harmful subsidies. Only 6% of Australia's annual US$400 million in fisheries subsidies is considered harmful. While Australia should give attention to its ongoing annual taxpayer contribution of US$25 million to the fishing sector, it is well placed to demonstrate global leadership on how fishing can deliver sustainable and equitable outcomes without harmful subsidies.
An essential opportunity
A second wave of negotiations on fisheries subsidies is expected during the WTO Ministerial Conference this February in Abu Dhabi. This conference represents an invaluable opportunity to better protect the ocean.
In anticipation of this meeting, we are urging nations to adopt more ambitious regulations that eliminate harmful subsidies, prioritizing fisheries sustainability and ocean equity.
Harmful fisheries subsidies are not only unsustainable but profoundly unfair. Based on the extensive body of evidence, the WTO should agree to eliminate harmful subsidies once and for all.
The team examined many marine carbon management methods, including marine carbon capture, which separates carbon dioxide from the air or ocean; sequestration, which permanently stores that captured carbon; and removal, which does both. None are faultless. Credit: James Niffenegger, NREL
The Caribbean has a problem, and it stinks.
Atop the Caribbean Sea's famously pristine waters floats a 5,000-mile-wide heap of rust-colored, brambly seaweed. When that seaweed, a form of sargassum, clumps up on beaches and decomposes, it emits hydrogen sulfide gas (also known as swamp gas), which smells like rotten eggs and, in high doses, can be toxic. For obvious reasons, this seaweed swarm is a huge problem for the Caribbean's tourism industry and residents—and potentially for Florida, where the heap is headed next.
But this stinky seaweed could also be part of a solution.
"If you sink that seaweed into the deep sea, you can potentially avoid those issues," James Niffenegger said. "And with seaweed sinking, the deeper you go, the longer you can store the carbon dioxide it absorbed from the air and water."
Niffenegger, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), is an author of a new study that examined various methods to capture carbon dioxide from the air or ocean and permanently sequester or store it—or, better yet, do both simultaneously.
These techniques—called marine carbon capture, marine carbon sequestration, and marine carbon dioxide removal—are almost as diverse as marine wildlife: Some involve farming or sinking seaweed, others inject captured carbon into deep-sea rocks, and some capitalize on clever chemistry to remove carbon directly from the ocean. But almost all are relatively new and untested technologies, and their costs, environmental impacts, and potential efficacy are still largely unstudied.
Until now.
For their study, Niffenegger and his colleagues—David Greene, Robert Thresher, and Michael Lawson—analyzed the benefits and drawbacks of each of the most promising marine carbon management techniques. But they also looked at how the country—and the world—could power these carbon-snatchers, especially those that operate in the remote ocean, far from any power grid.
The ocean, the team found, could be a valuable partner. Offshore energy technologies, including wind turbines and marine energy devices—which generate energy from ocean waves, currents, tides, and other watery power sources—could help meet global carbon removal goals. And they could do that with the energy available in U.S. waters alone.
"This is not a cure-all," Niffenegger said, meaning carbon removal alone cannot halt climate change.
Still, it is one remedy we can no longer do without.
A sinking ship: Why carbon removal is no longer optional
Like on-land carbon capture technologies, which can extract carbon from our air, marine carbon capture harvests the molecules from seawater or the air above. Carbon causes problems for both: Excess carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere creates a kind of blanket around our world, trapping more heat as more carbon crams in. And even though the ocean absorbs a lot of that airborne carbon, those waters can only trap so much. Plus, too much carbon causes ocean acidification—a steady increase in seawater acidity—which puts marine ecosystems and wildlife at risk. Today, the ocean is basic, with a pH similar to baking soda.
"Basically, we're in a sinking ship now. Our boat is taking on water and we've got to plug up the holes," Niffenegger said. "But even after we plug up the holes, we've got to bail the water out. And if we take too long to do that, there might still be too much water in there for us to avoid the most significant impacts."
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, carbon dioxide removal is now essential to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. If we cross that marker, today's climate change crises—superstorms, wildfires, floods, extreme droughts, lethal heat waves, crop devastation, and more—will only get worse.
To avoid those catastrophes (and their economic and human costs), the world needs to limit warming to 1.5°C by 2100. And to do that, we need to remove about 3 to 7 billion tons of carbon from our atmosphere per year by 2050. (For context, humans emitted about 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2022 just by burning fossil fuels).
More information: Mission Analysis for Marine Renewable Energy To Provide Power for Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal. www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/87165.pdf
Smarter eco-cities, AI and AI of Things, and environmental sustainability
by Eurasia Academic Publishing Group
FEBRUARY 2, 2024
The five pillars of an AI/AIoT-driven system: 1-sensing in charge of collecting raw data, 2-perceiving in charge of extracting semantically meaningful information from raw data, 3-learning in charge of learning to predict patterns, 4-visualizing in charge of communicating key insights, and 5-acting in charge of taking action to achieve a certain goal.Credit: Environmental Science and Ecotechnology (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.ese.2023.100330
Smarter eco-cities, characterized by their advanced technological landscape, are at the forefront of ushering in a new era of environmental sustainability. These intelligent urban environments leverage cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) solutions to address and mitigate environmental challenges.
The integration of AIoT technologies enables these cities to harness real-time data, optimize resource utilization, and implement innovative approaches for ecological conservation and resilience. In doing so, they contribute significantly to the creation of more sustainable and resilient urban ecosystems, fostering a harmonious balance between technological advancement and environmental well-being. As we explore the realm of smarter eco-cities, several questions emerge:
What foundational elements define the emergence of smarter eco-cities, and how do they intertwine?
What factors serve as the key enablers and drivers propelling the evolution of smarter eco-cities?
What constitutes the primary AI and AIoT solutions that can be leveraged in shaping the development of smarter eco-cities?
What challenges and barriers arise in implementing AI and AIoT solutions for the development of smarter eco-cities?
In a systematic reviewpublished in Environmental Science and Ecotechnology, invaluable insights and novel perspectives are presented. These findings serve as a crucial resource for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers, providing them with the necessary knowledge to advance the integration of eco-urbanism and AI- and AIoT-driven urbanism.
Since the mid-2010s, the gradual influence of data-driven technologies and solutions in smart cities has been reshaping the dynamics of eco-cities. This transformation aligns with a smarter approach to environmental sustainability, characterized by the integration of core eco-city domains with those of smart cities.
This trajectory is expected to persist as the technologies and solutions of smart cities—including AI, IoT, and Big Data—advance and seamlessly integrate with sustainable technologies and strategies. This integration enables the development of innovative approaches, showcasing the capability to address increasingly complex challenges.
Consequently, the continual advancement in AI and AIoT applications contributes to the ongoing evolution of smart eco-cities, making them even more intelligent in their commitment to achieving environmental sustainability.
In response to the pressing need for effective solutions, these technologies are poised to offer novel applications that not only overcome current challenges but also pave the way for sustained improvements.
Moreover, a positive feedback loop is anticipated, wherein the more these solutions are implemented, the higher the likelihood of their further adoption. This can be attributed to the amplifying effects of network dynamics, continuous learning, adaptive capabilities, and enhanced coordination, creating a reinforcing cycle of positive impact on environmental sustainability efforts.
More information: Simon Elias Bibri et al, Smarter eco-cities and their leading-edge artificial intelligence of things solutions for environmental sustainability: A comprehensive systematic review, Environmental Science and Ecotechnology (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.ese.2023.100330
