The Living Network - Control

In this episode, we explore the fascinating concept of sensory living networks with Prof. Dimitra Simeonidou, director of the Smart Internet Lab, Paul Wilson, chair of the advisory board for SmartCitiesWorld and Simon Saunders, honorary professor at the Smart Internet Lab. Discover how these intelligent networks can revolutionise emergency responses and provide critical data to enhance urban living. Join us as we delve into the potential benefits and ethical considerations of utilising such technology for the greater good of society.

Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
(01:15) Sensory Living Networks Explained
(05:30) Emergency Services and Data Utilisation
(10:00) The Role of Regulation
(15:45) Global Standards and Cooperation
(20:30) Future of AI and Data Governance
(25:00) Conclusion

This is an 18Sixty Production.

Transcript

>> Prof. Dimitra Simeonidou: We have networks that they use their sensory data to actually learn. Your network knows about the city, your network knows about the citizens.  And that is taking beyond to what we have called up to now, intelligent networks. That's almost a biological function, a living network.

>> Host: That was Prof. Dimitra Simeonadou, director of the Smart Internet Lab and chief scientific advisor to the European Commission. Let's remind ourselves of some of the incredible benefits of this sensory living network, such as how it can be used by our critical services.

>> Prof. Dimitra Simeonidou: So if you're having an emergency situation, lets say that we're having flooding or we're having fire. The whole idea is in situations like this, other things also fail, like utilities. So the idea is that you can bring your satellite network and your satellites can start detecting actually what is happening. It could give you an idea about people movements, people location, casualties. So critical services can go immediately or as soon as possible and intervene, lives be saved. So that is quite a significant, byproduct. And we have done some early work on that here at Bristol, where we actually had not the network to sense, but we had sensing for instance installed around the harbor site. So when people fell into the water and we had a couple of examples like this, then critical services in the city council, in the operations center could be actually being alerted and they had an immediate response, saved lives. So we have actually examples like this. Now we could do that because Bristol is an urban environment. But can you imagine that you have wild swimming, for instance, outside the countryside. You don't have their cameras, you don't have their specific sensors, but you have your 5G connectivity and your 5G network. If can actually detect people falling or having trouble in the water, that is going again, going to give quite a quick response. There are hundreds of examples like this that I can bring forward, all the benefits of having sensory information and use it in a good way. And there are hundreds of examples that I can bring of having this information and use it in a bad way. And so that is, I would like to focus on the good way. You know, being able to say that, okay, we have this capability is great. Let's now put it in good hands and properly governed so it works for the benefits of citizens. And this is what we're going to explore in this. A sensory network that works for the benefit of citizens

>> Host: Welcome back to the Living Network from the Smart Internet Lab at the University of Bristol. Episode 2 Control. If you've already listened to episode 1, then you'll have heard Demetra explain how this new technology is coming, it's unstoppable. So what needs to be done to ensure these developments are being used in the best possible way? Paul Wilson, Chair of the Smart Cities World Advisory Board.

>> Paul Wilson: Cities are, incredible things. The planet is 72% covered in water. The other 28%, only 25% of that is, farmland, mountains, parks, that kind of thing. Just 3% of the Earth's surface is covered in cities. But this 3% of the Earth's surface is where, 80% of the world's economy is created and about 70% of the world's greenhouse gases come from. So if you want to have an impact on how our planet functions, both at economics level and climate level, it, how we manage our cities and what we do in them, that is the biggest policy lever that the world has to think about for these very critical issues. And in many ways that's why this shift of the telecoms infrastructure from being a sort of comms infrastructure, first for voice, now for, you know, data, video stuff that we use it today. If that turns into the massive sensing network, you're able to use the existing telco infrastructure, probably upgraded with AI capabilities and more edge computing to harvest this data. And then the next question is obviously the big question, which is who gets to use it and how do we make sure that it's being used for good? In fact, who decides what good is? and that is a, you know, a deep philosophical question. Now the issue is going to be that technically we're going to get there probably within the next decade, all this stuff will becoming real. Of course that takes you to politics and local, government, national government, but we need to be getting to grips with that data management, today, and doing some good thinking through all of this as it increasingly happens for real.

>> Host: So how do we approach this challenge of controlling something as potentially huge as this? Simon Saunders Honorary professor at the Smart Internet Lab.

>> Simon Saunders: So there's this quite interesting interplay between the technological art of the possible and the benefits and the potential harms that come from that technology for society. And you know, there are different perspectives on this around the world where and I used to work for one of the very big hyperscale Internet companies, for a number of years. And the typical concern coming from that part of the industry is that regulation will stifle creativity, will stifle innovation, and that's a genuine risk, that if you start from a perspective that you can only do a thing if it's specifically explicitly allowed, you're probably not going to have a lot of innovation in what's happening, but you do have to look at least after the fact and say, well, what harms are actually happening and is that okay as a society? And put in place at least guardrails that give clear guidance on that. if you do that right, actually that can be a source of innovation. You can actually create a playing field in which people can have creative ways of solving these things. We had the GDPR regulations relating to personal content, held by Internet players broadly, which at first sight to some of those companies look like a terrible restriction on their ability to innovate. But once they got comfortable with the idea that it was going to happen, whatever they said, they put thousands of people on working out how to comply with those systems and suddenly realized actually they could make better systems as a result. And their ability to comply with that became a thing that they sold to other people. So you know, if it's done well, regulation can be a real stimulant for this kind of creativity. So when we're talking about this sort of vision of a living network with its own capability for sensing and assimilating sensing data, I think of it in a similar way. You know, first you have to create it and show that it can actually do things, but you also then have to think carefully about, about the potential harms and the potential, ways that you can address those potential harms without stifling the potential there. Ah. So I think regulation and policy have a really positive role to play in enabling these things, making people feel comfortable with these things, in creating a stable and predictable investment opportunity such that people actually want to help to build out these networks and so on.

>> Host: It's one thing to do this on a national level, but I wanted to better understand how this works at a global level. How do you regulate something at scale that crosses borders, oceans and different socio political landscapes?

>> Simon Saunders: Yeah, good question. I mean, how does technology that is international get regulated? Sometimes it's not through sort of hard regulation. It's a much softer, consensual approach to regulation, particularly through global standards where different parts of the industry around the world come together and agree some ground rules as to how all the jigsaw pieces fit together. Actually we have quite a good international framework for doing that that goes back more than 150 years. So there's a United nations agency called the International Telecommunication Union. So we have a good sort of overall mechanism. That mechanism is incredibly slow though. It takes years if not decades to make changes to the way it works. So there's still a lot to do to evolve them and we need ways that, allow that to happen at the pace of the innovation we're doing today.

>> Host: This reminds me of something that Dimitra said in episode one. We need to move fast, but not so fast that regulation and policy control can't keep up. To quote Dimitra, we need to move fast, but with assurances. Paul Wilson.

>> Paul Wilson: You know, you might say, oh, the best thing to do is just to not do this. And that, is a very obvious thought, like, let's just not do this. The problem is we are doing this. This is happening. So you couldn't bury your head in the sand if you want, but that doesn't seem very wise either. So I think we need to start this very multidisciplinary, approach to things, thinking through laws around data governance, data trust. We need to learn to collaborate intelligently and that to become a normal thing. This is still pretty sticky to get that to happen. So I think there's lots of layers to this. So you've got that legal data sharing layer, but then you've got the who decides layer to use this data in what way and what's automated and what requires human intervention. That's another thing. And at every angle, there's lots to be debated here. What we don't see is a very mature debate about these topic areas. I don't think we've got the best and brightest minds working on this yet. So I'm excited to think we might start to do that through programs like the Joiner program and podcasts like this one.

>> Prof. Dimitra Simeonidou: So, so in Smart Internet Lab, obviously we have identified this scenario and we're working with, within the community of other researchers, nationally, international and also industry, to try to motivate the discussion of what's happening next, how, we can make this environment safe, how we can actually have this as a byproduct out of our network infrastructure to actually invigorate the wWhole industry as well.

>> Prof. Dimitra Simeonidou: And there are two things that we are working in Smart Internet Lab. I mean, I have to remind everybody that we are technologists and we are technologists reaching out. but the one thing is identify, you know, the opportunity, I would say, so identify exactly where we are developing new technologies and try to see how, joining up these new inventions, what the capability they're going to give into the network. so we have a platform which is called Joiner, that actually provides a national platform for telco innovation. And it's a national platform where our partners are very keen to trial, what we call joint communication, sensing, which is what we are discussing here. But our diversion is instead of trying only the device, you know, just plug these devices into joiner so we can see what is happening at the national scale or even at the national scale. So we start getting an idea about this global scenarios that we are discussing here. The second thing that we are working on, of course, when you are having sensing, you're having data and you can only make sense of data if you actually try to leverage knowledge from your data. And my team is doing a lot of work on AI and AI for networks and also networks for AI. And therefore we are looking, when we are actually curating this environment and we are looking the data and we are looking at knowledge, that we are extracting from this, how we can use models that they are trusted, they are non biased, that actually respect privacy, that they are explainable why and for whom. You know, we are providing this information and then making sure create frameworks where actually we detect immediately model drift and we are looking at risks around AI models handling this kind of data.

>> Paul Wilson: We're creating something in our midst, an intelligence in our midst bigger than anything we've ever known before. And this needs a lot of careful thinking about right now because if we don't think about it and we don't get our grip on this, to have a bigger intelligence than our intelligence means, I don't know why that will work well for the future of humanity necessarily.

>> Prof. Dimitra Simeonidou: We are talking to the regulators, we are talking to policymakers, we are trying to make them understand what is coming forward and therefore being prepared with data trust, policy and regulation that's appropriate. With this evolving environment.

>> Paul Wilson: What could be more important now than putting those best practice guardrails, legal precedents in place? That's what we need to be doing right right now.

>> Host: Join us next time in the third and final episode of this series where Prof. Dimitra Simeonidou will be joined again in conversation by Host and Simon Saunders, where they'll take a deeper dive into the complexities of designing, building and regulating this living network. You've been listening to the Living Network from the University of Bristol's Smart Internet Lab. This was an 1860 production. The producer was Kate White.