Smart City services and resources in Russia are primarily associated with security, Mikhail Markov, international products manager at Ivideon, told a roundtable “What should a Russian smart city be like?” organized by Invest Foresight business magazine and the Institute for Information Transmission Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences as part of the Engineering the Future Club project.
According to Mikhail Markov, different countries mean different things by this term: in the USA a Smart City implies a heap of expensive servers; there is no rationality in them, but they cost a lot of money.
“In Europe, it implies smart technologies aimed at saving resources: various smart curtains that save electricity. In Russia, a Smart City is primarily associated with higher security,” the expert said.
According to him, the Smart City technology in Russia is about collecting information from crowded places, state institutions, and users’ phones to cloud data centers.
“This data is then transmitted to situational centers to help deal with economic, safety, convenience and comfort issues,” Markov added.
He noted that cloud-based video surveillance is one of the newest components of the smart home technology.
“The infrastructure for the CCTV ecosystem is already in place. In Russia, this technology helps us deal with the problems of urban security,” the expert concluded.