Smart City Expo World Congress 2019

Vaisala is a project partner in the CITYZER project. The project develops new digital services and products to support decision-making processes related to weather and air quality in cities, answering to the increasing challenges that poor air quality poses globally. The results of the project are utilized in the Helsinki and Nanjing Air Quality Testbeds.

The fourth session of the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) was held at Nairobi, Kenya March 11-15. Attended by heads of states and environmental ministers, and shadowed by the aftermath of the tragic Ethiopian Airlines crash, the meeting brought together thousands of delegates and participants to discuss under the theme “Innovative solutions for environmental challenges and sustainable consumption and production”.

The construction work to build up a new air quality network pilot in the city of Nanjing in the Yangtze River Delta in China is progressing at a good pace. Last year, Vaisala announced a project to build a groundbreaking air quality network pilot in Nanjing .

Road infrastructure is among the most important public assets we have. Essentially, modern society doesn’t work without them. 

And yet, many cities, counties, and transportation departments struggle with budget and labor limitations that cause their roadways to suffer. 

These challenges affect us all. For example, the American Automotive Association estimates that U.S. drivers spend $3 billion a year fixing pothole damage to their vehicles. Naturally, bad road conditions cause public safety problems as well.

Fortunately, machine learning, computer vision, and other technologies have matured so quickly that serious improvements can be made to road maintenance practices — relieving transportation departments of existing cost and labor burdens, improving maintenance, and maintaining higher safety standards.

Modern tools can support organizations and the ways of working in performing better. Construction, particularly infrastructure construction, has been considered to be quite a traditional industry. Albeit, if one took a closer look, it would be clear that this is not the case anymore.

Vaisala RoadAI service is developed to support data collection for road inspection. However, RoadAI is now playing a bigger role as a situational awareness tool and documentation bank to track the progress of a project in one of the biggest construction sites in Finland. This is due to the fact the service has been evolving and gaining new features since day one, now enabling the users to use drone footage and 360 panoramas in addition to videos recorded manually and from a vehicle.

The speed at which new technology changes our daily lives has reached breakneck levels. From our homes, to our places of work, to our public spaces, technology is driving major shifts in the way we tackle problems of all types.

Automation is interesting in almost every repetitive or simple task; traffic sign mapping and inventories are an excellent use case to be automated. Digital maps are getting more and more important in the days of connected vehicles and navigation, and smart phones have become a norm. Combining these ideas, with Vaisala Road AI technology turns mobile video into an ultimate format for vehicle based computer vision in various use cases.

Vaisala’s computer vision team has developed one the most advanced traffic sign mapping systems to support asset management and traffic system safety monitoring. The RoadAI system is for those who need to monitor signs and traffic arrangements with a simple and mobile video recording system.