CRI听力:What It Takes to Become a Smart City

When everything in a city is connected by a huge inflow of information, more intelligent decisions can be made that are better for the people who live there.

This is exactly what a smart city should be like.

A Smart City uses information and communication technology to make its critical infrastructure and the public services more interactive and efficient.

However some experts attending the forum believe that electronic solutions during that process are sometimes exaggerated.

Dr Thomas Hart is a senior consultant working in the China Academy of Telecommunication Research with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

"A city that is taking that path of modernization and moving towards becoming a smarter place, a place with better quality of life, with better foundation for private and economic life, needs to bear in mind that not every problem is best solved with an electronic solution."

One of the side-effect of the electronic solutions is the leaking of information.

Ian McLoughlin is an expert in speech and language information processing with the University of Science and Technology of China.

He cites a number of European countries that are facing this problem.

"This information ties in with that information from cameras and other types of surveillance that is used in the cities at the moment, passive information that can track people. Many people are frightened about the data that we collect and about sensing. We can sense things about people's daily life---we know too much about people. This is a possible problem."

The expert warns that the failure to properly address massive data breaches would undoubtedly spark public outcry.

In that regard, he suggests that this seemingly unavoidable error is not uNPReventable.

"Well, the European Union has a project as I mentioned. And they specifically address the leak of information, and there's a technological solution. There are solutions and technologies that can depersonalize information. This technology exists. But I'm stating there is a problem and maybe we need to form some wider industry collaboration to deal with that problem. Otherwise nobody wants to live in the city."

Meanwhile, experts in the forum also agree on the importance of establishing data protection regulations.

The one-day smart city forum is one of seven forums under the ongoing Beijing International High-tech Expo.

For CRI, I'm Li Dong.