Seoul joins Smart City Expo World Congress 2022

BARCELONA -- The Seoul city government will showcase the city’s latest smart city innovations as well as its future vision at the Smart City Expo World Congress 2022, the Seoul Digital Foundation said Tuesday.

SCEWC is the world’s leading smart city fair held annually, where governments, companies and experts come together to share the latest smart city innovations.

For this year’s event, held between Tuesday and Thursday at Fira de Barcelona, Spain, the Seoul city government has installed its own pavilion. The Seoul Digital Foundation, a Seoul-funded institution focusing on city-wide digital innovations, is running the pavilion.

On Tuesday morning, the Seoul city government held an opening ceremony for the pavilion, presided by a lifelike digital human, dubbed Seo Yu-jin, created by combining 500 faces of female citizens of Seoul in cooperation between the foundation and local artificial intelligence technology company CNAI. Later in the afternoon, the first day's forum commenced echoing these new heights of innovation.

"After COVID-19, digital transformation and innovation is accelerating. And through digital technology, we are all in this together,” Kang Yo-sik, president of the Seoul Digital Foundation, said Tuesday in his speech during the first day's forum.

Kang added, “In a smart city, various fields such as transportation, medical care, safety, and welfare are combined with digital technology. There are endless possibilities for future development.”

According to Kang, smart cities of the future will be able to provide a new level of convenience with advanced digital technologies such as AI and Metaverse.

During his speech, Kang introduced the latest efforts that the Seoul city government is making with the Seoul Digital Foundation, a Seoul-funded institution focused on city-wide digital innovations.

Kang made a special note of several ongoing projects, particularly Metaverse Seoul, the world‘s first metaverse platform in the public sector, recently selected as one of the 200 best inventions of 2022 by Time magazine.

The Seoul city government currently plans to launch the Mataverse Seoul platform in December this year. The city aims to develop the platform to work as a virtual venue for a wide range of services that can be used in real estate contracts, education and urban management.

Kang also featured several smart city projects spearheaded by the Seoul Digital Foundation, including AI-based sewerage defect detection system, AI-based urban change detection system, and other metaverse projects.

"Now, it is more important than ever for the public sector to lead in the strengthening of the competitiveness in global smart cities,“ Kang said.

For Tuesday’s forum, Matt Armstrong-Barnes, chief technologist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, delivered a speech titled "How many AIs does it take to change a lightbulb?"

Armstrong-Barnes introduced key elements for the metaverse. He focused on AI and blockchain technologies, which are the main tools for processing enormous volumes of data and economic transactions within the metaverse.

But, potential issues could also arise when bridging the metaverse with actual reality, Armstrong-Barnes said. Validating personal identities in the metaverse and sustaining exchange values of metaverse coins are just some of the potential headaches, he added.

Armstrong-Barnes suggested using the metaverse in smart cities could mitigate such issues if "trusted partners" -- like the government and financial services -- can provide a setting where people feel safe and have a positive experience.

“Smart cities are a critical first step, in my opinion, in getting metaverse deployed in a way that people could embrace the technology, understand how they can use it, get familiar with it, start to embrace it, and ultimately allow it to become a much more critical way of people interacting with the technology.”

Each day, the Seoul pavilion will hold forums where it will invite experts to share their insights in the field. Experts who will deliver keynote speeches during forums through three days include, Hewlett Packard Enterprise‘s chief technologist Armstrong-Barnes, Barcelona City Council CIO Michael Donaldson and Tel Aviv Foundation CEO Hila Oren.

On the sidelines of the congress, the Seoul city government will also hold a signing event on Tuesday with the Catapult Network, a UK-based non-profit organization, which brings together nine leading technology and innovation centers spanning over 40 locations across the UK. The city government will sign a memorandum of understanding with the UK organization to increase its cooperation for next year’s Consumer Electronics Show.

Meetings with government officials from Spain and Canada have been scheduled on Tuesday. The following day, a meeting between representatives from six local startup companies and those from Belgium has been fixed as well.

Along for the event are 10 students from Kyung Hee University who have volunteered to help with the city government‘s three-day operation of the pavilion, providing translation support and welcoming guests.