Welcome to the AI for Good Global Summit 2018. I'm delighted to be joined by Francesca Bria, who is the City I.O. at Barcelona City Council. Thank you very much for joining us. It's pleasure. Francesca, can you tell us about your work with the Barcelona City Council? For me, cities have a really strong role in democratizing artificial intelligence and data. First of all, cities are very close to citizens and we always say we should not start from technology. We shouldn't start from the technological challenges. We shouldn't start from sensors, AI, big data, connectivity. We shouldn't start from real citizen needs. We can take on a more participatory approach, a more democratic approach and work from citizen needs into the technological solution. So that if you look at all the challenges that artificial intelligence bring us, but also the more disruptive application that we see from automating industry and manufacturing, the practical cars, the use of artificial intelligence for cybersecurity, the use of AI or deep learning, machine learning in healthcare or even precision agriculture. These are all disruptive applications that present a lot of challenges from a social, economic, legal standpoint and really challenging our institutions and our governments the way we do things with citizens. And so in order to make sure that artificial intelligence will be picked up and diffused throughout society and throughout the economy, we need to start from trust. And we need to regain the trust of citizens and do it together with citizens. Start from citizen needs and then together with citizens we can find out the best way to apply this kind of technology in particular in cities. Trust is a very important aspect of your job. I haven't mentioned the fact that you are also the leader of the decode project in Europe. What is it all about? So the decode project is a big project funded by the European Commission, is 5 million euros investment and 14 partners. There are two city collaborating Barcelona and Amsterdam and we have technology expert more on the privacy and security side, but also sociologists, economists and people that do work with citizens group. And what we are doing is we are creating a privacy and uncing rights preserving decentralized data infrastructure to give back control of data to citizens. So we want to democratize data and get the citizens to be the one to decide what kind of data I want to keep private. What kind of data I want to share when, with whom and on what rules? So we are using the distributed ledger technologies or so-called blockchain with the layer of attributes based cryptography. This means encryption. This means that data can be anonymous, that it's not linked to your identity. And the citizens are the one that can set the degree of anonymity of the data. And when citizens can share data with ethical standards and privacy and security by design, then our ambition is to create data commons. What data commons are are shared resources on top of which we can really build together the application for future services in healthcare, mobility, transportation, education. And then you know really solve the big challenges. But we want to create a democratic way to control data, giving the power back to the citizens. And this is very important because at the end the data is about communities understanding what they can meaningfully do to have a better life. For instance, I have some stories to tell you about how we are applying the decode project in Barcelona. One case is on democratic participation. So we have a platform is called Decidim Barcelona. Over 40,000 citizens used it to propose ideas to government, to be implemented in our government agenda. 72% of the proposals that today are our government plan came from citizens. And now the Decidim Barcelona platform through the Decode project is privacy announcing. So people can sign petitions that can use it for participatory budgeting. But they are secure that their data is kept in, they have the ownership of the data and the data is secure. So they are the one that can decide what data they want to share with home. So we can basically avoid data manipulation for elections or political use that we saw very much present in the Cambridge Analytical scandal. Another very good use of this decode project is on a pilot round IOT citizen sensing. So we are collaborating with a project called Smart Citizen and this group of citizens that are putting open hardware in their home to measure noise pollution and air quality. Because they want to improve the air quality in the neighborhood and also they want to have less pollution, noise pollution. And so we are they're using the Decode project in order to have some data that they can share but also making sure that they're not sharing all the data in their homes for instance. Because they don't want that some of the data gets to an insurance company for instance without their consent, without their awareness. So basically you can trust the way you share the data. You can have this data that is used to target some meaningful urban problems and then create collective action-specific citizens. But also you are avoiding the accumulation of power in the hands of few players. Which is something that worries us as policymakers that today only few players, only few big companies have all the power to aggregate and extract data. And then to do machine learning and deep learning and artificial intelligence on that data. And so the problem is disparity is polarization. So we want to have some competition there. We want to make sure that the data is ethically controlled but also that more players, more companies, social entrepreneurs, citizens themselves can access that data on third terms and then build the kind of applications that they need to solve their own problems. It's very interesting to hear you describe your work with all the stakeholders of the Smart Cities movement. Because that's everyone isn't it government, citizens obviously you mentioned that they are at the core of the proposition of what you're doing really. Academia, technology companies as well, the private sector. And I suppose that I will summit that's taking place currently in Geneva's, the ideal platform to meet all these stakeholders and to discuss solutions with them isn't it. Absolutely, I think that partnership and working in an ecosystem with the right stakeholders, public administration that work together, cities that work together but also with national governments, with global governments, working with companies, small companies but also the big companies. And then academics, experts and citizens at large is really important to achieve a human-centric vision for artificial intelligence. And I'm sure that really AI and data will be serving the public good, will be serving the people which is the objective that we all have. For instance, in Barcelona we are collaborating with the Barcelona Super Computing Center. They have really high computation capacity, data scientists, lots of talent. They also work with startups that have the talent to come up with the new ideas, the new application. And then through the city we can make sure that the challenges that we pose are the ones that interest citizens. We have mission-oriented vision, but then work with all these stakeholders to achieve this goal. And then of course we need multidisciplinary, I mean these are issues that cannot be dealt only to the technologies. Of course we need the expertise of the technologies, the scientists, but we also need the ethical expertise, the economics, the policy makers. So we need multidisciplinary, and then we need an alliance. Because I think we have this vision of technologies serving the public good, but of course we need the right regulation, we need to have the right enabling rights preserving infrastructure, we need the funding to do that, and we need to bet on artificial intelligence as critical industry of the future. This requires a lot of investment and also a lot of talent to understand how we can all together solve these challenges and then really use the technological capacity to build a better future. Francesca Brillo, thank you very much.