The Sustainabilist | SMART CITIES
INTERVIEW
Adding Human Experience to Tech Cities Ali Rebaie, Data Anthropologist and President of Rebaie Analytics Group, discusses the ways in which anthropology will shape the cities of tomorrow
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hat made you go into the field of anthropology? I had no idea, when I was intrigued by pattern recognition games when I was a kid, that data would become my bread and butter. It wasn’t until I visited Al Hambra castle during 2011 in Granada, Spain that I became fascinated by patterns, mathematics, visual arts, and social sciences manifested in the architecture there. At that time, I used to build data warehouses and I predicted the rise of AI and its innovative applications. It was eyeopening to me, I noticed that what is really needed in this decade for AI to achieve its promise, is arts and social sciences, like anthropology. As AI continues to develop, the only way to make it human-centric is to extend and understand our ancestor’s cognitive evolution and the experiences we aim to achieve. That’s one of the roles of the data anthropologist who constructs and understands the consequences of AI on society along with other influences like privacy and ethics. 48
As the global cities begin their transition into smart cities, how can an anthropology perspective aid in this transition? As cities worldwide aim to become smarter, their ultimate goal is to become percipient, astute, and quick. Anthropology is key in this as it helps city stakeholders understand the historical timeline of a place, behaviours, needs, and feelings of people living there, improve an urban space by observing behaviour, map their emotional experience of a place, and predict how a new construction would affect their current state. AI combined with urban anthropology, or what we coined at Rebaie Analytics Group, urban data anthropology, helps in mapping the emotional experience of a place by collecting physiological measurements. Anthropology excels at understanding the “why” of human behaviour. Some of the tools used in urban data anthropology to assess urban forms in a city are visual arts, anthropological methods like direct observation, ethnographic methods, machine intelligence, and AI algorithms.
Only with Urban Data Anthropology can we pave the way for an augmented smart city. This transition will enable what I call a “kin-directed city”. Kin selection comes from biology and anthropology, and refers to preferences for kin, and the benefits of mutualism and reciprocity among kin. Humans and machines carry on a cooperative behaviour and inhibit dispersal of resources in an Internet of Things environment. The idea is to have generated data shared with among devices.
