37 SMART CITIES
CREATING A HUMAN-CENTRIC SMART CITY KAUST’s unique physical environment makes it the ideal living laboratory to innovate for liveability, sustainability and community MICROSOFT “We are proud of our partnership with KAUST. When KAUST Smart was first launched to push the boundaries of ideation and experimentation, we saw that the project aligned with our approach to innovation. Together with KAUST, we can make it possible to turn ideas into real solutions.” Turki Badhris, Vice President for the Public Sector in Saudi Arabia at Microsoft
Momentum is gathering at KAUST Smart, a program to turn the university campus into a smart city as well as a living laboratory. KAUST has provided its researchers with the tools they need to innovate digital and inclusive solutions to the modern-day problems associated with urban environments, using crowdsourcing and other cutting-edge tools to meet the needs of the university’s diverse and growing community. Formally known as Digital Experience and Innovation at KAUST, this team of futurists is colloquially known as KAUST Smart and is led by Jason Roos, the university’s chief information officer, and Mohamed Abdel-Aal, director of Digital Experience and Innovation. The university proved to be a particularly good fit for a project such as KAUST Smart because the campus features a small population of around 7,000, and is a community in which all the goods and services needed in an urban environment are readily available. The university also features research centers that are managed by Fortune 500 companies, including Dow Chemical Company, Aramco and SABIC. Moreover, the university is a self-contained environment overseen by KAUST itself, which makes it unique when compared to typical cities where multiple institutions act as stakeholders and do not always work together or have
