A harbor for smart ideas

For Northern Ireland's Economy Minister Conor Murphy, his country's technological success is based on three pillars - business, politics and universities - and on their cooperation. The capital Belfast is a kind of test laboratory for companies developing smart city innovations, for example in the areas of vibrant city centers, healthy and liveable districts and sustainable mobility, said Murphy in the keynote speech “Northern Ireland - Pioneering smart cities technology for a sustainable future” at the Smart Country Convention. There will also be a center for artificial intelligence and the city is a 5G project region. The “G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance” has therefore selected Belfast as a pioneer in smart technologies.

Steve Harper, Executive Director of International & Skills Group at Invest NI, the regional economic development agency, points to Belfast's port and the adjacent Innovation District, which is popular with tourists, as a center for ideas and smart city solutions. The Harlander project, for example, is deploying a fully automated self-driving shuttle service there. In the port, drones monitor the safe loading and unloading of ships. The “Innovation City Belfast” project aims to turn this part of the city into a center for modern financial, health and sustainability technologies with corresponding funding.

According to Harper, one of the innovative local companies is see.sense. The company has developed bicycle lights that not only become brighter when the bike approaches a traffic light to make it more visible. The AI-based sensor technology contained in the lights records real-time information about the condition of the road and reports potholes, for example. With the LoweConex software platform, Internet of Things systems for supermarkets can be used, for example, to find the optimum temperature setting for refrigeration systems in terms of energy consumption.