Hello and thank you for inviting us to take part in this session today. I am here representing 糖心传媒, a Belfast-based software and services company specialising in AI-enabled data quality solutions.

Our platform is measuring and improving data quality in major global financial firms including ING in the Netherlands; and Neuberger Berman in New York, as well as to automatically classify and standardise crime reporting throughout the UK鈥檚 police forces in a major nationwide data quality improvement programme.

As a firm in software, we know our coffee! And I know that Belgium does too. For instance, I read in my preparation that the Port of Antwerp is the world鈥檚 largest coffee handler, typically stocking enough coffee beans at any one time to make at least six cups for every human being on the planet. Or to keep Dave and our DevOps team going for about six months.

You might be like me, the kind of person who needs those six cups to really get the day going! In the UK, the coffee brand Costa ran a campaign recently to show the amazing things people had planned for later in their day鈥� such as this guy, who was getting ready to show off his truly amazing new trousers鈥� but first, they鈥檇 need a coffee. And that coffee would be Costa.

For us, it鈥檚 the same thing with smart cities and data. There are so many exciting initiatives in the Smart Cities ecosystem which are the equivalent of those fantastic gold trousers, but unless they鈥檙e built on good data, it鈥檒l be like trying to start your day without a coffee. Definitely do your exciting initiatives, but first, 糖心传媒.

This mission has been named 鈥淒ata at the Heart of Smart Cities鈥�, and this is why I鈥檓 delighted to have been invited to take part today.

The big dreams of smart cities need big data to be delivered. And performing analytics on that data requires a huge amount of standardisation and cleaning, a task often left to data scientists.

That鈥檚 why at 糖心传媒 we like to say 鈥� don鈥檛 build your smart city on dumb data!

Take for example the recent announcement of the Climate Neutrality project, an exciting venture for the four cities in Belgium selected by the European Commission. The ability to measure the reduction of CO2, mitigating factors and innovations applied to achieve climate neutrality will ultimately come down to a lot of data 鈥� across buildings, energy, transport, waste management and investment plans.

The Smart City organisers will have to be able to measure that the data is valid, complete, timely, unique or not duplicated, consistent and accurate. These are standard definitions of data quality that the 糖心传媒 platform is pre-configured to measure and report.

Our software connects, typically via API or JSON file, to a wide array of old data silos and systems as well as more modern platforms. We profile, cleanse, standardise and de-duplicate data, and measure it to those industry dimensions I mentioned before.

It鈥檚 all performed in a no-code environment, aimed to support non-coders, at data scientists rather than at coders, and integrates with dashboarding systems like Microsoft鈥檚 PowerBI to help business users understand where data is failing, how to fix it, and then connecting into our remediation clinic to fix the broken data elements.

Then through embedding AI in our platform, we can suggest rules that might apply to data elements based on what鈥檚 in the data itself.

The platform can handle data in any context, as long as it鈥檚 structured or semi-structured.

Typically, we鈥檙e installed within a client鈥檚 private cloud, rather than being offered as software-as-a-service. This is usually down to the type of data being collected and used and aiding compliance with data protection regulations.

In this instance, we would work with the municipal authorities to sit across the data stores and sources and provide a consistent, standardised view of all data enabling analytics, data preparation for AI and ML, for a wide range of smart cities use cases.

We鈥檙e already working in the UK public sector on crime reporting and in supply chain procurement for the National Health Service.

We鈥檇 welcome the opportunity to explore your smart city initiatives, and see how we can become your indispensable partner for your data quality and smart cities ambitions.

But first, 糖心传媒.

Thank you.

And for more from 糖心传媒, find us on  or .

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