About SOUNDSCALE
SOUNDSCALE aims at revolutionising urban planning for smart cities through an interdisciplinary, citizen-centric, and bottom-up approach for the development of AI-assisted distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) technologies. We will integrate a spectrum of research methodologies, ensuring each discipline informs the others at every stage. This includes unlocking the physical sensing capabilities of legacy optical fibre cables in a UKRI facility; measuring social, spatial, and health inequalities in cities through extensive data linkage; conducting arts-based research to explore citizen’s lived experiences; and studying AI ethics, policy, and environmental implications.
Simultaneously, we will incorporate citizen participation, deliberation, and narratives throughout, fostering a co-creation process, underpinned by a humanistic perspective on the complex intersection of culture, media, society, technology, and critical infrastructures. Our project not only offers a new paradigm for regulating emergent technologies with citizens at the forefront but also commits to mitigating risks, addressing ethical concerns, and ensuring ground-breaking technologies are sustainable, privacy-compliant, and inclusive. In our project, multiple disciplines, from physical, social and environmental sciences to humanities, will interlace in a cohesive project, informing each other at every stage and providing reciprocal benefits.
Cities of the future are deemed to be smart, and in an era of rapid technological advancements, citizens are often left feeling overwhelmed and disconnected from the development of life-changing emerging technologies. Recent breakthroughs in generative AI technologies have taught us to avoid moral panics and anticipate social, policy and regulatory challenges, abiding by responsible research and innovation principles that UKRI is set to lead on.
DAS can exploit legacy optical fibre cables to detect ambient vibrations (e.g., pressure, sounds) with exceptional spatio-temporo-spectral insights. Its use in cities, coupled with AI, has been suggested as potential solution to urban challenges such as traffic monitoring, environmental issues (sound/air pollution), and infrastructure monitoring (railways, buildings). However, at this speculative stage, implementing this in urban contexts needs to address important challenges of data privacy, AI ethics, equitable tech access, sustainability and climate impact, and the need for citizen participation in decision-making processes.
We will harness the National Dark Fibre Facility (NDFF), an EPSRC National Research Facility that connects through optical fibre cables the cities of London and Southampton, among others. We’ll focus in these two cities which share complex urban issues, from transportation and housing to cultural and social diversity, but also have unique challenges.
Southampton has features of a coastal city which will enable us to explore the intersection of coastal resilience, social inequalities, and urban planning. London, on the other hand, represents a bustling metropolis with complex issues like an extensive transportation network and a higher population density. With our multidisciplinary methodology, we’ll obtain a multi-faceted, nuanced understanding of the social, environmental, and policy challenges that arise from the implementation of novel technologies in urban landscapes.
Now is the right time for the UK to lead sovereign public decisions and citizen-informed design-thinking on how this emergent technology is developed and not later when path dependencies have arisen.
