‘Smart cities’ infrastructures have won fans among many officials, city planners, and infrastructure manufacturers. A collection of hardware devices such as cameras, sensors, and controllers linked to software-driven intelligence—often with an Internet, grid or network element and deployed at scale—these systems promise cities, regions and even nations better services, improved management capabilities and sometimes lower costs. Increasingly, the voluminous and diverse data they produce will be analyzed by AI or machine-learning routines, raising questions regarding how those machine-based procedures operate and the ethical systems undergirding their analyses.

As more of such city-based infrastructures move toward automated and algorithmically-optimized capabilities, the human and broader machine and platform environments present legal, ethical and accountability issues. These affect the strata of planners and managers in cities, the technologists producing (and selling) the software and hardware systems and companies, as well as citizens living and working with these systems. Our project will seek to build technical, legal and social approaches to maximize the trusted use of public camera-generated video data.