Enabling Next-Level Intelligence for the Cities of Tomorrow
By Dr. Jeff Esposito, Enterprise Architect
Lenovo SSG ISG International Services
As urban centers evolve, cities worldwide are turning to AI-driven tools to transform how they operate and serve their communities. Barcelona—a renowned leader in smart city innovation—is at the heart of this technological revolution, hosting landmark projects that use advanced AI, edge computing, and data management to streamline municipal operations. Using NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, Lenovo’s newest patent-pending innovations — visual insights network for AI (Lenovo VINA) and edge guarding — will set a new standard for smart city applications. These innovations are part of the Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage with NVIDIA framework, offering transformative tools tailored to the needs of high-demand urban environments.
Both Lenovo edge guarding and Lenovo VINA leverage NVIDIA Metropolis and NVIDIA AI Blueprints as reference workflows for generative AI use cases. Announced today ahead of the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona, NVIDIA AI Blueprint for video search and summarization enables the deployment of AI agents trained to analyze visual data, summarize massive data repositories, and produce answers to user prompts. These visual agents can understand large repositories of live or archived video to perceive and reason against action occurring across any space with sensor infrastructure and accelerate incident search. Suited for industries including manufacturing, retail, and healthcare, there is an immediate applicability in smart city applications for traffic management, parking and curbside management, and public safety.
Below, we’ll explore how these innovations address the complex requirements of urban settings and why Lenovo’s approach exemplifies the promise of hybrid AI in modern cities.
Lenovo VINA: The Future of Visual Data Management
Visual data, such as video from street cameras and real-time feeds from public spaces, plays a crucial role in smart cities, supporting a range of applications from traffic monitoring to emergency response. Lenovo’s VINA is designed to help cities manage this vast influx of visual information. Using the NVIDIA AI Blueprint for video search and summarization, the visual language model (VLM) technology alongside VINA can analyze large volumes of visual data and prioritize high-value information for quick retrieval, reducing storage needs and operational costs.
Imagine a tourist area that has heavy foot traffic, bicycles, and vehicles. With traditional systems, city operations managers would historically need to monitor their video streams manually and search hours of visual information to investigate events of interest. VINA’s predictive caching algorithms solve this problem by “learning” which pieces of data would be most critical to alert, effectively prioritizing high-traffic video feeds and improving efficiency of real-time response. For city managers, this means less bandwidth consumption and faster data retrieval, allowing immediate insights into public spaces without delays or interruptions. This rapid access to crucial data can help cities react swiftly, improving response times and enhancing public safety.
Lenovo Edge Guarding: Intelligent, Autonomous Network Security
Data security and service continuity are paramount for any city, particularly when managing essential services like traffic lights, security cameras, and emergency systems. Lenovo’s edge guarding (patent-pending) will enable an autonomous, resilient local network among edge devices found across city infrastructure, including traffic monitors, sensors, and city-wide cameras that can operate independently of cloud connections during disruptions. Edge guarding’s unique GPU allocation model prioritizes tasks according to urgency, allowing high-stakes operations to continue without interruptions.
Lenovo’s edge guarding predictive security model, powered by NVIDIA’s machine learning capabilities from NVIDIA AI Blueprints, is designed to strengthen the city’s defenses against cyber threats by dynamically adjusting task priorities based on potential vulnerabilities. For instance, if a network outage occurs, edge guarding will seamlessly establish a local network, keeping critical infrastructure, such as public safety systems, operational. By leveraging Lenovo’s longstanding expertise in edge computing for city environments, edge guarding will provide Barcelona and other cities with a resilient, more reliable network that helps ensure safety and continuity.
The Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage with NVIDIA: A Partnership Built for Urban Impact
Lenovo and NVIDIA’s collaboration is not just about integrating powerful AI tools—it’s about rethinking how these tools can be used in demanding urban environments. The Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage framework, which combines Lenovo’s comprehensive AI infrastructure and NVIDIA’s AI Blueprints, offers city-wide solutions that go beyond simple automation, enabling intelligent, adaptive, and cost-effective city management.
Power and Flexibility in the Hands of Urban Planners
Traditional smart city solutions often rely on cloud-based architectures that can lead to delays and connectivity issues. The full-stack Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage enables data processing at the edge — closer to the source – rather than relying on distant cloud centers. This approach, demonstrated through edge guarding and VINA, reduces latency and ensures that cities have uninterrupted access to critical data. This model also helps minimize costs, as less data routes through expensive cloud systems, and more is processed locally through high-performance NVIDIA GPUs.
The framework enables governments and enterprises to deploy AI solutions across a range of city operations quickly. Lenovo ThinkEdge devices, purpose-built for edge computing, offer advanced compute, storage, and scalability to offer an NVIDIA GPU-accelerated platform that’s purpose-built for sophisticated edge deployments requiring accelerated compute.
With solutions designed for diverse weather conditions and variable network loads, Lenovo has a unique advantage helping enterprises and governments deploy smart city applications, demonstrating the adaptability and reliability of their infrastructure.
Lenovo’s Proven Record in Barcelona: A Model for Global Smart Cities
For years, Lenovo has been a trusted partner with the city of Barcelona to journey toward becoming a global smart city leader. Lenovo’s contributions have included edge computing systems that withstand Barcelona’s climate, providing local government with consistent access to high-performance data processing capabilities. Through these initiatives, Lenovo has gained valuable insights into the demands of urban management, making it the ideal partner for implementing NVIDIA’s AI-driven technologies.
Barcelona, as a testbed for Lenovo’s innovations, has benefited from improved data processing, faster response times, and more reliable public services. By embedding Lenovo ThinkEdge technology within the city’s infrastructure, Barcelona now serves as a model for how smart city solutions can seamlessly integrate. This success story highlights why Lenovo’s expertise, combined with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform, delivers unmatched results for cities with complex operational needs.
Practical Benefits: How Lenovo VINA and Lenovo Edge Guarding Improve City Operations
Lenovo’s AI-powered tools are more than technical advancements; they’re practical solutions for urban challenges that enhance quality of life for residents. Below are some ways VINA and edge guarding will transform municipal operations in evolving cities::
- Rapid Access to Critical Data: VINA’s predictive caching system prioritizes and stores the most relevant visual data, allowing city officials to make quick, data-driven decisions without waiting for cloud retrieval.
- Enhanced Public Safety: Edge guarding’s autonomous networking capabilities help ensure that critical safety infrastructure remains online and operational, even if cloud connectivity is lost. This resilience is vital for high-demand public services like traffic management and emergency response.
- Cost Savings Through Efficiency: By reducing reliance on costly cloud storage, VINA minimizes bandwidth requirements and operational expenses. Edge guarding’s dynamic GPU allocation further ensures resources are used efficiently, helping cities manage budget constraints while maximizing functionality.
- Proactive Security Measures: Edge guarding’s predictive security model, powered by NVIDIA AI Blueprint for video search and summarization, anticipates potential security anomalies and adjusts resources dynamically, supporting a safer, secure enhanced urban environment.
Better Together with Lenovo and NVIDIA
The collaboration between Lenovo and NVIDIA is a benchmark for AI-driven smart city solutions. Here’s why it surpasses traditional offerings:
- Comprehensive Edge-to-Cloud Integration: Lenovo’s edge computing devices, optimized for NVIDIA GPUs, provides scalable, flexible AI platforms that can sustain performance for complex, compute-intensive vision AI workloads. This edge-to-cloud strategy ensures faster, more reliable access to data when and where it’s needed most.
- Enhanced Customization with NVIDIA AI Blueprints: The NVIDIA AI Blueprint provides the flexibility to tailor Lenovo’s AI solutions to specific city needs, whether that’s streamlining visual data processing or understanding, with great detail, the ongoing conditions of city roadways. This customization capability ensures that Lenovo’s solutions adapt to the unique challenges of any urban environment.
- Unmatched Experience in Smart Cities: Lenovo’s extensive work with cities, including Barcelona, gives Lenovo a unique understanding of deploying with city infrastructure and the experience to deliver solutions that work seamlessly within complex systems. Lenovo’s solutions are built to handle both the operational and environmental challenges of cities, making it a proven, reliable provider in the global smart city market.
See Lenovo + NVIDIA’s Smart City Solutions at Work with AMSYS
As smart cities become the standard, Lenovo’s expertise and NVIDIA’s groundbreaking AI innovations set the pace for a more efficient, protected, and resilient urban future.
For the first time, witness NVIDIA AI Blueprints in action at Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona, November 5-7. Lenovo will be exhibiting alongside AMSYS Innovative Solutions at Gran Via, Hall 3, Level 0, Street C, Stand 41.
The Lenovo, NIVIDIA, AMSYS co-exhibition demonstrates the powerful impact industry collaborations have in enhancing and reshaping our cities through AI-driven innovations. A Lenovo Gold 360 partner, AMSYS is a global technology integrator representing the ecosystem of Lenovo solutions built on NVIDIA AI Blueprints and will help bring Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage deliverables to the market. Lenovo worked with AMSYS in 2022 to deliver a crowd intelligence AI Solution for international auto racing.
LENOVO and THINKEDGE are trademarks of Lenovo. NVIDIA is a trademark of NVIDIA Corporation, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. ©2024 Lenovo Group Limited.