In the resort town of Shirama in western Japan, Japanese technology company NEC Corporation is said to be developing a smart city project set to be unveiled in December 2018.
Among the features to be piloted in the high-tech resort town include a smart check-in for hotel guests and smart shopping software that uses facial authentication, riding on the back of NEC’s technology on facial recognition.
The company said the technologies to be unveiled in this smart city undertaking are up for further expansion into a wide range of new areas.
This early, Shin Okada, President and CEO, NankiShirahama Airport Inc., is looking forward to collaborating with NEC “to help create new business for the Shirama area. In a media statement, he said the aim is to “revitalize the regional economy leveraging IoT technologies.”
But what is a smart city without a highly secure architecture?
On October 17, 2018, NEC announced a strategic partnership with Arm to develop security solutions as well for the Internet of Things (IoT), specifically made for smart cities.
Security for IoT
Under the agreement, NEC said it will adopt Arm’s Platform Security Architecture (PSA), an industry standard framework for securing connected devices. This framework includes threat modeling, security analyses, hardware specifications, and architectural guidelines meant to reduce cost, complexity, and risk associated with IoT security.
"The pace of deployment of IoT devices is growing rapidly, and smart cities will be an important use case for AI-enabled IoT," said Chet Babla, vice president solutions, IoT Device IP, Arm.
At Arm’s annual developer conference — Arm Techcon 2018 — held last week in San Jose California, the British semiconductor and software design company unveiled new APIs and API test kits to speed up PSA development.
A blog posted on the Arm website by Paul Williamson, vice president and general manager, IoT device IP Line of Business, Arm, said a year after it was launched, PSA has grown and gathered more industry support.
The new APIs and test kits support three key areas of design, according to Williamson. These include developer APIs for RTOS vendors and software developers, a firmware framework APIs for security experts and the Trusted Base System Architecture (TBSA-M) Architecture Test Kit for chip vendors.
Real-time facial recognition
NEC, whose face recognition technology has been tested by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, said it is currently developing a "box-type accelerator” device which uses real-time facial recognition that will be securely provisioned by Arm.
This accelerator will be equipped with an Arm processor and enable faster analytics. Commercial sales are expected to launch in the first half of 2019.
"We expect the new accelerator to promote further adoption of face recognition throughout many areas, including the public safety, entertainment, and transportation fields, as it contributes to the security and convenience of consumers worldwide," said Naoki Hashitani, SVP, NEC Corporation.
