Summer Capital Baguio Eyed for Minerva Project, Aimed at Creating a Smart City Model

The Asian Institute of Management has chosen Baguio City for its goal of creating a smart city model under its Minerva Project. According to Minerva project leader Christopher Monterola, Baguio will be the first adopter of the technology they will develop. The project was dubbed “Minerva” as a shorter term for monitoring of indicators for efficient redevelopment and value assessment.

Monterola explains that the “unintended consequence of increasing and fluctuating population is the pressure and the strain on the environment that can lead to urban decay. We chose to partner with the city of Baguio because they acknowledge that these are important concerns and proactively, they would like to innovate by harnessing the power of data science.”

With Baguio, Monterola plans to aim his attention on the areas of air pollution, water supply and quality, urban mobility, and tourism. We want to harmonize this information and deploy complementary sensors. We want to put this into a data hub, create decision tools, and in the process, we want to produce… a decision support platform that allows… comparison of various city metrics.”

In collaboration with Project ROAM, a sensor network will be deployed to keep an eye on the trends and factors in air pollution in the summer capital. Project Minerva has also engaged with UP Baguio and Terra Dynamics Inc. for a sensor network that will predict the trend of Baguio’s water supply and quality.

Monterola adds that they will utilize the city’s existing smart city initiatives, such as its CCTV network and GPS location sensor, to keep track of urban mobility. Alongside this, his team will also take into consideration the tourism data collected from Baguio’s tourism application Visita. “Our hope is that we can create an information system that will lead and help them in policymaking.”

“The idea is we want to develop AI models to predict tourism demands at a point of interest and, at the same time, we want to make sure that those who are visiting Baguio will maximize their experience,” affirmed Monterola.

Source: Manila Times