Our work on Smart Cities has historically centred on the MK:Smart project, a flagship £17.2M UK initiative, which focused on progressing the smart city agenda in Milton Keynes. MK:Smart is widely regarded as one of the leading international smart city initiatives and comprised a consortium of 21 partners, which included MK City Council, major technology companies (e.g., BT, Samsung, Huawei), three Catapult centres, water and energy providers, and a number of other organisations.  A key outcome of MK:Smart was the MK Data Hub, an award-winning data infrastructure that supports the acquisition and management of both static and dynamic data from a variety of sources.

Building on the work carried out in MK:Smart, we have further progressed the smart city agenda, developing new solutions for the MK Data Hub, as well as carrying out fundamental research on the wider socio-technological issues associated with the deployment of technologies in urban contexts.  In particular we have worked closely with MK City Council in the MK:5G project, which has deployed a state-of-the-art 5G infrastructure in the city.

An important spin-off of MK:Smart was CityLabs, a programme funded by the European Regional Development Fund, which enabled SMEs in our region to take advantage of our expertise in Intelligent Systems and Data Science to develop innovative products and services for the digital economy.

More recently we have also started a new line of research in Robotics, focusing in particular on the challenges associated with the integration of robots in a smart city infrastructure. In this context, we are working on augmenting Machine Learning approaches with Knowledge Technologies, to design autonomous agents that can assist humans on a number of tasks, such as in the case of HanS, the Health & Safety robot inspector being developed in our Lab.

This line of work in Robotics is also being progressed in the Gatekeeper project, where we are collaborating with the NHS and local community groups to develop novel interventions for community-based care, including robotic assistance in the home and management systems for community volunteering activities.

We have also organised the 1st Smart Cities Robotics Challenge, which was held in Milton Keynes in September 2019, under the umbrella of the European Robotics League. This was the first competition of its kind anywhere in the world and required robots to leverage the smart city infrastructure and interact with ordinary citizens, assisting them in shopping scenarios, dealing with emergency situations, and providing a variety of other services.