Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Tamlyn Shimizu: Welcome to Smart in the city, the BABLE podcast, where we bring together top actors in the Smart City arena, sparking dialogues and interactions around the stakeholders and themes most prevalent for today's citizens and tomorrow's generations.
I am your host, Tamlyn Shimizu, and I hope you will enjoy this episode and gain knowledge and connections to accelerate the change for a better urban life.
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So today we're headed back up north and we're talking all about Smart City IoT. And for the first time, I'm very excited to talk about the metaverse on the podcast, so I hope you're excited as well. I just want to get into it already and introduce you to the guest. His name is Teppo Rantanen. He's the executive director at the City of Tampere in Finland. Welcome, Teppo.
[00:01:39] Teppo Rantanen: Thank you so much.
[00:01:41] Tamlyn Shimizu: I'm excited to really get into all of these conversations. As I mentioned, it's kind of our first time we're going to talk about metaverse on the podcast, so I'm really excited to get all of your knowledge on the topic.
I always start off with a little bit of a teaser question to get us warmed up before we dig in more.
So I have a question for you. Outside of its practical implementations, what's the most fun or whimsical use of technology you've seen in Tampere's Smart City projects, or in general?
[00:02:19] Teppo Rantanen: Well, I think one of the fun thing was a few years back, we already launched robots with our school kids who taught them both English and math, and they were just so excited about doing that, and the feedback was just fantastic and they were showcased in many of the exhibitions afterwards as well, and everybody's always kind of eager to see them and laugh at them.
[00:02:43] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah. So did you find it built motivation as well?
[00:02:47] Teppo Rantanen: It built. The fun thing was that they told the teachers told us that when the kids can be at least thin, a bit shy when they make mistakes, so they don't dare to make mistakes. But with the robot, they were not at all shy and they didn't care at all. They made all the mistakes they could and should. So it was really opening up. Also the kids.
[00:03:06] Tamlyn Shimizu: Very fun.
I actually haven't done too much with robots, so I'm still waiting to have my meal served by robots or something like that soon.
So I know you've been around the block a bit. I'd love to learn more about who you are, what led you to where you are today. Please tell us a little bit about your background.
[00:03:29] Teppo Rantanen: Sure. I've been now with the city of Tampere for eight years, doing all sort of stuff around technology, Smart Cities and other things as well. Before that, I was a consultant for more than 25 years, first with Anderson and then with Deloitte. And at Deloitte I was actually specializing in the last years in technology, media and telecom, so led nicely into this space. And my last post was in London for two years.
[00:03:58] Tamlyn Shimizu: Very interesting. How is this transition between kind of private sector consultancy into public sector?
[00:04:05] Teppo Rantanen: It's been fun. First of all, you have to understand that you don't earn that much money that you do when you do consultant. But other than that, I was totally surprised by the quality of people that we have working for the public sector, even though not so much earnings, the motivation they have to do things, and sort of the whole readiness of a public organization to take new ideas, which I said I will bring with me, and a lot of change which has happened. And that's been fun.
[00:04:39] Tamlyn Shimizu: Good to hear.
I now want to give the listeners a little bit of overview into all of this work that has been done and you're doing in Tampere. Can you give us a bit of an overview of the Smart City focused work there?
[00:04:53] Teppo Rantanen: So when we started eight years back, we started with a program called Smart Tampere, which is our Smart City program for five years, which was a full fledged ecosystem program. We had more than 450 companies working with us, all the main universities, research institutions, plus the citizens as well, and the sort of civic organizations. So really got a lot already working for the first five years. Then we switched to something which we called a data driven city for citizens, where we focused more, even more on the data that we've been gathering and are gathering from all the devices and how to use that for the good for our people. And then last year, we figured out, now it's time to jump into metaverse. So we put our metaverse Vision 2040 in place and started to fulfill that at the same time as we do our data driven city program. So a lot of things happening, which again, is really exciting and really fun.
[00:05:54] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, and you've already given a few good examples within that, but I would love to. Also, do you have some more details about any of those projects within that overview that you want to mention?
[00:06:07] Teppo Rantanen: So if you look at the first part, we had five specific areas we worked on, which was around health care, mobility, education, the hard infrastructure, but also we were looking at how to sort of improve the governance of the city. And then we use the technologies to understand better the technologies. We started with connectivity, then we looked at the data and analytics part of it, and of course, all the times it's also security and safety elements of that. Then moving on to the next phase, we are now currently working on five flagship programs, as we call them, because we want to bring this to life all the time. We want to bring this so close to people that they actually see things happening. So our five flagship programs go from using the knowledge for enterprises where we have put out last year, and we showcased in Barcelona our really interesting tampere pulse, which is analyzing the data we have on people movement in the center of the city, but not only analyzing as it is today, but also forecasting the next 30 days, which will give the information for our companies, so small business owners, restaurants, that they know what to expect. And we use data from different sources, from the historical analyze, but also from the future events happening in the neighborhood and the weather data, and then combine all that into the movement data. And that has been really fun example of that. First flagship program.
The second program is around the immigration. So we want to help immigrants coming to the city with analyzed data to really bring them the services, bring them the different elements of how to feel welcomed in the city and stay in the city.
Third is around kids, especially the youth who have difficulties. So we want to help them to better understand their possibilities in life, to avoid them being segregated and left out from the rest of the group, again, using data and AI to do that, and robots, and robots as well. The fourth one is around the city, sort of walking city safety as it started out with, because we had a big program with EU around the safety and security of big events, which is called shore. And the shore resulted in such a good experience that we continued that. But now we bring more of the XR, sort of AR reality type of things into the equation as well. And then we have fifth program which is around building the whole digital twin of the city and using that digital twin of the city to do the digital planning, from the city planning to building construction, and also looking at elements like having a lot of data around built environment and non built environment. Could we do better when we are, for example, doing new areas of the city, which typically now what you do is you cut down all the trees when you go to the new area. Now, with this, potentially, we could then start planning so that we know exactly where the buildings are coming. We know exactly how we can save the nature. And since one of our key principles is to look for biodiversity, and that could help that goal to be alive if we are fully successful with the digital twin of the city. Also, we have things like drone corridors that we are planning with the digital twins and a lot of sort of other things that's happening there. So five flagship programs, which all have sort of concrete elements and steps moving forward towards the big vision that we.
[00:10:03] Tamlyn Shimizu: Have at the end of the really, really interesting. You mentioned in the first one about the project that you showcased in Barcelona, was that the one that you won the award for in enabling technologies?
[00:10:16] Teppo Rantanen: Actually, it was part of that, but it was more broader how we use the AI in the social context. So how we bring it to life for our people and make sure that they get the services and they get the information that they need for their everyday life, which has been our sort of guiding principle all the way along. And we believe that these sort of principles, which the pulse was a good example of something we bring to help everybody, was the sort of enabling technologies win reason for us.
[00:10:49] Tamlyn Shimizu: So how do you use AI in the social context?
[00:10:52] Teppo Rantanen: So we use AI to understand better the needs of the people. We use it in the context of unemployed. So with the unemployed people, we have sort of an AI model which separates the open jobs into elements of it. So what are the elements of the job? We also use the information from the people to break down what they actually can and match those elements together, which will then bring much closer the right kind of a job to right kind of a person. And that's something which we still have a little bit challenge with the GDPR, and how could we use the data, but we have tested and piloted it, and it was so good that our national government has now taken it into their program, so they are now working on it to make it national. And it's really interesting because right now, when we have, we have still unemployment, even though we have a big challenge to find people to work. And one of the reasons is that we don't find the match always to help the people to find the right kind of a job. So we hope that this will help also us in the shortage of workforce.
[00:12:05] Tamlyn Shimizu: That we have really interesting projects. Thanks so much for sharing those.
I want to talk about the metaverse now. I was excited you could tell at the beginning to talk about it. So first, for everybody who is like, okay, I know what metaverse is, but kind of explain to us, please, what is the metaverse and what are the possibilities there?
[00:12:28] Teppo Rantanen: Well, first of all, it's good to say that even I don't know what metaverse is. So I'm just trying to figure out, to me, it's something where we combine the sort of a real reality to the virtual reality in a way that actually they built upon each other. So a misconception of metaverse is that you work in a total virtual life with an avatar. That's not the case. We always need to find out how it works, how it helps the everyday life of our people to live their life better. And we try to do it by building a sort of a path going forward where we combine what we have in different elements of it. So digital twins, XR reality, connectivity, gen AI. So we believe that generative AI is one of those key elements that we need to make sure that this all works out. And in the background, we need to have very strong sort of frameworks how to work around it. We need to be thinking of the ethics of metaverse, how that works from our citizen perspective, but a lot of sort of exciting ideas. Technology is not there yet to sort of fulfill the metaverse as it is today. But it takes probably a few years. But we need to be prepared for that. So we need to prepare for the next few years when you have the kind of a six g connectivity and the glasses which look like your normal eyeglasses, which then work as the Apple Pro vision or something else, but they don't really are not that clumsy. I believe that we are not too far away from that reality. And when they come at a price point which is possible for everybody to get them, when eventually we will lose the kind of a phone as a device. The user interface will not be a phone anymore. It'll probably be something where we are using the glasses, voice, hand and eye movement, and that will be the way how we are using that. And it's not too far away.
I've always said it's 2029 is the year when we are getting this sort of a reality. And if we want to be there 2029. We need to prepare already, otherwise we'll be late.
[00:14:41] Tamlyn Shimizu: Absolutely. And so what are the biggest possibilities for cities? How can they use metaverse? Where do you see that going in the future?
[00:14:50] Teppo Rantanen: There are several elements of it. One, which is quite obvious, is of course the sort of a hard infrastructure cases where we can do better working with the city, infrastructure maintenance and planning and all the other issues there. But I also see a big, big potential with the services that we are bringing to our people. We are now having our new, or we had an old office building for the city services, which is now being renovated and combined with a new element of it. And when we open it up in 2026, we hope to have also a metaverse version of the sort of a city hall. So when the people come look for their services, they can either choose to come physically there, or they can do the same experience going at their own devices and enter exactly the lookalike of this building and lookalike of these services. So that's one of the cool things to have. We also believe that there's a lot of potential in the area of elderly care, which is the big, big challenge, because we just don't have the workforce and we just have the aging population. So we need to figure out how we can help them to get the services they need in a way that they could use. And then we can go back to the voice recognition and other type of techniques where they can get the help virtually in the cases that is possible.
One of the interesting things we have been working on quite a lot is actually also the area of entertainment and the whole experience industry. So broaden your horizon on the sort of experience industry, including the traditional entertainment, sports, esports type of things, the whole gaming industry, but also looking at how people are spending their free time and how they are using their going to know different type of XR reality events and happenings. So that is the area which I believe will be pretty soon there. I was also myself going to London to see the Abba voyage, just to understand how that works in that stadium. And we want to do something like that with our Nokia arena, which has a technical capability capacity, being the Nokia test case for all of these sort of things happening. So that's one of the new elements where there is right now. We have made a metaverse version with one of our museums. Tampere was the place for the fiercest fights in the civil war in Finland 110 years ago. So we believe that we can, and that's actually cool. I've seen versions of that, that we can demonstrate to people, actually how it is to be in the middle of those fights. And you can do it also in the middle of the central square where that happened. So these sort of things could be part of both educational and fun.
[00:17:49] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, absolutely. I see it as there's so many possibilities kind of also with AI and really finding the ones that are going to stick and going to have impact is a bit of the challenge. Right.
We have a lot of people listening that are working in cities, and so that's usually who I speak to. What pieces of advice would you give to people working in cities who are kind of dabbling in the metaverse topic, but not sure if they want to dive in yet?
[00:18:22] Teppo Rantanen: I think that, first of all, you need to be making sure that whatever you do, you have the full support and full backing of your organization. So if there's somebody who doesn't really like these sort of ideas, especially high enough in the organization, then that's a bad thing. So what we try to do, we try to make sure that our top leaders, our mayors and our politicians are always involved, and they are sort of very much informed what we are doing and getting fully support for them.
The other thing is to look for partners. So look for partners who you can sort of work together with. So with this metaverse thing, there's a specific EU bid ongoing right now, which is called the Citaverse. EU has reserved €15 million funding for two to five projects around the city, verse, which is their word for metaverse in the cities. I think that they don't like the word metaverse, so they'd rather call it citaverse, which is fine.
We have joined forces with Rotterdam, with Imec, with Flanders, and with Istanbul to come together with cool new ideas about what it might mean in the future. And working together with cities like Rotterdam has been just fantastic because they do a really good job in bringing this new stuff around. We work a lot with our nordic city colleagues. There's a lot of good cities in the Nordics who work on these topics, and we are really keen to expand our network and trying to see who others might be interested to work with us and come up with these new ideas. So I think that finding the right partners is one of those things who also may help you to understand better what can be done. Now we talk also to people and they talk to us, which is kind of fun, but reaching out to us. There's a city called Nusantara in Indonesia, which is the new capital when Jakarta is falling to sea, and they're bringing these hundreds and billions of dollars project building this new capital. And they said, we want to be like Tampere. And that to me sounds like, hey, really cool. We also want to be working with you. We work with Dubai, we work with Los Angeles, we work with Smart City work, but also with Neom. So trying to see how these big, big projects, the small things of what we do, can actually be helping them to figure out better how they move their big projects. So we love to be part of the global team and work together with our global city colleagues and of course also working with global companies. So we work our 450 companies then, and also additional 100 now. They are all from big global companies to small startups and everything in between. And we just love to work together with many of them. And we are happy to see that we get a lot of contacts from the companies as well, even around the world, that they see that they would be benefiting from working with us.
[00:21:29] Tamlyn Shimizu: Absolutely.
Everything sounds really exciting and great. Right? But I do want to touch on what dangers do you see ahead when using metaverse? What precautions really should we be taking with this type of technology?
[00:21:45] Teppo Rantanen: Well, I think that returning back to the sort of ethics point of view AI act with EU is one of those steps that we definitely need to take, and we need to do something with the metaverse ethical and sort of a safeguarding mechanisms as well to have them in place. How the data of people is being used. We are in Finland in a lucky position where there's high trust to government, so people are trusting that we can use their data in a correct way. So we try to use that as a sort of a good piloting environment for trying out and testing different technologies, how we can control the use of data in the best possible way. But I think that is probably at the same time the big challenge, but it's also the big sort of how to make sure that people are trusting the metaverse. Otherwise, if you don't get the citizens to trust what you do in the metaverse, then they just don't come along and then you sort of lost the game. So I think the keeping and maintaining the trust of people being as open and transparent as possible for that reason is absolutely important and vital. And we're putting a lot of efforts right now for the ethical part. So we have a couple of people just working on the ethics part of it and working together with the different academia around the world, actually participating in EU projects around. That latest one we just were awarded was an AI for Citizens project, which includes, I think, 1012 cities around Europe. And I think that these are the sort of things we need to be focusing on to make sure that we sort of maintain that ethical use of data. But the other thing is also, which is again, very important for us, how we make sure that the metaverse actually serves those who are not digitally capable, who are not sort of equipped to actually work in that environment. So how we make sure that what we build is built in a way that all those most vulnerable people in the society can actually get most benefit out of it. What we are doing. I've used the sort of an expression so that they don't even know the technology behind. They don't need to know anything about what's happening in behind, because we need to make it so safe and sure and easy for people to use that it actually helps them in their everyday life. And then I talk about the growing number of elderly people or people who have disabilities or young children, how we can make sure that we also protect them. I'm not so worried about us digitally native adults to be able to maneuver their way through, but all the rest, that's probably the biggest concern.
[00:24:42] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah. And especially you mentioned, for example, using it with elderly populations, and I can imagine there's some challenges with that as well. So, yeah, thank you so much for sharing all of this with us. It's really valuable for us moving forward also to be able to share these lessons with other cities also interested in the metaverse. I do have one final part that I ask every guest if they want to take an open floor.
So if you have anything that you felt like we didn't touch on, and you really want to talk about the people need to know this. Do you have something in mind that we didn't get the chance yet to talk about?
[00:25:24] Teppo Rantanen: Well, I think one of the things also which has been quite important for us, is that we have been able to think what is unthinkable. We have been able to go to the final frontier and face those new things that we didn't even know existed. We learn as we go, but you have to be courageous and kind of wanted to know the new things, wanted to learn the new things. And that kind of a team has been a real blessing for me to have a team who's always open to new ideas, always open to new thoughts, and brings those new ideas. And involving the people as much as possible in this has been one of the crucial points and also involving the whole city organization, because it's not just a group of people who work on these topics, it's actually something which we made sure that we have sort of a matrix type of organization. So there are a lot of people who actually work their day job doing something else in the city and they are part of this team and then they bring all these new ideas to their teams and bring them forward in the city organization, which can be sometimes a little bit slow in moving forward. But with these people in there as the agents for new things and for sort of putting stuff in place has been really fantastic and enjoying the fact that we have been putting together a team that doesn't recognize the sort of internal silos which happens so often in the government and city organizations. So we sort of be proud of trying to break down the silos as soon as we see some of them happening. So I think that challenging the sort of a traditional way of working is one of those key elements of success here. And that's something which definitely I want to share with all my colleagues around the world.
[00:27:18] Tamlyn Shimizu: Absolutely.
And I also understand that you have an event coming up in Tampere actually focused on the metaverse also. Right. Do you want to tell everyone what that's about and invite? Sure.
[00:27:31] Teppo Rantanen: Absolutely. So 11th and twelveth of June this year we will be gathering hopefully last year I think we had 3000 people more than that this year around the imagine the metaverse theme. And we're looking at the citaverse theme as one of them. With a lot of these international cities being there. We're looking at a little bit how it tackles with the industrial metaverse. So we have companies who work on that and we are looking at the experience and entertainment industry as well and see how it works there. And we have big sponsors, big company names there. Our main two partners we work together with is Microsoft and Nokia. So they are there and then a lot of other companies will be there as well. So absolutely, we invite everybody to come there and there is no entrance fee. So welcome to see the city. And by the way, June is probably the best time of the year to come to Finland.
[00:28:26] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yes. Sounds warmer than it is now, right?
[00:28:29] Teppo Rantanen: And 22 hours of daylights in a day.
[00:28:34] Tamlyn Shimizu: So many possibilities when you have that much daylight, right? Yeah. Cool.
Yeah, wonderful. So now I want to move on to our little segment and it's a fun segment that we have. The one that I chose for you today is called roll with the punches. And all the listeners will know that it's my favorite segment that I love to do with people.
Roll with the punches.
Answer this or that questions quickly. And with your first instincts.
So basically I ask you this or that question and you just have to answer.
You can't choose both and you can't choose neither. You have to choose one. And then afterwards you can explain after we go through all of them.
[00:29:20] Teppo Rantanen: Sure.
[00:29:21] Tamlyn Shimizu: Sound good?
Okay, are you ready? Yes. Okay.
Finnish sauna experience or ice swimming challenge?
[00:29:30] Teppo Rantanen: Ice swimming challenge.
[00:29:31] Tamlyn Shimizu: AI or metaverse? Metaverse citizen engagement or public private partnerships? Citizen engagement urban green spaces or high tech campus? Urban green spaces open data initiatives or enhanced cybersecurity measures? Open data initiatives, data driven urban planning or community driven urban development.
[00:29:58] Teppo Rantanen: That's a tough one. I would say community driven enabled.
[00:30:03] Tamlyn Shimizu: Good. Smart water management or smart energy systems?
[00:30:07] Teppo Rantanen: Smart energy systems.
[00:30:10] Tamlyn Shimizu: Smart lighting or smart sensors?
[00:30:12] Teppo Rantanen: Smart sensors.
[00:30:14] Tamlyn Shimizu: Super strength or super speed?
[00:30:17] Teppo Rantanen: Super speed.
[00:30:18] Tamlyn Shimizu: Super speed. All right, good job.
Do you want to explain any of your answers?
[00:30:26] Teppo Rantanen: No, I think that they intuitively come right. I always trust my intuition that going forward. So yeah, it sounded really good.
[00:30:35] Tamlyn Shimizu: I was surprised that you said ice swimming challenge, to be honest, over the sauna experience.
[00:30:41] Teppo Rantanen: Sauna experience is so normal. It's like every day you do that. Ice swimming is something I really love to do, but sometimes you just find hard to find the places to do it. We have a few places in the city center which are always queued, so there's a queue for the ice swimming. So it's tough and I'm too lazy. I have a place by the lake, but I'm too lazy to keep that hole open to sort of a stay there all the time, which I should have a pump there, but I don't have a pump to keep it open.
[00:31:14] Tamlyn Shimizu: Okay, good. So it's something more special for you.
[00:31:17] Teppo Rantanen: It's something more special and it's also something which makes you feel even better.
I don't know if you've done that, but it's something which first sense it's like, this is horrible, but when you come out from there you feel so refreshed and you feel so good. So what I do is normally in the fall I go as long as the ice doesn't come every morning to swim, which means that the temperature of the water is like plus seven, plus eight degrees. And that makes feel so good. But when the ice comes, I'm too lazy to start breaking the ice.
[00:31:57] Tamlyn Shimizu: That props to you, really.
I'm a bit of a wimp in the cold, I have to say. So I'm scared. I would do it once, right? If I come to tempore in the wintertime, I would do it once for sure.
[00:32:11] Teppo Rantanen: We have a great place in the center of the city where there's a hot sauna, a restaurant combo, and you can go swimming there as well. So it's a good experience to go. We did it, I think, two years ago when we had the event here, so we took people there.
[00:32:28] Tamlyn Shimizu: Okay, cool. Good to know. All right.
With that, I have one final question for you, and it is the question we ask every single guest, and it's to you, what is a Smart City?
[00:32:41] Teppo Rantanen: To me, the Smart City is a word I would not love to use at all. So I would love to sort of forget that and move on. But to me, it's all about how we can make the everyday life of our citizens better.
[00:32:56] Tamlyn Shimizu: Very good. What word would you like to use instead of Smart City?
[00:33:00] Teppo Rantanen: We haven't figured out yet. Good weather. That's why we chose the metaverse to be the next one.
[00:33:07] Tamlyn Shimizu: I quite like urban innovation or something along those lines, but yeah, Smart City.
[00:33:15] Teppo Rantanen: Urban innovation is good, but somebody has stolen it already and uses that name.
[00:33:20] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yes, very good.
All right, well, that's all I have for you today, Teppo. I'm really happy to have you on. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of your knowledge and a lot of experience and a lot of cool projects happening in Tampere, as well as the best tip on going ice swimming. So thank you very much.
[00:33:39] Teppo Rantanen: Thank you, Tamlyn. It's been a pleasure for me.
[00:33:42] Tamlyn Shimizu: And thank you also to all of our listeners. Don't forget you can always create a free account on BABLE smartcities EU. You can find out more about Smart City projects, cool cities like Tampere solutions implementations. Thank you very much.
Thank you all for listening. I'll see you at the next stop on the journey to a better urban life.
