Why Brenna Berman is Giving Chicago an AIoT Upgrade

Brenna Berman is at the front of a new wave of urban development. As the executive director of Chicago’s City Tech, she’s working out how to reinvent cities for safety and efficiency using technology.

“Cities are not growing as quickly and are not as flexible as the population is growing,” Berman says. She’s worked in city development for seven years, most recently as chief information officer for the city of Chicago, where her work focused on applying technology to solve modern urban policy and planning problems. In 2017, she became executive director of City Tech , an initiative from Chicago-based UILabs that brings together talent from academia, the private sector and city government to reinvent how the city is run.

Berman says city planners are still using guidelines and parameters that are nearly 50 years old. To bring cities into the 21st century, she is focused on using technology to gather data from around the city, learn from it and create more dynamic models to cope with volatile urban environments. Much of this technology centers on AIoT, the marriage of artificial intelligence with the Internet of Things. AI relies heavily on accurate data, delivered in high volume, to fuel its machine learning algorithms and produce accurate results, which are generated dynamically, based on the automation and learning elements of AI. IoT sensors scattered around smart cities can deliver constantly updated information about everything from traffic flow to water flow, providing regular, high-quality feedstock for AI algorithms.

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