Episode 5 of our Mapping Urban AI Series
Urban artificial intelligence has applications not only for the urban environment and its constituent systems, but also for improving government service delivery. In many cities, accessing city services requires residents to put in effort, completing a number of steps: identifying a service that fits their need, locating an appropriate form to request the service, filling out the form and sending it in, and awaiting a resolution. Historically, the same has been the case in Helsinki, Finland. However, the City of Helsinki has recently begun leveraging artificial intelligence to transform some of its nearly 800 city services, such that the city can offer them more proactively, without residents needing to specifically seek them out. For the fourth episode of the “Mapping Urban AI” webinar series, we welcomed Pasi Rauto, a Service Manager and Team Lead for AI and Optimization for the City of Helsinki, to share about Helsinki’s service optimization efforts.
The “Mapping Urban AI” webinar series, which is organized by Urban AI, CIDOB, and the Global Observatory of Urban AI (GOUAI), hosts representatives from cities around the world to showcase and discuss their projects and policies through the lens of an overarching theme: holistic strategies, health, urban planning, sustainability. The concept for the series draws from both the project “The Atlas of Urban AI,” an interactive online map of AI initiatives that cities throughout the world have undertaken and also from the newly released “Urban AI Guide,” which presents detailed case studies on AI project implementation in local government.
During this episode, Rauto described how AI and data have optimized city service delivery in Helsinki. He offered kindergarten placements as one such example. The standard process required residents with kindergarten-aged children to go through the motions of requesting and waiting for a kindergarten placement for their children, in order for their children to be able to attend school. Rauto and his team redesigned this process, such that the City proactively identifies the families with kindergarten-aged children, finds the nearest kindergarten to their place of residence, and pushes out a text message informing the family that their child has been placed in the corresponding kindergarten. The launch of this new kindergarten placement system proved quite successful, with a response rate of 93% and a placement acceptance rate of 89%. However, as Rauto points out, in order to successfully offer the service in a proactive manner, Helsinki needed to collect and manage comprehensive data on its residents, while also maintaining a high degree of citizen trust.
To cement its data collection capacity, Helsinki put forth a lofty vision that “the data generated by Helsinki [will be] the most usable and used city data in the world by 2025.” To serve this vision, Helsinki outlined nine principles that outline its right to access certain data, its obligations to make those data available and accessible internally, its purpose to use those data to improve city services to better meet resident needs, and its intention to maintain ethical responsibility. The specific measures that it puts in place to ensure ethical data handling contribute to the second aim of instilling citizen trust. Externally, Helsinki has published an AI register, which provides transparency into the lines of service that utilize artificial intelligence. It highlights the datasets used, the data processing conducted, the controls in place to prevent discrimination, the ways in which human oversight is leveraged, and the risk management procedures for each implementation. On the internal-facing side, Helsinki has developed a comprehensive “data operator” training, which ensures that city employees understand the legal constraints around data processing, best practices for handling data, and ethical considerations. These measures help ensure that Helsinki’s data-informed service delivery serves its citizens, while minimizing potential harms.
Additionally, Helsinki developed an accelerator program to engage municipal stakeholders more in learning about AI and the ways that it (and other digital technologies) can be leveraged to improve city service delivery. The program aids employees in low-cost rapid prototype development to test out their ideas. So far, the program has received more than 100 proposals, of which 40 have been implemented. Some of the projects have included analysis and classification of citizen feedback, a service that recommends city cultural events, and tools to assist civil servants in providing job counseling. As Helsinki continues to collect data and build citizen trust, and as more lines of government are engaged through the accelerator program, it will continue to optimize its city services, allowing it to proactively meet its citizens’ needs.
By Sarah Popelka, Head of Education Programs at Urban AI
