Interview of Michael Seufert, project manager at VisionWare (Portugal), member of the coordination team of SCENE.
Is it you first EU project?
VisionWare has been involved in quite a lot of projects over the last couple of years, mostly projects providing services to security, law enforcement, agencies. In terms of smart city, this is our first project.
What do you expect from this project?
We are quite excited to have the possibility to approach customers that are already in our client base and to extend the range of our services to smart city services. Lots of municipalities in Portugal have already been working with us for quite some time now and this is pushing us toward a different direction that adds value to us and to them too.
What is the added-value of working at the European level?
The thing with European projects is that it is difficult sometimes to find the market and to see how the project that you have, as a good idea that has convinced the evaluators of the Commission, how that can be turned into a meaningful project and a meaningful product.
And at this point we are quite optimistic that the idea of getting together sensors in a platform that can be decentralized and this will work with cities that want to make a jump into building smart cities. Some of them find it very hard to join lots of different services that are on the market. So we are trying to bridge that gap. Again we are quite optimistic that it will work.
What is the use case you are working on in Lisbon?
We are working on a use case that will help municipalities to detect double-parkers.
So we are trying to develop a sensor that works as a camera but that detects that a car is double-parked after a certain time; after that time it can alert the authorities and then two things can happen, depending on the choice of municipalities. Either it can produce a fine automatically or it could send somebody overthere to check on the situation and fine it locally.
Cities nowadays in Portugal have a tough problem with double-parking so we are also trying to address a real-life problem here.