Building Smarter, Safer Cities: Centific Joins NSF's Center for Smart Streetscapes
Aug 21, 2025
We're excited to share some big news from the world of smart cities and responsible AI innovation. Centific has officially joined the Smart Streetscapes Advisory Board (SSAB) of the Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3), an NSF-funded Engineering Research Center that's reimagining how AI can make our urban environments safer and more efficient.
Why This Partnership Matters
As cities around the world grapple with growing populations, major events, and evolving safety challenges, the need for smarter infrastructure has never been more critical. But here's the thing – "smart" isn't enough on its own. Today's urban AI solutions need to be responsible, transparent, and community-centered from day one.
That's exactly what drew us to CS3's mission. Their commitment to developing ethical, community-focused smart city technologies aligns perfectly with our core values at Centific.
Bringing Our Vision-Language Expertise to Urban Challenges
Our Global Head of Solutions, Sanjay Bhakta, will be representing Centific on the advisory board, bringing years of experience in large-scale AI deployment across diverse industries. But more importantly, he's bringing our proven track record with vision-language models (VLMs) – technology that's already making a difference in complex urban environments.
"Joining CS3's Advisory Board represents a natural evolution of our mission to make AI safer, more scalable, and more accountable," says Sanjay. "As smart cities accelerate adoption of AI-powered infrastructure, rigorous governance and transparency become non-negotiable."
The Verity VLM Difference
Here's what gets us most excited about this partnership: our proprietary Verity VLM technology has already demonstrated how AI can enhance public safety in places like airports, transit stations, and city streets – not through invasive surveillance, but through intelligent contextual understanding that respects privacy while improving emergency response.
Think of it as AI that understands what's happening without tracking who's doing it. Our human-in-the-loop approach means technology augments human decision-making rather than replacing it entirely. It's exactly the kind of responsible innovation that smart streetscapes require.
Solving Real Urban Problems
The challenges facing modern cities are complex:
How do you manage pedestrian flow during major events?
How do you detect potential safety issues before they escalate?
How do you coordinate emergency responses more effectively?
And most importantly – how do you do all of this while maintaining community trust and protecting civil liberties?
Traditional surveillance raises significant privacy concerns, while purely reactive approaches often fall short. Our vision-language models offer a third path: AI systems that understand context and patterns without tracking individuals, providing actionable insights while preserving the privacy and freedoms that communities rightfully expect.
What We're Contributing
As part of the SSAB, we'll be working alongside industry, non-profit, and public sector leaders to guide CS3's innovation ecosystem. Our focus areas include:
AI Governance and Ethics: Implementing the model transparency, bias detection, and responsible deployment practices we've honed across thousands of production systems.
Vision-Language Innovation: Applying our contextual understanding technology to new urban safety and efficiency challenges.
Human-Centered Design: Ensuring that every solution enhances rather than replaces human judgment and decision-making.
Scalable Infrastructure: Helping bridge the gap between research prototypes and production-ready urban systems that cities can actually deploy.
Looking Ahead
CS3 Director Andrew Smyth put it perfectly: "Centific's leadership in AI solutions will help us address one of the most critical challenges in deploying smart city technologies... Their work with vision-language models shows how we can create safer urban environments without compromising the privacy and civil liberties that communities rightfully expect."
This partnership represents more than just advisory participation – it's our commitment to shaping the future of urban AI in a way that benefits everyone. As we work with CS3 to translate cutting-edge research into real-world solutions, we're not just building smarter cities. We're building cities that communities can trust.
Ready to Learn More?
Interested in how Centific's responsible AI solutions could transform your urban environment? We'd love to connect and discuss how our Verity VLM technology and human-in-the-loop approach can address your specific smart city challenges.
Centific powers the world's most advanced AI as the trusted data and infrastructure partner for thousands of production-grade systems. Read our latest on how VLMs help smart cities get safer: d
Sanjay Bhakta is the Global Head of Edge and Enterprise AI Solutions at Centific, leading GenAI and multimodal platform development infused with safe AI and cybersecurity principles. He’s spent over 20 years, globally in various industries such as automotive, financial services, healthcare, logistics, retail, and telecom. Sanjay’s collaborated on complex challenges such as driver safety in Formula 1, preventive maintenance, optimization, fraud mitigation, cold chain, human threat detection in DoD, and others. His experience includes AI, big data, edge computing, and IoT.
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