Abstract
Recent global growth in the interest of smart cities has led to trillions of
dollars of investment toward research and development. These connected cities
have the potential to create a symbiosis of technology and society and
revolutionize the cost of living, safety, ecological sustainability, and
quality of life of societies on a world-wide scale. Some key components of the
smart city construct are connected smart grids, self-driving cars, federated
learning systems, smart utilities, large-scale public transit, and proactive
surveillance systems. While exciting in prospect, these technologies and their
subsequent integration cannot be attempted without addressing the potential
societal impacts of such a high degree of automation and data sharing.
Additionally, the feasibility of coordinating so many disparate tasks will
require a fast, extensible, unifying framework. To that end, we propose FaRO2,
a completely reimagined successor to FaRO1, built from the ground up. FaRO2
affords all of the same functionality as its predecessor, serving as a unified
biometric API harness that allows for seamless evaluation, deployment, and
simple pipeline creation for heterogeneous biometric software. FaRO2
additionally provides a fully declarative capability for defining and
coordinating custom machine learning and sensor pipelines, allowing the
distribution of processes across otherwise incompatible hardware and networks.
FaRO2 ultimately provides a way to quickly configure, hot-swap, and expand
large coordinated or federated systems online without interruptions for
maintenance. Because much of the data collected in a smart city contains
Personally Identifying Information (PII), FaRO2 also provides built-in tools
and layers to ensure secure and encrypted streaming, storage, and access of PII
data across distributed systems.