RESULTS WITH GOOGLE CLOUD
- 41.3 TB of data stored and 9.5 TB of data processed daily
- More than 6 million OCR readings processed per day in CIVITAS
- More than 1,400 cases that used information generated by image capture from AI
- Reduction in citizen response time provided by the chatbot, from 30 to 5 min
The implementation of the City Hall's data lake benefited different secretariats, increased employee productivity, and resulted in an even more consistent delivery of services to the population
The Rio de Janeiro City Data Office began operating in 2022. The division emerged with the mission of increasing the efficiency of the municipal administration based on data and evidence. Currently, the Office—which is now part of IplanRio, the municipal technology company led by Carabetta—integrates a unique data infrastructure that centralizes essential information from the Municipal Government and its various secretariats.
But for this data-related transformation to be possible, another story began to unfold back in 2021 at the Secretariat of Transport—where there was an initial request related to real-time GPS monitoring of buses in the city, which would require a more in-depth analysis.
“GPS had been implemented since 2011 in the city's road transport network. However, it needed to be better utilized. The goal was to create an infrastructure to save this GPS information that appears in feeds and then process it. The intention, with this, was to perform various analyses, know which bus passes at a certain time, and closely monitor the activities of the service provider companies,” details João Carabetta, Chief Technology Officer of the City of Rio de Janeiro.
In addition to the need directly linked to the Transport portfolio, others emerged over time. In the public sector, many agencies face difficulties in accessing, integrating, and governing their own data, with a physical infrastructure that is often limited. Therefore, the idea was to have an integrated and complete infrastructure that would allow new solutions for all municipal secretariats in Rio de Janeiro.
The modernization brought by the use of cloud tools
Right at the beginning of 2022, there was a public consultation phase to define which company could lead the City Hall's data lake project, an occasion when several service providers disclosed their prices and requirements, covering each stack of technological tools.
In this stage, Google Cloud gained ground. One of the major differentiators presented was BigQuery, which featured support for training AI models and had the best performance and cost-benefit ratio, something essential to abstract the complexity of computing and resource administration.
Thus, the initial architecture was assembled in about three to four months, prioritizing governance and user access control. Shortly thereafter, data began to be integrated gradually, paving the way for what would become the concept of centralizing the City Hall's operational and transactional data.
In June 2022, the data lake was launched, containing some of the most important databases of the City of Rio de Janeiro. Today, several solutions of the public body already operate within this platform, which continues to expand and include more projects each year.
The features offered by the cloud, especially related to BigQuery, became a highlight due to their ease of use and scalability potential. João Carabetta.
New era: a data lake that would welcome different projects
Now, essential information is centralized at the Municipal Government of Rio de Janeiro, such as employee payroll; school data (including student attendance and report cards); transport data, such as real-time bus GPS; health data, covering both medicine inventory and patients' clinical histories; and public safety data, such as the real-time identification of vehicles driving in the city.
We discovered that, for image reading, Gemini stands out in context identification. From a simple flood and a car stopped on the road, to people walking inside a tunnel—in short, everything that could represent some safety risk can be mapped with the help of Gemini.
João Carabetta, Chief Technology Officer, City of Rio de Janeiro
Although not all data is publicly available, some can be accessed through the DataRIO portal and its APIs, allowing citizens to use this information for their own query and analysis.
Regarding the technical structure, the Data Office, now incorporated into IplanRio, the municipal technology company, uses clusters in the Google Kubernetes Engine to host services and run applications, which also support the ETL infrastructure for BigQuery. Cloud Storage is useful for setting up external tables. In addition, the City Hall's customer service chatbot was implemented in Dialogflow, with webhooks in GKE integrating on-premise services. Dialogflow handles interaction flows and operates on 1746 for citizen service, an initiative focused on urban maintenance.
But the innovations kept coming, and Google Cloud solutions became fundamental to also serve the public safety area. The Center for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Technology Supporting Public Safety, CIVITAS, which is responsible for uniting municipal data and analyzing it from the perspective of public safety and advanced technologies, makes extensive use of Gemini. Through a situation room at the Rio Operations Center and the use of AI, thousands of cameras and radars in the city are used to monitor suspicious vehicles, identify cloned license plates, and act in other risky situations.
Numbers that prove the advances of the technological transformation
Overall, the infrastructure adopted by the public agency increased employee productivity, freeing professionals to focus on analysis and strategy instead of focusing on technical issues.
Now, the Office can create data solutions in a few days or weeks, easily scaling to massive volumes (terabytes and petabytes) without changing the infrastructure. Today, the Municipal Government gathers 41.3 TB of stored data; 9.5 TB of data processed daily, 49 integrated systems, and 10.5M queries performed. The Data Office, which unites the Secretariat of Health, the Secretariat of Transport, the Secretariat of Education, Rio Águas, Personnel Management, and CIVITAS, the Operations Center, as well as AlertaRio, among others, achieved significant metrics.
In the case of CIVITAS, on average, more than 6 million OCR readings are processed per day, and in less than a year, there have already been more than 1,400 cases that used information generated through image capture with the help of generative AI, and more than 7,000 suspicious vehicle license plates registered in the Electronic Fence.
Other projects impress with their performance regarding service to the population. The AI-enabled chatbot, which is the direct communication channel for dealing with the municipality's urban maintenance, recorded a citizen response time that decreased from 30 to 5 minutes, in more than 30,000 conversations per month.
These are just some of the programs led by the municipality that rely on the Data Office for their full operation. Thus, the metrics and positive results gathered over time prove that cloud tools not only promoted this revolution of the City Hall's internal data but also significantly improved the accessibility and efficiency of the services offered to citizens.
We have bold goals. One of the main ones is the growth of CIVITAS, and the idea is to expand the number of cameras in the city. We are starting to use AI agents as well, to perform security reading and reporting, with the aim of automating our work.
João Carabetta, Chief Technology Officer, City of Rio de Janeiro
The Data Office is a center for research, training, and dissemination in data science and visualization of the City of Rio de Janeiro Municipal Government.
Industry: Public Sector
Location: Brazil
Products: BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Dialogflow, Gemini, Google Kubernetes Engine
The implementation of the City Hall's data lake benefited different secretariats, increased employee productivity, and resulted in an even more consistent delivery of services to the population