Sofia Bigun

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Nowadays, technologies are everywhere. Everyone talks about digitalization. But an interesting thing is that mostly people are aware of technologies and innovations either in commerce sphere (different products or services provided) or in spheres that are directly connected with IT (devices, Internet communications, automation etc.). However, there are other industries that are less obvious for people in terms of technologies adoption, as an example food industry or aviation.

Airport innovations are as important as in any other spheres. Digitalization helps to keep up with all recent trends (such as widespread Apple Wallet boarding pass) and optimize operations (make them quicker and less costly). Here are the use cases of emerging technologies implemented in different airports:

Wi-Fi tracking

Wi-Fi is known as a source of providing wireless network connection to passengers while they are waiting for their flight. But there are also advantages for an airport: it is possible to use Wi-Fi hotspots to track people’s smartphones and analyze how people move around terminals. First, this data is extremely useful for reducing congestion at the most crowded places by allocating more human resources there, for example. Second, based on passenger flows in duty free areas an airport could better estimate what are the most popular spots and optimize facilities rent pricing, therefore, increasing its non-aviation profits.

Biometric Identification

End-to-end passenger journey is the aim of so called One ID initiative. The idea is that once a passenger has registered his/her biometric data (face, fingerprints, iris pattern) it is possible to use this data for all the control stages at the airport instead of documents. Starting from check-in and baggage drop off to security control and boarding everything you need is just you! This initiative could help reduce waiting times and decrease the number of employees needed at each touch point.

Digital Twin

Having a digital overview of an entire airport on the palm of a hand (similar to a scaled LEGO version of a city) becomes real with a digital twin. Idea is that all the monitoring and analytical systems are getting connected with one another, tangible assets are connected to the existing systems by being tagged with various types of tags and scanners (beacons, RFID etc.), airport map is digitized and converted to a 3D model. Using this digital twin makes the whole infrastructure visible and improves monitoring of vital systems so that an airport can react faster to any changes (breakdowns, congestion etc.).

Baggage tracking with RFID

Have you ever faced the problem of losing your suitcase? Hope not, but this is something that happens sometimes with other passengers and then it takes quite a long time to find baggage and return it. An IoT solution comes here to help airports addressing this issue and reduce costs for baggage search. Instead of using manually scanned stickers with barcodes (that you always see on your suitcase) airports can start using RFID tags that could be scanned by machine and tracked throughout all the path increasing transparency and allowing faster detection in case of loss.

CT scanning

Computer Tomography is known by its usage in healthcare to detect any internal abnormalities in the body. But this is something that could also be applied by security control as this method allows scan everything inside the baggage without a need to take out liquids and devices (yes, the most annoying step of all controls when you have to take everything out and then try to place it back, especially challenging when your suitcase is hardly available to be closed). This has a potential to significantly reduces the time needed to perform the security check.

AI Assistance

Artificial Intelligence capabilities are being used to develop digital assistants to help passengers with practical matters in an airport. Whenever there is a navigation question, question regarding a flight or any other you don’t have to struggle with information signs or try to find a staff member – just come to the point and ask your question to a robot or a virtual assistant and it will help you!

Machine Vision

A network of different video observation systems (including CCTV cameras, 360-degree cameras, multifocal sensors etc.) allows to monitor the situation around all parts of the airport and make decisions to perform actions if required. For example, it can detect crowds of people on a certain touch point signaling that there is a need for additional staff to be directed there. Or it can help detect intrusion on territories with limited accessibility such as the apron/runway.

Drones

Drones are a controversial topic, but they also have a useful potential. It has been discussed a lot that drones coming from outside are threatening the airside operations by invading the flight space and causing dangerous situations. However, if used internally (by an airport) they could be used for runway deliveries. If there is something needed for an aircraft, be it a spare part or a forgotten document, it would be much faster and effectively delivered by a drone than by a person who needs to cross all the apron.

Remote Air Traffic Control Towers

One of the most crucial elements of an airport infrastructure enabling its functioning is ATC (those high round towers that you saw on the apron) where operators are located to provide guidance and commands to aircraft pilots. With the use of video, sensors, AR/VR visualizations there is no need for operators to be in this tower – they can have a huge system of integrated displays in front of them showing in real time what is happening on runways or in the air so they have access to all necessary information and can provide their guidance remotely.

Did you know that Amsterdam Schiphol airport has been leading in innovation for quite a long time already? They have implemented at least 5 of the abovementioned solutions (CT scanning, biometrics, information modelling etc.). The other innovator is Frankfurt Airport that has implemented an AI-powered assistant (called FRAnny), robots for tasks automation, omnichannel e-commerce platform and many other projects.

And this is not a complete list of all technology applications that could be used by an airport! There are many more such as self-service baggage check-in, robotic car parking, visual docking guidance systems that help parking aircrafts etc., the described ones are just the most popular that airports around the world have already started implementing. So do not underestimate airports to become one of the most digitized organizations in the observable future.

Resources:

https://www.internationalairportreview.com

https://www.airport-technology.com

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You have probably heard a lot about AI, neural networks and machine learning. But have you heard of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) that is capable of learning and creating impersonations of what it “sees”?

GAN is a semi-supervised machine learning algorithm that contains 2 main components:

Generator – which generates samples based on input data
Discriminator – which distinguishes authentic samples from generated ones

Due to the continuous adversarial process (where the name comes from), mutual training and improvement of models occur.

There are already many different use cases for this technology:

The most application GANs can find in creative areas such as photography, movies, music, art. These networks are used to create new music tracks (you might’ve heard of Jukebox and even listened to some samples on SoundCloud, if not check out the link), convert photos into images copying the style of famous artists, create new cartoon characters, convert text to an image, restore damaged photos and increase images resolution and many other exciting things

So next time you have a new friend request on Facebook, think if it’s a real person or just a network that really liked you.

Services as Toonify and StyleGAN2 transform people images into cartoons

The other wide area of application is creation of data sets. If you need a lot of data to test some of your forecasts, for example, but do not have access to it – just synthesize! This also helps to avoid any privacy related issues (remember about GDPR).

GAN could be used for cybersecurity purposes. In banking industry, it can help in detecting fraud operations. Your GAN “employee” will train to distinguish suspicious activity from a regular one and help to increase deception detection rates. So next time a bank will not block someone’s grandma card by mistake when she accidentally decides to buy a trip to Maldives (and thereby offending an old lady thinking that she can’t go there).

Drug discovery is quite important and here GAN could also be applied. Who knows how soon 100% protection vaccine or recovery medicine for Covid will be found?

But, of course, each technology comes with its features that people should be afraid of:

GAN could be used to forge facial recognition systems by generating high resolution fake images. In terms of identity theft, it might sound quite creepy.

Another danger is password cracking as GAN can be trained on large datasets to recognize patterns and guess your Instagram password (if it’s not hellokitty123, of course).

Finally, malware could be hidden. GAN could be used to create such malware that will be capable to evade security detection systems and your Norton anti-virus won’t help, so think twice next time you’re accessing untrusted website.

According to Gartner, in 2020 Generative Adversarial Networks were an emerging trend and it was predicted to become adopted widely in 5 to 10 years period. So, soon we might be enjoying all the benefits that this technology could create.