Edge Signals: This Week’s Reading (& Listening) Shelf in Tech, Policy & Leadership

1. Article – “Making AI Track the City’s Hottest Blocks” (Axios Boston)
   Mass General Brigham and IBM demo a street-level heat-risk model that auto-texts residents in multiple languages with nearest cooling sites. Use it: bolt their open-source workflow onto any Landsat-based heat map instead of building a full early-warning platform from scratch. (Axios)

2. Article – “Harnessing Smartphone Sensors for Enhanced Road Safety” (Nature Scientific Data)
   An 18-country open dataset logs potholes and harsh-braking events with nothing but accelerometer + GPS data from regular phones. Use it: crowd-source a pavement-condition index where LiDAR van surveys are too costly. (Nature)

3. Article – “Object-Based AI Spots Informal Settlements from 30 cm Imagery” (Intl. J. Remote Sensing)
   A novel object-attention network increases detection F1 by 12 % over UN-Habitat baselines, even in dense tree cover. Use it: fast-track slum upgrading by locating plot boundaries before on-site surveys. (Taylor & Francis Online)

4. Article – “AI-Driven Rapid Landslide Mapping After the 2024 Hualien Quake” (NHESS, July 2025)
   A CNN-based (end-to-end analysis pipeline in which the heavy-lifting step—the pattern recognition—is done by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)) workflow turned Sentinel-2 scenes into a usable landslide inventory within 24 hours of the event. utomated landslide detection methods by combining Earth observation (EO) data with AI models. The models identified 7090 landslide events covering >75 km² within ≈3 h of the acquisition of the EO imagery. This research showcases AI's role in rapid landslide detection for disaster response. Use it: plug the model into your disaster dashboard to reroute relief convoys the same day. (NHESS)

5. Pre-print – “Generative AI for Urban Planning: Diffusion Models that ‘Sketch’ New City Blocks” (arXiv, May 2025)
   A Stable Diffusion + ControlNet combo synthesises realistic satellite images conditioned on land-use prompts, roads, and water bodies. Use it: test alternative zoning scenarios visually before committing to costly 3-D models. (arXiv)

6. YouTube – “SPACE4Cities: Space-Based Urban Green-Space Management” (35 min, July 2025)
   ESA’s webinar walks through a Sentinel-2 + PlanetScope pipeline that auto-flags canopy loss by neighbourhood and feeds results straight into budget dashboards. Use it: replicate the script in Google Earth Engine for an instant tree-equity audit. (YouTube)

7. Podcast – AI Today: “AI in Smart Cities” (14 min, 2 July 2025)
   Rapid-fire use-cases—from leak detection to chatbot city halls—each with tech stack and cost ballpark. Use it: pick one pilot per quarter for quick wins. (Apple Podcasts)