Felipe Lara

All cities are photographed. Projects such as Google Street View and Mapillary allow you to see the streets as if you were there. These platforms let us visit almost any place in the world from home. But they don't let you search for information like bad sidewalks in their huge database of street-level images. There is a whole new dimension of data in those photographs to be used. Aware of this shortcoming, megatronics engineer Felipe Lara decided to launch Percepthor. 

His project takes photographs and 360 videos of the streets and with artificial intelligence measures the entire infrastructure by automatically identifying the elements of the city. The young man makes cities smart. For this commitment to digitizing public space, Lara has become one of the 35 winners of MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35 Latin America 2022 in Spanish. 

Percepthor's algorithms make it possible to audit customer activity in stores, take inventories of lights in the city, and Lara has inaugurated an autonomous store that charges customers without going to the cash register. Its next big bet is to make cities smart. By applying artificial intelligence to the images that the project captures monthly from the streets, it allows companies to monitor their investment in advertising in public space. The creator explains: "Companies pay a lot of money to agencies to promote themselves. We let them know if their marketing strategy should be on the street and the return they get." 

By digitizing the city for the benefit of commercial clients, Percepthor achieves a social impact by mapping urban infrastructure. With its technology it manages to identify, classify, and group stores, potholes, traffic lights, lighting, and security cameras to provide insight into the state of the city. Lara believes that more free information for the city's population strengthens democracy, empowers citizens to oversee local governments and helps authorities to prioritize elements and areas for improvement. 

After validating the technology, this innovation is in the process of being implemented in Mexico's main cities. In the medium term, the young Mexican aspires to expand to map Latin American cities, which could benefit from digital smart cities.