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Following is a guest blog post from Scott Belcher, CEO of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America:
We, at the Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America), are excited to announce the final stage of the ITS Congestion Challenge. The challenge, which was developed in partnership with IBM and Spencer Trask Collaborative Innovations, has created a space for entrepreneurs, academics, researchers and engineers to join together to submit and evaluate solutions to solve the world’s transportation congestion crisis. The overall cost of congestion in the US alone (based on wasted fuel and lost productivity) reached $87.2 billion in 2007. The total amount of wasted fuel topped 2.8 billion gallons and the amount of wasted time totaled 4.2 billion hours – nearly one full work week (or vacation week) for every traveler. We know this impact can be reduced with the innovative solutions the ITS Congestion Challenge participants have contributed.
After a community of 4,080 people reviewed 94 solutions, nine final ideas have risen to the top from Hungary, Ireland, Canada, the Netherlands, and the United States. The innovators behind these solutions will spend the next 30 days refining their plans and making presentations to our panel of judges in hopes of winning the $50,000 prize.
Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) solutions can reduce traffic congestion and help prevent accidents before they happen, provide more effective incident and emergency response, give consumers real-time travel information and options, and reduce energy use and emissions. We are thrilled that the ITS Congestion Challenge has been able to feature such innovation.
We hope you take some time to explore the solutions and we look forward to announcing the winner on September 26, 2009 at 16th ITS World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems in Stockholm, Sweden.
The ITS Congestion Challenge is sponsored by Spencer Trask, IBM, the 16th World Congress in Stockholm, Virginia Department of Transportation, American Highway Users, AAA, Environmental Defense Fund, CalTrans, Institute of Transportation Engineers, National Association of Counties, ITS New York, ITS Sweden and ITS Pennsylvania.
The race to host the Olympics is shaping up to be a race to the smartest city. In order to catch the eye of the Olympic committee cities have to become smarter – more efficient, greener and more sustainable. This series explores different initiatives proposed by various cities vying for the 2016 Olympic bid. Be sure to look for upcoming posts on Tokyo, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro.
As one of the cities bidding for this honor, Chicago has unveiled its Blue-Green Games concept. This idea is based around five themes for improvement, which include water management, clean energy, recycling, greenspace and sustainability. The goal is to create conditions that allow the athletes to compete at the highest levels while reducing the carbon footprint the Games would leave on the city.
Source: http://bit.ly/yINyS
If the 2016 Olympic games do come to Chicago, there will be a great demand for energy. To help support the goal of producing reusable, clean energy, a modular tile flooring system will be implemented. A unique sub-floor system will use blocks that depress and slip when stepped on. The moving blocks create electricity to power a variety of lights, machinery and signage. This floor system will be used in high-volume areas, such as the sporting venues and transportation hubs. The goal is to have all electricity for the Games operations come from renewable-energy sources.
Another goal is to ensure that wildlife is not negatively impacted by the games. For the Olympic tennis venue, the existing parking lot would be located further away from the Jarvis Bird Sanctuary, so the disruption to the birds is minimal. Also, many new green spaces would be established, ranging from rooftop gardens to parks to urban community gardens.
Facilities such as stadiums will be needed to house the games, and that
Source: http://bit.ly/2KWtcr
requires creating seats. Rather than build seating that will be thrown out after the event, temporary seating will be converted into wheelchairs. These will be donated to individuals in need in developing countries. This will reduce waste and allow thousands of wheelchairs to be donated. The Blue-Green Games initiative would not only make Chicago green and sustainable, but also a socially responsible citizen of the world. It’s a bold plan and if all goes accordingly it should greatly improve the quality of life in the city. Then again without enough backing and contribution the initiative could fall flat on its face.
So hey Chicagoans, what do you think? Will these plans catch the eye of the Olympic committee? Are you from another city that is competing against Chicago for the Olympic bid? Let us know how your city will be smarter than Chicago.
For more information check out the Chicago 2016 website.
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In our effort to expand the conversation on building a smarter planet, we asked Randall Munroe, the genius behind the web-comic XKCD, to create a few just for our blog. Here’s his take on smarter health care:
As for our take on smarter health care:
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Today at 2 p.m. Eastern, the White House will continue its ongoing series of health care discussions from key stakeholders in the debate on health care reform. The focus will be on different models for primary care. IBM’s Paul Grundy and Dan Pelino will be participating in the discussion. Readers of this blog know Paul has been a strong advocate for primary care reform. You can watch the video live below.
[Note, the live stream is now complete. You can see the footage here on C-Span]
Very briefly, I found this example from a larger post by Jeff Jonas about predictive systems to be appropriate for the topics we cover here on blog – particularly in understanding some of the challenges in building analytics around disparate data sets:
Take a hypothetical biosurveillance system on the West Coast of the US, which is supposed to observe the trends of a future influenza outbreak – say a new swine flu mutation. Such a system might, for example, use newsfeeds and other available data like blogs to count incidents and locations over time. How accurate could a system make predictions if San Francisco, San Fran, SF and the Bay Area were tallied as discreet regions? If the system cannot tally geographically there might appear to be five cities each with mild volumes – when in fact, it is one dense region with moderate volumes.
Counting like entities (Semantic Reconciliation) is fundamental to the measurement of trajectory and velocity.
How often is the prospect for creating truly smarter systems derived through collecting and analyzing data from connected systems prevented by artificial boundaries to data? All of this underscores the need for software that can understand those boundaries to connect and associate appropriate data.
Smart systems, prediction systems, sensemaking systems, situational awareness systems, incremental learning systems … whatever one calls these things … must first be able to form an opinion (aka make assertions) about context (aka count and associate) … if they are to be relevant.
Read Jeff Jonas’ full post here.
In dem Video wird die Notwendigkeit für mehr Transparenz in der Nahrungsmittel Lieferkette beschrieben. Das Vertrauen in die Sicherheit unserer Nahrung ist vermutlich nicht nur in USA in den letzten Jahren gesunken…
Zahlenmaterial findet sich auch im Blog:
Cultivating a smarter food value chain | A Smarter Planet
Major stresses are appearing in the global food value chain—recalls, price spikes, hunger and waste among them—and trends such as climate change, population growth, water shortages, plateauing yields and changing consumption will likely exacerbate these stresses. From the multinational agribusiness to the farmer working his small plot of land, food is being produced in unprecedented quantities around the globe. Most experts believe that enough food is produced to feed the world, but distribution issues, waste and diversion of food sources to other products such as biofuels mean that one billion people go hungry each day and 5.6 million people die of hunger every year, according to UN estimates. At the same time, more than one in three Americans over the age of 20 are obese.
Much of the food grown and raised is never consumed—as much as 50 percent of the world’s food supply may be lost or wasted between farm and fork. Food spoils in the field and is damaged in processing or in transit. The 2009 recall of contaminated peanuts from Peanut Corporation of America was the largest recall in FDA history, comprising 3913 products, impacting 200 companies down the value chain and sickening 700 people, eight or more of whom died. Food spoils or exceeds its shelf life while in storage, in the retail market and in the home. It is wasted at the dinner table and in the restaurant. And it is consumed too much by too few, as per capita consumption of meat and dairy are on the rise. Retailers cannot get food to their customers because of out of stocks, and overstocks leave much food unconsumed. The average Consumer Products company loses 2.5% of sales due to food items being out of stock.
All stakeholders in the food supply value chain are under enormous pressure to optimize their processes and safeguard the world’s food. Where will the solution to this food crisis be found? The UN secretary general has estimated that it will take $15 billion to $20 billion dollars a year in new investments and innovations in agriculture and food technologies to offset this crisis. Technology alone cannot solve the crisis, but the application of “smart” technology—instrumented, interconnected and intelligent—just might.
The world is rapidly changing, and these changes are placing unprecedented pressures on the earth’s natural resources and the man-made systems designed to manage them. These changes are profoundly impacting the world’s food supply, which is beset by crises ranging from skyrocketing fuel and ingredient costs to major shortages where food was once plentiful, from widespread product contaminations to escalating demand for high-quality, environmentally friendly products.
IBM brought together major stakeholders in the global food supply value chain, including members of The US Congress, USDA, FDA, industry trade organizations, academia and consumer advocates in Washington, D.C. on June 24th. This overwhelmingly-successful forum produced the following highlights and sparked the discussion that will continue with subsequent events including a series of webcasts coming up shortly. http://www.youtube.com/user/IBMSocialMedia
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Following is a guest blog post by Dr. Paul Grundy
While the national debate on health care reform heats up, we’re seeing an area of common ground: the need to focus on wellness, prevention and primary care. Studies show that when someone has a comprehensive primary care provider as their usual source of care, their medical care costs one-third less and they have a 19 percent lower mortality rate.
If we increase prevention and wellness programs, we’ll reduce expensive emergency room care and free up doctors to spend more time with patients to keep them healthy — not over-treat conditions, which ratchets up costs.
I touched on this in a recent segment on BBC-TV. We need more physicians to take the initiative on health care reform through patient-centered primary care and prevention.
Doctors who embrace patient-centered care are spending more valuable time with patients, adopting electronic medical records to improve efficiency, and even consulting with patients after-hours via email to gain a full view of the patient, 24/7.
The notion of comprehensive primary physician-based care that creates a “medical home” has been proven to reduce a patient’s medical bills because it veers away from expensive, unnecessary medical tests and procedures. That’s more crucial than ever: according to a study published online by the American Journal of Medicine, 60 percent of all bankruptcies in the United States in 2007 were driven by health care costs.
We must work with physicians to build a comprehensive system of primary care and align this with how we pay them. Let’s learn from the truly successful examples. IBM employees who are patients at Kaiser Permanente are experiencing one-third less deaths from heart disease. And when they go for their eye glasses, someone will ask them about an overdue glaucoma screening exam — not about an unrelated procedure that is of little or no value to the patient.
Other places like Geisinger in Pennsylvania and Healthpartners in Minnesota are doing exciting things with a focus on primary care. At Geisinger a patient centered medical home model decreased hospitalizations by 48%. Healthpartners has pioneered nonpayment for treatment of preventable complications and they have focused on condition management at the point of care delivery.
Fixing the health care crisis is a huge task. We clearly want to have care for all, but in order to afford this, we need to focus like a laser on transforming the model of care itself and building upon the need for primary care and prevention. We need to accomplish real care management — at the point of care delivery — with the tools and technology to support primary care. That should be accomplished not in a physician-centric way, but in a patient-centered way with a total team approach, involving nurses, mental health providers, pharmacists, office staff and physicians.
As a large employer, IBM has 450,000 reasons to care about the national discussion about healthcare reform — counting employees, retirees and dependents, IBM spent. $1.3 billion on health care alone in 2008.
And as a country, we need to invest more in primary care doctors and incent them in line with the outcomes we want: better health. Only on this foundation can we build smarter healthcare that makes sense.
Dr. Paul Grundy is Director, Healthcare Transformation, IBM, and President of the Patient-Centered Primary Care Cooperative (www.pcpcc.net)
Ein interessanter Artikel über Tumblr - die Plattform, die wir auch für uns nutzen. Irgendwo zwischen Blogging und Twittering befindet sich Tumblr und verbindet die Vorteile beider Ansätze.
Tumblr operates on two different levels at once: On one, Tumblr is an elegant and easy-to-use blogging platform that lets users create web pages far more attractively and quickly than something like Wordpress or Drupal. On the second level, Tumblr has a culture of reblogging (via Tumblr Raises Money, Touts “Really Sexy” Plus Accounts)
