Editor’s note: the following was originally posted on John’s blog.
Time for the annual pilgrimage to Austin for South By Southwest. I’ve been on panels before but, with zero disrespect to previous co-panelists, the one I have currently lined up is going to be really freaking good, maybe the best ever. Here’s detail.
Tuesday, March 16
11:00 AM
Room 9ABC
Austin Convention Center
[Add to my.sxsw.com or sitby.us.]
The panel is a great cross-section of perspective on networked urbanism. We got non-profit, academia, start-up, city government, and faceless mega-corporation (me).
Ben Berkowitz runs SeeClickFix.com, a tool that allows communities to report non-emergency issues to those responsible for the public space. This app has changed the conversation around civic engagement and prompted a number of municipalities to rethink their 311 strategy. Also, NPR likes it.
Assaf Biderman is the Assistant Director of the SENSEable City Lab at MIT. The work from the lab itself is amazing (flying LED robots, trash-tracking, city bikes that are also environmental sensors!), but it also approaches art, having been featured at the Venice Bienalle, Centre Pompidou, and Ars Electronica. Also, he’s the suavest panel member.
Dustin Haisler is the CIO and Administrative Judge for the City of Manor, Texas. Words can’t do justice to the amazingness that is Dustin. But a link might. He’s just completely rewritten the rules of city governance and engagement. Also, he’s younger than you.
Jen Masengarb is an Education Specialist at the Chicago Architecture Foundation where she educates the public about cities and the built environment. Jen gets what it takes to translate the urban world for its citizens and is a template for how we might do so in our second cities of data. Also, she’s the femalest member of the panel.
And then, me, of course. I’m just stewarding the awesome above.
We’re going to tackle three question areas, broadly.
- What is the physically-built urban environment’s relationship to the digital environment that is being built atop it? Put another way, is there a mandate for information architects to be thinking as critically about cities as they do about websites?
- What is the design imperative: how do we train the makers of today to think about the city as a platform?
- What is the role of citizens in this design? This is different than focus groups and user studies. Citizens shape the machine that is the city in completely indirect and informal ways.
If you’ll be in Austin for South by Southwest — and you’re hanging around until the last day of Interactive — I’ll bet you a taco and a beer you’ll learn something from this panel.
Recap post and podcast to follow.
[Editor's note v.2: For those who will be at SXSW, we are hosting an informal networking gathering Sunday evening to talk about the future of Cities. If interested, email Adam Christensen at acch (@) us.ibm.com.]
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In recent years, cities, states, and national governments have been harnessing the power of the Internet to provide citizens with information and services, and to find out what their people think and want. These efforts began with simple Web sites, but now they can be much more sophisticated. The widespread use of social networking technology makes it possible for citizens to participate in government as true partners with their elected representatives and officials. At the same time, the availability of vast amounts of information, including everything from street-by-street crime statistics to on-time records for mass transit, means government officials and citizens can know with precision how well or poorly the systems we depend on to conduct our daily lives are functioning. In short, governments are getting smarter—and citizens are better off for it.
Unfortunately, not everybody gets an equal shot at connecting and getting the information and services they need. In emerging markets, hundreds of millions of people are illiterate or semi-literate. Even if they could afford a computer and an Internet connection, it’s unlikely they could use it to interact with government. Everywhere, blind and deaf people face similar access problems, and so do the elderly.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Access to government services and participation in civic life can be dramatically increased for this vast group of people. The solutions include mobile Internet connectivity, new voice technologies, and collaboration between technology providers and other interested parties aimed at making such access ubiquitous.
IBM has long been concerned about making it easier for people with disabilities to use computers and access the Net. We support the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines published by the World Wide Web Consortium. They include guides for making authoring tools, Web content, and browsers that support text-to-speech software, text-to-Braille hardware, and other aids to accessibility.
But much more can be done, and we’re working on it. IBM Research Fellow Chieko Asakawa, who is blind, is leading an internal effort to identify all of the technologies and experts within our global laboratories that can help advance the access capabilities of illiterate and disabled people. Our aim is to produce game-changing technology breakthroughs.
Asakawa is already a leader in the accessibility field. In 1997, her research group released one of the first Web browsers designed to read the content of Web pages aloud. In 2004, the team produced software that helps Web site designers improve their pages so its easier for blind people to navigate them, such as using a man’s voice for text and a woman’s voice for links. Now she’s leading a collaborative research project aimed at improving Web access for the illiterate and elderly. IBM’s partners in this effort are the National Institute of Design of India and the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at University of Tokyo. Over the next two years, the alliance plans on developing an common user interface platform for mobile devices so they’ll be easier to use. The ideas and software the researchers produce will be freely available. “We believe our work will help invite people into the world, so they can fully participate,” says Asakawa.
Asakawa dreams big. She envisions a world where accessibility technologies are designed into the whole array of mobile and non-mobile communications devices from the get-go, rather than being seen as things that can be added on later. By giving every human being equal access to the full benefits of a digital life, we’ll have smarter governments—and a much smarter planet, too.
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Following is a guest post by Dr. Chandrasekhar (Spike) Narayan:
Environmentally sustainable plastics, smarter recycling methods, new ways to deliver medicine – these are all areas that could benefit from recent discoveries in green polymer chemistry by some of our scientists at IBM Research and Stanford University. The discoveries will be published in a paper in the American Chemical Society Journal, Macromolecules, on March 10th. You can find an abstract of the paper now at acs.org.
Recently, my colleague Dr. Thomas Theis wrote about how IBM Research is exploring new areas such as DNA sequencing and water filtration using our chip, materials and nanotech expertise.
Similarly, this chemistry breakthrough around sustainable plastics represents another example of how we are expanding beyond our traditional boundaries by applying lessons learned in the development of photoresists for advanced microelectronics.
In the process of solving the problem of how to make metal-free materials and processes for the thin polymeric films that serve as lithography materials for on-chip application, we began exploring other ways to apply this research beyond the traditional IT uses with our partners.
Through pioneering the application of organocatalysis to industries such as biodegradable plastics, plastics recycling and healthcare, this discovery and new approach that uses organic catalysts could lead to biodegradable materials made from renewable resources in an environmentally responsible way.
The following video sheds more light on the breakthrough:
Dr. Chandrasekhar (Spike) Narayan presently leads the Science and Technology Organization at IBM’s Almaden Research Center.
Even if you attended or viewed some of the videos from our New York City Smarter Cities event in October, you’ll find that last week’s first-ever Smarter Cities Virtual Forum affords a deeper dive into some of the key issues and smarter solutions that cities from Richmond, Virginia (public safety) to Las Vegas, Nevada (transportation) are undertaking today. One of the nice features of hosting the event virtually is the ability to deliver the presentations to you, in their entirety, on demand.
IBM’s new General Manager for North America, Bridget van Kralingen opened the forum with an update on our Smarter Cities initiatives and on what we’re seeing come out of these important conversations, as more people understand and embrace its vision.
- Cities are taking their first steps, piloting projects to improve efficiency and lower costs: The District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority (DC WASA) is working with IBM to analyze and revitalize its aging water and sewer system.
- Relationships are deepening: IBM completed an automatic metering project with Houston-based Centerpoint Energy, and now the utility is engaging with us for a Smart Grid project.
- Understanding and awareness are growing: Fordham University in New York has developed a new business analytics curriculum, preparing students with the needed skills to address key challenges – from reforming healthcare, to making buildings more energy efficient, to improving delivery of public services.
- Cross-industry connections are being made: Sempra Energy, based in San Diego, is partnering with grocery retailer Kroger developing charging infrastructure for electric vehicles.
Later, in her keynote, North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue noted that as cities recover from the global recession of last year, “there will be a new normal for people, business and government at all levels.”
Governor Perdue discussed how North Carolina is doing business differently across the board to ensure its cities run smarter, leaner and poised to compete globally. She shared some of the targeted initiatives she’s been undertaking to address each of her top four priorities for the state – job creation, education, smarter government and public safety – and how she’s positioning North Carolina to be a world leader in green energy and green technology.
Speaking of green, the general session concludes with an insightful presentation and Q&A with Joseph Rigby, Chairman of Pepco Holdings, Inc., one of the largest energy delivery companies in the mid-Atlantic. His company, which was awarded $168 million in federal stimulus funding for smart grid projects over the next several years, has begun implementing smart meters in Delaware with plans to deploy them in Washington, DC, and Maryland, later this year.
Now that we’ve hopefully whet your appetite, I invite you to replay the general session and each of the six subsequent breakout sessions – which feature additional experts and some great Q&A – on energy, transportation, government, education, public safety and healthcare.
Leslie J. Monreal-Feil is an IBMer based in South Florida.
Every year, it seems like there are hundreds of thousands of medical conferences. And the topics are too many to name. These conferences are where scientists and clinicians can get together to share ideas, experiences and data. But on a smarter planet, that kind of collaboration can be constant and continuous, rather than limited to time and place.
Take research studies, for instance. Each time a research team launches a new study, they create a new database, and build from the ground up. But what if they could tap into a larger database that’s ready-made?
For the Australian healthcare community, that database exists. It’s called BioGrid Australia, an online service hosted by Melbourne Health that lets physicians and researchers use data from multiple sources—particularly outside their own organizations. This allows them to tap an exponentially larger pool of anonymous medical histories gathered by many institutions. And that means stronger—and more reliable—results.
Can genetic biomarkers give insight into a patient’s response to a particular drug? Do colorectal cancer patients with diabetes have a higher rate of recurrence? What is the best treatment plan for post-surgical cancer patients?
These are the kind of questions BioGrid is designed to help address. And in research, numbers count. Now, data from more than 80,000 patients and 25 million records from up to 25 years of research is available to authorized clinicians. BioGrid lets researchers increase the sample size of their studies—from less than 250 patients to more than 1,000 patients—and increase the statistical power of their findings.
BioGrid is virtual, but such resources can have physical homes as well.
A brick and mortar collaboratory is now under development in Taiwan. IBM Researchers will work with various entities—be them university, government, or commercial partners —to share skills, assets and resources toward a common goal. The facility will bring together expertise in the areas of healthcare services, privacy, data management, analytics and device management.
Congressman Earl Blumenauer, Oregon at IBM's Smarter Transportation Forum
Rather than provide only my own recap of the highly insightful sessions at last week’s Smarter Transportation event in Washington D.C., let me simply point you to the recap from Sean Barry, from Transportation For America, and give you direct access to all the videos of the sessions.
Barry points out two session highlights in particular on the T4America blog, the first from Dr. Leo Kroon of the Netherlands Railway and second from Gunnar Soderholm, of the Stockholm. We’ve talked about Stockholm quite a lot here on the blog, so I’ll focus Dr. Kroon’s comments:
“Kroon described the importance of rail in his “tiny country,” whose 16 million people make it extremely dense. According to Kroon, rail market share between some Dutch cities reaches 50 percent, an amount that would be unheard of in the United States. And rather than force anyone onto the train, Kroon says the Netherlands Railways “seduces” them instead, through continued technological improvement that makes travel convenient and a commitment to reliability and affordability.”
The concept of “seducing” travelers into transit is one we could do well to emulate elsewhere. Even here in New York City, where transit is quite effective and ridership is relatively high, I would hardly consider the riding the subway a seductive experience (though, it does have it’s own charm.
Cost and efficiency are critical pieces of creating a public transportation system that seduces ridership. But it’s beyond simple utility.
Think of premium brands: Apple, BMW, etc. They seduce you on a level above pure functionality. You pay more for the experience. I could find mp3 players far cheaper than the iPod with similar (sometimes better) functionality, yet I willingly pay more so I can have an iPod in my pocket.
What if we applied a similar approach to transit? I’m not naive about the realities we face, nor the challenges of this kind of approach. But surely there’s more we can do to entice transit ridership.
Click here for video archives of the entire event, which included remarks from the following:
- * Dr. Robert Bertini, Deputy Administrator, Research & Innovative Technology Administration (RITA), US DOT
- * Dr. Leo Kroon, Logistics Consultant, Netherlands Railways
- * Gunnar Soderholm, Head of Environmental & Health Administration, City of Stockholm
- * Judge Quentin Kopp, Member and Former Chairman, California High Speed Rail Authority
- * Tom Wright, Executive Director, Regional Plan Administration
- * Janet Kavinoky, Director of Transportation Infrastructure, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
- * Michael Replogle, Global Policy Director, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy
- * Congressman Earl Blumenauer, Oregon, 3rd District
Update: As noted in the comments below, I’ve corrected the Netherlands population number to “16″ million in the quote.
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If there’s one trend that underpins nearly every topic and post we’ve addressed here on this blog in the past 18 months, it is data. The reason we instrument the world is to generate and collect data. The reason we collect data is to analyze it. The reason to analyze data is to understand better the world around us. And the reason to understand the world around us better is to make decisions that improve that world.
It is all very simple, really, in a linear sort of rationale. The challenge, of course, is the inherent complexity at each of those steps.
Which is where human expertise, computing power and analytical software play a huge role. You can’t create a congestion charging system without software and sensors. You can’t create predictive models to understand the spread of infectious diseases without massive computing power. And you can’t apply it in the context of human behavior without a fundamental understanding of psychology, culture and politics.
Why am I talking about all of this? And what’s it got to do with the video above? If you live in the United States and happen to own a television, you are likely to come across a whole new slate of IBM TV advertising in the coming days that at a very high level does two things: 1) reinforces the point that data is fundamental to creating a Smarter Planet; and 2) highlights just a few of the thousands of IBMers whose day jobs are to think about data on a smarter planet.
Following are a few of the ads you’ll begin to see soon.
Featuring Julia Grace, IBM Researcher working on social and collaborative computing:
embedded by Embedded VideoFeaturing John Cohn, IBM Fellow and “Distinguished Agitator” (and a familiar face here on this blog):
embedded by Embedded VideoFeaturing Jeff Jonas IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Scientist, Entity Analytic Solutions, IBM Software Group:
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Following is a guest post from IBMer Lonne Jaffe:
At the HIMSS 2010 conference in Atlanta this week, the topic of improving collaboration in the healthcare industry will be front and center. At IBM, we believe software that can enable hospitals, physicians, patients, health insurance companies and others to share information, work together and collaborate more effectively is critical to decreasing healthcare costs and improving the quality of care.
For example, Boston Medical Center and caregivers across the Boston HealthNet are using collaboration software from IBM and IBM Business Partner Carefx in a new eReferral system, enabling primary care physicians to share information with specialists both before the referral and after the specialist visit. Previously, as is the case in many health systems, referrals were tracked by generating paper and faxes, often getting lost in the process. The result? The time to get an appointment with a specialist has declined from 90 days to less than 10 days in many cases.
Another way to improve collaboration is to get a more comprehensive view of the patient. IBM announced today it has finalized the acquisition of Initiate Systems, a software vendor that has played a key role in improving data integrity and collaboration across the healthcare industry. The software can sort through billions of patient records at a time, determining each unique individual from another with a similar name, so doctors can get an accurate and complete view of every patient. More than 1,700 healthcare organizations and some 40 health information exchanges (HIEs) across the world use the technology to uniquely identify patient records at all points of registration and care across various systems and different organizations.
This acquisition also brings to IBM technology for collaboration between physicians and hospitals, facilitating the flow of important information such as referrals and lab results. It is also another example of what we consider smarter healthcare – helping healthcare organizations everywhere capture, share, analyze and act on information in a connected, coordinated and systematic way.
Lonne Jaffe is Director, Public Sector Solutions, IBM Software
