Following is a guest post from Leendert van Bochoven, IBM’s NATO and European Defense Leader:
Within the next few days, Brussels-based Security & Defence Agenda (SDA) will be releasing a report (pdf) that makes recommendations to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU) for broad policy changes to improve global security.
What makes this report so unusual is not the content itself; rather, it’s the source: The recommendations come from nearly 4,000 people from 124 countries and all walks of life who “jammed” for five days in February on global security challenges.
In the process these individuals made history. I was there. I saw it happen. I participated.
The occasion was the first ever global Security Jam, which used IBM jamming and advanced analytics technologies and services to successfully engage thousands of people in moderated on-line discussions over the Internet.
This was a “first” on many levels: It was the first time that civilians and military experts, including defence and security professionals, journalists, and representatives from governments, think-tanks, academia, and industry, had come together using this form of social media to discuss, debate and brainstorm on the changing nature of 21st century security. An idea born over a beer with Mike Ryan from the US Ambassy in Brussels. It was the first time that EU and NATO had supported such an open debate involving the international community – people beyond the “usual suspects” — on such a strategic and sensitive subject as our global security.
There were a tough set of issues to tackle, including crisis preparedness, cross-border cooperation, climate change, and cyber threats. These issues illustrate just how interconnected our planet has become. This interconnectedness affects geographic, organisational and institutional boundaries, as well as our concept of who we are and how we relate to one another. No greater symbol of this interconnectedness could have been that both EU and NATO supported this Security Jam.
I applaud NATO and the EU for supporting the Security Jam and for recognizing that new thinking, new levels of collaboration and greater civilian-military cooperation are needed to find viable solutions to global security challenges. Maybe this Security Jam should be turned into an annual online meeting of the minds, with the stature of “Davos” and the reach of “Facebook”, discussing smart ideas for dealing with today´s and tomorrow´s security challenges.
The Security Jam and the recommendations that followed are game-changing. But the full measure of success will be whether we can look back in a few years to see the realization and implementation of smart ideas that emerged from the Security Jam.
I, for one, am confident we will.
Leendert van Bochoven is IBM’s NATO and European Defense Leader.
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Jack Mason in
If you stroll outside IBM’s offices at 11 Madison Ave in New York City with an iPhone or Android-powered smartphone, you’ll discover something strange and new in Madison Square Park, and it’s not the Gormley sculpture exhibit imported from London.
Using Tagwhat — the augmented reality (AR) content creation service just launched — we’ve scattered bits of content about Smarter Cities, analytics and the Internet of Things throughout the park. On one corner there is an item about Cabsense, a new app that predicts the best nearby corner to find a taxi, based on crunching a year’s worth of GPS data and traffic patterns from NYC cabs.
Right smack in the middle of the park you can find a post pointing to the wonderful Internet of Things video with IBMers Mike Wing, Andy Standford-Clark and John Tolva.
Towards the southeast corner, near the popular Shake Shack eatery, is another tag hovering in virtual/physical space. It touches on how RFID tags are being used to track sensitive shipments such as strawberries, like those used in the Shack’s delectable hand-spun shakes. 
The aim was to create, literally out of thin air, a kind of location-specific walking tour or exhibit of how cities and urban centers can become suffused with new kinds of intelligence. AR is one of the promising new dimensions of that kind of ambient intelligence converging at the cross roads of digital and physical realms. In fact, we’re calling this little pilot MadSqAIR, as in Augmented Intelligent Reality, to undescore the connection. You can follow developments at http://www.tagwhat.com/smartercities and via Twitter at @madsqAIR.
We’re also using the Foursquare location-based social media network to let people in the Madison Square Park neighborhood discover this open AIR experience.
To see this array of posts in the park, download the Tagwhat app from the Android market (an iPhone version is pending). You can post comments on tags, or even create some of your own. In fact, you don’t even need a phone to create AR content. Just use the Google Maps tool on Tagwhat’s site. We hope this experiment can grow across New York City, as well as in other metropolitan centers. We also hope to put this new platform and approach to work for the upcoming 2010 Global CEO Study launch.
What uses of Augmented Intelligent Reality can you imagine that would help make our cities, systems and entire planet smarter? Please share your thoughts and comments.
One of the most emotion-fraught scenes in Precious, the highly-regarded 2009 film, takes place when the protagonist, an overweight, illiterate, 16-year-old black girl living in New York’s Harlem neighborhood, steals a bucket of fried chicken from a fast-food restaurant and stuffs her face as she rushes to school. Rather than providing sustenance, the food makes her sick.
This scene encapsulates the extreme complexity of improving public health. A nation’s health care system is just one of many influences that determine whether individuals are healthy or not. You’ve also got to consider the family situation, education, genetics, poverty, location, transportation, retailing, advertising and a host of other factors. Each of these factors is a complex system in itself, with its own dynamics. Add them all together, with all of their interdependencies, and it looks like chaos.
But it doesn’t have to be.
Some of our research colleagues at the Almaden lab are working on a project aimed at making it possible for government and business policymakers to get an accurate, holistic view of health so they can analyze the situation well and craft better ways of improving it. Called SPLASH (it’s an acronym, but don’t ask what the letters stand for), the project seeks to create a technology platform and a community for integrating all of the data models that researchers and social scientists have created for the various systems affecting health. “People started to realize that this could be done, but nobody was mapping the system of systems. It’s so complicated,” says Paul Maglio, an IBM researcher who co-leads the project along with researcher Pat Selinger, who adds: “We hope to build a community of people who can contribute models and data, start a dialogue, and do joint work together.”
That dialogue was launched last week at Almaden Institute 2010, a two-day conference held at the lab in San Jose, Calif. About 200 people from different health-oriented realms watched presentations and discussed the possibilities for collaboration. Some were quite enthusiastic about forming a community. “I’d love to partner with you. I hope this can be the beginning of a good conversation,” said Kevin Grumbach, the chief of family and community medicine at San Francisco General Hospital.
There’s a lot of technical work to be done, which is one reason why IBM Research has made SPLASH one of its so-called grand challenges–big-bet projects that require technical breakthroughs. The difficult tasks include defining software languages and methods for describing and matching data models, and inventing frameworks for integrating the various models.
The other main challenges are not technical: Understanding how to communicate effectively with policymakers and defining innovative business models that create win-win situations for various participants in the system. What kinds of incentives, for instance, could government leaders create to induce grocery stores stocking a wide variety of fresh fruits and vegetables to locate outlets in inner city neighborhoods?
For starters, the team will attempt to create an integrated model for addressing the causes and effects of obesity.
This effort is certainly daunting, but, if it works, it could help transform the art of health policy decision making into a science.
Earlier today at the Intelligent Transportation Society of America’s annual meeting in Houston, IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano shared the stage with the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood, and delivered the day’s keynote speech. We’ll have more insights and feedback from the speech in the coming days, but I want to call out a few of the key points as they underscore some of the thinking here around a path forward for transportation in America by applying a level of systems thinking.
From the speech:
Over the past year and a half, IBM has been working with cities and nations around the world to improve many kinds of systems and make them smarter – with particular success in transportation.
In doing so, we have learned that our transportation system isn’t, in fact, a system. It’s a collection of related industries, operating in close proximity to one another.
The opportunity is that as we think about transportation as a true system, we have the opportunity to reinvent transportation for the needs of the 21st century. But what exactly is a systems approach? From Sam’s speech:
- First, there must be clarity on the system’s purpose or goal – a vision of its end-state.
- Second, its elements must actually be connected – which is another way of saying, interfaces matter.
- Third, we must be able to know, continually and with confidence, the status of the system and its critical components.
- Finally, the system must be able to adapt as conditions change, often in real time.
Now, translating that for the transportation industry, here are some implications, in my own paraphrasing:
- A vision of its purpose. In short, a traveler-centric system that is oriented around people. Sam cited airline passenger rights and the livable streets movement as examples of this.
- Connected elements. The components of a transportation system – vehicles (in the broad definition), pathways and terminals – must be connected to the governmental agencies and regulations, manufacturers, and service providers to share data and information across the system. And ultimately, the human in the system must be able to connect with each other.
- Status is known. This is well-worn territory on this blog. As we instrument the system at all access points, collecting and analyzing the data, we begin to understand with confidence the status of the system – its health, its opportunity, its weaknesses, its strengths. All of this leads to better, more informed decisions by all parties.
- Adaptability. This is about scale. As demand and population grows, the system can’t just grow linearly. We need to find ways to do things differently. And we understand what to do differently through data. Data matters.
Sam closed with a clear call to action for all the participants in the ITSA forum. Actually, four calls to action. We’ll probe further on each of these in the coming weeks.
First, standards: We must establish agreed-upon data standards for transportation. This is long overdue, but I am hopeful that it will soon be accomplished. As we do, however, it is essential that those standards be open. That’s the only way to interconnect processes and data sets across the whole system. On this, you need to be an active voice.
Second, smart systems by design: In anything as complex, interdependent and fluid as the transportation ecosystem, the qualities we seek cannot be “bolted on” after the fact. We need to build in the key criteria of interconnectivity, system knowingness, analytics and security from the beginning, by design.
Third, moving to a true transportation system will enable – and require – far more collaboration: I’m not just talking about the familiar idea of “private sector-public sector cooperation.” A diverse, multi-stakeholder world requires all the parties actually working together, shoulder-to-shoulder on a daily basis. Yes, we all have particular responsibilities – to customers, to partners, to regulators, to citizens. But in today’s world, fulfilling those responsibilities requires that we also fulfill our responsibilities to the system as a whole. That will be transformative. But it will also require change.
And by the way, speaking of collaboration… let’s come together and use the next nine months to educate members of Congress on incorporating smart technology into the nation’s transportation infrastructure – in preparation for passing the full, six-year surface transportation authorization bill.
Finally, policy and ethics: From new models of technology… to the changing form of the corporation… to the changing role of the individual in modern life… to new expectations for sustainable living… we are entering a very different world. We must come together around clear guidelines on how to operate and manage our organizations and industry, from an ethical and societal point of view.
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Steve Hamm in
W. Brian Arthur explains agent-based modeling.
What if legislators could foresee how people might find loopholes in the bills they’re working on–and head it off? That was one of the themes in a fascinating presentation made by the Santa Fe Institute’s W. Brian Arthur at IBM’s Smarter Health Through Modeling and Simulation conference last week in San Jose, Calif.
Arthur, an external professor at the institute, which focuses on the study of complex systems, said that by using agent-based modeling, researchers could have been able to identify some of the unintended consequences of the partial repeal in 1999 of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had prohibited bank holding companies, whose accounts are insured by the federal government, from owning securities businesses. Some economists have blamed the repeal of the act for worsening the effects of the global financial crisis.
The techniques could have headed off some of the problems that arose with Massachusetts’ health care reforms, as well. One of the problems with the the Massachusetts system, he said, is that too many people signed up for health insurance only when they anticipated they would need it in the not-too-distant future, so they took benefits from the system but didn’t contribute their fair share to the insurance pool. Arthur said agent-based models could have spotted this loophole ahead of time and allowed legislators or the insurance industry to put in place rules that could close it.
In this video clip, Arthur explains the magic of agent-based modeling.
