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Steve Hamm in
The world is teaming with billions of sensors measuring everything from temperature and light to motion and video imagery. In the coming years, billions more of the tiny devices are expected to be spread across the world like so much digital dust. But the sensor networks of today and tomorrow won’t be able to fulfill their true potential unless it’s easier to build software applications and upgrade the capabilities of sensors that are already deployed. That’s why scientists at IBM Research in Zurich, Switzerland, invented a package of software called Mote Runner.
Mote Runner, announced today at a sensor industry conference, is both an operating system for wireless sensor networks and an application development platform. Our scientists hope that the software will help foster an explosion of creativity and business activity capitalizing on the Internet of Things–the myriad of devices that can be connected via the Internet, forming something like a central nervous system for the planet. (Check out the video: Internet of Things) “If you put a tool in peoples’ hands that’s easy to use, they will come up with amazing ideas,” says Thorsten Kramp, an IBM Research scientist.
The technology is available for free downloading to students and university researchers at www.alphaworks.ibm.com. It’s available for commercial purposes for a fee.
Kramp and his colleagues had previously developed smart card technology based on the popular Java programming language. They turned their attention to sensor networks two years ago when they saw that their use was expanding more slowly than many people had hoped. The reason, Kramp says, was that the most commonly used operating systems for sensor networks were difficult to write programs for–often requiring that people learn specialized programming languages.
Applications built on top of Mote Runner can be written in either Java or C#, two popular programming languages. In addition, since Mote Runner is a virtual machine, an application can be written once and run an a variety of sensor networks hardware. Mote Runner also makes it possible for these sensor networks to be upgraded with new capabilities dynamically.
One of the leading sensor network companies, MEMSIC, has agreed to distribute Mote Runner with its products starting in July.
But Kramp says this is just the beginning. He hopes that the introduction of Mote Runner will be a catalyzing event, and that other scientists and software programmers will develop their own, compatible platforms based on the same technical specifications.
By the way, the name Mote Runner comes from motes, which is the name for wireless sensor nodes, and Road Runner, IBM’s fastest-in-the-world supercomputer. Mote Runner won’t be especially fast, but, with luck, it will be big.
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Steve Hamm in
We’ve been talking about creating a smarter planet for a year and a half, but it’s a lot more than talk. At this point, IBM has engaged with 430 clients on smarter cities projects and we’ve learned a lot about how this sort of thing gets done. Ginni Rometty, IBM’s senior vice president for sales and distribution, talked about the lessons at SmarterCities Shanghai.
These are complex situations. Cities are systems of systems, from transportation and health care to public safety and utilities. Understanding the workings of each individual system is complex by itself. But to improve the functioning of cities you have to understand and manage the interdependencies between the systems. So it’s a step by step journey, Rometty said.
Step #1: Instrument to manage. You’ve got to collect a lot of data; then understand it, manage it, and act on it. She mentioned a great example. It’s not a city situation, actually, but it demonstrates the power of instrumentation: In New Zealand, farmers discovered that dairy cows produce more milk when when they listen to music. But all cows don’t have the same taste in music, so farmers use the RFID tags attached to each cow to identify them when they enter the milking stall and play each one the music they like best. Who knew!
Step #2: Integrate to innovate. By combining data from many related sources, city leaders can draw superior insights. A good illustration is New York City’s Realtime Crime Center. The city gathers a tremendous amount of data about crimes and criminals and makes it available to police managers and individual police officers on a realtime basis. This makes it possible for police to respond quickly and to even anticipate crimes, and to predict where a person might go after they commit a crime. The system has contributed to the city’s incredible public safety improvements: The crime rate has dropped by 27% since 2001.
Step #3: Optimize to transform. All the data in the world doesn’t matter much if you don’t do something with it–have an impact on people’s day-to-day lives. A cool example here is Singapore. The tiny country is pushing public transportation hard. Working with IBM Research, it has developed a system that makes it possible for bus riders to find out if their bus is going to be on time. In the future, they’ll be able to know if a bus is overcrowded. Maybe they’ll wait for one with open seats. It’s all part of an effort to make public transportation both a way of life and a pleasurable experience.
Actually, there’s another step that’s got to come first, Rometty said. That’s getting all of the parties involved in the project to agree on what their common ambition is. Otherwise, they’ll be pulling against each other from beginning to end.
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Steve Hamm in
I’m a sucker for efforts that bridge the gaps between different cultures and systems, and a collaboration between IBM and the Guangdong Provincial Hospital of Chinese Medicine is particularly intriguing. We’re helping to integrate the best features of Western and traditional Chinese medicine.
The 77-year-old hospital was founded at a time when Western medicine was making major inroads in China, and a group of physicians in Guangdong province organized the institution to preserve the practice of traditional Chinese medicine. TCM consists of using herbal medicines, acupuncture, massage, healthy diet, and talk therapy. There’s a focus on prevention, and on treating the body and mind together. There’s no surgery. But, while the hospital concentrates on traditional medicine, mixes it with Western medicine. That’s a winning combination. The hospital has thrived. It now has five branches and serves more than 5.4 million patients per year.
But its leaders aren’t satisfied with the status quo. They’re determined to improve the effectiveness of traditional medicine, the integration of Chinese medicine with Western medicine, and training of physicians in TCM. So they’re working with IBM to improve their electronic medical records, their knowledge management system, and their research into treatment outcomes.
At the SmarterCities Shanghai event, the director of the hospital, Lu Yu Bo, talked about his goals. One of his main frustrations has been the difficulty in educating new practitioners. It’s a slow process. TCM is based on the experience of the physician and their analysis of the needs of each individual patient. So Lu wants to capture the knowledge of veteran doctors, using information technology, and transfer it more quickly to medical students–at the same time creating more standardized processes and best practices. Another major goal is establishing the scientific basis of TCM. “We’re moving toward theory-based medicine,” he said.
Lu believes there’s a lot of potential now for spreading the use of Chinese medicine worldwide–bringing new treatments to bear on diseases for which there is no cure in Western medicine and, at the same time, addressing the need for better preventative medicine. “The best doctors are those who can prevent disease from arriving,” he said.
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Steve Hamm in
Fareed Zakaria rarely fails to impress. Nobody understands and expresses the dynamics of globalization better than he. In his keynote at the SmarterPlanet Shanghai conference, he pointed out that the relationship of the world’s developed countries and the emerging ones has changed dramatically in the past half-decade. In earlier days, the developed nations could usually be counted on to employ sophisticated, disciplined financial controls and economic policies. The emerging nations: not so much. But Zakaria pointed out that China, India and Brazil are managing the current global economic crisis better than the Western giants. China, for instance, controlled growth and built up a budget surplus during the boom years. The United States, on the other hand, built up huge deficits with tax cuts and wars, and promoted unsustainable economic growth. As a result, China was able to respond more effectively when the crisis came. “The world has turned upside down,” said Zakaria.
But Zakaria also gently chided China. He said one of the keys to China’s success since Deng Xiaoping began liberalizing the economy three decades ago was its willingness to learn from the rest of the world, to adopt best practices, and to remain modest about its accomplishments. Today, however, Zakaria senses the emergence of an “arrogance” that concerns him. He urged the Chinese leaders in the audience to heed Deng’s guidance and remain modest and willing to learn. “Stay open to the world,” he said.
Zakaria is optimistic about the future. He said Al-Qaeda will ultimately go down as nothing more than a footnote in history, and this era will be shaped much more profoundly by three pillars of global economic strength: political stability in the wake of the end of the Cold War, better economic management in emerging nations, and global electronic connectivity. “These elements are what knits the world together,” he said.
Posted by
Adam Christensen in
Click on the image above to launch a video player of IBM CEO Sam Palmisano’s full presentation at the Smarter Cities Summit in Shanghai.
Rather than belabor the recap of the speech, I’ll let you watch and draw your own conclusions. The total video is 25 minutes.
If you missed the prior recaps see the previous few posts on other insights from today’s sessions, and be sure to watch here more tomorrow for many more. You can follow the conversations live on Twitter as well. Let us know your thoughts by adding a comment below.
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
Atrium of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, Shanghai
It’s remarkable how much computing, communications, supply chains, knowledge, and economic development have in common. They’re all increasingly taking the shape of networks, operating with the same principles. And, as such, they are some of the most powerful forces at work in the world today.
This thought came through loud and clear in a SmarterCities Shanghai session led by Victor Fung, group chairman of Li & Fung, the Hong Kong-based trading, distribution and manufacturing giant. In network parlance, Li & Fung is a hub, a maker of connections–which makes it tremendously important globally. In fact, over the past 30 years, Li & Fung wrote the book on the modern global supply chain. It operates in 40 countries and runs a network of 30,000 suppliers, but Fung made the point that Li & Fung’s network is really made up of a constellation of cities. The company orchestrates its network, getting things done in the places and by the organizations that can do them most efficiently and effectively. “Our global supply chain is the story of the connectedness of 100 cities,’ Fung told the audience.
Years ago, all around the world, places vied to be the next Silicon Valley, a concentration of talent and enterprise and intellectual property and intellectual foment. But that model is now outdated, it’s clear. Today, the Silicon Valleys are increasingly virtual, networks of relationships between people and places with different and complementary capabilities. Li & Fung and its suppliers are the new Silicon Valley.
There are powerful networks within the global network, too. The Pearl River Delta is a cluster of cities in Southeastern China with a total population of 60 million people and a GDP of $600 billion–12% of China’s overall GDP. “Every city in the region has a specialized place in the network,” says Fung. “You ask what can we do as a group, rather than as a single city.”
I’ll make this prediction without trepidation: The businesses, governments, and individuals who understand their connectedness and learn how to orchestrate it will be the great successes of the 21st Century.
Posted by
Adam Christensen in
With the first sessions just now concluded, I’m left with two overriding and related impressions.
First, I was impressed with the substance presented about the role that technology is playing in the modernization and urban development around the globe. Now, I’m sure you are saying, “of course you’d say that, you are from IBM.” True, perhaps, except that this sentiment didn’t come from IBM. It came clearly from the first two presenters, Madam Ma Xiuhong, Vice Minister of Commerce, People’s Republic of China, and Yang Xiong, Senior Vice Mayor, City of Shanghai. Both Madam Xiuhong and Mr Xiong spent considerable time discussing the specific role technology has played in the massive transformation of China over the past two decades. Madam Xiuhong spoke at length about how the Chinese Government sees the Internet of Things as fundamental in the future development of cities and fueling worldwide growth. In fact, considering every speaker spoke at length about the Internet of Things, I’ll be writing up a separate post on that later.
Second, it was clear that the the massive modernization and urbanization happening in China places it at a monumental point in its long history. This fact has not been lost on its leaders and they articulated a very clear vision of how they plan to use the government’s resources to actively exploit these factors to shape the future development of China’s cities and the country as a whole. China wants to build smarter cities, from the ground up.
This underscored a point that IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano, made during a panel discussion with China Mobile’s CEO, Wang Jianzhou. The panel moderator, Yang Lan, (the famous Chinese TV host, businesswoman, and Chairperson of Sun Media Group) asked whether the concepts for a smarter city were more relevant to developed cities, rather than developing cities. Sam countered that the opposite, in fact, is true because many developed cities have to deal with a built infrastructure that heralds from a bygone era.
This point was illustrated by the story Mr. Jinzhou shared about how a 13-year old boy called his mother from the summit of Mount Everest to tell her he was “on top of the world.” In one of the most remote places on earth, he had access to a regular cell connection. By contrast, Sam shared his experiences in trying to make calls in Greenwich Connecticut, one of the richest suburbs in the world, but can rarely connect the call because of the lack of cell towers in the area.
Of the 100 fastest growing cities in the world, 97 are in developing economies. The opportunity to build from scratch smarter, sustainable cities is a luxury only the developing world enjoys.
Posted by
Adam Christensen in
Leaders from around the world – and especially across Asia – have begun to assemble here today in Shanghai for the Smarter Cities summit. We’ll be providing a number of means to stay connected to the themes, ideas and insights from the event over the course of the next two days. Here’s what readers can expect:
- - Live tweets from @smarterplanet, and a handful of others with the #smartercity hashtag (should be an intimate Twitter group, considering the location).
- - Blog posts here culling the most salient insights from the event.
- - Videos from the sessions posted at the end of each day, or beginning of next day.
- - Pictures on Flickr, updated through the event. You can flip through the slideshow above for a nice introduction to Shanghai this week (including images from the Expo 2010).
- - Deep dives over the next two weeks into the breakout session insights and opportunities.
If there’s anything in particular you want us to report on, just leave a message here or reach out on Twitter. Stay tuned for what will certainly be a firehose of great information.
Posted by
Karl Roche in
How often have you been told to ‘stop doing that’ because x,y and z is bad for you? Plenty, if you’re anything like me.
We get these sorts of messages everyday with the earliest examples usually from our parents and schools. It’s a common theme throughout life that usually continues after school into work. Quite honestly, people stop listening, especially when the reason for not doing something isn’t adequately conveyed.
If we take the environment, which probably contains the largest number of groups telling people to stop doing this, that or the other, people begin to push back. People don’t like being told what not to do. Even reasonable people think that being told not to drive but use public transport when it will take them longer and will cost them more is just crazy – they want the alternative to be better.
So lets flip it. Lets ‘start’ something. Today in London, IBM announced that it will be the exclusive partner for a nine day summit in September 2010 called surprisingly, START. It aims to explore what business can do for sustainability and what sustainability can do for business. In many ways it is just a start. Even though it is an event, START is also a national (UK) initiative of the The Prince’s Charities Foundation will continue way past September and a street in London coming to communities across the UK.
Over nine days, IBM summit at START will bring together a brains trust of thought leaders to come up with ideas that organisations can sign up to because it makes sense for them and their business – not just the environment. All the ideas, findings and debates will be published online. Each day will focus on a different topic, such as new skills, the future of cities, energy and transport. You can see that in all cases that no single organisation or government is responsible for everything within these topics, it requires a number of bodies to come together and work together. So the summit will try to build a community of collaboration, discuss ways we can all work together to make stuff really happen, to make the alternative better than what we have now.
At the launch in London today, Steven Leonard, Chief Exec for IBM UK said, “the challenge [is] bringing all the necessary constituents together to develop and deliver more complex solutions to make the world – literally work smarter.”
Collaboration between organisations, public and private, is essential to make this initiative work. I for one am excited about the opportunities that this could bring up, such as the need to develop new skills myself and the push it will give to widen the use of social tools within business. Is it going to be easy? No. Will it all happen in 9 days? I very much doubt it, but there needs to be a point where we say, things have to change and we mark the beginning with this event.
But before the event we have a few weeks, time in which partners and invited companies will be starting to collaborate using our collaboration tools. So that the final agenda for each day will be built on the basis of the combined expertise. Essential to begin as you intend to go on.
Caroline Taylor, VP leading Project Start in IBM raised an essential point at today’s launch about the next generation: “If sustainability is about securing the future, young people are that future, and they will be vital in ensuring we define genuinely 21st century and forward thinking solutions.” Day 4 and 5 are devoted to new skills and starting young.
It’s not all work, work, work…there will also be a 12 day public festival that apart from being great fun will also give clear, simple and positive ideas on how people can start doing things that will help them lead a sustainable future. There will be plenty of big names in attendance, including two of my favourite comedians, secret gigs, mystery artists and a host of other good stuff.
Where’s this all happening? IBM summit at START will be hosted in Lancaster House, The Mall, London, September 8th – 16th. with the START garden party happening right next door in Green Park. Hopefully we will also be able to broadcast large parts of the business event over Livestream, no doubt we will have more updates here.
Prince of Wales (centre) at the launch of the "IBM Summit at Start" which will be held over 9 day in September 2010
The Start founding partners include: IBM, B&Q, Virgin Money, M&S, Asda, EDF Energy, Addison Lee, BT Group plc and Waitrose. Full list of supporting organisations on the web site.
Read more about IBM Summit at Start.
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