Alfred Vanderpuije, Mayor of Accra, Ghana

By Alfred Vanderpuije

This week at the World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town, leaders will come together to discuss Africa’s future. One of the three focus themes is the importance of ‘Strategic Infrastructure’ as a foundation for the continent’s growth. As Mayor of Accra and Chief Executive of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, I would say that there are few areas as crucial for infrastructure investment as cities.

Buoyed by an emerging oil and gas industry and a rapidly growing consumer class, Ghana’s economy is one of the fastest growing in the world. Investors are flocking to the country’s capital Accra to take advantage of new business opportunities and become part of this success story. Mastercard recently identified Accra as one of Africa’s top cities in terms of economic growth potential over the next few years. Local and foreign firms are also driving a number of urban development opportunities such as Ghana Cyber City, King City and Appolonia City which aim to set up modern, high-tech hubs within and around Accra.

I welcome these initiatives, however, at the top of my agenda is Accra itself and the transformation of its existing systems and services for the benefit of its citizens and businesses. The truth is we cannot look to Accra’s future opportunities, without looking into the challenges of today.

Accra’s existing infrastructure is being put under increasing strain by an influx of new residents – the city’s population has expanded by over 1 million people – a 35 percent increase in the past decade alone. As we cannot, and will not, put a wall around the city to restrict the arrival of new residents, we can expect this trend to continue.

We must therefore act today to ensure that the city’s systems – from transportation, to water, sanitation, energy, healthcare, public safety, education and administration – are able to accommodate and cope with this influx of new residents.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For instance, today nearly all transportation in Accra is by road, but 70 percent of the vehicles carry only 30 percent of the people – a trend which causes significant traffic jams during peak hours.

Accra also suffers from perennial flooding problems and in 2011 there was extensive loss of life due to flash floods within the city. These problems highlight the extensive modernization required to our sanitation and storm water systems.

At the heart of many of these problems is our inability to finance projects to maintain and transform Accra. The reality is, my Metropolitan Assembly struggles to raise enough revenue for city services due to out-of-date revenue collection systems, tax evasion and fraud.

The government of Ghana and the Accra Metropolitan Assembly are already taking steps to address these challenges. Recently, Ghana’s President, John Dramani Mahama, launched the National Urban Policy Framework and Action Plan to promote the sustainable development of Ghanaian cities and towns. In Accra, we have put in place the Millennium Cities Initiative to raise the standard of living and we are beginning the transformation of many of the city’s systems. The Accra Sanitary Sewer and Storm Water Drainage Alleviation Project, supported by the U.S. government, also stands to improve waste water treatment for the city’s four million residents.

We recognize we cannot do this work alone. We need to tap into expertise and experience from across public and private sectors and civil society, within Ghana and around the world. We also recognize that the infrastructure we are currently installing has to be designed to withstand the challenges of tomorrow. We must therefore turn to the latest technologies to ensure that our systems are optimized and smarter.

IBM recently offered its expertise to the Accra Metropolitan Assembly to help tackle some of the city’s most intractable problems. A team of IBM experts travelled to Accra last year to work alongside our own. Just last week the company presented me with a report which outlines some of the key challenges and possible solutions in areas such as transportation, city services and energy. I also met with Dr. Kamal Bhattacharya, Director of IBM Research-Africa who presented some interesting new solutions specially designed for Africa. 

We see great opportunity for technology in Accra. For example, in the area of revenue collection, we see potential to use mobile payment systems to enable citizens and small businesses to pay for their taxes and city services electronically. Once payment systems are digitized, it will become a lot easier for my administration to identify cases of tax underpayment or fraud.

In the area of transportation, we could also turn to mobile phone data to help us to understand how Accra’s residents move around the city and how we could use that data to enhance our transportation systems to avoid traffic bottlenecks and traffic jams. We have a number of mobile service providers active in Ghana who could act as partners for such work.

In the area of water and sanitation, we could use technology to help monitor and manage our drainage systems and predict possible cases of flooding.

Technology holds great potential in Accra. However, we also recognize that what makes a city safer and smarter are its people. We need to forge a better relationship with our citizens and increase their sense of responsibility for their city. Accra’s residents need to take an interest in caring for the city. Nearly every one of our residents has a mobile phone – this creates the perfect channel for reporting problems and threats to the city’s infrastructure.

Across Africa, cities are growing quickly – economically and demographically. In Accra we need to embrace technologies and show leadership to ensure that our city is not left behind.

Technorati Tags: africa, Big Data, Ghana, IBM Smarter Planet, mobile computing, smarter analytics, Smarter Transportation, WEF 2013

Mitzie Hunter, CEO, Greater Toronto CivicAction Alliance

By Mitzie Hunter

Like many city-dwellers worldwide, residents of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) have reached an impasse. Our congestion problems are getting worse and worse, and we now have some of the longest commuting times in North America. Congestion is not only taking a toll on our economy and our environment, but also on our health and our quality of life.

IBM’s Social Sentiment Index research pulled tens of thousands of tweets about traffic from five major cities across Canada. The exercise homed in on what our residents feel is most important—not surprisingly, Toronto’s commuters were the most active to vent their opinions. Toronto had 10,000 tweets about traffic over an 11-month period, 40 percent of which were explicitly negative. By contrast, only 20 percent of tweets in Halifax were negative.

In the GTHA, through CivicAction’s Your32 campaign, we’ve been reaching out to all commuters—drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, and transit users—to learn what a better transportation system would mean to them. We’ve been driving people to our website, your32.com, and to twitter, and asking a simple question: “What would you do with 32?” Thirty-two represents the number of minutes, on average, commuters in the region will save if the approved transportation plan, The Big Move, is funded and built over the next 25 years. The Big Move is the region’s plan for an improved, fully connected transportation system across the GTHA.

Through their responses, people have been painting a picture of the human cost of congestion—the toll congestion is taking on our lives by sucking away the time we could otherwise be spending on the things that matter. Things like eating healthy meals, going to the gym, or spending time with our families.

But we’re also finding that people are inspired by the idea of what a better system could bring: time to finish that novel they’ve been working on for years, to learn a new language, to take on a new hobby, or to explore more of what our amazing region has to offer.

When it comes to solving our congestion problems, smarter transportation is part of the solution. Employers can play their part by offering staff incentives for carpooling and taking transit, or by being open to flexible hours and telecommuting.  Smart commute networks can also help employers promote smarter commuting choices. New technologies and demand management mechanisms, from computer modeling, to crowd-sourcing, to intelligent traffic lights must also play a role – and we’re sure to see new and exciting innovations in the decades to come to maximize our road capacity and our transit system.

Many cities are exploring these opportunities now. But while these technologies can play a role in solving our congestion woes, what we need more than anything is better physical infrastructure. Transportation infrastructure in Canadian cities—and especially in the GTHA—has been chronically underfunded for decades. We’ve far exceeded the capacity of our current network, and with the estimated nearly three million people—a population the size of greater Montreal—moving into the GTHA over the next 25 years, things will only get worse. Unless we start building now  the upgraded, expanded, multimodal system that we need to make up for lost time and to plan for the future.

Fixing any city’s congestion crisis won’t happen overnight; it will take time, money and commitment to make up for decades of neglect and delay. But the need to act has never been so clear, and the cost of inaction has never been so high.

As we act, we should be guided by an overriding vision of smarter networks that better connect us to the places we want to go, and that provide us with more choice in how we get there. New technologies and attitudinal changes are part of the answer, but unless the public and decision-makers accept that we all have to pay for a better system, to build the new infrastructure that we need, the human cost of congestion will affect us for generations to come. While we continue to innovate and design a better future, it’s time to get moving on building The Big Move.

Join the conversation in the GTHA: visit your32.com, like us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, Crowd Sourcing, IBM Smarter Planet, IBM Smarter Transportation, IBM Social Sentiment Index, innovation, smarter analytics, smarter traffic, social media, social sentiment, Toronto

Ahmed Simjee, Smarter Planet Leader, IBM South Africa

By Ahmed Simjee

When I was growing up in South Africa, my family was fortunate.  We had access to fresh drinking water. At first we lived on a small farm near Johannesburg, where we used a well. Later, when I moved closer to the city, I had good tap water. But many of my fellow South Africans weren’t so lucky, and, even today, many people in the rural areas and in informal settlements near the cities don’t have ready access to fresh drinking water. That’s why I’m extremely pleased to be spearheading an initiative in South Africa, WaterWatchers, which is aimed at using mobile phones and crowdsourcing to cut down on leaks and wasted water.

We’re launching our free WaterWatchers app today in Gauteng Province, home of Johannesburg and the capital city, Tshwane. With 12.3 million residents, the province represents 23% of South Africa’s population. We timed the launch to coincide with the United Nations’ World Water Day. If you’re in South Africa, please download the app.

We hope that once government leaders elsewhere in South Africa see WaterWatchers at work in Gauteng Province, they will adopt the service as well. South Africa is the only country in the world to include access to fresh water as a basic human right in its constitution, and the government has set a goal of extending that benefit to every citizen by 2020. Our WaterWatchers program will help South Africa achieve universal access to fresh water. Using SMS, the app enables citizens to quickly and conveniently report leaks and unauthorized use of water.

Communal tap in Johannesburg Credit: E. Muench

South Africa suffers from a critical water problem. It’s one of the driest places on earth, with average annual rainfall of just 45.7 cm, half the global number. South Africa ranks 148 out of 180 countries for water availability per capita, according to the United Nations World Water Development Report 2012. At the same time, in South African municipalities, an average of 37% of the water pushed through public water systems is lost via leaks or pilferage. In Tshwane alone, these losses cost the municipality about $50 million a year. South Africa’s draft National Water Resource Strategy estimates that it will cost about $100 billion to upgrade and expand the country’s water infrastructure over the next decade. So any savings from reducing waste and pilferage can be reinvested in system upgrades.

WaterWatchers takes advantage of the rapid spread of mobile phones in South Africa, where just about every adult now owns a hand set. Using the application, people take photos and answer three simple questions about water problems they observe. Then they SMS the information to a central database. All of the messages are stored and analyzed to help municipal authorities spot problems, dispatch repair crews and set maintenance  priorities. Using analytics technologies, officials will be able to predict where and when problems are likely to occur and plan pro-active maintenance.

Citizens with Internet access can also tap into a WaterWatchers portal. There, they can learn about water conservation and view a leak hotspot map showing where problems exist in their municipal water systems.

IBM  began exploring the idea of using crowdsourcing to address water issues in San Jose, Calif., with its CreekWatch mobile app. The simple application enables people with Apple iPhones to take photos of reservoirs and creeks they pass to report water levels and potential pollution problems. CreekWatch is now being used in 25 countries. The WaterWatchers app, built by IBM business partner Element Blue LLC, has additional capabilities, including the ability to post photos on Twitter and social networking Web sites. It’s available for iPhone, Android and Blackberry devices.

Once municipalities get the benefits of WaterWatchers, I hope it will be an eye-opener to the potential for using other cutting-edge technologies to make cities work better–for everything from transportation and energy to healthcare and education. In fact, the crowdsourcing technology in WaterWatchers could be used to help address a wide range of problems, including traffic jams, crime and pollution.

It all starts with awareness of the possibilities. WaterWatch engages citizens and government leaders alike. Once people understand problems and feel empowered to address them, society can make progress. I look forward to the day when all of my fellow South Africans enjoy easy access to fresh water.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Johannesburg, South Africa, Tshwane

Jeffrey Nichols, IBM Research Staff Member

By Richard Silberman, Writer/Researcher, IBM Communications

Jeffrey Nichols is putting a new twist on Twitter that could change the way businesses use social media to identify, engage and market to customers.

“What we actually see from Twitter is just the tip of the information iceberg,” said Nichols, who manages the social media and crowd research team at IBM Research in Almaden, Calif. “Below every tweet there’s a lot more information that people have that they’re not sharing.”

Determined to extract hidden information from social media, Nichols is developing strategies to ask questions directly of targeted strangers over Twitter. The crux of Nichols work is to move from the ubiquitous reactive approach to social media, where marketers follow and respond to what people are saying, to a proactive model where they can reach out to individuals to collect specific information.

“The number one thing we’re trying to do is to get beyond social sentiment, which is basically an aggregation of whether the crowd feels positive or negative about something,” Nichols said. “Direct engagement with individuals over Twitter allows us to understand people and their opinions a lot better than we can with a coarse measurement like sentiment.”

Soliciting information from strangers over Twitter

Nichols, who studies human-computer interaction in the User Systems and Experience Research (USER) group at IBM Research, has led several experiments that validate the viability of engaging individuals over Twitter.

Two years ago, Nichols launched TSA Tracker, which collected and displayed wait times at airport security checkpoints. Nichols and his team identified people who were at airports, based on their Twitter status updates, and asked them to share their estimated wait.

“We got a much higher response rate than we expected — above 40 percent — which suggested that this is pretty fertile area to explore,” Nichols said.

Nichols’ next study, being presented at a social computing conference this week, not only measured response rates, but also analyzed the quality of the information respondents provided. In this two-part study, Nichols sent questions via Twitter to individuals who own a particular tablet computer — and also queried people who visited Los Angeles food trucks. He then compared the Twitter replies to reviews on reputable online sites to see how closely they align.

“Once again we got a response rate around 40 percent, which shows that people seem pretty happy to respond to questions over social media,” Nichols said. “The most exciting outcome, however, is that over 70 percent of the responses were really high quality answers, and in many cases people gave us more information than we asked for.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Modeling personalities based on Twitter text

Targeting the right people on Twitter is, of course, essential to getting high response rates and good data. To that end, Nichols and his team are currently exploring ways to analyze personality traits based on the text in social media messages. By modeling and understanding personality types, it will be possible to reach out to the right individuals, in the right way, at the right time, to elicit the best response possible.

“If you just send a person a message out of the blue and it doesn’t offer any value to them, then that’s spam and they’re not going to respond to that,” said Nichols, who is developing analytics to infer who will likely respond to unsolicited questions on a particular topic.

“If we choose to reach out to someone, we want to know there’s a very high probablilty that they’re going to react positively,” Nichols said. “Response rates of 40 percent are great, but wouldn’t it be awesome if we could get that up to 80 percent?”

New tools for Enterprise Marketing Management

Nichols’ fascination with crowds has its roots in the massively multiplayer games he once played. His interest in harnessing massive social communication and using Twitter in new ways evolved from there.

In one of his first social media experiments, Nichols and a team member used only the status updates posted to Twitter to generate summaries of sporting events comparable to those created by professional journalists. Encouraged by the results, Nichols has been on a steady path of innovation ever since.

“Going forward we hope to take what we’ve done so far, make it more business-relevant and bring it to market,” Nichols said. He is currently working to incorporate some of his techniques into IBM’s Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) solution to support a very focused, individualized and interactive approach to marketing.

“I think our approach to using Twitter will become a routine part of doing business in the next couple of years,” Nichols said. “It’s not only going to enable companies to hone valuable relationships with individuals, but also to reach beyond and expand their established customer base.”

Technorati Tags: Enterprise Marketing Management, human-computer interaction, Jeffrey Nichols, twitter

Michael Haydock, IBM Distinguished Engineer

By Michael P. Haydock

In this era of Big Data, facts and opinions are flying fast and furiously. Unfortunately, too much of this outpouring is of little consequence. So it’s incumbent on marketers and other business leaders to figure out how to turn raw data into insights that they can act upon.

Consider the type of info that streamed out in the past couple of weeks concerning the holiday movie and shopping frenzy.

News reports told us, for instance, that The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 ranked #1 in Thanksgiving weekend domestic box office movie receipts with a whopping $227 million in ticket sales. Meanwhile, the French art film Rust and Bone took in just $30,196 in limited release in two theaters.

Amid a blizzard of dispatches concerning holiday shopping, we heard that during Black Weekend, the stretch  between Thanksgiving Thursday and Sunday, the average American consumer spent $423 — roughly $25 more than they did last year.

These “factoids” may trigger a momentary flutter of mental excitement, but what do they actually mean? Rarely are we provided with the knowledge behind the data that makes it useful. Regrettably, this substitution of facts for insights is a fact of life these days–whether you’re a consumer planning a purchase or a marketer trying to make the most of a business opportunity.

At IBM, we interact with some of the most sophisticated companies in the world. We have learned from working with them that in order to get the most out of Big Data, organizations need to craft comprehensive data strategies and to use a variety of tools and information sources that provide both depth and context. But technology alone isn’t enough: They need to assemble interdisciplinary teams of people with deep expertise in technology, statistics, social networking, specific industries and human behavior.

Coincidentally, three initiatives that IBM engaged in over the past couple of weeks show how this approach can produce a sizable payoff from Big Data. We conducted deep analysis of holiday shoppers’ behavior, analyzed social sentiment concerning holiday movie releases, and announced a new analytics center in Columbus, Ohio, that will eventually employ 500 people.

Our retail analytics team peeled back the onion on the rapidly-changing holiday retailing environment. Their research showed, for instance, that on Cyber Monday the number of consumers using mobile devices to visit online retailers increased by 22.4% over last year, while those using mobile devices to actually make a purchase rose 12%. That’s a clear trend that will prompt many retailers to rethink their mobile strategies.

But the team dug deeper and discovered that mobile shopping habits vary greatly depending on the device people own. They found that iPads and iPhones accounted for nearly 20% of Black Friday online sales, compared to just 5.5% for devices running Google’s Android operating system. What does this mean? Prompted by intriguing data points like these, smart marketers search for additional clues and create a complete story that helps them understand what’s really going on–so they can craft more effective marketing campaigns.

Our social sentiment analytics team is doing the same kind of deep analysis concerning the movie business. They hooked up with the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab to sniff out useful insights from millions of public Twitter musings about the most popular movies playing in U.S. theaters. One surprise they uncovered concerned the vampire flick Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2. Before its mid-November release, our index showed positive sentiment toward the movie of 90%. Yet on Saturday, Nov. 24, in the midst of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, the positive sentiment dipped to 75%.

Did that mean consumers were disappointed with the film? Nope. We discovered that many of the people who used words in their Tweets signaling sadness or disappointment were reacting to the emotional moments in the film or to the fact that their beloved series is ending with this installment. The lesson: It’s vitally important to do the extra work of not only measuring the quantity of chatter via social networks but also understanding how people from particular demographic and psychographic groups use language in social media.

Bottom line, you’ve got to see the big picture–especially when you’re mapping out a data strategy. Separate from our holiday retailing project, we’re helping  a major retailer develop a  strategy aimed at understanding an important demographic group, people from ages 18 to 24. Many of these youngsters are in school or working at their first full-time jobs. The idea is that if the retailer can cement relationships with them at this stage in their lives, it might be able to secure them as loyal customers for life. But, to achieve this level of trust and intimacy, they’ve got to know these people really well. And that takes a lot of work and a lot of expertise drawn from fields outside the scope of traditional market research.

To master the art of data analysis, businesses are going to need lots of people with new skills. That’s one of the reasons IBM is working with mroe than 200 academic institutions to help traditional students and mid-career professionals expand their understanding of analytics and Big Data. The latest such collaboration is with Ohio State University, and is an element of our plan to  set up a new analytics center in Columbus.

IBM employs a lot of statisticians and data scientists. In Columbus, our people will work closely with clients from the upper mid-west, including leaders in the retailing  and healthcare industries. The focus there will be on Big Data and on applying cognitive computing technology, including IBM’s Watson, to complex problems our clients encounter as they gather and process ever large volumes of information.

Some people say the essence of analytics is finding a needle in a haystack of data. There’s something to that, but we see things a bit differently. Think of the haystack as the context that surrounds any particular piece of information, and that makes it decipherable, meaningful and useful. We want businesses to take all the hay and spin it into gold.

So, bring on the data! It’s up to smart organizations to transform it into insights.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, IBM, Twilight

Jonathan Taplin, Director, USC Annenberg Innovation Lab

By Jonathan Taplin

Before I became a university professor, I had a long career in the entertainment business–first as a concert producer for the likes of Bob Dylan and The Band, and later as producer of motion pictures, including Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets and The Last Waltz.

Both the music and movie industries have been utterly transformed by the Internet, in positive and negative ways. But I sense that we’re still at the beginning stages of this big shift, and that some of the most interesting developments are yet to come. For example, social sentiment analysis is going to change the game for Hollywood marketing.

Evidence of the changes and challenges to come is abundant in the Film Forecaster analysis that USC Annenberg Innovation Lab and IBM conducted over the past few weeks at the front end of the holiday movie viewing season. It also surfaced in an LA event we hosted on Wednesday night, A Night Behind the Movies, where the panel included Robert Friedman, co-chairman of Lionsgate Motion Picture Group.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The IBM Social Sentiment Index, which we used to conduct the Film Forecaster analysis, relies on sophisticated analytics and natural language processing to understand the opinions shared on millions of public Twitter Tweets. It offers up penetrating insights into why certain films did well and poorly–insights that will help movie studio marketing executives determine how to  best capitalize on that knowledge.

Our results demonstrate not just the usefulness of monitoring social sentiment but the importance of deeply analyzing the raw results so marketing leaders come away with a precise understanding of what consumers think and want. For example, before the mid-November release of Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 our index showed positive sentiment toward the movie of 90%. Yet on Saturday, Nov. 24, in the midst of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, the positive sentiment dipped to 75%.

Did that mean consumers were disappointed with the film? Actually, no. We discovered on close examination that many of the people who used words in their Tweets signaling sadness or disappointment were reacting to the emotional moments in the film or to the fact that their beloved series is ending with this installment.

Social sentiment analysis is such an immature field that much about it still has to be explored. Marketers have to learn to use the new tools effectively and apply them to various types of data.  The tools themselves must be improved. And, at the same time, marketers must be aware that the way consumers use social media is constantly evolving–and their techniques and tools and marketing strategies will have to evolve rapidly as well. (At our lab, we’re teaching students these skills.)

Today, entertainment marketers are just beginning to experiment with using social sentiment. The most sophisticated organizations use their readings of sentiment to shape marketing messages or to reshape campaigns that they learn are off target.

Dreamworks, for instance, discovered before it release the animated feature Puss in Boots that the Twitter conversation about the film was sparse and surprisingly negative. In response, the studio created a new TV ad campaign that was well received. The movie was a hit, and the Twitter mention volumes and positive sentiment increased significantly. That was the first time I understood the power of social sentiment analysis. You can change the social conversation if you do really good advertising.

In the future, such analysis has the the potential for utterly transforming the way the industry rates TV shows. Today, we use the Nielsen rating system to evaluate the popularity of TV shows as the basis for setting the prices advertisers pay for TV ad placements. It’s a crude instrument. The system simply measures how many of the 25,000 participating households have their TVs tuned to particular channels at 15 minute intervals.

But what if we added social sentiment to the mix? Marketers would know how millions of people were reacting to their programming in near real time. Those insights could help them decide how much to pay for advertising slots and how to appeal to viewers in their ads. In addition, the intelligence they pick up could inform the way they develop programming or even lead them to change a character or a plot direction.

Today, social sentiment analysis is as much an art as it is a science, which is fun for people like me. But as the tools improve and marketers learn to use them more effectively I believe we’ll see a revolution in entertainment marketing. As social sentiment analytics matures, the best films and programming will be even more successful, and even the not-so-good stuff will find its audience. I wish I had some of these tech tools back in the 1970s and ’80s.

Here are some related blog posts and news stories:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-canepa/ibm-big-screen-and-twitter_b_2198056.html
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelhumphrey/2012/11/28/just-like-social-tv-data-is-coming-to-the-movies-infographic/
http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2012/11/21100.html
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ibms-computers-try-understand-twihards-394028

Technorati Tags: Holllywood, IBM, Lionsgate, USC Annenberg

Heading into the second week of September, the hallways of the Los Angeles School District (LAUSD) are already buzzing with the sounds of students and teachers settling in for another school year.

Similar to many other schools around the nation, LAUSD is also facing another year of budget cuts to several of its education programs and extracurricular activities. In fact, a survey from the American Association of School Administrators cites that more than 8 in 10 school districts in the U.S. are inadequately funded for the coming year. Clearly, we all must do more with less.

We chose to tackle this problem head on and find innovative ways where we could help reduce costs and keep the focus on our number one priority: the students.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As the second largest school district in the US, our campus spans 14,000 buildings and is spread out over 710 square miles. With more than 300,000 maintenance service requests every single year, the upkeep of our school happens to be one of the main areas we have spent too much time, money and energy. Often times, all of our resources go into locating and reporting a problem before we even have a chance to fix it.

But now, LAUSD has a new weapon to help our repair crews stay steps ahead of the problems — our army of 700,000 students. With nearly 25 percent of kids between the ages of 14 and 17 already owning a smartphone, we enlisted their help — along with the rest of our faculty and staff — to act as living sensors and report maintenance problems they saw first hand using their mobile devices.

Now, students can do much more with these devices than just play Angry Birds and keep up with their social networks. They can also use their phones to be responsible citizens and help keep their schools in tip top shape.

Through analytics technology provided by IBM, and a mobile app through IBM partner CitySourced, users have turned their smartphones into a sensor to help us identify maintenance issues in need of repair — from a leaky faucet, smashed windows, graffiti to broken toilets.

Add to this the power of crowdsourcing, and this simple mobile app enables the school district to engage its students, faculty and staff to help keep their schools clean and safe.

With the use of the new mobile app, all reported issues sent with a simple text or photo goes directly to the school’s maintenance office. Each request also contains GIS information to pinpoint locations so workers know exactly where to route staff, saving time and resources.

Prior to this crowdsourcing app, we relied on faculty and staff to report maintenance issues with the campus plant manager, requiring the manager to decipher and pinpoint each issue before the appropriate personnel was sent to solve the problem. It was a time consuming process.

These results shows that leveraging tools that already exist, combined with a little ingenuity can create drastic improvements. So, despite those long, lazy summer days already being a distant memory, I know that as students and teachers walk down our halls, they’ll appreciate knowing that the days they spend on our campus will be safer, greener and more efficient thanks to their own hard work.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Los Angeles, mobile, Schools, smartphone

by Sreeram Ananthasayanam, Associate Partner, Government & Education, IBM Global Business Services, India

Smarter Cities are defined as cities that provide sustainable economic growth and enhanced quality of life by leveraging information to make better decisions, anticipating problems to resolve them proactively, and, coordinating resources and processes to operate effectively.

How can cities become Smart by leveraging what they have? What kind of investments do we need to build a transformed city? Often, the thrust is on the kind of investment that needs to be pumped in to start the journey. 1 Trillion USD? You guessed it wrong.

There is a common misconception that “Smart Cities” would need tons of IT investment. While this is a truth to reach the nirvana stage, our city leaders can take small actionable steps in the right direction to imbibe smartness. What is required is a systemic thinking and a governance mechanism to engage citizens and the available infrastructure with common-sense tools to start on the journey of smart. Typically, cities have the highest mobile density and broadband penetration, and it is very easy to put these technologies to use to make cities smarter.

A strong collective will to use our resources optimally, and create infinite value out of it, can begin the journey towards a transformed planet, And, all this can be achieved by the innovative applications of the existing technologies, and available resources. How do we attain that? This needs better synergy between the ecosystem of city planners, municipalities, public and private entities.

Driving our cities as engines of economic growth would require an integrated approach, coupled with instrumentation, interconnectedness and intelligence. The above may seem to suggest that there is a need for strong infrastructure and instrumentation on top of it, so that cities can be viewed as a system of systems and can be managed accordingly.

Consider this. What do we get when social business can be put to use for citizen government interactions? The low hanging fruits on the journey to become a smarter city.

Some of the following examples cite some interesting innovations and how social business can be harnessed in the journey to smart. Imagine a scenario where there is mobile app that allows people to take photo of energy meter readings and upload to the utilities company’s website. On one hand, the citizens get a monetary discount and on the other the utility company gets accurate readings without investing in foot soldiers.

Think of a scenario where there is an app that allows people to take photos of violations (of any kind – traffic, unauthorized power tapping, water leakages and so on), geo tag it and upload to a website. Apart from allowing for faster resolution, this allows to create a pressure point on the local administration based on the number of complaints that come from any specific area (e.g. ward).

Another scenario could be where the traffic police can seek feedback on proposed one way rules (which is aplenty in many cities) or seek feedback on how to decongest certain stretches.

Well, the possibilities are enormous, and endless are the opportunities – all it takes is thought leadership and some jugaad innovation. Few steps in the right direction will ignite citizen participation in governance and that can be a self-propelling machine that takes a city to smarter level. Are we ready?

Check out other ideas for progress at India Onward, an IBM India initiative.

Technorati Tags: Crowd Sourcing, Growth Markets, india, Smarter Cities