by Cary Barbour, IBM
IBMers are a proud lot for many reasons. One of the things that makes me proud to be part of this organization is the impact that we have in our communities, and our company’s overall social responsibility. In fact, citizens in general – and IBM employees in particular – are becoming more and more interested in their communities and societal engagement. A company that’s dedicated to making a difference and being a responsible corporate citizen is a company that more people are interested in working for and staying at.
But IBMers are not the only ones who value these traits – others are impressed by them too, and that’s helping to boost our brand equity. As many of you have seen, IBM was recently selected as #2 in BrandZ’s ranking of the Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands for 2010. Sure, some of the criteria used to rank companies are not surprising: building trust, making a brand personal, using heritage to create authenticity. Those make sense and they’re hugely important. But the things that resonate most with me might not be quite as intuitive when it comes to brand equity – citizenship and corporate social responsibility.
In a tight economy like the one we’ve been in for the past couple of years, corporate giving and philanthropy tend to be some of the first casualties. As companies around the globe have struggled through one of the toughest recessions on record, a lot of them have dialed down or entirely stopped community donations and volunteering programs. But not IBM.
Corporate social responsibility and community engagement are part of IBM’s nearly 100-year history. Our focus has always been on innovation that matters for our communities, helping IBMers feel fulfilled and developing the next bench of leaders. It’s our business culture and our community culture.
See IBM’s VP of Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs, Stan Litow, speak about this value to communities, employees and brand equity here.
The Corporate Service Corps is a perfect example of how IBM employees are engaging in communities, feeling more fulfilled in their jobs and enhancing their leadership development. This program is taking what’s at the heart of our Smarter Planet strategy and enabling groups of highly talented employees from a range of countries to volunteer their time and travel to emerging markets to help improve economic development, government services, and stimulate job growth.
There are three main advantages to programs like this. They benefit the cities in these emerging markets by helping them to leverage intelligence and improve critical systems such as transportation, water, food safety, education and healthcare. They benefit the groups of IBM volunteers by building their teaming abilities, providing a cultural learning experience, and offering a chance to broaden their skills and test them out in emerging markets.
And for IBM, which has created this program to enable this expert volunteerism, it provides an enormous benefit by building bridges between high-talent employees and important urban centers around the world and developing the type of leadership to help the company lead globally in the 21st Century.
With programs like this, we’re not just tossing our spare change back to the community, with the only goal being generosity. But rather we are taking what is most valuable to the IBM company – our innovation technology and the skill and talent of our people – and contributing it into the communities we live and work in. IBM’s overall approach to philanthropy goes beyond simple check writing and harnesses our company’s industry leading technology, the talents and passions of IBM employees, and our Smarter Planet vision. That’s one of the reasons we keep talented employees around, and it’s one of the reasons I’m proud to be an IBMer. It’s also helping to build our brand equity around the world, as more and more people see the value we’re creating in our communities.
Many of the most important advances in science occur at a scale so miniscule that their effects are invisible to the unaided eye. That’s why IBM scientists create unusual visual aids to help people understand their work. Years ago, IBM physicist Don Eigler demonstrated the ability to build structures at the atomic level by spelling out IBM with individual atoms. Well, a team of researchers at our Zurich lab has done Eigler one better. They have produced a work of art at the nano scale–carving a replica of the famous Matterhorn peak that’s just 25 nanometers high.
Urs Duerig, one of the scientists involved in the project and a mountain climber in his leisure time, explains the choice: “I always had the dream of mimicking the ancient Egyptians and chis
eling stones, making something beautiful, so I said, ‘Let’s try to do a work of art.’” He chose the Matterhorn as the subject for obvious reasons. To avoid being labeled provincial, the team also carved a tiny elliptical replica of the world. It measures 22 by 11 micrometers. More than 1000 copies would fit on a grain of salt.
Enough fun for the non-scientists, though. The team’s handiwork illustrates an important scientific achievement. For the nanotechnology revolution to fulfill its potential, scientists and engineers need tools and techniques for creating structures at the nano scale for use in electronics, medicine, and life sciences–devices that can be used to make the world work smarter and better. The Zurich team’s carvings demonstrate a breakthrough they have achieved in the field of scanning probe lithography. “It’s a completely new method for creating structures at the nano scale,” says IBM Zurich researcher Armin Knoll. 
They use a sharp cutting tool, called a nanotip, to carve patterns in semiconductor materials. The tip, which is just 50-atoms across at its point, is heated to between 300 and 700 degrees Celsius to to make it possible to evaporate the material without so much force that the nanotip wears out. Think of it as a miniature milling machine.
Such tips have been used to carve materials before, but the team produced several significant inventions, including their method of positioning the tip, the materials they used, and the ability to carve the material in three dimensions at such a fine resolution. The Zurich team, primarily physicists, worked with chemists at IBM’s Almaden lab to produce the materials they use–molecular glass for the Matterhorn and a heat responsive polymer for the globe.
- Urs and the machine
Their method will make the process of creating nano structures much cheaper than existing methods for university scientists and corporate researchers. “We can make nano science available to a large audience,” says Knoll.
The team faces some significant challenges. Their next task is to figure out how to scale up production. It took just 2 minutes and 23 seconds to carve the globe, but that’s a lot of time when you apply the technique to the mass production of devices. So the team is developing techniques for using several thousand tips in parallel.
That will be an important step toward turning the promise of nanotechnology into reality.
By Peter Ward, IBM SMS for Life Project Manager, Tanzania
1. What was the aim of the project?
Stock-outs of malaria treatments at the health facility level in many sub-Saharan African countries have been a persistent problem for many years. A stock-out is the unavailability of medicine at the health facility. In Tanzania, 93 percent of the population are at risk for malaria infection. The number of malaria cases is estimated to be 11 million resulting into 60-80 thousand deaths per year or 220 deaths per day in Tanzania alone.
The goal of the SMS for Life pilot project was to develop a flexible and scalable solution to bring up-to-date visibility of anti-malarials within the Tanzanian Public Health Sector with a potential to reduce or eliminate stock-outs of five drugs (four dosage forms of ACTs and Quinine Injectable) in all health facilities in a pilot sample of three districts.
2. What was IBM’s involvement?
The concept was developed on an Extreme Blue internship programme with Novartis. IBM provided project management to the pilot project and also made LotusLive, IBM’s cloud-collaboration services, available to the global project team to ensure every member of the team was kept up to speed and remained in touch with one another on every detail of the weekly stock data, the updated locations of health facilities, the most current versions of documents and activities critical to the success of the program.
3. Pete, what was your personal involvement and observations on the ground?
I was the project manager from the initial 3.5-week recce across the three pilot districts in Tanzania in May 2009 until the delivery of the final report to the Minister of Health in April 2010. I participated in the recce, subsequently created the project plan, participated in delivering the end user education in Dar es Salaam and the 3 pilot districts, managed the work remotely through the 21-week pilot running period, and had heavy involvement in creating the final reports.
My personal observations are that this project is a simple yet effective way of addressing a previously intractable problem. The use of end user technology which appears simplistic is appropriate for the harsh environments found in sub-Saharan Africa, while the complex server/application technology that drives the solution remains hosted in the developed world. I anticipate that the success of the project will encourage a speedy rollout in Tanzania and also in other countries across the African continent where malaria is a problem. I also expect the solution to be applied to other similar requirements.
4. What were the results of the pilot?
The pilot delivered against three primary objectives:
A. The SMS for Life system provided visibility of accurate anti-malarial stock levels of the health facilities, and this visibility has supported the districts in better stock management and the elimination of stock-outs.
The SMS for Life pilot provided, for the first time ever, reliable weekly stock information on anti-malarials at the health facility level. This information was provided via the Internet or mobile phones and accessed by district management and project team staff. At the beginning of the pilot project, all three districts had high stock-out rates of one or more of the five medicines (Lindi Rural at 57 percent, Kigoma Rural at 93 percent and Ulanga at 87 percent). During the pilot, malaria medicine availability improved significantly in all three districts, such that at the end of 21 weeks, stock-out rates were reduced to zero percent in Lindi Rural, 47 percent in Kigoma Rural and 30 percent in Ulanga.
B. The SMS for Life application is a viable, easy-to-use system leveraging common everyday technology.
The project team successfully designed and implemented a complex data repository application system, with built-in automated workflow and error message handling in addition to on-line statistical analysis, graphing and stock reporting. The system is located in an industrial data centre used by the banking industry in London, UK, with guaranteed availability, backup and all the normal fire suppression, standby generators, multiple communications and multiple electricity sources required to ensure continuous availability. While hidden from users, the ease of access by the health care workers and NMCP and district management staff is demonstrated by system usage/data access statistics showing average access per user group of more than once per day. The pilot project collected 13,500 stock-level data points from 129 health facilities across three remote districts in Tanzania over 21 weeks utilizing the SMS for Life application.
C. The SMS for Life public-private partnership model is an effective organizational structure to identify, build and implement a solution to help resolve long-standing societal problems.
The SMS for Life pilot created a unique public-private partnership model that enabled the problem to be precisely identified, a technical solution to be designed, built, and implemented in three rural districts in Tanzania in less than one year. No formal budget, legal contracts, or MOUs were developed between any of the partners. The concept of creating a partnership from multiple public and private organisations, and assembling a very lean team combining all the expertise, skills and influence necessary to tackle a complex problem, has worked very well. Each partner committed their unique resources and covered their associated project costs, eliminating the need to source and manage budgets on a project level. This model also made it easier, faster and more efficient to obtain results, by passing the often lengthy and difficult approval processes for project funding allocation and transfer.
5. What are the implications for other projects going forward?
We recommend the following actions:
- Implement the SMS for Life solution in all districts of Tanzania
- Implement SMS for Life in other African or non-African countries that have a need to bring visibility to medicine stocks at the health facility and district levels, and eliminate/reduce stock-outs
- Encourage countries to use the SMS for Life solution to track other medicines of priority in their national environments
- Apply the SMS for Life solution to disease surveillance
- International bodies and governments should utilize the public-private partnership model that has been piloted, which harnesses the diverse skills and expertise across the public and private sectors, to tackle other societal problems.
In other words, the solution must be rolled out and will save lives across Africa.
by Martin Kelly, IBM Venture Capital Group
When we talk about a Smarter Planet our discussions usually move very quickly from the general to the specific. Take water management as an example. What is a Smart Bay? How does the technology capture weather data in real-time? How will it improve the quality of my drinking water? Can I use the information to plan my fishing trip this weekend? The most interesting conversations are about the detail of how the solution operates.
Most Smarter Planet solutions however involve many different groups. Typically these companies and organizations range in size from large multinationals to smaller niche players and start-ups. Each one however brings a different part of the solution and unique domain knowledge and experience. In this post however I want to talk about these ecosystems and what we are doing to support them.
It’s about communities and entrepreneurs
Over the last couple of years we have been watching as organizations like Seedcamp, TechStars and Y-Combinator have started to build a network of highly active ecosystems. They have successfully helped entrepreneurs build businesses with lots of mentoring and very small amounts of cash. They have successfully engaged the broad community of seasoned veterans to support young entrepreneurs and share experience and networks. They have started to build new role models for entrepreneurs to show how building your own business is an exciting and rewarding career path. Their way of working and geographies are slightly different however they all have great mentor networks and a model which puts the entrepreneur at the centre.
It is interesting for me is to watch how the energy of the entrepreneur is matched with the experience of the mentors who have ‘done it’ before. To see how they learn and evolve very quickly to adsorb new insights and outlooks. Also to see that the gap is not capital (most of the time) but skills, experience and networks. This energy and experience is important if we want to build a Smarter Planet.
Smartcamp grew from our involvement in these programs.
What is SmartCamp
SmartCamp is designed for start-ups who are developing solutions which fit this vision of a Smarter Planet and connecting them with a global network of mentors, entrepreneurs and investors.
The program will be rolled out to 7 cities in 2010. In each location, five companies will be selected to spend one day networking with 25 world-class entrepreneurs, investors and industry experts. Selected companies will be invited to the global finals week to be held in Nov.
SmartCamp aims to accelerate the expansion and internationalization of promising companies. We do this a number of ways. Firstly, selected companies receive 12 week mentoring. During this time we identify appropriate resources IBM has in terms of technology, marketing and go-to-market globally. Secondly, in addition to our own resources we look to leverage our network. For example via our Venture Capital team we work with leading investors to filter and showcase appropriate companies. Last year 4 of the 5 selected SmartCamp companies received funding or investment offers from our partners.
As you might expect these events will be covered by leading local and international press.
What types of start-ups?
SmartCamp is interested in early stage technology companies who are helping to build a Smarter Planet including:
•Networking and Mobility
•Enterprise Software Applications
•Internet & SAAS
•Cloud and IT infrastructure
•Healthcare & IT related
•Analytics and Modelling
•Energy efficiency and Smart buildings
•Carbon and Water management
•Transportation systems
•Smart Cities including – transportation, education, and public safety
•Risk management
Presenting companies will at the seed or start-up stage. In all cases the process is open to companies with revenues
less than $1m in the last 12 months.
Next Steps – Apply today
Smartcamp is now open – the first event is Stockholm on the 20th May. The other locations and dates are:
Additional locations include:
Stockholm 20th May
Boston 3rd June
Tel Aviv 24th June
London: 21st July
Silicon Valley: 8th Sept
Paris: 16th Sept
Dublin: 15th Nov
Note: deadline is typically 14 days before the event
And finally….
In future posts we’ll ask our partners like Seedcamp and Techstars to talk about their experiences of building these networks. We’ll also ask the selected companies from 2009 to post on what they are doing and what SmartCamp means for them.
I recently sat down with Wayne Balta, IBM’s VP of corporate environmental affairs and product safety, to talk about a new program to advance sustainability across the company’s huge network of almost 30,000 suppliers in 90 countries. We talked about how a company can help the environment beyond the walls of its own business:
Q: Ten years, ago, we never could have predicted the current state of global sustainability efforts. What are some trends you’re seeing today?
Balta: We’re seeing more activity in areas where business interests intersect with the environment and sustainability. More companies are realizing that what is good for the environment is good for business, especially when it makes a company more efficient and effective. A case in point: if you produce a product — anything from hula hoops to heavy machinery — if you do it in a way that is more efficient, you’ll consume less energy, save money on energy costs, and lessen your contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. We’re seeing this across all industries.
Q: One place a company can make an impact is in its supply chain. Can a company’s purchasing power be translated into better environmental policies?
Balta: Absolutely — we’ve certainly seen that at IBM. This dates back to the 1970s, when IBM was evaluating companies performing waste management and recycling. In 1998, we wrote to our suppliers to encourage them to adopt the new ISO 14001 standard for environmental management systems. Then, in 2004 we published the IBM Supplier Conduct Principles that suppliers were required to follow in order to do business with IBM. Those standards set IBM’s overall expectations for corporate responsibility, because suppliers are a key component of a company’s sustainability efforts.
Q: What is IBM asking its suppliers to do in 2010?
Balta: Starting this year, we are asking each of our suppliers to define an environmental management system suitable to their particular business operations. We’re asking them to establish voluntary environmental goals and measure performance for at least three topics applicable to virtually all businesses: energy conservation, greenhouse gas emissions, and waste management/recycling. In addition, we’re asking them to publicly disclose their results. We’re also asking that these requirements be cascaded down to any of their suppliers who perform work for them that is material to what is ultimately supplied to IBM. So this program will fan out among our suppliers’ suppliers, spreading its impact even further.
Q: I see you are not issuing a blanket mandate. What’s the reason for that?
Balta: A key aspect of this program is that we want suppliers to create a management system that works for their particular business operations. Since our suppliers are diverse, there cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution. Some are huge publically-traded companies while others may be small businesses with much fewer employees. We want them all to build long-term sustainability in a way that is integral to their routine operations, not as an add-on fix.
As we set these new requirements, let me point out that we are not going to publicly “grade” suppliers. This is a carrot, not a stick approach. Our goal is to help them improve their businesses, whether they work with IBM or someone else. We want them to succeed.
Q: Can you give me a few examples of what suppliers could do?
Balta: It varies. Chemicals used for manufacturing must be properly managed from inception through final use and disposition. Products and components can be designed for the environment, considering material selection, energy intensity, and recycling at end-of-life. Even service operations such as call centers can be energy-intensive.
Take the electronics industry, which supplies IBM with components for our servers. As an example, we want them to use environmentally preferable materials. However, that doesn’t happen overnight, and a supplier must put a system in place to phase out a particular material or manufacturing process.
For a services oriented supplier, its environmental management system might identify energy consumption as a significant issue. Upon recognizing that, the supplier might do things like install motion detectors so lights automatically shut off when rooms are not occupied, or installing energy-efficient light bulbs or energy-saving settings on computers. For a shipping company, their routes might be redesigned to save fuel.
Q: Aren’t some suppliers already doing this?
Balta: Indeed, many of IBM’s suppliers already have such systems in place and for them these requirements may not represent anything substantially different from the way they already manage their businesses. For others, however, this approach may be relatively new. Some suppliers may need help and we look forward to helping them succeed.
There is another dimension. In our era of globalization, we find ourselves working with suppliers from all over the world. In fact, the executive who oversees IBM’s supply chain, John Paterson, is based in Hong Kong. We’re finding that suppliers are at different stages of development and sophistication in terms of their understanding of sustainability and environment impact. While these requirements may seem like old news in mature economies, attention to these matter in emerging markets has not been great over the years. It’s very important for suppliers in those markets to get the help they need to put the right systems in place.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Balta: Our world is a system of systems — we’re seeing that in IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative, where cities around the world are creating systems to make water cleaner, roads less congested, and populations healthier. That’s what we are doing here; helping suppliers build systems so that they can be sustainable and succeed.
by: Mark Greenwald, chief of research and planning at the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice
More than 2.4 billion individuals are locked in the nations’ prisons costing U.S. taxpayers roughly $70 billion a year in support of this over-crowed system. Remarkably, many of these adult convicts showed a high-probability of landing in the system many years earlier as repeat juvenile offenders.
With advancements of technology, forward-thinking State Departments of Juvenile Justice can now better identify those likely to re-offend and customize programs and services to lower the rate of recidivism.
At the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, we are taking an innovative approach to better understand and predict juvenile behaviors and properly assign rehabilitation programs for the more than 85,000 youth that enter our State’s juvenile justice system each year.
We are pleased that the overall number of youth entering the DJJ system is decreasing. And, 93 percent of youth remained crime-free six months after receiving prevention services from our Department from 2007-08.
Still, we have work to do to improve the way we use our resources. It is with this determination that we will be using IBM predictive analytics technology to help guide prevention efforts for the high-risk youth before they become chronic, serious or habitual juvenile adult offenders.
Using this technology, we are confident our organization can improve its existing screening and placement process and intervene in juvenile lives earlier to help them become — and stay — law abiding citizens. Essentially, it will predict which youths will have a higher likelihood to reoffend.
Using evidence-based interventions, we can direct youth toward treatment that will address their specific criminogenic needs. This gives us the opportunity to place individuals in specific programs, such as combating substance abuse or addressing mental health issues, creating personalized – versus generic – rehabilitation programs.
We have embarked on this exciting mission with IBM by using predictive analytics software to help us in our efforts to turn around the lives of troubled youth.
These initiatives also support our involvement in Florida’s Children’s Week activities (April 12-16, 2010). The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice is holding its Annual Youth Success Day that recognizes the efforts underway to protect the public by reducing juvenile crime and delinquency, and improve the lives of those who enter our system.
It might seem odd to say, but by working with IBM we are hoping that the use of predictive analytics will essentially put us out of business, with first-offending juveniles never returning to the incarceration system.
By Paul Chang
In the U.S. alone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that 76 million Americans are sickened each year by food-borne illnesses, leading to the hospitalization of 325,000 people and causing 5,000 deaths. A study that was published a few weeks ago by the Produce Safety Project at Georgetown University reports that the health-related costs of food-borne illnesses – including medical bills, lost wages and lost productivity – total US $152 billion a year in the U.S. alone. Of course, food safety is a global problem. In Australia, for example, OzFoodNet estimates that 5.4 million cases of food borne disease occur annually in the country of 20 million people leading to approximately 18,000 hospitalization and 120 deaths, with an annual cost to society of AU$1.2 billion.
It’s not just the cost of food-borne sicknesses that is troubling, or even the frequency of these outbreaks. It’s the difficulty retailers and authorities around the world have in identifying the causes in a speedy manner; tainted food sometimes stays on store shelves and in our kitchens for too long. In addition, the current antiquated “system” of inspecting processing facilities once every few years is simply not frequent nor reliable enough.
The good news is that by using instrumentation such as sensors and barcodes, interconnection through the Internet, and new information management and analytic tools, food can now be traced from farms to supermarkets. Although the technology adoption has been limited on a worldwide basis, a growing number of countries and businesses are successfully using it. That’s why I am in Thailand this week. Today, at an agricultural industry event being held in Nonthaburi, a city outside Bangkok, the country’s Minister of Agriculture and Cooperatives, Theera Wongsamut announced a major program aimed at making Thailand’s agricultural products traceable from farms to retailers. Mr. Wongsamut said that beginning with about 600 farmers and agricultural exporters, his ministry would offer a new system based on open standards that will allow farmers and all their trading partners to access and share information on food including farm of origin, the type of feed used, date of harvest, and the like.
The idea behind the new system is twofold. First, it will help Thailand differentiate its agricultural exports in the marketplace – a smart business decision. But the system also offers real societal benefits. If someone gets sick from a food that was imported from Thailand, it will be easy for a supermarket or public health authorities to determine exactly what farm the tainted food came from. This means recalls will happen much faster and potentially save many lives. And it means we can start reducing that staggering sums that are lost as a result of antiquated food safety systems.
We can’t prevent all food borne illnesses, but we can bring accountability to the actors, transparency to the supply chain, speed the process of uncovering their causes, and reduce their impact on public health and the food industry by building food tracking systems fit for the 21st century. By remotely monitoring the key events in a production process, applying business analytics, and identifying high risk scenarios, we can all make better use of the existing resources to prevent future outbreaks instead of merely reacting each time.
Paul Chang, worldwide business strategy, emerging technologies, is one of IBM’s top food and drug safety experts. Over the past few years, Paul has worked with major pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors globally to help them meet legislative mandates aimed at protecting consumers from counterfeit medications. More recently, he has helped food producers use sensors and barcodes to trace food from farms and manufacturing floors to retailers.
Related Links:
Food Safety News
Beginning Farmers
Quality Digest
by Sharon Nunes
Have you ever thought that one day you might turn on a faucet and no water would come out? Did you ever consider that getting a glass of water from a restaurant could cost money? While these scenarios might seem far-fetched today, a water crisis is looming — and if we don’t get serious about smarter water management, it can – and will – become a reality.
The world’s population tripled in the 20th century, and according to the World Water Council, the use of renewable water resources has grown sixfold in that timeframe. Within the next fifty years, the world population is expected to increase by another 40 to 50 percent. This population growth – coupled with industrialization and urbanization – will result in an increasing demand for water. But overall, little has been done to address this crucial issue. Consider the Clean Water Act of 1972. Although it was put into place to create an era of technological innovation, the promise is still largely unfulfilled.
In his recent speech ushering in the Decade of Smart, our chairman, Sam Palmisano, pointed out that applying smarter technologies to drive cost out of legacy systems and institutions—doing more with less—would be critical to near-term and long-term economic prospects. He emphasized that we need to do more than extend the useful lifetime of our infrastructures – we must ensure that next-generation systems are inherently more efficient, flexible and resilient.
Up to 50 percent of usable water is lost due to leaky pipes. To put this into perspective, imagine that when you fill up your car with gas, half of that gas drips to the ground, wasted, instead of flowing into your tank. The good news is that there are many ways to extend the useful lifetime of our water infrastructures around the world – and to look at water management in new ways and build new, smarter systems that take into account the true value of this critical resource.
For example, IBM is working with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) to provide deep insight into the management of their water supply and usage so they can improve the quality of their water while reducing the costs associated with minimizing pollution. SFPUC, which treats an average of 80-90 million gallons of wastewater per day during dry weather and up to 370 million gallons of combined wastewater and storm runoff per day during the rainy season, is working with IBM to develop smarter management of the city’s 1,000 miles of sewer system and three treatment facilities.
We are also working with water utilities around the world – in Europe, Australia, China, Japan, to name a few – to help improve the availability and quality of drinking water and to help add efficiency to the management of water management systems.
With advances in technology—sophisticated sensor networks, smart meters, deep computing and analytics—we can be smarter about how we manage our planet’s water. We can monitor, measure and analyze entire water ecosystems, from rivers and reservoirs to the pumps and pipes in our homes. We can give all the people, organizations, businesses, communities and nations dependent on a continuing supply of freshwater—that is, all of us—a single, reliable, up-to-the-minute view of the way we use water. And by doing so, we can help build a sustainable, smarter planet.
Sharon Nunes is vice president of IBM Big Green Innovations, a portfolio of environmentally-focused initiatives at IBM.
Twitter Helps My “Smart Home” Reduce Energy Usage and Trim Electricity Bills by One-Third
by Andy Stanford-Clark
The science of how things work has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. As a young lad, I developed a way for my Mum to dry her washing outside without it getting wet when it rained. I set up a simple buzzer that would go off when a sensor detected falling rain. When Mum heard the signal, it was time to grab the laundry off the line.
Today I’m still trying to “connect the dots” of how my family and I can pursue a lifestyle that reduces our use of natural resources.
Using the same “messaging” software I work on with my development team at IBM’s software lab in Hursley, UK, I’ve made my 16th Century cottage on the Isle of Wight into a modern-day “smart home,” so I know exactly how much electricity and water I’m using, and when I’m using them.
While some might scoff at this, having this knowledge has enabled my family to reduce our personal carbon footprint and slash energy bills by one-third.
Here’s how it works: About a dozen wireless sensors are hooked up to the electricity and water systems and other things in the house. The sensors collect information, which is fed into an analytics system that makes “intelligent” decisions based upon that information. The updates are distributed to a display in my house, and as a stream of messages on Twitter, the social networking communications tool, which I can watch on the web, or on my mobile.
The “tweets,” or brief status messages, talk about how much electricity or water is being used, or even if a mouse has been caught in a trap in the attic. I can see unusual activity: if I’ve left on a heater, my home “talks to me,” via Twitter, and I can go find what’s causing the spike in electricity use.
The information on display has become part of the home’s ambient background, like having a light on in the kitchen. You know it’s there: but unless the light starts flickering, you don’t pay much attention to it. Unless my home “tweets” me that something unusual is happening, such as a window left open on a cold day, the messages blend into the household’s background.
Feeling good about helping the environment can be contagious. What if all of us got involved? According to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, 47 percent of the country’s carbon emissions come from the way the nation generates heat. The DECC has set a goal of having “smart meters” in all homes in the UK by 2020 to monitor gas and electricity usage.
If you don’t want to wait until 2020, you don’t need a Ph.D. to install and use the relatively inexpensive gadgets available to monitor your energy use and to begin conserving energy immediately.
Sometimes what we do for ourselves can benefit many others.
Like many commuters, I want to spend the least amount of time on my commute.
Strong winds or fog can delay the ferries running between my home on the Isle of Wight and my workplace near Winchester.
By tapping into data available online about the location of the Red Jet ferries, I began timing my arrival at the dock to when a ferry would actually leave. I began sharing this information via Twitter to other passengers. To its credit, the Red Funnel line saw the value in this information, and now the company provides a constant stream of information about the ferry schedule to their passengers who follow the company on Twitter. This is not ferry personnel posting the information to Twitter manually, it’s a tweetject (an object that twitters!). That’s a tricky idea for some people, but it’s at the core of building a smarter planet.
These are examples of how all of us have the ability to make our entire planet “smarter.” We just need to use sensors that operate individually to instrument the world around us, link together the information streams the sensors provide in a network, and then apply intelligence in the form of an analytics system that can recommend appropriate actions.
I look at my “smart home” and use of social networking tools for commuting as steps that I can take as an individual.
If enough of us take steps at the micro level, momentum will build. Smarter buidlings are coming as we think about structures differently: seeing homes not just as living spaces, but as living systems; seeing offices not just as static structures where work is done, but as manifestations of all the ways the world works.
Click to listen to podcast: Building a Smarter Planet – Patents
Manny Schecter, IBM Chief Patent Counsel told me that “patents are the currency of innovation.”
Approximately 150,000 U.S. patents are granted to investors each year and for the last 17 years, IBM has received more U.S. patents than any other company in the world. According to IFI Patent Intelligence, in 2009 IBM was issued 4,914 U.S. patents. So IBM is clearly a major player in the world of innovation.
Yet it’s still the case that some don’t know what IBM does. It’s clear based on numbers that IBM is an “innovative” company, sure, but what does IBM invent and why?
What I found out from speaking with Kathryn Guarini and John Gunnels, two IBMers with a number of IBM patents is that, believe it or not, inventors don’t want to spend their time reinventing the wheel to pad their portfolio, they’re looking toward innovation that matters (a company line which I understand better now that I’ve spoken with some true innovators). Guarini, director of Systems and Technology Development for IBM Systems and Technology Group says, “We want to innovate where there is real value. We don’t want to innovate everywhere, all the time.”
Mr. Gunnels is a research scientist in the area of high performance computing. He has worked on several projects and is named on multiple patents related to IBM’s Blue Gene Supercomputer which was awarded the U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2009. Blue Gene systems have helped map the human genome, investigate medical therapies, safeguard nuclear arsenals, simulate radioactive decay, simulate brain power, envision financial scenarios, predict weather and climate trends, and identify fossil fuels. And he told me that there have actually been cases where Blue Gene predicts the outcome of an experiment, which were only later verified with an actual experiment.
Several patents have been issued around Blue Gene in 2009, but consider another patent which IBM was issued this year:
U.S. Patent 7,612,655 – “Alarm System for Hearing Impaired Individuals Having Hearing Assistive Implanted Devices”
This patent describes a method for alerting profoundly deaf sleepers to danger, such as fire and carbon monoxide, or to circumstances such as a doorbell, phone call or wakeup alarm. The concept works best for deaf individuals who have cochlear implants. These people typically deactivate their implants when they bathe or sleep for reasons of comfort and safety. They do so by detaching a small device normally worn outside the ear, and which normally functions as a signal transmitter to an implanted component. During sleep or bathing activities, they typically can’t or won’t wear a device that vibrates, nor can they rely on flashing lights to catch their attention. The patented method enables the implanted component to begin buzzing abnormally or stay silent, depending on what occasion for which the user has programmed it to respond.
As an IBMer, it’s a source of job-related pride to see companies like mine investing in something that actually makes a difference for our company and for the world. “Innovation that matters”, not just a catchy slogan or corporate mantra. It is one of our company values. Something we, as IBMers, take pride in and use as inspiration everyday. And I think that the real thing to take away from all the reports on patents and patent leadership is this: a great number of these innovations being patented are helping to make the world safer, cleaner, more efficient and most notably, smarter; for people, societies, and for the world.
To read about more IBM innovations and their impact, see this article from IBM Research.
