By Andreas Fuchs, co-project leader, Electric Mobility, EKZ, Kanton Zürich, Switzerland

It is estimated that by 2050, 95 percent of cars will be equipped with an electric socket. This will mean that more than five million parking lots in Switzerland alone will be need to be equipped with a charging station to enable electric vehicle (EV) charging. Now imagine if all of these cars began charging at the same time and the impact it would have on the power grid.

While the electrical grid in Switzerland is not yet “smart,” the fact remains that EVs are being purchased. It is therefore, up to the auto manufacturers, utilities and equipment suppliers to ensure that the charging process is coordinated and controlled in order to prevent grid overload.

This was the driving incentive behind the Smartphone application (app) pilot that we are conducting with IBM Research in Zürich and the University of Applied Research Zürich in Winterthur, ZHAW. The goal is to study how mobile communication can be used to remotely control the EV charging process.

As you can read here and watch here – the driver can set boundary conditions for the charging process, using a smartphone, such as immediate or later charging, or delegate the charging responsibility to the utility. From this point, a charge schedule is created based on the availability of renewable resources such as sun and wind, as well as current grid conditions.

The main menu

Image 1: The Main Menu

In the graphic above you can see the interface for the app, which is web based and works on all of the latest smartphones and tablets.  Going in an counter-clockwise direction:

• Starting on the lower right edge: “Vehicle” one can choose which EV they plan to drive.  This could be particularly useful for car sharing programs or for managing an EV fleet of cars, similar to what we have at EKZ.
• On top to the left: The battery state of charge and an estimation of the remaining range in kilometers is displayed.
• On top to the right: Users can see a GPS map showing the locationof the EV in relation to the closest charging stations (data by www.lemnet.org).

• Bottom, to the left: This button offers EV drivers with the option to select from three charging modes – the first being “Immediate” which basically means that once plugged in, the car will begin to charge. For this project, the Twingo car was set with a default charging current that would provide drivers with a typical daily distance of 40km in Switzerland.
• The second charging option – “Premium” automatically shifts the charging period to the night. This will help avoid adding strain to the grid during the day, when most systems   are running.
• The third option – “Intelligent” allows the user to delegate the charging to the utility. Using a virtual power plant application, a utility can determine time of charge and load based on the charging history. For example, a car that is needs to be charged up to 85 percent at 4:30pm when the owner leaves for work.

Image 2: The blue rectangle during the night represents off-peak load charging of the electrical car.

Many companies are making in-roads in developing innovative technologies that have the potential to not only change how consumers get from A to B, but also change their level of interaction and control.

Image 3: The virtual power plant application calculates a “charging time table” that takes conflicting requirements into account, such as user preferences and available energy.

Before, consumers would just grab a set of keys and go – however, in the years to come, it will be a more connected experience. To prepare, many countries – especially in Europe, are implementing infrastructures to support the mass adoption of EVs – look no further than Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom or Ireland and of course Switzerland. We have the cars, now all we need is reliable energy, and the roads, charging stations, technology, as well as the consumers to keep up.

For more information: Visit http://www.klewel.com/conferences/iamf2012/ and http://www.klewel.com/conferences/iamf2012/

Join the #EVWeek Twitter Chat on April 12, from noon to 1pm ET @smarterplanet. For more information, visit: http://storify.com/smarterplanet/p4spchat-electric-vehicle-adoption

Technorati Tags: electric vehicles, energy, EVs, EVweek, IBM, smart grid, Smart Grids, smarter charging, Smarter Cities, Smarter Energy, Smarter Planet, Smarter Transportation, sustainability, transportation

Editor’s note: Nearly two-thirds of all deaths globally occur due to non-communicable diseases. Better prevention and treatment could save tens of millions of lives and reduce healthcare costs dramatically. IBM and Novartis recently sponsored the NCD Challenge, a global university competition aimed at producing innovative solutions addressing NCDs. The winners are Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley; and ESADE Business School, Ramon Llull University in Barcelona, Spain. This guest post was written by the leader of the University of California, Berkeley team.

By Emily S. Ewell, Haas School of Business, University of California-Berkeley

Chronic illness such as asthma, diabetes and cancer need tangible, targeted solutions that maximize impact with the right intervention. Our university’s team in the NCD Challenge chose to narrow in on Type 2 diabetes – a measurable condition and intersection point for countless chronic risk factors. The good news is Type 2 diabetes is nearly 100% preventable by addressing risk factors such as unhealthy diet and physical inactivity.

Focusing on the area of largest need, the developing world, we contextualized our solution in Mexico – a country with an established burden and rapid growth in NCDs. Our team traveled to Mexico City to see and learn for ourselves how diabetes could affect communities, families and individuals.

In the city’s largest hospital waiting room, we met Ana – a pregnant woman with diabetes. She introduced us to her mother and grandmother sitting next to her; all three generations in Ana’s family have diabetes. It became abundantly clear that at the core, diabetes isn’t an individual challenge, but a family challenge driven by habits – passed down from generation to generation.  The only way to stop the problem, is to stop the cycle.

With widespread and lifelong behavior change an even greater challenge than NCDs, our team identified a confined touch point where a patient’s motivation is the highest: pregnancy.

We developed a solution called 2Vidas, a pharmacy membership program focused on pregnant women with diabetes. 2Vidas works because it doesn’t ask for lifelong behavior change – it’s a unique time when a woman is most motivated to change for herself and her baby; a short-term intervention with a long-term impact.

2Vidas means “two lives” and it’s a 2-for-1 solution reducing the woman’s risk for complicated birth or c-section and decreasing the child’s lifelong risk for obesity, diabetes, and other NCDs. What happens in a mother’s womb, programs a child for life.

2Vidas is not just a solution for Mexico City, but for women, families, and people with diabetes worldwide. Mexico represents the future of the developing world with rapid urbanization, adoption of Western lifestyles, and dual burdens of disease. With a targeted solution, committed team, and identified potential partners – we hope to make 2Vidas a reality to empower women, families, and communities to combat diabetes around the world.

Technorati Tags: diabetes, healthcare, life sciences, NCD, non-communicable diseases

 
Engaging
It promotes citizen involvement and builds a new sense of
ownership with scope for collaboration in every aspect of city life.

Transparent
It lifts the bonnet on how the city works – processes are visible,
dialogue is open, feedback is swift.

Nimble
It delivers services in real time with an enhanced ability to adjust
to citizens’ fast-changing needs.

Secure
It respects privacy, protects data and leverages technology to
enhance the physical security of citizens.

Download the report

Watch Social Media Enabled Cities webinar

Technorati Tags: IBM, Smarter Cities, Smarter Planet, social business

When I played football at the University of Notre Dame and for the San Diego Chargers, broadcast television and radio were the primary ways fans enjoyed the game. There was no ESPN, no sports talk radio, the Internet was only known by DARPA scientists and social media didn’t exist.

Gosh, I sound pretty old. But in just 30 years the media and sports industries have been completely transformed by technology.  Today, fans are not only Tweeting about their favorite players and teams, but just last week at the Pro Bowl athletes were participating in the virtual conversation on the field at Twitter stations.

This week, IBM and the University of Southern California Annenberg Innovation Lab (AIL) are conducting an analysis of social media trends related to Super Bowl Quarterbacks Tom Brady and Eli Manning.  By analyzing hundreds of thousands of public tweets they’ll determine the fans’ sentimental favorite – the people’s champion if you will.

Like previous analyses on movies, retailing and baseball, analytics makes it possible to understand positive, negative and neutral sentiments of social media commentary, distinguish irony, and even apply machine learning to figure out which tweets are just background noise and those that are truly important.  So we can now break down the Big Show’s compelling story lines in a way that traditional media never could.

Take the eternal New York/Boston sports rivalry. Is this a grudge match for the Patriots who had their perfect season ruined by the Giants four years ago?  Will Tom Brady be the first quarterback to win four Super Bowls since Joe Montana?  With his second Super Bowl in four years, has the Giants’ Eli Manning earned elite status and taken up his brother Peyton’s mantle as arch-rival of Tom Brady?   How will the family dynamic affect Eli Manning who will play on his brother’s turf in Indianapolis during Super Bowl XLVI?

Talk radio and sports columns are full of pundits and prognosticators discussing these topics ad nauseam. Coaches and players are focused on playbooks and game strategy. Organizations running commercials are waiting anxiously for consumer reaction. In this context, fans today have an opportunity to both share and learn from others instantly; and they’re providing researchers with an unfiltered voice that is ripe for analysis.

But this is about so much more than analyzing which QB fans are rooting for in Super Bowl XLVI.  Uncovering hidden insights from public Twitter comments can help a slew of people, from marketers to the NFL franchise owners, better understand opinions toward players, teams and products.  These opinions can no longer go unnoticed, which is why the NFL has wisely established a Super Bowl Social Media Command Center.

We can see from the work that IBM and USC are doing that this notion of shared community engagement continues to expand exponentially thanks to other social media platforms like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube. In this context, sentiment analysis can be applied to learning how consumers perceive brands, reputations of companies and organizations, and new television shows and movies – just to name a few.

So which quarterback will be the social MVP of Super Bowl XLVI?  We’ll find out later this week.

In the meantime, the data that IBM and USC are gathering affirms what I’ve known since my playing days — statistics are an important part of sports.  And today gathering social media data can be a powerful tool that impacts the bottom lines for businesses of all sizes in all industries.

• Learn more about IBM and USC AIL social media analysis projects.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, business analytics, data, Education, IBM, IBM Research, picture stories, predictive analytics, retail, smarter commerce, Smarter Planet, social business, Watson

Discovery techniques based on social media are already helping local authorities to shape the future and to define exactly what a smarter city should look like. Coventry in the UK’s West Midlands is a case in point.

CovJam is a collaborative online venture staged by Coventry City Council and IBM. It used social media as part of a unique three-day brainstorming exercise to identify ways to make Coventry a smarter city.

IBM’s “jam” technology is a proven technique for drawing on the wisdom of crowds, capturing ideas in a way that isn’t possible using traditional forms of consultation. CovJam generated more than 2,000 posts, with 82 per cent of re-registered participants, including residents, public-sector organisations and companies, taking part.

Following the event, IBM used corporate brand and reputation analysis to organise the unstructured information, identify patterns and to help the city council to prioritise key topics and viewpoints. For the council, CovJam provided new ideas; for local people and businesses, it provided an easily accessible opportunity for people to become active citizens.

As well as providing a channel for capturing and analysing realtime information, social media provides a critical feedback mechanism, with citizens able to report on everything from road closures to broken water mains. Commuters can also provide feedback after an incident or event is reported, using the social web including Twitter, blogs and forums.

Social media also has a unique capacity to capture the mood of the moment and to spur powerful, impromptu actions. That can have both a positive and negative impact: social media may have been used by some rioters to organise criminal activity during the disturbances that took place in English cities during the summer of 2011. Yet the same social media helped to galvanise the unprecedented community response that followed.  An account on Twitter – @riotcleanup – attracted more than 70,000 followers in a matter of hours, with residents turning out to help in the clean-up operation across the country.

Download the paper

Technorati Tags: IBM, Smarter Cities, Smarter Planet, social business

The rise of social media is undeniable, with over 800 million Facebook users worldwide and 140 million tweets sent every day, social media can no longer be dismissed as a trend or generational phenomenon. It is therefore vital for cities and the communities they represent to not only monitor these social channels, but to also actively participate in them. Social media represents a unique opportunity for local councils to offer innovative new services and communicate with their citizens. This webinar will bring together experts from local governments, digital agencies, and technology providers to address the key challenges facing councils in implementing such a programme.

Please click here to register to this free webinar

http://marketforce.eu.com/Conferences/SocialMediaEnabledCities12/

Technorati Tags: IBM, predictive analytics, Smarter Cities, smarter city, Smarter Planet

The business community didn’t fair much better as 50 per cent of the public rate the way organisations convey their sustainability policies as ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’. How can we change that?

May be changing that perception over the 9 days of IBM Summit at Start is asking a lot but we can begin to get things rolling. The key to the event is asking, what can sustainability do for business? This is a more authentic way to approach the subject so as to arrive at a place where the output makes sense to business and it’s consumers.

Over the nine topics we will look at those people and businesses doing it right, talk to those with the big ideas and dreams and see how, through collaboration, we can all make business, people and cities work better. It’s a tall order but if you don’t start, you never get going.

We have a packed agenda and we will bring you much of the action via Livestream, Twitter @ibm_start (#ibmstart) and our news hub as is humanly possible.

Along-side the IBM summit is the Start Garden Party that is focusing on what individuals can do. The summit will deep dive into the issues and questions that help and hinder the take up of sustainable business practices.

Some of the sessions at the Summit are going to be held under Chatham House Rules, simply to encourage a full and frank exchange of views. However, the output will be collated and published after the event, probably in October.

We have a number of keynotes and panels sessions with speakers such as Wayne Hemingway, Designer and Entrepreneur; Dame Ellen MacArthur, Sir Martin Rose, CEO M&S, and many more. Full details here.

We hope you can join us and participate in the on-line debate around this topic of our times.

Related articles by Zemanta

• IBM to hold summit on sustainability (computing.co.uk)
• I’ll be at IBM Start this week (and next!) (greenmonk.net)

Technorati Tags: business, Ellen MacArthur, environment, IBM, ibmstart, london, sustainability, Wayne Hemingway

A month on and 2,000 posts later, IBM and Coventry are teaming up to make the ideas raised in CovJam real and transforming Coventry over the next 30 years.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Martin Reeves, Chief Executive of Coventry City Council explained:

“The IBM Jam brought out practical ideas. People know that we can’t change overnight, that we need to take baby steps to being a smarter city with low-cost, practical projects. I was really impressed with some straightforward, not very costly ideas that people would like us to implement over the next few years.”

With cities getting larger, facing tougher economic and environmental pressures than ever before this type of idea generation is setting  the tone and direction for using what resources are available in an efficient manner. Directing those resources towards the things that people really need to attract inward investment, improve employment prospects, personal security and quality of life.

You may think that this type of interaction with residents would restrict the participation of some groups in older age groups, far from it. 28% of those that declared their age group we over 50.

IBM will continue to analyse the data and unearth valuable insight that will inform Coventry’s Sustainable Community Strategy. As Reeves pointed out, this is just the start:

“The CovJam represents the start of a new open and honest dialogue between the City Council and its residents. We’re willing to take risks and be innovative in order to build closer, more dynamic relationships with all our stakeholders.”

The first idea – to guide tourists from the railway station to the city centre -  is already being put into action and more will feature in future planning initiatives.

Press release available

Technorati Tags: business, citizens, cityscan, Coventry, IBM, idea, jam, redevelopment

What do you think about when you read or hear the word “smart” when it is applied to computers? How about a supercomputer? If any machine is smart, a supercomputer is, right?. According to a study released by the University of California at Berkeley in May, 2010, 470 of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world run Linux, the open source operating system. That’s 91%. Evidently the people who decided to use Linux for these computers were pretty smart too.

As we think about all the ways where we can work together to create a Smarter Planet, Linux has a very natural role. First, Linux runs on more kinds of hardware than any other operating system. So if we are talking about tying together disparate systems to deliver better, more accurate, and more predictive health care, Linux can power the hardware and software to maintain the information repositories, do the data mining, and perform the analytics. That is, Linux can help provide the intelligence we will need and expect in our complex and sophisticated 21st century systems.

Linux runs on the smallest devices all the way up to the fastest supercomputers, as noted above. Linux today powers smart phones, Netbooks, laptops, desktops, and servers in datacenters, but also home automation and many embedded systems. Linux will be at the heart of smart electrical grids that allow utilities to reduce waste, remotely manage and monitor use, and help reduce costs to consumers. Linux will increasingly be part of the instrumentation that provides the data we will use to tune and optimize not just our electrical grids, but also our water systems, supply chains, and factories, to name a few examples.

As the data is collected from the sensors, Linux can help ensure that it goes where it needs to go to do the most good. In order to reduce pollution, cars need to be inspected and kept off the roads until they are compliant with emission standards. Linux can power websites where citizens can pay fees and schedule inspection appointments in a low friction manner. Then once the inspections are complete, Linux systems can push the data to local and regional authorities, but also to repositories and software that measure not only compliance but perform data analysis. This will yield important information to further improve the system, and reduce pollution even more. Our systems need to be more interconnected, and Linux can help them be so.

Linux is global and supports many languages and locales. The tools needed to create a Smarter Planet must run in the heterogeneous environments that we have today. Linux is a big part of how we instrument, interconnect, and derive intelligence from the information around us. As we optimize the systems we have today and develop entirely new ones to solve problems in better ways, don’t be surprised to see Linux inside.

Dr. Robert S. Sutor: Vice President, Open Source and Linux, IBM Software Group
Jean Staten Healy: Director, Cross-IBM Linux Strategy, IBM Systems and Technology Group

Today, IBM is announcing it has been tapped by another major health plan organization, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBSMA), to revamp its entire information technology (IT) infrastructure, encompassing everything from data center management to overseeing the applications portfolio. Central to the project is the primary member Web site, bluecrossma.com that is designed to provide BCBSMA’s nearly 3 million members fast and secure online access to claims and general healthcare information. The new agreement is expected to generate approximately $16 million annually in savings for BCBSMA.

“The big driver for choosing IBM was the breadth and depth of capabilities IBM brings to the table,” said Bill Fandrich, chief information officer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. “The IBM team proved over and over again their ability to bring different products and integrate them onto one platform. IBM provides a lot of flexibility for us to leverage IBM’s partners, whether it’s for development or whether it’s for other product capabilities. It’s very important in this day and age when we’re trying to bring solutions to the market that we have an IT provider that’s looking at things from the lens of what we need, not just at what they can sell us.”

BCBSMA is among several major health plan organizations that have recently turned to IBM. Kaiser Permanente last year tapped IBM to deploy smart systems and activate its highly sophisticated global delivery network to provide patients, members and physicians real-time access to medical data and tools whenever and wherever they need it. Similarly, IBM is working with National Account Service Company LLC (NASCO) to manage its entire IT system as well as work with IBM Research to modernize its claim processing system. IBM is working with CIGNA in a multi-year strategy to place an entirely new focus on improving customers’ experience, including tapping customer information to make interactions with the company more personalized. More recently, IBM signed a deal with athenahealth Inc., a leading provider of Internet-based business services for physician practices. IBM will enable athenahealth to focus its resources on simplifying and improving administrative and reimbursement processes while reducing staff workload, allowing physicians to focus on delivering higher quality care to their patients.

The work that IBM is doing is hardly limited to the healthcare in the US. For example, in China, by integrating data from health records that combine Eastern and Western medicine and applying sophisticated analytics, doctors and nurses at Guang Dong Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine can figure out which treatment plans and techniques from each approach work best for specific diseases and medical conditions. In Italy, the Rizzoli Institute is transforming treatment of hereditary bone disease by using analytics while Europe’s non-profit research alliance EuResist Network GEIE, is working with IBM to improve treatment for HIV patients using a prediction engine that simulates the intervention of HIV treatment drugs within the human body.

While other companies are making claims about helping shape the future of healthcare, IBM is actually doing it. IBM is making systems “smarter” for healthcare payers and providers as they are faced with new pressures to improve efficiency and create new business models to serve their clients while holding the line on costs. IBM is helping companies transition from outdated IT environments to more modernized systems capable of analyzing data and predicting errors, as well as integrating data so doctors, patients and insurers can share information seamlessly, securely and efficiently. IBM is creating a smarter, more connected healthcare system that delivers better care for everyone involved.

Technorati Tags: healthcare, Smarter Healthcare, Smarter Planet