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Steve Hamm in
When communities set out on massive, multidimensional civic improvement projects, a necessary first step is gaining agreement from the principle players in government, business, and the non-profit sphere on what they want the city or region to be–its brand, if you will. This is a conclusion IBM executives have drawn from dozens of Smarter Cities engagements in communities scattered all over the globe.
That ambition is more easily stated than accomplished, but some of the work IBM is doing in Poland points to lessons that could help community leaders elsewhere.
Katowice, with a population of about 300,000, is the unofficial capital of the Silesa region in southern Poland, which is known for its coal mining, steel making, and other heavy industries. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the region has suffered economically. Its coal mines, in particular, became less competitive, resulting in a loss of tens of thousands of mining jobs.
Fortunately, the city and the region have some inspired and energetic leaders, among them Katowice Mayor Piotr Uszok. The goal is to shift to high-tech and service industries–supported by improvements in the transportation system. Uszok asked IBM for help in devising an economic renewal plan, and, as a first step, we sent in a five-person team from our Corporate Service Corps to help size up the situation.
The CSC, which has been called a “business” version of the Peace Corps, sends small groups of IBMers with diverse talents into countries or cities to help them craft economic development strategies, beef up government services, and improve systems such as transportation, health, and water. Some of the teams, such as the one that went to Poland, are made up entirely of executives–bringing a higher level of expertise and management skills to the projects.
Visiting Katowice this spring, the team engaged with a group of community leaders who have been jointly developing regional strategies for several years. At the same time, they’re open to new ideas, particularly along the themes of attracting foreign investors to create new jobs, improving the quality of life, and updating the transportation system.
The team members met with about 200 people from government, academia, and businesses. From these conversations they drafted a set of recommendations, which they presented to mayor Uszok in a marathon five-hour meeting. (The mayor demonstrated his commitment to strategic planning by continuing the meeting even though the city was under a severe flood threat.)
Following is a guest post from Leendert van Bochoven, IBM’s NATO and European Defense Leader:
Within the next few days, Brussels-based Security & Defence Agenda (SDA) will be releasing a report (pdf) that makes recommendations to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU) for broad policy changes to improve global security.
What makes this report so unusual is not the content itself; rather, it’s the source: The recommendations come from nearly 4,000 people from 124 countries and all walks of life who “jammed” for five days in February on global security challenges.
In the process these individuals made history. I was there. I saw it happen. I participated.
The occasion was the first ever global Security Jam, which used IBM jamming and advanced analytics technologies and services to successfully engage thousands of people in moderated on-line discussions over the Internet.
This was a “first” on many levels: It was the first time that civilians and military experts, including defence and security professionals, journalists, and representatives from governments, think-tanks, academia, and industry, had come together using this form of social media to discuss, debate and brainstorm on the changing nature of 21st century security. An idea born over a beer with Mike Ryan from the US Ambassy in Brussels. It was the first time that EU and NATO had supported such an open debate involving the international community – people beyond the “usual suspects” — on such a strategic and sensitive subject as our global security.
There were a tough set of issues to tackle, including crisis preparedness, cross-border cooperation, climate change, and cyber threats. These issues illustrate just how interconnected our planet has become. This interconnectedness affects geographic, organisational and institutional boundaries, as well as our concept of who we are and how we relate to one another. No greater symbol of this interconnectedness could have been that both EU and NATO supported this Security Jam.
I applaud NATO and the EU for supporting the Security Jam and for recognizing that new thinking, new levels of collaboration and greater civilian-military cooperation are needed to find viable solutions to global security challenges. Maybe this Security Jam should be turned into an annual online meeting of the minds, with the stature of “Davos” and the reach of “Facebook”, discussing smart ideas for dealing with today´s and tomorrow´s security challenges.
The Security Jam and the recommendations that followed are game-changing. But the full measure of success will be whether we can look back in a few years to see the realization and implementation of smart ideas that emerged from the Security Jam.
I, for one, am confident we will.
Leendert van Bochoven is IBM’s NATO and European Defense Leader.
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Steve Hamm in
W. Brian Arthur explains agent-based modeling.
What if legislators could foresee how people might find loopholes in the bills they’re working on–and head it off? That was one of the themes in a fascinating presentation made by the Santa Fe Institute’s W. Brian Arthur at IBM’s Smarter Health Through Modeling and Simulation conference last week in San Jose, Calif.
Arthur, an external professor at the institute, which focuses on the study of complex systems, said that by using agent-based modeling, researchers could have been able to identify some of the unintended consequences of the partial repeal in 1999 of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had prohibited bank holding companies, whose accounts are insured by the federal government, from owning securities businesses. Some economists have blamed the repeal of the act for worsening the effects of the global financial crisis.
The techniques could have headed off some of the problems that arose with Massachusetts’ health care reforms, as well. One of the problems with the the Massachusetts system, he said, is that too many people signed up for health insurance only when they anticipated they would need it in the not-too-distant future, so they took benefits from the system but didn’t contribute their fair share to the insurance pool. Arthur said agent-based models could have spotted this loophole ahead of time and allowed legislators or the insurance industry to put in place rules that could close it.
In this video clip, Arthur explains the magic of agent-based modeling.
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Steve Hamm in
Data modeling and simulation are necessary tools for taking on society’s largest and most complex problems, including public health and climate change, but unless scientists can change the mindsets of policy makers and the world’s citizens, the world’s in a heap of trouble. That was the loud and clear message today from John Sterman, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, at IBM’s Almaden Institute 2010 conference in San Jose, Calif.
The two-day conference, which started today, is focused on using modeling and simulation to improve public health. Sterman and his colleagues at MIT’s System Dynamics Group have created a model and visualization techniques for analyzing and displaying the potential effects on global warming of policy changes by the world’s leading nations, The model makes it possible for leaders to run what-if scenarios and see the effects of decisions within seconds–so the tool can be used at the negotiating table when they’re hashing out potential solutions to global warming. Sterman argued that while sophisticated technologies are necessary, they’re not sufficient, and warned: “We are laying a table for our children and grandchildren that will be impoverished, and we need to do something about it.”
Here’s a clip from the end of his keynote speech, when he argued that successful approaches for solving large problems will be less like the Manhattan Project and more like the civil rights movement. For more info about what Sterman is up to, click here.
Healthcare is a complex topic with many moving parts, including doctors, hospitals, clinics, the pharmaceutical industry, government policy, privacy, medical schools, etc. Now, take your thinking up one level—to health itself. The health of individuals is affected by myriad factors, ranging from globalization of agriculture and economic vitality on one end to advertising messages and opportunities for exercise on another. So, how can a society that’s determined to improve the health of its citizens get its arms around all of those factors and their interdependencies?
Some of our IBM colleagues at the Almaden research lab in San Jose are taking a step towards answering that question at a two-day conference starting today. The goal of the conference, Almaden Institute 2010, is to help achieve better health through modeling and simulation. They’ve invited experts from academia, government health agencies, health care providers, and policy think tanks. Among the speakers are John D. Sterman, professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, and Margaret Brandeau, professor at Stanford. Sterman’s speech, A Banquet of Consequences: Management Flight Simulators for Climate Change Policy, will be streamed starting at 9 a.m. PDT, and Brandeau’s speech, Modeling and Simulation in Public Health, will be streamed starting at 11:30 a.m. PDT. You can tune in here.
Modeling and simulation aid our ability to understand the interrelationships of systems and how a change in one can affect others—which is an important building block in improving public health and health care.
Consider this disturbing situation: Some large American cities have so few supermarkets that they’re considered “food deserts.” There’s actually an abundance of food in these places, but it’s the wrong kind. It comes in the form of fast food in restaurants or processed food in small shops—not the abundant, affordable fresh fruits, vegetables, and other fresh provisions that people need to remain healthy. For instance, Detroit, a city with a population of nearly 1 million, has no major supermarkets. Meanwhile, it has more than 400 liquor stores.
This difficulty in getting fresh food is a major cause of America’s obesity problem–where roughly one-third of Americans are obese. Obesity, of course, is a contributing factor in a wide array of maladies, including heart disease and high blood pressure. But why can’t people get healthy food? There are many causes. Crime is a factor in the paucity of supermarkets in the inner cities. And poor public transportation systems make it difficult for city residents to travel to a fully-stocked store. Meanwhile, advertising drives people toward poor food choices. So you can begin to see how truly vast and complex is the health ecosystem. “It’s easy to tell people to eat less and exercise more, but the situation is complex. You have to take into consideration genetics, socio-economic factors, location, and social influences,” says Paul Maglio, manager of smarter planet service systems at IBM Research.
Knowledge about how these factors interrelate is crucial to policy makers and leaders in government, the health care industry, and other participants in the health ecosystem. This is where modeling and simulation come in. Today, decisions that affect health are typically made based on looking at a single system in isolation. Even when researchers gather data and build models for analyzing it, they look at systems as if they stand alone. Maglio, database management researcher Pat Selinger, and a handful of other IBM scientists have embarked on an effort to make it possible for stakeholders in a nation’s health to share data and create integrated models that can provide holistic views of how the world works. “Everything is connected to everything. If you change one piece, everything else needs to reconfigure. It’s like a spreadsheet where every value needs to recalculate every time something changes,” explains Selinger.
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Steve Hamm in
This has happened to you. You’re motoring down the highway when you hear a bulletin from one of those all-news-all-the-time radio stations telling you there’s trouble ahead. A tractor trailer has flipped and is blocking two lanes. So you hop off at the next exit and …… come to a grinding halt in gridlock traffic. Everybody else has the same idea you did. When you finally arrive at your destination, late, a colleague tells you they made it on time using the highway. The accident had been cleared. %@#+*!
Timely traffic information. It’s a promise that is often made but rarely fulfilled. The reason: Most systems for monitoring traffic and alerting people about problems have latency issues–maybe as much as 20 minutes. Even the traffic information services on iPhone and other GPS-enabled devices isn’t always up to date.
A big idea that IBM scientist Nagui Halim had back in 2003 is about to finally make traffic information truly an up-to-the-minute phenomenon. More about Halim in a minute. First, today’s news:
Scientists from IBM and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden are collaborating to bring real-time traffic info to Stockholm–which likely will make it the first city in the world to possess such a capability. Over the past year, IBM has been working with the city to monitor traffic flow during peak hours. The congestion management system has reduced traffic by 20 percent and reduced average travel times by almost 50 percent. Now we’re putting some of our newest analytics technology, called InfoSphere Streams, to work there, too. The plan is to gather information germane to traffic congestion from a wide variety of sources, including sensors in taxi cabs and delivery trucks, on-time performance updates from transit systems, and weather information–then making it readily available to travelers so they can make the best decisions about driving routes, travel times, and transit alternatives. “This is the first application of real-time analytics to traffic,” says Halim.
Picture this: A resident could send a text message to the traffic monitoring system listing their location and destination. The system would instantly spit back a recommendation.
Back to Halim. He was working at IBM Research back in 2003 when he saw the need for technology that could monitor multiple streams of data, real-time, and then mash it up to create actionable knowledge. At the time, most so-called real-time systems weren’t real time at all–or they were highly specialized systems. He saw the opportunity to create an approach that could be applied to any number of purposes.
It took a while. There were glitches and dead ends. Some of Halim’s colleagues thought he was crazy. But now its here. IBM last year began working with clients to build applications for the technology in health care, financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, water management, radio astronomy, and particle physics. In February, we formally launched InfoSphere Streams as a product–in a new version with substantially improved performance.
Here’s how it works: Data comes into the computing system from the network. The system can handle thousands of streams of information concurrently. It breaks the flow into a series of small steps, recognizing the kind of data that’s coming in and quickly sending each chunk to a microprocessor that best able to deal with it. Then, through a method called “sensor fusion,” the system weaves the strands of processed data into usable information. “It’s all about gathering and making sense,” says Halim.
Depending on what you want to do, you can run a stream computing application on a supercomputer, a blade server, or even a laptop. You can analyze something relatively simple like a flow of Twitter Tweets on your laptop.
How big could stream computing be? Halim, who is now director of the InfoSphere Streams product group in IBM software, won’t put a big number on it. But he points out that there are potentially game-changing uses for the technology in one industry after another.
By the way, that IBM TV commercial you’ve seen of a baby blanketed in colorful strands representing the data from monitoring its vital signs? That’s stream computing. But that’s another story.
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Steve Hamm in
Tax Collectors in Their Office
Source: Wiki Commons
Tax collectors. Not a popular bunch. Still, the job must be done, and it’s best to do it effectively and efficiently. For years, IBM has been providing governmental tax offices with technology that helps collectors spot cheats and delinquents. Our latest bit of technical wizardry, the IBM Tax Collections Optimizer (nickname: TACO), helps them collect the money that’s owed by individuals and businesses.
This project got underway a couple of years ago when the folks at the New York state tax office began asking for an improved system for going after scofflaws–something that would be more effective but also require less effort. Up until now, the Office of Tax Enforcement followed a standard set of rules and a step-by-step process for going after cheats, but it wasn’t satisfied with the results it was getting.
TACO optimizes the actions of agents by taking into account the complex dependencies between the office’s resources, the potential for recovering money, and legal constraints. It uses a variety of taxpayer data, such as filing status, the amount owed, and past payment history. Then it comes up with an overall plan for collecting from the entire population of delinquent taxpayers.
Rather than building something from scratch, scientists at IBM Research cast around for techniques being used for other purposes that could be applied to the tax office situation. They found them far afield, bringing together methods used commonly in game theory and robotics. Using the Markov Decision Process, or MDP, they mapped the collections process and segmented taxpayers based on their characteristics. Then they applied a method called Reinforcement Learning to the map. Based on historical information, they were able to learn the optimal sequence of actions for each type of taxpayer. “We came up with the optimal approach to maximizing the chances of success while minimizing the expenses,” says Chid Apte, director of analytics research at IBM Research.
Because of a crackdown on tax delinquents, New York has 1.2 million active cases pending. One of its goals is to resolve more cases without having to issue warrants and initiate a formal legal processes that can drag on for years. The State expects to recover an additional $100 million over the next three years with the help of TACO.
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Adam Christensen in
As many have noted over the past year, transparency in government should mean more than just turning cameras on in an internal briefing or dumping raw data sets on the public. If one merely has access to raw government data – and I include complex legislative text in this category – chances are they are no more informed than they were before gaining access. Individuals – or entities – need to help make sense of that data in ways citizens can understand. (Likewise, availability of raw open data is critical to ensure accuracy of resulting analysis)
In light of that, I wanted to share a new public beta project from the IBM Research team responsible for the ManyEyes Visualization services. The new service, called ManyBills, is aimed at making it easier to explore and understand the legislative process and specific bills, both of which are often too complex for most citizens grasp fully, by offering an interactive visualization of the bill.
From the new ManyBills blog:
Today we are officially launching the public beta of Many Bills, a web-based visualization of US Congressional legislation. Many Bills is a tool that provides a peek into the internals of Federal bills, making it easier to understand and navigate these dense texts. Its interface offers users an overview of this complex dataset while still allowing for full access to the original text.
As you can see from the example above of the new Health Care Bill the output is embeddable on any web page.
I’m still tinkering with it – the tool itself takes a bit to get used to and the produce embeddable visualizations that “fit” the page. But I love the interactivity of the tool. What’s your verdict?
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George Faulkner in
In our latest video, we wanted to address a few of the basics behind IBM’s smarter planet strategy. We interviewed three IBMers, featured in the video above – in order of appearance: Mike Wing, Andy Stanford-Clark and John Tolva – and asked them to talk about what Internet of Things, System of Systems, and Smarter Planet mean to them. We tried something new with this video, interviewing these gentlemen, then animating around some excerpts from the audio captured.
Although Internet of Things and System of Systems are not IBM-bred concepts, they help to explain a great deal about what is happening now where the digital world meets the physical and intellectual. An excerpt from the film:
Michael Wing: “Over the past century but accelerating over the past couple of decades, we have seen the emergence of a kind of global data field. The planet itself – natural systems, human systems, physical objects – have always generated an enormous amount of data, but we didn’t used to be able to hear it, to see it, to capture it. Now we can because all of this stuff is now instrumented. And it’s all interconnected, so now we can actually have access to it. So, in effect, the planet has grown a central nervous system.
Look at that complex set of relationships among all of these complex systems. If we can actually begin to see the patterns in the data, then we have a much better chance of getting our arms around this. That’s where societies become more efficient, that’s where more innovation is sparked.
When we talk about a smarter planet, you can say that it has two dimensions. One is to be more efficient, be less destructive, to connect different aspects of life which do affect each other in more conscience and deliberate and intelligent ways. But the other is also to generate fundamentally new insights, new activity, new forms of social relations. So you could look at the planet as an information, creation and transmission system, and the universe was hearing its information but we weren’t. But increasingly now we can, early days, baby steps days, but we can actually begin to hear the planet talking to us.”
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Even if you attended or viewed some of the videos from our New York City Smarter Cities event in October, you’ll find that last week’s first-ever Smarter Cities Virtual Forum affords a deeper dive into some of the key issues and smarter solutions that cities from Richmond, Virginia (public safety) to Las Vegas, Nevada (transportation) are undertaking today. One of the nice features of hosting the event virtually is the ability to deliver the presentations to you, in their entirety, on demand.
IBM’s new General Manager for North America, Bridget van Kralingen opened the forum with an update on our Smarter Cities initiatives and on what we’re seeing come out of these important conversations, as more people understand and embrace its vision.
- Cities are taking their first steps, piloting projects to improve efficiency and lower costs: The District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority (DC WASA) is working with IBM to analyze and revitalize its aging water and sewer system.
- Relationships are deepening: IBM completed an automatic metering project with Houston-based Centerpoint Energy, and now the utility is engaging with us for a Smart Grid project.
- Understanding and awareness are growing: Fordham University in New York has developed a new business analytics curriculum, preparing students with the needed skills to address key challenges – from reforming healthcare, to making buildings more energy efficient, to improving delivery of public services.
- Cross-industry connections are being made: Sempra Energy, based in San Diego, is partnering with grocery retailer Kroger developing charging infrastructure for electric vehicles.
Later, in her keynote, North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue noted that as cities recover from the global recession of last year, “there will be a new normal for people, business and government at all levels.”
Governor Perdue discussed how North Carolina is doing business differently across the board to ensure its cities run smarter, leaner and poised to compete globally. She shared some of the targeted initiatives she’s been undertaking to address each of her top four priorities for the state – job creation, education, smarter government and public safety – and how she’s positioning North Carolina to be a world leader in green energy and green technology.
Speaking of green, the general session concludes with an insightful presentation and Q&A with Joseph Rigby, Chairman of Pepco Holdings, Inc., one of the largest energy delivery companies in the mid-Atlantic. His company, which was awarded $168 million in federal stimulus funding for smart grid projects over the next several years, has begun implementing smart meters in Delaware with plans to deploy them in Washington, DC, and Maryland, later this year.
Now that we’ve hopefully whet your appetite, I invite you to replay the general session and each of the six subsequent breakout sessions – which feature additional experts and some great Q&A – on energy, transportation, government, education, public safety and healthcare.
Leslie J. Monreal-Feil is an IBMer based in South Florida.
