To see a live video of the event, click here. To learn more about the event, click here. To follow or participate via Twitter, use #icities.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Anne Altman, general manager, Global Public Sector, IBM, talks about why cities are so important to having a sustainable planet.

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5:51 p.m. Closing Remarks

Chase W. Rynd, president and executive director, National Building Museum, announces that Data Materialized wins the prize for the best of The 24-Hour City Project experiments.

Also, an Intelligent Cities exhibition is coming.

Also a book.

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5:15 p.m. Town Hall Meeting
A panel of municipal leaders discuss how we can collectively build intelligent cities.

One of the key points is the recognition that many American cities were built after the introduction of the automobile, and their design (or lack thereof) is based on the availability of cheap gasoline. So how do cities designed for the automobile proceed when that approach is no longer sustainable?

One example is Raleigh, North Carolina, which got the nickname “Spraleigh” because of its sprawl pattern. The city has very little available land for development and an aging population that won’t  be driving in the not-too-distant future.

Mitchell Silver, director of planning for Raleigh, says the city leaders began their long-term planning process with a series of discussions, which included a heavy dose of citizen input, about what it means to be a 21st century city. “A city has to understand its purpose. The public has to understand its purpose. The elected officials need to understand its purpose. Then you can understand what it is as a system,” he says.

In the end, they came up with a plan to develop 8 growth centers that will accommodate most of the community’s growth. They were able to get 96% support from the public. One crucial factor: They showed that the community would save hundreds of millions of dollars over the next 30 years by pursuing this plan.

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5:00 p.m. Designing a Collaborative Built Environment

“I never let the data trump my intuition about what my community values.”

–Maurice Cox, past mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia and former director of design at the National Endowment for the Arts.

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4:16 p.m. Designing a Collaborative Built Environment

Nicholas de Monchaux, architect, urbanist, writer, and assistant professor of Architecture & Urban Design at University of California, Berkeley: “Recently, I was asked who is the Jane Jacobs of social media? Well, Jane Jacobs was the Jane Jacobs of social media. She was the first to identify the layers of urban social relationships that are the essence of social media just like they are the essence of healthy cities.”

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3:55 pm – Thought Vignette: Community and Social Interaction in the Wireless City

Keith Hampton

Keith Hampton, assistant professor, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, is exploring the social benefits of using new technology in cities. He is presenting the results of his studies seeking to address three questions:

- Do new communication technologies reduce the use of traditional settings such as public spaces?
- Do new communication technologies reduce in-person interaction with others?
- Do new communication technologies make communication possible where it wasn’t before?

Hampton’s  data shows that people who use a variety of new media are more likely to visit public spaces – for example, bloggers spend a lot of time going to parks and cafes, and interacting socially. As a result of this kind of socialization, people have more diverse networks, and are physically and mentally healthier, creating higher levels of trust and tolerance.

There is a perception, he says, that people have less serendipity and pay less attention to the world around them due to social media. But his study shows that while that is true to a degree, many of the things people do online tend to be socially active, for example, increasing political participation.

In one of his studies, 25 percent of those interviewed had not visited the public space before wireless Internet was available at that location. Seventy percent of those who previously visited said they visited more often due to availability of wireless internet. And they almost always came alone, yet they are interacting with a lot of people online while they were in those public spaces– mostly interacting on social networking Web sites. Ten percent observed in an extended interaction with a stranger; 12 percent participated in a more modest social exchange;  and 1 in 6 maintained contact over time, forming a relationship.

In answering the question: Can social media make communication possible where it wasn’t before, Hampton tested lower-income neighborhoods with a low likelihood of access to technology.  The study found that in low-income neighborhoods, new communication technologies can help produce local cohesion and collective action in new and exciting ways.

The bottom line? The built environment hasn’t declined in importance and new technology doesn’t detract from the built environment.

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2:40 p.m. Imagining a Healthier City

A question to members of the panel: Look out 50 years. What do we need to anticipate now?

Climate change, says Patrick L. Kinney, professor of environmental health sciences, Columbia University. “The scientific community is essentially unanimous in the conclusion that we have seen climate change over the past 30 years, and no matter what we do we won’t be able to change things in the next 30 years,” he says.

Larger hurricanes are coming, like Katrina, because of the warming of the oceans. At the same time, cities along the seacoast will have to deal with rising sea levels.

If you’re interested in exploring some ideas about how cities can reach to rising and increasingly angry seas, check out this design project, Rising Currents, sponsored by New York’s Museum of Modern Art–the output of which was put on display in the museum’s galleries last year.

The project brought together five interdisciplinary teams to re-envision the coastlines of New York and New Jersey around New York Harbor at a time in the future when the sea level will be much higher. Their visions of the city of the future give new meaning to the concept of  “open space.”

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2:20 p.m. Imagining a Healthier City

Don’t leave home. That’s the advice of William Lucy, professor of Urban and Environmental Planning, University of Virginia. He says the mortal threats to humans in metropolitan areas area traffic accidents and murders. Most murders happen at home, but most traffic accidents, of course, don’t. Since there are many more traffic fatalities in metros than there are murders, the more time you spend at home, the less likely you are to die an early death.

That also means that the dangerous areas in a metropolitan area are the ones that are considered to be safest—the outer areas. That’s where you get the traffic fatalities.

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12:36 p.m.  During the lunch break

In one of the National Business Museum’s galleries, they’re presenting some experiments that have come out of  The 24-Hour City Project, launched in D.C., which project organizers call “a wild experiment to hack the city.”

The purpose of the project is to explore the intersection of the built environment, data, the arts and information technology. In a beta conducted in recent weeks, teams competed to develop physical and digital interventions at the museum, which were opened to the public over the weekend.

One cool one: Data Materialized. A group gathered data about the education levels of people in D.C., arranged by location, and represented it in a three-dimensional graphic—which they displayed in physical form in one of the National Building Museum galleries. Notice in the video the huge spike of education in D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In November, the 24-Hour City Project competition will launch citywide in D.C. and, the organizers hope there will be parallel events in Boston, New York, Chicago and elsewhere around the world.

To see what’s going on, visit the Intelligent Cities Tumblr blog.

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12:25 p.m. Regionally Thinking: Transportation, Affordability, and Equity

Robert Puentes, senior fellow, Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, says one of the problems is that suburban towns think about their relationships to the cities and not how they relate to one another. We have hub-and-spoke transit systems. “If you’re trying to get between suburbs you have tremendous challenges,” he says.

He says we have to fundamentally rethink and remake our transport corridors so it makes it easier to live work shop and play: “We have to remake the suburbs for the 21^st century.”

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12:00 p.m. Regionally Thinking: Transportation, Affordability and Equity

Robert Puentes, senior fellow, Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, recently concluded a study of accessibility to work in metropolitan areas in the United States. The good news is that 70% of metro residents had some sort of transit. The bad news is that the transit isn’t convenient enough. On average, people can only get to 30% of the jobs in their metropolitan area within 90 minutes.

The conclusion I draw from this info is that you can’t solve the problem by brute force–building a lot more rail or other transit infrastructure. You’ll be able to move quicker and cheaper if you concentrate in the near-term on better coordination of what exists, which requires collaboration between different regional and municipal transit organizations. The transit systems have to not only intersect but their schedules need to sync up.

Scott Bernstein, president and founder, Center for Neighborhood Technology, says, “We need a jobs-to-people strategy, not just a people-to-jobs strategy.” He urges government leaders to provide incentives to companies to move the jobs to where the people are. That’s much less expensive than making massive new investments in mass transit systems.

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11:15 a.m. Thought Vignette: Democracy and Inclusion in the Intelligent Cities

Ceasar McDowell, professor of the Practice of Community Development, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explores ways of democratizing data and city development.

He argues that in the social networking world, people, not corporations, should have should have control over their data. He proposes what he calls a “personal digital commons.” Individuals should be able to place digital information about them on the Web in four buckets: free use, limited use, collective community use and no use. Once people have decided how their information can be used, the way is clear to start using it in potentially powerful ways.

He has the concept of “collective framing.” Rather than organizations or city governments setting agendas and announcing them to the public, why not engage the public in setting the agenda from the get-go?

He says even if you ask people to provide input  via an online survey, the way you ask the questions is limiting. He encourages open-ended questions.

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10:10 a.m. The City as a Lab.

Government is in ill-repute in some quarters these days, but good government leadership is absolutely vital to leading and coordinating the development of more successful cities.

Dustin Haisler, director of government innovation, Spigit, and former CIO, Manor, Texas, says government leadership is vital, even at a time when municipal governments are pressed financially. “Don’t accept the constraints you’re given,” he says, adding later: “The city is a lab now. They’re experimenting and solving problems.”

Mark Cleverley, director of strategy, Global Government Industry, IBM, says, “I challenge the notion that government isn’t innovative. You have to find a way to let those people free and work together across city agencies. The message has to be that it’s okay for that to happen.”

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9:55 a.m. The City as a Lab.

Mark Cleverley, director of strategy, Global Government Industry, IBM, says,  “We can think of creating solutions in many more places than we could just a few years ago.”

We’re engaged in smarter cities projects all over the world.

One example is IBM has been working with the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to help city leaders transform the management of their operations.

The impetus for the overhaul was a series of floods and mudslides that claimed the lives of 100 people back in April 2010 combined with preparations for the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. The city and IBM are collaborating to create what Rio leaders call their City Operations Center, where they’re integrating information from more than 20 city departments for for real-time visualization, monitoring and analysis of incidents across the city. It will help meteorologists, geological surveyors, field operations people and security managers work together to dramatically speed emergency responsiveness—no matter what happens.

As part of the agreement, IBM Research scientists have developed a high-resolution weather forecasting and hydrological modeling system, which can predict heavy rains up to 48 hours in advance. Essentially, they’ve created a giant mathematical model of how the city’s weather interacts with its water management systems.

The center is the first in the world to integrate all the stages of a crisis management situation: from the prediction, mitigation and preparedness, to the immediate response to events, and finally to capture feedback from the system to be used in future incidents.

Rio Operations Center

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9:35 a.m. Keynote Conversation: What Makes an Intelligent City?

Susan Piedmont-Palladino, curator, National Building Museum: “I look forward to the day when a city isn’t considered beautiful unless it’s sustainable. You won’t get an architectural award unless you pay attention to how the building is oriented toward the sun.”

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9:17 a.m. Keynote Conversation: What Makes an Intelligent City?

One of the keys to making cities manageable and data really useful is developing technology systems that allow city leaders to see data, make sense of it, and make better decisions based on their new knowledge.

IBM has has been working with cities for decades, and, three years ago, when it launched its Smarter Planet strategy, it began bringing new thinking and new technologies to bear on cities’ problems and opportunities—combining the availability sensors for collecting data, the ubiquity of networks and new analytical software tools. Initially, most of the software had to be written from scratch.

Not so any more. Today, coinciding with the Intelligent Cities Forum, the company introduced a new software product, the IBM Intelligent Operations Center for Smarter Cities, which pulls together functionality from more than a dozen IBM products and integrates it into a single package. The software gives cities of any size a holistic view of information across city departments and agencies and a central point of command and collaboration.

This package came together really fast. “We’re laying track as we cross it,” I was told by Michael Kehoe, the IBM product manager in charge of building the Intelligent Operations Center.

To me, one of the coolest aspects of the software is its awareness of the interrelationships between systems—called event correlation. Data from different city services is integrated so, for instance, if the water department records that a particular fire hydrant is out commission, the fire department will be alerted to connect to a different hydrant if they get called to a fire in the area.

Click here to view the embedded video.

IBM’s Michael Kehoe talks about the importance of event correlation in managing cities.

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9 a.m. Keynote Conversation: What Makes an Intelligent City?

Dr. Xavier de Souza Briggs, associate director for General Government Programs, Office of Management and Budget, The White House, points out that the building industry has historically been slow to change. Unlike the auto industry, where there are a relative few players and they can develop and adopt new standards rapidly, the building industry is highly fragmented. His point is that there’s a role for government here in helping to set standards—which is one of the things he does at the White House.

The tech industry provides another model. It’s a healthy combination of market competition, industry standards bodies, and standards bodies such as NIST and ICANN setting standards.

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8:40 a.m. Keynote Conversation: What Makes an Intelligent City?

Richard Stengel, managing editor, TIME:  “In my city, New York, Robert Moses used data to create parts of cities that were inimical to the interests of the communities. What’s different now? A lot of those endeavors destroyed parts of cities.”

He asks, What’s different now?

Anne Altman, general manager, Global Public Sector, IBM, says we have a project at IBM called Cities in Motion. We capture information about where people are and how they’re moving, and when they’re moving. We use cell phones and other sensing devices. “People can see if we want to have green space we can  put it in a place where people can get to it. If we’re building roads, how can we design them so people aren’t just sitting in traffic jams. Having the data means we can improve everything from transportation to leisure activities.”

Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, says one of the differences now is that a lot of data is transparent. People in communities can see it and get involved in projects. They can use the data to make a case that a major city project isn’t really in the public interest.

The Federal government and New York City, among others, are making large amounts of data available to the public.

John Tolva, the chief technology officer in Chicago, built City Forward, a city data sharing organization and Web tool, when he was at IBM previously. Visit there to see how people in dozens of cities around the world have used data to understand what’s really happening in their cities.

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8:05 a.m. Keynote Conversation: What Makes an Intelligent City?

Rudith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation: “We’re seeing a tsunami of urbanization”

“Urbanization is an engine for sustainability, but it’s also a gathering place for poverty.”

“We need technology. But we need it to be inclusive. If we don’t answer ‘Intelligent for what?’ and ‘Intelligent for whom?’ then we aren’t going to build the intelligent city of the 21^st century.”

This is an important reminder. Rigging a city up with sensors, wiring and data dashboards won’t make a big difference unless the parties involved first come up with a vision of what they want the city to be and how they want it to work. Another key: involving people from throughout the community in helping to shape this vision.

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8:00 a.m.: Chase Rynd, president and executive director, National Building Museum, tells the crowd of 300: “We’re at the convergence of two major events in history. For the first time in human history more than 50% of the people on the planet are living in cities. But it may be a way to make a more sustainable world. People in cities have a lower carbon footprint. But cities face challenges.”

The National Building Museum has been working for six months to gather information about cities as systems. It has published infographics on its own web site and on Time Magazine’s site–also surveying people about their attitudes and reactions.  So far, more than 5000 people have responded. The info can be found here.

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IBM uses the term smarter cities. It’s an essential piece of the overall Smarter Planet strategy. The company believes that smarter cities drive sustainable economic growth by leveraging information to make better decisions, coordinating resources to operate more effectively and anticipating problems so they can be resolved before they get too big. If cities manage their knowledge wisely and aggressively, they’ll become better places to live and will create abundant economic opportunities for their citizens in a rapidly changing world. IBM’s Smarter Cities business has grown to nearly 2,000 engagements with cities globally in the last two years.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Intelligent Cities

Superconductivity demonstrated

When IBM scientists J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller discovered the first practical high-temperature superconductor material 25 years ago, they were considered rebels–and maybe even a little crazy. That’s because they were experimenting with ceramic materials that were deemed by many scientists to be inappropriate for the task.

Their stunning breakthrough altered the landscape of physics. The two were able to demonstrate the phenomenon of superconductivity in materials at a temperature that was 50% higher than had been shown before–theoretically making it possible for the effect to be used in commercial applications. For their work, they received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987.

But it is only now, a quarter of a century later, that the early promise of this breakthrough is beginning to pay off for humanity. Electrical utilities are now deploying superconductor materials in their distribution lines, and they’re also being used or tested in wind turbines, metal processing equipment, magnetic-resonance-imaging scanners and Maglev trains.

For scientists, there are two thrilling moments in the life cycle of innovations–the initial breakthrough and the big bang of impact. This is one of those moments, and it’s felt not just by the two scientists involved but the entire staff of IBM Research. “You don’t just work for the fun of it. You’re working to have impact,” says Christophe P. Rossel, a physicist at IBM’s Zurich lab, where the superconductor work took place. “Looking at the breakthrough of a colleague is an inspiration every day.”

Here’s a video clip about the superconductor breakthrough that was made in 1986.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Müller has retired from IBM and Bednorz has cut back his schedule to about one day per week, but the legacy of their work lives on.

Rossel tells a funny story. In 1986, when he was a research fellow at the University of California, San Diego, he applied for a job at IBM Research in Zurich and visited with Bednorz, who told him about the superconductor project. Intrigued, Rossel offered to collaborate with the two IBMers and perform some testing for them. Bednorz politely turned him down. Rossel jokes that he was that close to sharing in a Nobel Prize. He went to work for IBM one year later.

The path that superconductivity has taken from lab to market is every bit as compelling as the story of the breakthrough itself. Immediately after Müller and Bednorz published a seminal paper about their research, the global physics community went wild with excitement. At a famous meeting of the American Physical Society in New York City in March of 1987, nicknamed the “Woodstock of Physics,” more than 50 scientists present discoveries based on the IBMers’ work.

The science seemed so promising that businesses immediately started trying to commercialize it. One of them was American SuperConductor Corp., which was launched by three MIT professors in 1987.  Their goal was to develop cables from ceramic materials that would be bendable, durable and affordable enough for use in the electric grid.

Today, American Superconductor  is poised to reap the benefits from 25 years of product development. Last year, the company received an order from South Korea’s LS Cable for 10 million feet of superconducting wire. The cable had early been tested in New York and Ohio early, but Korea is where the first large-scale commercial roll out will take place. The company anticipates landing big orders from Chinese utilities, as well.

The main attraction of superconducting cable is that is can conduct 150 times the electrical current of similarly sized copper wire. In addition, it acts as a natural surge protector. It can absorb and suppress damaging power surges, protecting conventional power grid components from being damaged. So, ceramic cable is not only dramatically more efficient than traditional materials; it also improves the manageability and durability of the grid–making it a valuable element of Smart Grids.

Before too long, the effects of that breakthrough moment at the Zurich lab in 1986 will be felt all around the world.

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Here’s a link to IBM’s Centennial Icons of Progress essay about the breakthrough: http://www.ibm.com/ibm100/us/en/icons/hightempconduc

Technorati Tags: high temperature superconductivity, IBM, J. Georg Bednorz, K. Alex Müller, Zurich Lab

For over a century railroads have served as the vanguard in transportation — redefining what it means to travel, to transport goods, and to link together cities, states and nations around the world.  From the first steam-powered locomotives of the early nineteenth century to the high-speed commuter trains of today, railroads have been a great engine powering growth.

They are also one of industry’s earliest examples of an interconnected system — made up of many critical parts that require a special kind of ingenuity to make them work.

Since its earliest days as a corporation, IBM has been helping railways around the world manage critical aspects of their business — from understanding passenger travel patterns, to controlling the movement of rail cars, to collecting and interpreting data gathered from minuscule devices on the wheels and tracks.

Travel all the way back to 1896 — before there even was an IBM — and there’s the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad keeping track of all its operations with the help of tabulating equipment invented by Herman Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company, a predecessor of IBM.

Jump ahead to 1928 and IBM is putting its IT prowess to work in Italy, helping Ferrovie dello Stato automate its administrative processes for the organization of spare parts and the scheduling and allocation of trains.

We’re in the 1960s and IBM is still at it, introducing new, advanced systems for managing traffic and maintenance scheduling and tracking, yard assignments, inventory control and other things.  These become a foundation for the modern rail system.

We reach the present, and IBM is working harder than ever to help railroads become smarter in tackling their information, infrastructure and operational challenges — only now this has stretched to networks of intelligent rail systems that crisscross all over the world.

And then we experience that dual feeling of reassurance that bits of yesteryear are still here, and the thrill that innovative and important breakthroughs are still happening far and wide.

Click on the image to open the picture story:

Icons at Work: A Century of Inquiring Minds

Icons at Work: Taking a Smarter Route

Technorati Tags: IBM Centennial, icons of progress, rail, smarter rail

At IBM, we believe that taking advantage of advances in instrumentation, interconnectivity, and data analytics is an essential element of any city vitalization plan. One of the IBMers who is wrestling with the priority-setting issue is Rashik Parmar, an IBM distinguished engineer who heads up an initiative aimed at making Smarter Cities projects appealing to government leaders. He and some his colleagues, including distinguished engineer Colin Harrison and corporate strategist Martin Fleming, find that  Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs (graphic above) is a good thinking aid.

Parmar points out that there are three drivers of action in communities that line up pretty well with the elements of Mazlov’s hierarchy. Issues: Fundamental things like crime and transportation that determine the livability of a city correspond with levels one and two. Investment: Government, non-profit, or commercial investments that build and maintain infrastructure line up with levels three and four. Inspiration: The creation of a unifying, shared vision that defines the path to a “better place” corresponds to level five–peak experiences.

The winning argument in favor of strategic investments comes when you can point to long-term improvements in livability that result in part from fulfilling aspirational needs. Academic Richard Florida in his Creative Class writings makes the argument in a general sense: The cities that are most successful are the ones that attract and retain artists, scientists, and other kinds of innovators. Can anybody point to strong data proof points in your city that back up this argument? If  so, please weigh in.

I was struck today by a Thomas Friedman’s column today in the New York Times. He’s writing about the Tea Party and it’s angry demands for less government and lower taxes. I don’t want to get into the politics of the column, but one of his observations about what he sees as a necessity for the United States also applies to cities.  He calls for a plan to revitalize the nation:

“To me, that is a plan that starts by asking: what is America’s core competency and strategic advantage, and how do we nurture it? Answer: It is our ability to attract, develop and unleash creative talent. That means men and women who invent, build and sell more goods and services that make people’s lives more productive, healthy, comfortable, secure and entertained than any other country.”

To me, these are the questions that city leaders ought to be asking themselves, as well. I believe that the bold and smart ones among them will make the plans and investments now that will pay off a decade from now, and pay dividends for many years into the future.

But, easy for me to say…

What do you think? How do city leaders go about asking the right questions? How do they find ways way to make the plans and investments that will result in Smarter Cities?

Technorati Tags: crime, IBM, New York Times, potholes, Rashik Parmar, Smarter Cities, Thomas L. Friedman

This Smarter Cities phenomenon is really taking off. We’ve held major terrestrial events in Berlin and New York, and plan another in Shanghai this summer. We’ve also staged dozens of mini-events in cities throughout the world. So going online is an obvious next step. Anybody who wants to participate is welcome. Register on ibm.com.

The event will start off with a handful of speeches delivered by government and business leaders who are up to their elbows in making cities work better. They include Bev Perdue, governor of North Carolina, and Joseph Rigby, chairman of utility giant Pepco Holdings. Our own Bridget van Kralingen, IBM general manager, North America, will launch the event with an update on our Smarter Planet initiative. (One tidbit: A little more than a year after launching the initiative, we have 1200 partnerships with clients worldwide–a faster uptake than we expected.) Gov. Purdue will talk about a test project in Charlotte aimed at revolutionizing the way highways are built. Using a public-private partnership model,  North Carolina is teaming up with developers who will not only perform the design and construction of the new highway sections, but will invest some of their own money, as well. If this approach works in Charlotte, Perdue plans on rolling it out across the state.

After a lunch break (you’re on your own for that), there will be breakout sessions focusing on education, public safety, transportation, government, energy, and healthcare. As somebody who attended university in Pittsburgh, I’m particularly interested in hearing from Dr. Daniel Martich, the chief medical information officer at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. UPMC is reinventing itself as a laboratory for innovations in healthcare technology and new approaches to delivering care.

For participants, there will be plenty of opportunities to weigh in. There will be a question-and-answer session after  the major addresses and interactive discussions during each breakout panel. Participants will type their comments and questions on their computers.

Who knows, maybe the next Jane Jacobs will emerge out of one of these events. The pool of brainpower is certainly getting big enough to make that possible.

Here are a few highlights from each speaker – common themes include the need for identifiers for food products, open traceability systems, standards, and information sharing:

Congresswoman Nita Lowey, NY-18 (Westchester): we need a mandatory traceability system for all foods
David Acheson, Assoc. Commisioner for Food, FDA: major roadblocks to food safety are the lack of uniform standards, we need a global traceability system, there’s a misconception that local is safe and global is unsafe
Gay Whitney, Standards Director, EPCglobal: we need standards for food identification, information capture and information sharing
Caroline Smith DeWaal, Food Safety Director, Center for Science in the Public Interest: 46% consumers worry they’ll get sick from food, 52% have little confidence in food safety systems, retailers need to take more responsibility with recalls
Viktor Varan, Matiq: talked about the food tracking system implemented in Norway
Dr. Allan Preston, DVM and Assistant Deputy Minister, Manitoba Agriculture, Food & Rural Initiatives: humbled by how underdeveloped and developing nations are ahead of North America in food traceability
Dr. Harold Schmitz, Chief Science Officer, Mars: We need government, universities, and the industry to work together, and not fragment, to counter food supply chain threats
Margaret Saunders, Homeland Security Director, Oak Ridge National Lab: food safety is important to homeland security

The session ended with an active Q&A that could have gone longer, but we were already over our allotted time.

Below is a link to the press kit for the event that includes the final press release on the consumer survey we did about their attitudes on food safety that we released the day of the event. as well as other relevant content.

www.ibm.com/press/smarterfood

Technorati Tags: consumer products, food, food recall, food safety, safety

Of course, you are also welcome to follow Smarter Cities news and development via the Smarter Cities Widget, or via the Smarter Cities channel on Tumblr.

More of a :60 second primer than an ad, this new video hits home on the new intelligence aspect of IBM’s new consulting service, business analytics. For more on this see the Smarter Enterprise channel on our Smarter Planet site on Tumblr.  Also, you can add this new Analytics Album widget to your blog, site, page or network to stay on top of this fast developing front.

Technorati Tags: bao, business analytics, decision management, predictive analytics

On April 14, IBM launched Business Analytics & Optimization Services, a major expansion of its consulting organization that embraces all of these fronts. The move not only signals how the smarter planet vision is transforming into new value for IBM clients, but how that worldview will help individual organizations actually become more intelligent.

Business analytics may sound like an abstraction – (analytics simply means the science of analysis) –  but it reflects a very tangible reality at the heart of Smarter Planet: because we can increasingly sense and gather information with unprecedented scale and precision, entire new spheres of knowledge and insight are within reach. We can measure and monitor just about anything, from the complex interactions in natural systems like Galway Bay to the ebb and flow of power over an intelligent electric grid.

As the new paper from IBM’s Institute of Business Value, Business Analytics & Optimization for the Intelligent Enterprise, notes:

The information explosion has permanently changed the way we experience the world: everything – and everyone – is leaving digital tracks. Intelligence is increasingly embedded in objects.

What company wouldn’t want to operate with the kind of highly instrumented, interconnected and realtime intelligence that business analytics promises? While that may seem like a rhetorical question, the study IBM conducted as part of the launch of the new analytics service found that nearly eight in ten business leaders were making decisions based on gut and instinct.  Business analytics is meant to change that.

As Fred Balboni, the global leader of the new business analytics & optimization unit notes in this video to introduce the new service line, this new view of a smarter enterprise is not a matter of just feeding more information into organizations, or merely providing more business intelligence dashboards and reports. Business analytics as envisioned by IBM represents a shift from the management model of “sense & respond” (first articulated in the early ‘90s by an IBMer, Stephan H. Haeckel) to the more realtime and proactive paradigm: perceive.predict.perform.
This animated chart explains the perceive.predict.perform paradigm more fully, but the key difference is speed, continuous processing and predictive capabilities. The “dot” conceit is meant to reinforce the online and non-linear nature of the model. (For full-screen view, click the button on the lower right corner of the screen after starting the clip.)

Finally, while this frontier is still taking shape, I came across an article about a new medical device that brings some of the principles of business analytics down to a personal level, and serves as a decent analogy of how advanced analytics will help keep businesses healthy.

This new wireless sensor patch allows for automated early detection of heart failure.

“The patch measures temperature, heart and respiration rates, levels of physical activity, body position, and body-fluid levels, then beams data to a special cell-phone-like gadget in the patient’s pocket or home. From there, the data is wirelessly transmitted to the company’s servers, where algorithms detect anomalies and trigger alerts to doctors, who could then view the data from the Web or from their own mobile devices.”

Business analytics will do similar work: measuring and monitoring a complex mix of the organization’s operations and vital statistics. The net result: an enterprise that has fewer blind spots, makes better predictions, and can optimizes itself in bold new dimensions.

Jack Mason, IBM Global Business Services, Strategic Programs & Social Media

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