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Steve Hamm in
Intel’s purchase yesterday of security software maker McAfee, detailed in this News.com story, signals a shift in the tech industry’s view of how to better secure computers, networks, and software programs: Security has to be built in, rather than added on later. It’s the concept of “secure by design.”
At IBM, the secure-by-design concept extends to encompass our Smarter Planet agenda. These days, its not enough to secure the traditional computing infrastructure. You’ve got to protect all of the devices and networks that are now being used to monitor, manage, and analyze everything from smart electrical grids to health care systems. “All of the physical assets of the world are becoming digitized, instrumented, interconnected and intelligent,” says Kristin Lovejoy, head of IBM security strategy. “But the sad reality is that as people develop and design these new technologies they’re not thinking enough about the issue of security. These devices are so critical that if they’re unavailable or if they’re tampered with, it could have a significant negative impact on an individual or a large population.”
When security is an afterthought, it tends to be expensive and not that effective. Plus, organizations typically find out about a vulnerability after it has already been exploited by malicious software programs.
We believe that only by designing products to be secure can organizations gain the protection they need at a reasonable price. With that principle in mind, IBM has established what we call a secure engineering framework. It’s a set of specifications that we are beginning to use in all of our design processes, for hardware and software alike.
Now that the world’s critical infrastructure is being wired and networked, security is becoming more important than ever before. Business-as-usual in the tech industry isn’t good enough any more.
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Steve Hamm in
You name it. The faculty members at Carnegie Mellon University who are connected with the Center for Sensed Critical Infrastructure Research (CenSCIR) are busy applying smarter-planet technologies and thinking to practically any system of physical infrastructure. Now, in connection with IBM, the organization’s leaders are creating a physical place to serve as sort of a clubhouse for researchers and organizations that want to tap into their brain power.
The IBM Smarter Infrastructure Lab, announced today, is going to be a 1,000-square-foot facility within one of the the university’s buildings. It will be equipped with engineering workstations, 3-D displays, a telepresence set up, massive data storage capabilities, and access to powerful clusters of number-crunching computers. “Here, people can organize and visualize their work. It will be a showcase for what we do,” says James H. Garrett, Jr., the co-director of CenSCIR and head of CMU’s civil and environmental engineering department.
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jamesmathewson in
Editor’s Note: Following is an essay co-authored by Bob Sutor, vice president of open source and Linux for IBM, and Jean Staten Healy, director of cross-IBM Linux strategy for IBM. It describes the central place Linux plays in building a smarter planet, and builds on a presentation about the role of Linux in Smarter Systems, which the two IBM executives gave at the recent Red Hat Summit.
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
Smart Metering is creating buzz in the marketplace, and for good reason. Consumer visibility into energy consumption — and having the means to take a more active role in day to day consumption – means less energy wasted and more money saved. But to get that level of visibility, companies and consumers need to make sense of massive amounts of data. Our project to bring smart metering to homes across Britain with IBM is a good example of how beginning with the home, our communities and cities can be more energy conscious and work to reverse the effects of climate change.
Background here: We received funding in the UK for a 30-month research project that will allow stakeholders from local authorities, private businesses and universities to study energy monitoring and its effect on human behavior. The goal was to enable real-time analysis of electricity usage for households, or even for individual appliances, to help people make better decisions about energy efficiency in the home and minimize their environmental impact.
So we installed small, low-cost energy monitoring devices at groups of homes in five European cities: Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester in the UK, and Plovdiv and Ivanovo in Bulgaria. These are really ‘living labs’ that give researchers access to real-world energy usage data, and where they can study behavior and attitudes towards energy management.
The key is getting homeowners access to all this information online in a simple format. Our dashboard does just that. It displays their electricity usage and performs analytics, such as calculating costs against the users’ electricity tariff, or comparing their usage to the average for their group. Our project proves that when people can see and understand the numbers, they can make more informed decisions about energy management and change their behavior – like reducing electricity bills and saving the environment, so to speak.
What does this mean for the larger UK population? In the first proof-of-concept we simulated three million homes sending readings once a minute and we were able to capture nearly 50,000 readings per second using only a quad-core, dual-processor Intel server. In the second, we moved to a slightly larger server and found we could deliver analytics response times of between one and three seconds for a similar load. Tech talk here, but the point is that energy monitoring for millions of homes or more can now be a practical proposition.
Clive Eisen, Chief Technology Officer at Hildebrand, is directly responsible for the operations and software development staff tasked with managing the roll-out of Hildebrand products and services.
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Editor’s note. For some more of IBM’s perspective on the project, following is a video of Guido Bartels, IBM’s general manager for Energy & Utilities.
This past Saturday, I watched as a gust of wind snapped a 70-foot pine tree like a toothpick—and sent it flailing, bringing down a tangle of power lines. The recent Northeaster in Westchester County, N.Y., gave new meaning to the words “wind power,” the subject of a recent story on the Smarter Planet Web site. Except the wind is supposed to create the power, not snuff it out!
Wind is the fastest growing source of energy in the United States, with a 39% increase in installed capacity this past year. The U.S. has the largest installed capacity in the world, followed by Germany and China. But this may not be for long as countries around the world make green energy an environmental and economic priority.
For example, Denmark, with 20% of its power coming from wind, is working to advance its grid to be able to power electric cars with wind.
China has the most aggressive renewable energy deployment in the world, according to ClimateWorks. It has six immense wind power projects under construction, dwarfing any project anywhere else in the world. Government mandates, available funding and relatively light regulation provide some of the impetus for this surge in growth.
Top ten wind turbine manufacturers by megawatts installed in 2009
| 1. | Vestas (Denmark) | 35,000 |
| 2. | Enercon (Germany) | 19,000 |
| 3. | Gamesa (Spain) | 16,000 |
| 4. | GE Energy (Germany/U.S.) | 15,000 |
| 5. | Siemens (Denmark/Germany) | 8,800 |
| 6. | Suzlon (India) | 6,000 |
| 7. | Nordex (Germany) | 5,400 |
| 8. | Acciona (Spain) | 4,300 |
| 9. | REpower (Germany) | 3,000 |
| 10. | Goldwind (China) | 2,889 |
Source: (Wikipedia)
Today, only one of the top 10 wind turbine manufacturers is located in the U.S. But momentum is growing. Last week, leading wind energy industry executives—and this week, a group of 29 bipartisan state governors—called on Congress to pass a national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES).
Currently 29 states have such a standard, but a pan-American standard is needed for the infrastructure to reach its full potential. Last year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which requires overall renewable energy and efficiency to provide 6% of power in 2012, rising to 20% in 2020.
However, the recommendations of the House bill still need to be taken forward through the Senate before they can gain the President’s signature and become law.
“We have the potential for explosive growth if we can get long term support. A national RES will result not just in new installations, but also in new manufacturing,” said Denise Bode, CEO, American Wind Energy Association. And that translates into jobs. If we can develop a full-fledged wind power industry in the U.S., the benefits are twofold: cleaner, greener energy for the long term and a new industry and more jobs for now.
Posted by
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.”
Watch Video
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.
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Steve Hamm in
“The point of cities is multiplicity of choice,” said Jane Jacobs, the champion of cities who penned the breakthrough 1961 critique of urban renewal, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. We think it’s a good idea to give a multiplicity of people who are interested in the future of cities opportunities to learn about it and do something about it. That’s why we’re conducting a virtual Smarter Cities event on Feb. 23 (10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., Eastern U.S. Time) as we mentioned here on this blog a few days ago.
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.
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Adam Christensen in
As readers of this blog will remember, over the past year, we’ve spent a lot of time convening leaders from the public and private sectors to discuss the future of our cities. We started in Berlin in June, then, in November hosted another Smarter Cities forum in New York City. In between these major international sessions, we’ve been hosting dozens of local fora in cities around the world. We’ve had mayors, governors, CEO and a whole host of civic and federal officials participate in the conversations. In fact, we’ll be convening another large meeting in Shanghai in early June.
But, physical events are necessarily limiting in their access and participation. Thus, to address that issue, we are going to be hosting the first ever Smarter Cities Virtual Event on February 23. The event will allow anybody to participate live, online, in discussions addressing the weighty issues our cities face, including transportation, education, energy, public safety and more. This is not just a webcast of the same content. Rather, they will be interactive sessions probing deeply on these big topics.
I’ve included a sampling of the agenda below (more details can be found on the registration page on ibm.com). We’ll be sharing some major recaps from the event here on the blog next week. You can also follow along on Twitter @smarterplanet and the event hashtag (forthcoming). But if you are interested in participating in the conversation live, register now.
Here’s a sampling of the agenda:
Main tent:
- Bridget Van Kralingen, IBM
- North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue
- Joseph Rigby, President & CEO, Pepco Holdings
As in all of our Smarter Cities conferences, the “main tent” sessions are followed by interactive breakout sessions probing much deeper into the major systems that comprise a smarter city. The Virtual Smarter Cities Forum will host the following:
- Smarter Energy, moderated by Guido Bartels, IBM and Todd McGregor, PHI
- Smarter Transportation, moderated by Gerry Mooney, IBM; Pat McCrory, Moore & Van Allen, (and former Mayor of Charlotte, NC); and Bob Kingston, McCarran Airport, Las Vegas
- Smarter Government, moderated by Nicole Gardner, IBM; Barbara Ramsey, Oklahoma Employment Security Commission; and Don R. Edwards, Alameda County Social Services Agency
- Smarter Education, moderated by Mike King, IBM; J.L. Albert, Georgia State University; and Sharon P. Pitt, George Mason University
- Smarter Public Safety, moderated by George Cruser, IBM; Stephen Hollifield, City of Richmond Police; and Pat McCrory, McCrory & Co. (and former Mayor of Charlotte, NC)
- Smarter Healthcare, moderated by Patrick Boyle, IBM; Daniel Martich, University of Pennsylvania Medical Center; and Asif Ahmad, of Duke University Health System
We hope to “see” you next week.
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Guest in
Magnified view of a cross section of the compound Cu2ZnSn(S,Se)4
Following is a guest post from Dr. Thomas Theis:
IBM’s launch of Power 7 systems has generated significant media attention this week. While IBM’s investments in materials research, nanotechnology, manufacturing and chip design are paying off in bringing new, innovative products to market, IBM is also applying that expertise to areas you may not be aware of.
For example, today, the scientific journal Advanced Materials published a paper detailing a breakthrough in solar research by IBM scientists. IBM researchers have created a high-efficiency solar cell that holds potential to produce more energy at a lower cost, as it is made of earth abundant materials.
Solar cell in a working device
The quest to develop a solar technology that can compare on a cost per watt basis with the conventional electricity generation, and also offer the future ability to deploy at the hundreds of gigawatts or greater levels, has become a major challenge that this breakthrough moves us closer to overcoming. IBM does not plan to manufacture solar technologies, but is open to partnering with solar cell manufacturers to demonstrate the technology.
The key part of this solar cell, which is the layer that absorbs most of the light for conversion into electricity, is made entirely with abundant and readily available materials Copper (Cu), Tin (Sn), Zinc (Zn), Sulfur (S) and/or Selenium (Se) and performs at a power conversion efficiency of 9.6 percent, which is 40 percent higher than previous attempts to create a solar cell made of similar materials. Other solar cells which perform at similar efficiency levels are comprised of materials that have been either too costly to produce or contain elements that could limit production capacity, or have poor prospects for further improvements in efficiency, making commercialization and wide usage less likely.
IBM has a long history of pioneering advanced silicon technologies to help enhance performance, while reducing size and power consumption. Such advances include the development of the world’s first copper-based microprocessor; silicon-on-insulator (SOI), a technology that reduces power consumption and increases performance by helping insulate the millions of transistors on a chip; and strained silicon, a technology that “stretches” material inside the silicon decreasing the resistance and speeding the flow of electrons through transistors.
Similarly, IBM Research is applying its chip, materials and nanotechnology expertise in other areas. Consider the following:
- DNA sequencing – In an effort to build a nanoscale DNA sequencer, IBM scientists are drilling nano-sized holes in computer-like chips and passing DNA strands through them to read the information contained within their genetic code. IBM Research has received an “Advanced Sequencing Technology Award” from the US National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, to design a silicon-based DNA Transistor that will advance genome sequencing technology and generate progress in health care diagnosis and practice. This advanced research effort to demonstrate a silicon-based “DNA Transistor” could help pave the way to read human DNA easily and quickly, generating advancements in health condition diagnosis and treatment. The challenge in the effort is to slow and control the motion of the DNA through the hole so the reader can accurately decode what is in the DNA. If successful, the project could improve throughput and reduce cost to achieve the vision of personalized genome analysis at a cost of $100 to $1,000. In comparison, the first sequencing ever done by the Human Genome Project (HGP) cost $3 billion.
- Water purification – Scientists at IBM Research, together with collaborators from Central Glass, KACST and the University of Texas, Austin have created a new membrane that filters out salts as well as potentially harmful toxins in water such as arsenic while using less energy than other forms of water purification. Membrane filtration is currently one of the most energy efficient techniques for removing salt and improving water quality. But, conventional membranes used today are easily damaged by chlorine, which is commonly added to water to prevent bacterial growth that can cause health problems. Now, the collaborative research team has designed a new concept in membrane materials that combines resistance to chlorine damage and high performance separation behavior in mildly basic conditions, making it suitable for arsenic removal in addition to water desalination
- Medical diagnostics – IBM scientists, in collaboration with the University Hospital of Basel in Switzerland, have created a one-step point-of-care-diagnostic test, based on an innovative silicon chip, that requires less sample volume, is significantly faster, portable, easy to use, and can test for many diseases, including one of world’s leading causes of death, cardiovascular disease. The results are so quick and accurate that a small sample of a patient’s serum or blood, could be tested immediately following a heart attack, to enable the doctor to quickly take a course of action to help the patient survive. The diagnostic test uses capillary forces to analyze tiny samples of serum, or blood, for the presence of disease markers, which are typically proteins that can be detected in people’s blood for diagnostic purposes.
As IBM focuses on building a smarter planet, at IBM Research we are looking at new ways to apply our expertise to help solve some of the big issues of our time. Oftentimes, this involves collaborating with other leading institutions. We are excited by the possibilities of what we can do when we look at a problem with new lenses and think of new ways to solve it. Today’s solar breakthrough is a good example.
Dr. Thomas Theis is Director of Physical Sciences at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Lab in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.
