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Update:

Here’s Ginni Rometty, IBM’s senior vice president for Sales, Marketing and Strategy (and IBM’s next CEO) talking about how to build a smarter city.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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9:00 a.m. Special Address: Economic Recovery, Urbanization and The City, by Alfonso Vegara Gómez, President, Fundación Metrópoli.

Cities have transformed themselves with such intensity. The challenge of the 21^st Century is to build a better urban environment.

“We can’t build cities in the conventional way. We would destroy the planet.” We have to use smart technologies and ideas to build cities in a sustainable way, and a way that provides jobs and economic growth.

In the future there will be super cities and mega metropolitan areas. Between Washington DC and Boston, for instance. We’ll need new transportation systems. The cities in the corridor will share talents.The same in Europe: From Lisbon to Madrid; ultimately you’ll get a huge cluster of connected cities in Europe. “This is the new scale in which you can compete.”

Some exampled of smart cities: Singapore, the new city state. They bet on a port economy. They have smart transportation. They attract talent focusing on IT, media and bio-med. In compact urban spaces they have combined expertise and creativity.

Bilbao, Spain. It integrated all of the systems. It integrated art with urban architecture. Bilbao hasn’t been successful in attracting talent. This will be a big challenge. It has to compete with other cities in a knowledge economy.

The challenge is to build a new urban development park, which will include all of the modern elements: architecture, art, communications, and improved infrastructure.

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9:30 a.m. A Conversation with: Pablo Allard, Decano de Arquitectura y Arte de la UDD y Asesor Senior de Reconstrucción Urbana; Dr. Néstor Bercovich, Coordinador ECLAC, Plan Regional para la Sociedad de la Información de América Latina y el Caribe ECLAC; and Wilson Ferreira Junior., President, CPFL Energia.

Bercovich: We need to rethink the state so we can rise to the challenges of urbanization. A wide variety of stakeholders need to cooperate and innovate.

The free market has created distortions in the social fabric of cities. There’s a huge disparity in wealth and services. This needs to be addressed.

Smarter platforms are the base from which we make the systems of cities and regions work better. For instance, broadband needs to be made available widely and affordably.

Allard: Urban centers, if they’re smarter, can begin to address some of the inequities. They can be a source of economic opportunity for the people of the favelas.

In the future the rate of population growth will go down, and that will make it possible for personal income to come up. Latin American cities will get wealthier and offer new opportunities. “We will have a population that demands a better quality of life.”

“Favelas are full of small entrepreneurs who will make the most of the opportunities that are offered to them.” Little by little, they’ll reach the middle class.

But we need smarter systems in the cities to make this possible.

The context:

Pablo Allard, dean of architecture and art, Desarrollo University, Chile, talks about why he’s “addicted to smarter cities.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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10:30 a.m. Special Address: Smart Investments in Cities: Managing for the Long-Term, by Luciano Coutinho, president, The Brazilian Development Bank.

The quality of life in cities and the city ecosystem constitute key factor in innovation going forward. Traditionally we saw that innovation was is driven by three pillars: big private companies, government subsidies and universities. But that’s the old paradigm. Now there are additional factors: cities, NGOs and society.

If we can make cities more efficient we can increase their creative output. A smart city doesn’t just need to be efficient. It needs to have quality of life and creativity. “A city is an ecosystem that encourages innovation and creativity.”

Technological progress will increase in the coming years. Mobile computing is going to be an important factor. Broadband access is increasing greatly. We need to deploy sensors, and large scale databases.

All of this makes information about what’s going on in the city and how it’s working widely available to everybody.

“The city is becoming a new thing.”

In Latin America and Brazil, cities are a bigger factor than they are in other areas of the world. We have 34 cities in Brazil with 45% of the population, and Rio and Sao Paulo have 25% of the GDP of the country. “We need to reinforce the mid-tier cities and prevent them from falling into the same traps as the mega cities, with their traffic and pollution problems.”

We’re at a critical moment in Brazil. We must have a high level of performance and competitiveness. Our public services must be more efficient and more creative.

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11:00 a.m. A Conversation with: James W. Breyer, partner, Accel Partners, Luciano Coutinho, president, The Brazilian Development Bank, and Marcelo Haddad, executive director, Rio Negócios. Discussion leader: Marcus Regueira, founding partner, FIR Capital.

Breyer: I’m interested in investing in Brazil. We think through the cultural attributes of great entrepreneurs. Is there a common characteristic?

“The people we like to back have passion, think about long term impact and think about building high impact team from the beginning.”

We’ve seen many of these characteristics in Brazil. We see entrepreneurs building strong teams of co-founders. Every location is a little different. In Silicon Valley today we’re finding very young breakthrough technologists. When I first met Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook I took him out to dinner and I offered him a glass of wine, but he said he was not yet 21. He’d have a Sprite.

Brazil will be one of our three most important countries for investments in the coming years.

Coutinho: In Brazil, we need to create an ecosystem for entrepreneurship. The Brazilian capital markets are still a step behind. “We need to create an atmosphere for entrepreneurship by young people. That’s vital to creating smarter cities.”

Regueira; What we need for venture capital to take off in Brazil is a quarter of a billion dollar exit.

Breyer: The city and country have to minimize the difficulties for young people to get going. One thing we have lost in the US is the idea of allowing small businesses to thrive without uncertainty and significant regulatory overhang.

You need a partnership between great entrepreneurs, people who come in early to help them scale the company—without losing the entrepreneurial spirit, and also partnerships with large and important companies.

“The first trillion dollar valuation company could come from Brazil.”

Here’s the video of the panel:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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11:30 a.m. Special Address: How to Build a Smarter City, by Ginni Rometty, IBM’s senior vice president of sales, marketing and strategy—and next CEO.

“Brazil is a country full of natural resources. We think of information as the world’s next important national resource.”

We’re heard a lot about why people should build smarter cities. My focus today is on how.

So how does a city actually get started? Over the last year or so, we’ve reviewed thousands of Smart City initiatives. We’ve identified three common steps that are taken in successful projects.

–By instrumenting different city systems, the city can leverage data as a strategic tool to understand the performance of those systems, and be in a position to managing them better–responding to changes in those systems more rapidly and effectively.

–Once a city has developed that solid foundation, they can start to think about integrating key processes within and across systems.  You can take the data and use it across departments and functions.

–Cities can start to optimize their systems and transform service delivery. Analytics become key here. “You can start to re-imagine the art of the possible.” It’s not just about using analytics to examine the past, but to predict the future.

Value goes up with each of these three steps.

We have also identified key leadership skills for Smarter cities.

–The complexity of cities requires us to understand the city as a system-of-systems and manage it accordingly.

–“We need to build a culture of analytics versus gut-check decision making.”

–Managing and coordinating across city systems will require all city leaders to collaborate with one another, with local business leaders, and other influencers in new ways.

I hope that we’ve been able to provide some guiding principles here that we’ve learned from hundreds of Smarter City engagements, and that have opened our eyes as to what it takes for cities to be successful.

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Noon: A Conversation with: Jorge Gerdau Johannpeter, chairman of Gerdau, Gerdau Steel, and a private sector leader in Brazil’s economic development; and Kenneth Schwartz, dean, School of Architecture, Tulane University. Discussion Leader: Ginni Rometty, IBM’s senior vice president for sales, marketing and strategy, and the next CEO.

Schwartz: Tulane was impacted by Hurricane Katrina. We had to shut it down for months.  Now we’re back and the city of New Orleans is back. We’re both building more sustainably and smarter.

We’re using the school of architecture and technology from IBM to see if we can achieve significant carbon use. We’ll take what we learn to other buildings on the campus.

Instrumentation was relatively easy. Integration was harder. We had to get our school, IT and facilities to work together.

“We think of buildings as the building blocks of cities.” You can experiment in buildings and a university campus and then model solutions that you can use city wide.

Gerdau: We started a movement to build the economy of Brazil based on using management technologies.

The public sector is inefficient.

“What decides a country’s wealth today is its management competency.”

Cities have to be build and rebuilt by seeing them as an integrated unit. Technology is important for gathering information, but it’s not enough.

You need to do management with efficient technology. But it only works when your have good governance aligned with strategy.

Political will is perhaps the biggest challenge. I like to talk to government leaders. I feel there’s lack of policy. We have to transform cities. It requires the kind of strategic thinking I don’t see now.

We have to get our communities involved so they see this is the way forward. Maybe it’s in our education. Time is being wasted. How can we harness all of this?

“We have to change culture.”

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12:15 p.m. Key Observations from Sam Palmisano, IBM’s CEO.

We operate in 170 countries and every political system. All societies are going through a transition. The same goes with companies. You can be optimistic or see it as concerning. How do some do it better than others?

Your have to re-prioritize. You have to take things that were done one way in the past and come up with new approaches.

Mayor Paes of Rio surrounded himself with professional managers. “Good management is the key to getting things done.”

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Breakout session

Emergency Management: Learning from the Leaders

Moderator: Guru Banavar, CTO, Global Public Sector, IBM; Pedro Almeida, Director, Smarter Cities Strategy, IBM Brazil; Pablo Allard, Dean of Architecture and Art, Desarrollo University; Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary for Conservation & Public Service, City of Rio de Janeiro; and Pablo Escudero, general director, Madrid Police Department

Banavar: There’s an impression that more disasters are happening. Part of it is that because of modern communications, we know more about what’s happening. But it’s true for floods, perhaps caused by global warming. There are also man-made disasters, such as nuclear disasters. These kinds of massive events require a long term planning, preparedness and response system.

Factoid: $265 billion total global economic losses due to natural disasters in the first half of 2011.

We can do a lot to prevent these kinds of losses.

We’ll look at four types of events: natural disasters, terrorism, industrial accidents and large-scale events like protests and riots, but also the World Cup and the Olympics.

The density of communities in coastal communities has  been increasing, and those populations are the most vulnerable

Four stages for managing disasters: Mitigation, such as building codes; short-term preparedness, responding to warnings; response with full situational awareness of what’s happening; recovery and long term rehabilitation.

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Breakout session

Emergency Management: Learning from the Leaders
Second installment

Moderator: Guru Banavar, CTO, Global Public Sector, IBM; Pedro Almeida, Director, Smarter Cities Strategy, IBM Brazil; Pablo Allard, Dean of Architecture and Art, Desarrollo University; Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary for Conservation & Public Service, City of Rio de Janeiro; and Pablo Escudero, general director, Madrid Police Department

Osorio: We have two major challenges in Rio. We have a history of natural disasters mainly caused by heavy rains and flooding and mudslides, and we have a history of dealing with large scale events.

We were very poorly prepared to face natural disasters.

Every five or six years on average we have a major natural event, but we have flooding every year. We have had two big events in the past two years. It seems to be a pattern. It could be global warming.

In the past we’d say it’s god’s will. We just reacted.

The city decided to approach the situation head on. We felt it was our obligation to meet the challenge in a different way.

They mayor who is 42 started his political life as deputy mayor in part of the city. He was in charge of the region when it had a disaster about 14 years ago.

When he became mayor, he was the emergency response plans and felt it wasn’t enough. Early 2009. He ordered a study.

We had a major disaster–incredible rain. More than 70 people died here. We used the plan to some extent, but not enough

We decided to have an emergency response center but later decided to make a city operations center to handle a wide variety of situations.

We had an organization with many fiefdoms, but, in order to respond to disasters, you have to cooperate. They mayor made people work together.

So we have become much more agile.

We’re facing big events coming to Rio, including the World Cup and Olympics. They’re a big challenge for us. They’re big and complex events. The operation center is a major tool to enable our preparations and response.

This year, we had the Rock in Rio festival with 700,000 people. The last edition was 2001 and was a total disaster. Nobody could move in the area. But this year the operational part worked well. We reacted very quickly, and the operations center was instrumental. We think we’ll be ready for what’s coming.

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Breakout session

Emergency Management: Learning from the Leaders
Installment 3

Moderator: Guru Banavar, CTO, Global Public Sector, IBM; Pedro Almeida, Director, Smarter Cities Strategy, IBM Brazil; Pablo Allard, Dean of Architecture and Art, Desarrollo University, Chile; Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary for Conservation & Public Service, City of Rio de Janeiro; and Pablo Escudero, general director, Madrid Police Department

Allard: In Chile we had the large earthquake and tsunami, and it was also widely dispersed. We had more than 700 kilometers of land affected. The disaster affected the three main metro areas in Chile and many smaller cities. Five major highways were broken. Many buildings fell—even some built in the past few years. More than 500 people died. 370,000 houses were destroyed or damaged.

The neighboring communities had to come and help the ones that were affected.

First response, lasted 33 days. It was coordinated by the emergency ministry.

Reconstruction is expected to take four years.

I worked on the reconstruction.

We opened a voluntary record for families that had suffered damage. This helped us relocate them. They received vouchers.

We arranged for houses to be rebuilt by private companies. These projects were subsidized.

Six months after the catastrophe we had 60,000 emergency houses built, where people could stay while their permanent houses were built.

It was a huge management challenge. We had to track people’s identity and map it to their location and what was being done for them.

We invited companies to present different kind of building systems. We had a fair where the families could go and chose the type of house.

We had voting by the people to chose the best designs. The winners started quickly.

But we also wanted to use the rebuilding to create smart options. We studied the risks in locations by the coast.

For places that were especially vulnerable, we designed the houses to be resilient to quakes and tsunamis.

By this September we had more than 60,000 houses built and more than 200,000 under construction. We expect to have all the houses built in February 2014.

Lessons:

–Be prepared for the worst case scenario.

–Manage the expectations of the people after the disaster.

–Communicate complexity and time frame.

–Reinforce local capacity and leadership.

Here’s Allard talking about why he’s a “smarter cities addict.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Emergency Management: Learning from the Leaders
Installment 4

Moderator: Guru Banavar, CTO, Global Public Sector, IBM; Pedro Almeida, Director, Smarter Cities Strategy, IBM Brazil; Pablo Allard, dean of Architecture and Art, Desarrollo University, Chile; Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary for Conservation & Public Service, City of Rio de Janeiro; and Pablo Escudero, general director, Madrid Police Department.

Escudero: We created an emergency response system in 2006 that turned into a crime fighting system as well.

Here’s a look at Madrid’s emergency management system:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: Brazil, IBM, Rio de Janeiro

Next month, I’ll be meeting with key industry experts to discuss Security metrics at the EnerSec Smart Grid Security Summit in San Diego. We’ll covering the challenges with, and business benefits of measuring utilities’ smart grid with the right metrics, including organizational security maturity. This got me thinking about consumers and behavioral economics and what we value as important. Is it convenience, social acceptance, security, privacy, price?

If you live in a region where smart meters have yet to arrive, then this may not matter much to you … yet. But if, in the last few months or years you’ve found a utility technician swapping out your stone-age mechanical electricity meter for a new 21st century, computerized Smart Meter, then you may be tuned into the discussions on whether this change is a good or bad thing for you or your family.

As someone who follows the issue as part of my day job at IBM, as well as an after hours blogger, I am certainly inclined to say that having a Smart Meter is an important first step that will enable some great new capabilities for you, once the rest of the grid, in the form of the coming Smart Grid, catches up. Though it’s largely been held in check thanks to cheap coal and newly cheap natural gas, the cost of electricity has been increasing in many regions and it’s expected that costs will rise more in coming years. It’s also projected that the proliferation of new electronic devices in the home will amplify the impacts of price increases. Most notably, these include multiple large HD screens today, and electric vehicles tomorrow. Smart Meters are the first step in helping consumers get a better sense of their electricity use patterns, make adjustments, and keep their bill down, by being able to see their amount their currently using as well as the cost of electricity at that time.

In most regions of the US and the world, these capabilities won’t fully arrive for a little while … depending where you live, maybe several years from now. But when they do, it’ll mark a major change in the way we think about electricity and how we interact with our utilities. It’ll be much more of a self service model where individuals will have much more control. But along the path to this better approach to electricity delivery and consumption, consumer groups and journalists have remarked on potential risks that attend the deployment of Smart Meters. Some, like health concerns related to radio frequency emissions the meters use to communicate with utilities, have been largely allayed by scientific studies showing they are not harmful. But others, like privacy concerns, persist.

In theory, should a hacker or other cyber intruder gain access to your electricity usage data, they might be able to infer when you’re not home or not awake.  In my humble opinion, there are far simpler, less technical ways of making these observations today.

But this position aside, there are real reasons why protecting your data is important, and we are now seeing significant safeguards emerge in places like California that mandates utilities follow certain rules and procedures when handling electricity usage data that can be linked with individuals. That’s what makes it a privacy concern, by the way.  Usage data that’s not associated with any one person has very little value to a would-be criminal.

Canada, and in particular Smart Meter leader Ontario, places a very high premium on protecting customers’ privacy. This is largely the case across much of Europe, as well, and with California’s leadership, similar privacy protections will likely ripple across the rest of the US in coming years.

What I’m trying to say is, at least for me, the arrival of Smart Meters brings 99% potential goodness, and 1% uncertainty over how the data they generate at my residence could be mishandled or manipulated. In this day and age, for better or worse, most of us have learned to live with technologies (see: the web, social media, etc.) that expose some of our personal data online.  My recommendation to you is get to know your Smart Meter and get ready to step out into your new energy future with confidence.

Andy Bochman is author of the Smart Grid Security Blog and an Energy Security Lead for IBM’s Rational division, where the focus is on securing the software that runs the smart grid. Andy is a contributor to industry and national security working groups on energy security and cyber security. He lives in Boston, is an active member of the MIT Energy Club, and is the founder of the Smart Grid Security and DOD Energy Blogs.

Technorati Tags: andy bochman, energy, energy security, grid, security, Smart Grids, smart meters, utilities

Sixty percent of those surveyed did not know the meaning of the terms “smart grid” or “smart meters.” Half of them didn’t understand the term “time of use pricing,” which is essential to understanding the benefits these technologies offer such as improved reliability, lower costs and increased efficiency. Thirty percent were unaware of the basic mechanism used for charging for electricity–the amount paid per kilowatt hour.

This confusion helps explain why the consumer uptake has been slower than hoped for, according to Michael Valocchi, IBM’s vice president for Global Energy & Utilities. His prescription: Utilities, regulators, government officials and technology companies need to go back to basics when communicating with consumers. “Today, the industry is focused on engineering and regulatory matters. All the companies in the ecosystem have to connect better with the consumer.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The main problem, according to Valocchi, is that the industry has made things too complicated. Consumers are confused by the industry jargon and overwhelmed by the complex options being offered to them. “If you give the consumer too much information and too many choices, it leads to inactivity,” he says. “It’s like offering a shopper the choice of 10 jams in a supermarket. They can become intimidated and demotivated when a decision becomes too complex.”

Complicating matters further, consumers sometimes seem to act contrary to their own best interests when it comes to electricity use. For instance, even though smart grids are designed in part to reduce energy costs, including consumers’ monthly bills, consumers sometimes resist the changes. Valocchi urges utilities to examine consumer attitudes toward energy usage through the lens of behavioral economics, which could provide companies with better insight into the thoughts, motivations and misconceptions of consumers and help them change the way utility customers react.

For example, the survey results showed that, compared to past surveys, financial incentives are no longer the overwhelmingly important factor guiding consumers to decrease their energy consumption. Younger consumers are motivated strongly by environmental concerns and people over age 55 cite the health of their national economies as a key motivator for behavioral change. This analysis suggests that utilities should devise communications strategies targeting different demographic groups separately. “Cost is still important, but it’s not the only thing,” says Valocchi.

The fact is, the adoption of smart grids is crucial to the sustainability of life on the planet. But for smart technologies to be accepted more readily, attitudes must change on all sides. And changing attitudes starts with changing the way we talk about things.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Michael Valocchi, Smart Grids

Demand for electricity is forecast to grow by 33% in the next 20 years, with nearly 100% growth in Asia. According to Lux Research, there will be nine times the smart grid data in 2020 that there is today.  IBM has been active in the smart grid space long before the term was coined and continues to show strong momentum worldwide, including emerging markets like  Korea and Brazil – and the growing area of securing the grid.  While energy providers look for ways keep up with this demand, we are also very cognizant of the implications that a more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent grid can have on security.  On the path to a smarter planet, it has become an imperative to build security in at the foundation of these smart grids.

Today IBM announced that they are working with United Illuminating to proactively do this. United Illuminating serves a total of 690,000 electric and natural gas utility customers in 66 communities across Connecticut and Massachusetts in the US. Right now, we are in the process of upgrading our meter grid to advanced meters to improve customer experience and operational efficiencies. Clearly the impact that these new meters is having on our customers is very beneficial, however , these upgrades also could pose some security risks that needed to be mitigated.

For help in doing this, United Illuminating turned to IBM’s security expertise.  By using IBM’s WebSphere DataPower appliance, we’ve been able to gain greater authentication, authorization, and accounting/auditing capabilities for our smart meters that have dramatically reduced our exposure.  As a result, we have been able to secure 50,000 of our advanced meters, with the goal of supporting a total of 80,000 by the end of 2011. And in the near future, all of our 350,000 electric meters will be covered by Data Power security features.

While we continue to observe the world around us becoming smarter, there is a need to keep pace and infuse digital intelligence into industries, infrastructures, processes and cities. Organizations that proactively embrace security and ensure it is designed into the foundation of their smart grid infrastructures will be those that benefit most from today’s smarter planet.

If you are interested in hearing more about this topic and news,  IBM is hosting a Twitter Session at 3:30pm-4:30pm ET later today (Wednesday, July 13) with participants from both IBM and UIL. This will be an opportunity for you to tweet questions and receive responses instantly. If you are interested, please follow hashtag #IBMSG.

Technorati Tags: energy, smart meters, smarter grids

Why not? Jean-Christophe Samin, project manager for IBM’s smart grid deployment for electricity and water in Malta, says the engagement teaches two important lessons:

1) Communities shouldn’t do smart metering in a vacuum. It should be part of a comprehensive makeover of how their utilities manage their businesses–the entire information chain from meter to billing system. “Smart metering needs to go hand in hand with the larger transformation,” Samin says.

2) It’s important to start small with a pilot version of the system. You work the problems out without major disruptions to the utilities or consumers. “This is a fundamental step before launching the massive rollout,” he says.

Installing a wireless receiver in Malta

IBM in 2008 won a five-year contract to help Malta’s national power and water utilities, Enemalta Corp. and Water Services Corp., to build the world’s first national smart utility grid. The task was to replace 250,000 analog electric meters with smarter meters that can monitor electricity usage close to real time, identify electricity losses and set variable rates. At the same time, IBM is integrating the smart electricity metering applications with the island nation’s new smart water metering system.

Today, half way through the life of the project, more than 75,000 smart electric meters have been installed and they’re being added at a rate of 5,000 per month. Malta launched a smart grid Web portal that allows customers to get information about their accounts and, eventually, will allow them to monitor their consumption of water and electricity and compare their consumption with that of people with similar households.

While the system still has a long way to go to reach all of the island’s citizens and provide them with the full array of features, it’s already making a difference in many lives. For instance, previously, because of backlogs, people sometimes got their utility bills as rarely as once every six to eight months. Since the cost of electricity and water is so high on the island, they’d get socked with hug bills and have to scramble to come up with the money. Now, they’re billed reliably every two months and, and because the smart meters are monitored wirelessly, the bills reflect actual usage patterns, so there shouldn’t be surprises. People are able to budget and pay their bills with more confidence. “The benefits are favoring the consumer, and that’s helping with the acceptance of the program,” says Samin.

Down the road, the island’s smart utility grid has the potential of freeing it from dependency on expensive foreign oil. Businesses and individuals will be able to set up solar electricity generation systems and sell their excess energy to the utilities. In a country with an average of about 300 sunny days per year, that’s going to be a game changer.

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

Andreas Wespi

Harm could come in many forms, but some of the most hurtful scenarios for attacks on the Internet of Things  include electrical power and communications blackouts, disruption of air traffic and roadway traffic lights, interruption of oil and gas exploration and contamination of water. So far, these concerns are mostly theoretical, but the spread of  Stuxnet, the computer worm that targets control systems at nuclear power plants, shows just how dangerous such attacks can be. The worm knocked out about 1,000 centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant last year–and atomic energy experts warn that it has the capability of creating Chernobyl-like disasters. “We have to understand the new threats and understand how to protect our own infrastructure,” says Andreas Wespi, a cybersecurity expert at IBM Research’s Zurich laboratory.

Attacks will likely come in two ways: to the sensors and to the servers that gather, store, and analyze information from the sensors. Both kinds of vulnerability must be addressed.

Let’s start with the sensors, which Wespi calls “the weakest link in the system.” Sensors connected to the Internet can take many forms, ranging from simple devices that measure things like temperature to video cameras that monitor the physical security of anything from city streets to remote oil pipelines. We have to develop and deploy new technologies that signal when sensors are not working reliably or have been tampered with. IBM  scientists are developing technology that can be embedded in sensors, to do just that. One of the challenges is that simple sensors much be very inexpensive to be affordable on a mass scale, so the modules that IBM is developing must be extremely cheap–costing just pennies per device. Also, it will be vital to embed security in the sensor networks before they’re installed, rather than trying to retrofit them later.

A lot of work has been done over the past two decades to defend computer servers and networks from malicious attacks, but the emergence of the Internet of Things is forcing cybersecurity experts to rethink how such assets are protected. In the past, one of the key strategies for protection control systems was to isolate them from other networks. But now that control systems are being connected to the Internet, that approach won’t work well anymore. What’s needed, Wespi says, is a multi-tier security system–combining protections for individual servers and applications with more powerful access controls and network monitoring.

The Internet of Things creates exciting new possibilities, but it can only deliver on its promises if it’s reliable and trustworthy. Now is the time to start addressing these concerns.

Technorati Tags: IBM, security, sensors, Stuxnet, The Internet of Things

How can a hospital ensure thousands of pieces of clinical equipment are where they need to be when they are needed?  How can a utility prevent breaks in vast networks of underground water mains, some dating back hundreds of years?  How can power companies maintain their grids and reduce the number of power outages with fewer truck rolls?

Those are the kinds of challenges that are bringing together 7,000 clients, partners and IBMers at the annual PULSE conference in Las Vegas this week.

We start to address those problems by putting technology into places that you never could before.  Consider this:

• There will be one trillion connected devices by 2015, many of which will be instrumented with real-time capabilities to respond quickly and accurately to the environment.
• There will be 30 billion RFID tags this year alone on everything from water mains, train tracks, traffic signals, hospital equipment and more.
• Smart meters can wirelessly transmit energy readings once every 15 minutes to a utility company’s central servers—delivering a 3,000 fold increase in meter readings versus the traditional typical meter read once a month.

The growing ubiquity of sensors, smart grid networks and 4G wireless networks, smartphones and tablets are transforming everyday objects in the physical world into ‘smart’ ones with information on their history, location and status.  This “Internet of Things” is creating new streams of data for organizations to drive more data-based decisions.  Clients around the world are embracing this and it is opening the door for business transformation.

Just look at how data can impact one industry.  The average hospital misplaces or loses 10 to 20 percent of an estimated $750 million of their valuable medical equipment annually and most hospitals can’t find 15 to 20 percent of the devices they own, according to industry experts. By tracking medical equipment by real-time location, hospitals can save hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost and underutilized equipment and ensure that life-saving medical devices are instantly available and expertly maintained.

We need to “listen to” and “see” our infrastructure for greater efficiencies. With location-based and real-time data, organizations can get a bird’s eye view of their infrastructure — roads, buildings and waterways– as well as insight into their operations inside a building or underground, such as water pipes, hospital equipment, electrical meters, HVAC and more. With real-time monitoring an organization can listen to its transportation network, smart meter, buildings and more to see what its data is saying.

The next efficiency frontier is all about  analyzing data on the physical world.  Solutions with geospatial intelligence from IBM are helping Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, the City of Waterloo, and the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority add location-based data to their services such as water and energy maintenance.  DC Water’s service trucks are now assigned more direct driving routes based on analyzing locational data from maintenance service calls, resulting in fewer trucks on the road, slashing their fuel usage by 20 percent.

Advanced analytics can monitor any network that distributes data including: railways, escalators, ATMs , and even refrigeration units for grocery chains.  Swiss Federal Railways, for example, combines data from track switches, stations and cars gathered from sensors and video at train stations connected by a fiber-optic cable network with 50,000 fixed and 20,000 mobile connections. IBM network monitoring helps Swiss Rail recognize and repair more than 50 percent of network issues around train delays before they occur, leading to an annual savings of US$ 2.3 million

The world’s infrastructure is getting smarter.  To learn more, visit http://spatiallyspeaking.tumblr.com

David Bartlett is vice president of Industry Solutions for IBM Software.

Technorati Tags: David Bartlett, internet of things, pulse