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Steve Hamm in
IBM has plenty of company when it comes to deep concern and deep thinking about the future of cities. Today, at the Intelligent Cities Forum in Washington, D.C., hundreds of urban planners, city leaders and data mavens are gathering to share insights on ways to make cities more successful and sustainable using data, analytics, collaboration and foresight. The A Smarter Planet blog will feature live blogging from the event, so please return here frequently to see updates.
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.
Anne Altman, general manager, Global Public Sector, IBM, talks about why cities are so important to having a sustainable planet.
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
IBM has plenty of company when it comes to deep concern and deep thinking about the future of cities. Monday, at the Intelligent Cities Forum in Washington, D.C., hundreds of urban planners, city leaders and data mavens will gather to share insights on ways to make cities more successful and sustainable using data, analytics, collaboration and foresight. The A Smarter Planet blog will feature live blogging from the event, so please return here frequently to see updates.
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.
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.
Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post from Guru Banavar, Chief Technology Officer, Smarter Cities, IBM
When you think of the world’s smartest cities, London, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, Kitakyushu and others might come to mind for their innovative projects to reduce traffic, energy and waste.
But if you look deeper, there are hundreds of smaller cities that are getting smarter – and even outpacing big cities — by applying digital tools like analytics and location-based services to improve the way they manage city water, roads, parks, and utilities.
Take Corpus Christi, Texas, population 280,000. Corpus Christi has rolled out an intelligent city-wide system to help the city to quickly evaluate and respond to issues, anticipate and prevent problems and improve the quality of life for the citizens.
Before working with IBM, each city department had its own process for handling incoming work requests and maintenance, mostly tracking those problems on 3”5” index cards. Now with a city-wide call center, city managers can digitally see all the hotspots on a map, prioritize their responses and know who is handling problems across the city in real time. When data analytics showed that a third of the Corpus Christi’s water department’s effort was spent resolving problems at just 1 percent of customer sites, the city shored up those sites, ultimately cutting costs.
I think Steve Klepper of Corpus Christi captures this concept best when he talks about a city as a collection of data points — streets, bridges, parks, buildings, fire hydrants, water mains and storm water ditches. If you manage your data, you can measure it, and improve it continuously. And Mayor Joe Adame is pleased that city departments are coordinating and integrating around the data they all generate and share.
Check out the video to see the ‘street-view’ of this smarter city:
Today another city — Providence, Rhode Island — is taking an innovative step today to address their energy consumption. A public/private partnership called OSCAR (Ocean State Center for Advanced Resources) is aiming to make Providence become greener and more sustainable, focusing first on smarter buildings and better energy consumption. This is just the tip of the iceberg. With help from IBM, Brown University, the University of Rhode Island and more than 30 local organizations, OSCAR aims to tackle healthcare, education, environmental, and economic development across the state. See here: www.Oscarri.org
In addition to Corpus Christi and Providence, IBM is working with 300 cities around the globe to be smarter by rolling out new projects (such as City of Cambridge in Ontario, Chesapeake Va), forging greater public/private partnerships and research projects (such as Dubuque Iowa, Cape Cod)http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/28981.wss, and even issuing philanthropic grants for cities (Smarter City Challenge).
The bottom line is that cities need to be smarter; Cities are stressing the world’s resources. They consume an estimated 75 percent of the world’s energy and emit more than 80 percent of greenhouse gases.
India, where I spent the last 5 years, presents its own issues — rapid urbanization and population growth, as well as a rapidly rising middle class with disposal income is driving growth of cities. In fact, every minute during the next 20 years, 30 Indians will leave rural India for urban areas. At this rate, India will need some 500 new cities in the next two decades.
Many of the world’s emerging countries face similar issues, and I’m currently working with countries like Brazil, Vietnam, and China, in addition to India to address these issues. Countries in the developed world have a different set of problems related to economic slowdowns and changing demographics. Urban revitalization and improved services while cutting costs can also be addressed by developing innovative solutions. In short, if there were ever a time to focus on developing solutions for sustainable cities around the world, that time is now.
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Adam Christensen in
New chips designed in IBM's East Fishkill, NY plant to speed machine-to-machine networks
When even the most common objects in our world — sidewalks, pipes and toaster ovens — all need internet connections to function, society has a serious addiction to bandwidth.
We’ve dedicated a lot of cyber-ink on this blog to the Internet of Things. And we aren’t the only ones. Just read the Internet of Things archive at Read Write Web and you’ll see just how many objects require an IP address to function. In a recent post, “The “Rise of the Machines,” VentureBeat claims that global revenue from sales of wireless telecommunications technology for M2M (machine-to-machine) systems are set to spike from $1 billion this year to $6.5 billion in 2014, according to iSuppli.
As the world’s buildings and infrastructure evolve towards smarter cities, they’ll add vast new oceans of data to already creaking communications infrastructure. All manner of digital detritus is crowding the world’s wireless infrastructure. Growing arrays of cameras, sensors and other devices chat among themselves, communicating on all manner of commercial activity from the number of cartons in a cargo ship’s hold to how many cars are stuck at the next freeway ramp. Very often M2M data are critical in nature — real-time hospital data on a patient’s status, perhaps, or tracking bad guys somewhere.
Of course, analytics is a big play for IBM in this space — users will need powerful hardware and smart software to make sense of all this data. We also play at a more protean level — we offer cutting-edge chip technology to makers of networking gear, optical switches and handsets. Very often, our custom-chip offerings provide breakthroughs. Ten years ago, for example, our silicon-germanium technology helped jump-start the wireless revolution.
This week we start selling a new custom-chip offering (WSJ) that looks like it has breakthrough written all over it.
We call it the Cu-32 Design Kit (sounds like a refugee from the Periodic Table). It gives custom-chip designers a potent toolkit to create the next-gen networks that will become a foundation of smart-planet communications.
For consumers, Cu-32 arrives in time to keep the teens texting and HD movies streaming through the ether. The rapid rise of web-enabled consumer devices will only add to consumers’ expectations of fast, always-on connections wherever they happen to be. Over the next five years, research firm In-Stat expects the majority of CE devices purchased, including digital TVs, Blu-ray players and gaming consoles to be web-enabled, with 137 million devices shipping in the U.S. in 2014. Experts say that as consumers demand better service from mobile networks, providers will be looking to technology like Cu-32 to deliver.
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Smarter Planet projects don’t have to be complex and expensive. They’re well within the capabilities of mid-sized companies. Consider the story of the Dragon Hotel, in Hangzhou, China. General Manager Eric Du decided to give the hotel a complete makeover, and he saw that technology could help the Dragon stand out by providing a superior experience for guests. Working with IBM, he set out to make the Dragon the most technically-sophisticated hotel in the world. This mini-documentary video explains how he went about it.
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
- Analytics
- Education
- Government Services
- Smart Grids
- Smart People
- Smarter Buildings
- Smarter Cities
- Smarter Communications
- Smarter Energy
- Smarter Healthcare
- Smarter Planet
- Smarter Public Safety
- Smarter Systems
- Smarter Traffic
- Smarter Transportation
- Smarter Utilities
- Smarter Water
- Smarter Water Management
- Smarter Work
- urban planning
Game fanatics have been enjoying simulation games ever since SimCity was first introduced in 1989, and electronic games are used for military and corporate training, but IBMer Phaedra Boinodiris designs so-called serious games to help people solve complex business and social problems.
Today, IBM is releasing her latest creation, CityOne, an on-line game that can help city leaders, businesses, and students figure out how to make cities work better by simulating transportation, environmental, business and logistical problems. The free game challenges players to complete missions involving energy, water, banking, and retailing. “It’s like an onion,” she says. “You can jump in and play it for 20 minutes, or you can stay and go deep and learn how cities are actually using different technologies.”
If Boinodiris doesn’t seem like a prototypical IBMer, it’s because she’s not. She was previously an entrepreneur and founder of two companies–one an Internet game portal and the other a game consulting company. Both her parents are IBM retirees, though.
Fittingly, it was a game of sorts that brought Boinodiris and IBM together. Three years ago, when she was studying for an MBA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she participated in a business case competition versus another university. The task, posed by IBM, was coming up with an innovative way to get business people interested in business-process management software. Her idea was to draw them in by designing an electronic game that would simulate how BPM software works in an imaginary business. One of her teammates was so sure that IBM would never accept a game as a solution that he up and quit the team on the spot. He was wrong. Sandy Carter, an IBM vice president in the software group who was one of the judges of the competition, liked the idea so much that she hired Boinodiris as an intern–with the task of designing the game she had proposed.
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Posted by
Steve Hamm in
- Analytics
- Government Services
- Green 500
- new intelligence
- Retail
- Smart banking
- Smart Grids
- Smarter Buildings
- Smarter Cities
- Smarter Communications
- Smarter Energy
- Smarter Enterprise
- Smarter Food
- Smarter Healthcare
- Smarter Planet
- Smarter Public Safety
- Smarter Systems
- Smarter Traffic
- Smarter Transportation
- Smarter Utilities
- Smarter Water
- Smarter Water Management
- Smarter Work
There’s no shortage of contests for tech startups in this world, but IBM’s SmartCamp is different. The focus is on companies that aim to make the world work better, and is aligned with our Smarter Planet agenda. We launched the program last year in Dublin and conducted regional contests this spring and summer in Stockholm, Boston, Tel Aviv, London, and Silicon Valley. (This video tells the Silicon Valley story.) There are still two contests left, in Paris on Sept. 24 and Copenhagen on Oct. 7, before the finals in Dublin on Nov. 16. So there’s time for entrepreneurs to get involved. Check it out at www.ibm.com/ie/smarterplanet/smartcamp.
Editor’s note: Following is a guest blog from Mike Hausser, the director of asset management for the City of Cambridge in Ontario, Canada:
How do you start building a smarter city if you are a rapidly growing municipality of 125,000 with over 200,000 assets like buildings, sewer systems and roadways valued at more than $1.2 billion across 50,000 locations?
Here at the City of Cambridge, Ontario, we think we’ve got what it takes. And we have combined vision, technology and collaboration with the public and private sector to make it happen.
Today, in partnership with the Federal Government of Canada and IBM, we announced how we are using the Canadian Federal Government’s Gas Tax Funding to better manage critical city information and assets.
The Federal Gas Tax fund (GTF) is a key component of the Building Canada infrastructure plan. The plan’s intent is to strengthen Canada’s communities by providing predictable and long-term funding in support of municipal infrastructure that contributes to cleaner air, cleaner water and reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
Technological advances now allow cities to be instrumented, making it easier than ever before to collect data points and use that information to make real-time decisions in areas like traffic flow, water usage, sewage flow and overall water management, We believe a smarter city goes to work for its citizens. It measures and influences more aspects of their operations. These interconnected cities allow free flow of information from one discrete system to another, which increases the efficiency of the overall infrastructure. Finite resources are optimized.
Vision and creative leadership at a municipal level are critical. For example, some cities have used the gas tax funding to repave roads. We’ll do some of that too, but we have decided to take a more innovative, forward-thinking approach that lays the foundation for a smarter city in a number of key areas:
Water: It is a precious resource which is becoming increasingly scarce worldwide. Our new water management process calculates the outdoor water use volumes by customer. Through the interconnection of several independent systems, the collective datasets allow us to analyze the volume of sewage from homes and businesses against the volume of water coming in from ground water or rainfall. Problem areas can then be quickly targeted for detailed inspection. This process is helping improve the efficiency of our sewer systems and is reducing environmental impacts.
Traffic: We want to make driving easier for citizens of Cambridge. Traffic is counted and loaded into the new system automatically alongside collision records. This helps us do safety audits to more efficiently determine the need for changes in intersection design, speed limits, traffic calming and traffic control. This information is also automatically used to classify roads to determine the severity of road defects and prioritize repairs.
Our approach to traffic management also includes sidewalks. We have started mobile inspection of sidewalks. The computer is mounted on a bike which is ridden across nearly 800 kilometres of sidewalks each summer. The system tracks what sidewalks have been inspected and safety hazards and defects are identified on a map by the operator. Defects and safety hazards that fall within certain thresholds are queued and the IBM system then creates automatic service requests to generate the appropriate work order, or job ticket, for repair crews. Progress is monitored to ensure defects are resolved within expected time frames.
Natural events that affect traffic are also managed using IBM software systems. For example, to better manage snow storms, we developed a set of response plans and templates. Resources are deployed based on the severity of the forecasted storm. These plans setup a series of work-flow controlled work orders. Each job ticket assigns work to resources in their respective routes or locations on a preliminary timeline that ranges from 24 hours to 24 days in the case of a severe storm.
Plow and salt route areas for roads and sidewalks are created for various levels of response and each area is reflected in the IBM system as a location. Based on the weather forecast, the manager in charge inputs an internal service request choosing the appropriate classification which represents the level of storm expected. The service request presents the Manager with questions that record the expected duration, nature, and extent of the forecasted storm.
The IBM system then generates the appropriate ‘package’ of work (based on the classification) with a series of job tickets each with an initial target start/end time, assignment to the appropriate manager, and appropriate routes and locations. These job tickets are currently paper-based. Our plan is to replace the current paper output with a “system-to-system” link by installing on-board computers in the plow trucks. In this scenario, the appropriate route is sent to the selected operator and the system will provide onboard navigation of an optimized route, re-optimizing on the fly to account for blocked streets.
Digital Infrastructure Management: Digital closed circuit television robot units crawl through sanitary and storm pipes to inspect structural and operational condition of pipe assets. The video and data is automatically loaded back into the system. Defects that need immediate attention generate a work order. Higher defect rates will trigger capital renewal/rehabilitation projects.
Being able to automate and more efficiently manage City services like leaf pickup, snow removal, water and traffic infrastructure gives us the ability to better service the citizens of Cambridge – today and in the future.
I believe we are living proof that a smarter city is reachable for all sizes of municipalities. With bold leadership and vision to use funding creatively, plus state-of-the-art technology and a commitment to bettering services and protecting precious resources, anything is possible.
Photo caption: A cambridge city worker uses computer system on bicycle to inspect sidewalks. The computer is mounted on a bike which is ridden across nearly 800 kilometres of sidewalks. Defects and safety hazards that fall within certain thresholds are queued and the IBM system then creates automatic service requests to generate the appropriate work order, or job ticket, for repair crews.
