Paul Chang, Worldwide Consumer Products Lead, IBM

By Paul Chang

In a 2010 study conducted for the European Food Safety Authority, 58 percent of a sample of 27,000 consumers across the European Union said they were confident that farmers would convey information on food risks. Their confidence rate for food manufacturers (35 percent) and retailers (36 percent) was much lower.

That’s good news for farmers. But what about the other players in the food supply chain? How can they start improving their confidence rankings? One way, is to start providing more information about their products. Consumers around the globe are growing increasingly savvy and increasingly hungry for information. So why not give it to them?

Of course, consumers don’t want their information delivered any old way. For example, the IBM Institute for Business Value found in its 2011 Winning Over the Empowered Consumer study that 60 percent of 28,000 shoppers surveyed said they wanted to use mobile devices for checkout and service when making purchases.

Westfleisch, the third largest meat marketer in Germanyand the fifth largest in Europe, is embracing this trend with a new smart phone application that uses QR codes on meat packages to enable shoppers to find information about the animal’s origin. Through the app, called fTrace, information about things like, where the animal was slaughtered and when it was packed, is as readily available as recipes and tips on storing the meat safely. The app also enables consumers to access specific information on carbon emissions. fTrace has already been rolled out in the large European discount supermarket chains Aldi Süd and Netto; and the supermarket chain Lidl is set to begin using it this month.

Westfleisch believes that giving smarter customers additional information that was either difficult or impossible to find out heretofore will help build brand loyalty. Greater visibility into products, supply chains and practices, can only improve customer confidence. Equally important is the carbon emissions information, which is stored with all the other data that supports the application.

 In other words, agribusinesses don’t have to guess what it takes to bring home more bacon – consumers have already told them.

Technorati Tags: agriculture, IBM, retail, smarter consumer, Smarter Planet

Traceability has become a hot topic as global companies try to stay ahead of real-time consumer reaction that spreads like wildfire on social media.  From fruits and vegetables  to pharmaceuticals, traceability systems are being used to track product ingredients, movements and ownership throughout the supply chain to improve products and services.
This was a major topic in February at the first meeting of the Innovations for Environmental Sustainability Council, which the IBM formed with the World Environment Center and companies including Boeing, CH2M Hill, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, F. Hoffman-La Roche, General Motors, Ingersoll Rand, Johnson & Johnson and Walt Disney.

We agreed that as advances in technology have made it easier to acquire and analyze information about product development, distribution and use, the issue of traceability has moved front-and-center for business and competitive strategy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The speed of supply chains has created more challenges for companies, where even minor missteps can have major consequences.  Because supply chain issues can have a lingering impact on brands, the effectiveness of traceability has become a concern of supply chain executives and chief marketing officers alike.

Take the food industry as an example, where the need to monitor and trace the safety of the food supply has never been more crucial, or more difficult. As food systems become increasingly global, more producers, distributors and retailers must follow unique standards of quality, processing and accountability for multiple countries, which compounds the complexity of the task.

The implications are real:  Up to 30 percent of populations in industrialized countries  suffer from food-borne illnesses each year, and about 1.3 billion tons of food are lost or wasted each year around the world.

But we are making progress.  China’s Shandong Commercial Group, the world’s largest producer of pork, has stepped up its traceability efforts to track and monitor meat as it moves from farm to market.  They are using software, sensors and GPS technology to construct a system throughout its regional supply chain.  If illness strikes, as it did with the swine flu pandemic in Europe during the last decade, it can be quickly identified, isolated and addressed.

That’s an example of smarter supply chain management that’s interconnected and collaborative, with networked processes that improve efficiency and transparency.  This approach makes it easier for organizations to achieve end-to-end traceability of their inventories, from raw materials to product components and finished products.

Such traceability systems benefit businesses and consumers alike.  Applications can include consumer safety, temperature tracking, speedy product recalls, and reduced spoilage and waste.

With the proliferation of smart technology, predictive modeling for supply chains has become a reality.  Traceability technologies can be integrated into business processes so companies can prevent problems before they crop up.  When materials and products are equipped with sensors and GPS technologies, companies can verify whether bananas are truly organic, or where antibiotics were compounded. Wineries can calculate the best time to harvest grapes, and furniture manufacturers can learn the provenance of lumber.

The era of traceability is in full swing. Companies that embrace the systems, processes and practices of smarter supply chains can introduce innovations that  improve the relationships with their customers, strengthen the integrity and performance of their operations, reduce costs, and advance their competitive position.

Terry F. Yosie is President and Chief Executive Officer of the World Environment Center in Washington, D.C.

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Technorati Tags: Boeing, CH2M Hill, Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, F. Hoffman-La Roche, food, General Motors, IBM, Ingersoll Rand, Johnson & Johnson, supply chain, traceability, Walt Disney, WEC

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

Robert Atkinson, president of the non-partisan public policy think-tank ITIF, today moderated a panel of experts on emerging technologies in the fields of health care, transportation and energy at IBM’s Frontiers of IT Capitol Hill briefing.

Here’s the Washington Post’s Post Tech blog curtain-raiser on the event.

Recently considerable attention has been drawn to the emergence of “Big Data”—large scale data sets that businesses are using to unlock new value using today’s computing and communications power.  As a McKinsey Global Institute study recently showed, Big Data offers a wide range of commercial opportunities in virtually every sector of the economy for the United States.  To take one example, the authors estimate that better use of big data in health care could generate an additional $300 billion in long-term value, with approximately two-thirds of that coming from a direct reduction in national health care expenditures.

The use of Big Data should not be confined to just the private sector; data offers incredible new opportunities to the public sector as well.  Policymakers have the opportunity to use Big Data to improve government in areas such as public safety, public health, public utilities and public transportation.  ITIF has discussed many of these opportunities before.

Consider the following:

• Electric power utilities can use data analytics and smart meters to better manage resources and avoid blackouts,
• Food inspectors can use data to better track meat and produce safety from farm to fork ,
• Public health officials can use health data to detect infectious disease outbreaks,
• Regulators can track pharmaceutical and medical device safety and effectiveness through better data analytics,
• Police departments can use data analytics to target crime hotspots and prevent crime waves,
• Public utilities can use sensors to collect data on water and sewer usage to detect leaks and reduce water consumption,
• First responders can use sensors, GPS, cameras and better communication systems to let police and fire fighters better protect citizens when responding to emergencies, and
• State departments of transportation can use data to reduce traffic, more efficiently deploy resources, and implement congestion pricing systems

Better use of data can help government agencies, from city agencies to federal bureaucracies, operate more efficiently, create more transparency, and make more informed decisions.  And government can use cloud computing to more efficiently develop online systems that provide anytime, anywhere access to information. However, government officials should do more to spur uses of data. Taking advantage of these opportunities will require federal government leadership, such as the Department of Commerce creating a data policy office to spur data innovation and overcome obstacles to adoption, all the while protecting privacy.  And going forward, government agencies will increasingly have to deal with issues such as data security and identity management, so these issues do  not become impediments to successful utilization of data analytics. Local governments can help pioneer the use of data as well.  For example, the city of Boston city sponsored the development of a mobile app “Street Bump” to automatically determine where potholes are based on data collected using citizen’s smart phones equipped with GPS and accelerometers. Tools like these are helping create “smart cities” and build a world that is alive with information.

Although there have been many successes in this area, much more can be done.  For example, in homeland security, law enforcement must deal with a changing threat landscape.  While corporations and individuals can increasingly use better technology to communicate and store data security, criminals can also use these same tools.  As a result, law enforcement is increasingly confronting the “Going Dark” problem where they have less access to investigative data, not because of a lack of legal authority, but because of technological hurdles.  Yet while law enforcement may have a reduced ability to intercept some types of communication, they now have many more sources of data, such as transactional data, to use to detect threats.  As ITIF discussed at an event in 2010 following the Christmas Day terrorist attempt, the intelligence community still needs to develop better analytical tools to “connect the dots” and allow intelligence officers to do a better job. Similarly in many other sectors, Big Data offers government opportunities to reinvent how to operate effectively.

Overall, more investment in data infrastructure and analytics will enable government to better provide and efficiently deliver values and services to its citizens.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Robert Atkinson

So why does Milwaukee aim to become a model for smart water management and urban food production? And why is it experimenting with aquaponics–systems that combine soil-less vegetable growing with fish farming?

Milwaukee is concerned about water because its traditional industries, including meatpacking, tanning, shoe making, beer brewing and heavy manufacturing, are all major water users. In addition, the city experienced the largest waterborne disease outbreak in US history in 1993 when the protozoan parasite cryptosporidium appeared in the municipal water supply and made more than 1.6 million people sick. Two years ago, the city formed the Milwaukee Water Council, made up of representatives of government, academia and industry, with the goal of making the city a recognized global leader in water-related technologies.

The city is interested in urban farming because some of its neighborhoods are so-called food deserts. Large grocery stores don’t locate outlets there, so people rely on small stores, which often charge high prices for processed food. There’s a shortage of healthy food such as fresh vegetables and fish. So city leaders are promoting community gardening, large-scale composting and the nascent aquaponics industry. “The urban agriculture movement in Milwaukee is bringing local food production to the block level,” says Rocky Marcoux, commissioner, Milwaukee department of city development. “We can feed our population more economically and sustainably. We can put our neighborhoods in charge of their own destiny.”

In June, a team of five IBMers spent three weeks in Milwaukee as part of the company’s Smarter City Challenge grant program with the goal of helping city leaders explore the feasibility of their urban farming initiative.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Aquaponics combines aquaculture, or fish cultivation, with hydroponics, or growing vegetables on waterfed beds of rocks, in a single, self-regulating system. Sweet Water Organics and Growing Power, both Milwaukee-based urban agriculture organizations, have  developed aquaponics systems and are piloting them in the city. The way the systems work is perch or tilapia are raised in water tanks that are connected to enclosed hydroponic growing spaces. The water in the fish tanks, which contains fish waste, is pumped into the hydroponics systems. There, the waste is converted by bacteria on the rocks into a natural fertilizer for the plants. After this natural process removes nitrogen from the water, it’s recycled back into the fish tank. Further, the fish give off carbon dioxide when they breathe, which is absorbed  by the plants at night as part of their photosynthesis process. In this way, fish and vegetables can be grown year round.

The IBM team spent the first half of their stay in Milwaukee interviewing government officials, scientists, community organizers and the leaders of the aquaponics outfits. They visited some of the test sites, helped harvest fish and ate meals at restaurants that served the  fish and salad greens.  “It was really good,” says Carey Hidaka, one of the team members, who is a water management specialist.

The team concentrated on fashioning a set of recommendations during the final days in Milwaukee. They encouraged the city leaders to continue with their initiative. The recommended that the city set up a Council on Urban Agriculture and Aquaponics, which would be similar to the Milwaukee Water Council. And they urged them to create an innovation center for the technology in a building on a former industrial site. “I wanted to know if we’re on a fool’s errand or does this make sense from an economic standpoint. Their answer is it does make sense. It’s viable,” says Marcoux.

He’s passionate about the impact that this project can have–and not just on Milwaukee. “This could bring major health benefits if we can bring this to a lot of American cities,” Marcoux says. “We’re going to change the world.”

What’s in it for IBM? Nothing now, in the way of new business. The Smarter Cities Challenge is a competitive grant program awarding $50 million worth of technology and services over the next three years to 100 cities around the globe. The aim is to help make the world work better.

Eventually, if aquaponics catches on, IBM could provide technology for monitoring and managing the systems. Meanwhile, says Hidaka, “This is about learning to understand the needs of a customer, seeing their pain points, their requirements, and coming up with a solution for them.”

Technorati Tags: aquaponics, IBM, Milwaukee, Milwaukee Water Council

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.

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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.

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.

Technorati Tags: IBM, smartcamp, Smarter Planet

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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The company’s heavy reliance on data began five years ago after it was purchased by a private equity firm that brought in new management and insisted on improved performance. “These days, we ask questions, understand the numbers, and, most importantly, do something,” says Gordon Robertson, vice-president of sales and marketing.

From its 12,000 acres of land in California, Sun World International sells table grapes, stone fruit, peppers, and water melons worldwide. It also breeds its own varieties of plants and licenses its genetic intellectual property to other growers. Its brands including Superior Seedless grapes, Black Diamond plums, and Honeycot apricots. It employs about 7,000 people in the fields.

Here are some highlights of how it uses business intelligence:

–The sales team analyzes the profitability of each customer and concentrates on developing the most profitable segments. As a result, sales to those segments grew 20% last year, yielding an additional $3 million in revenues.

–The company evaluates the effect of different irrigation systems on crop yields. Its increased use of drip irrigation systems has decreased  water usage by 8.5% since 2006.

–It uses data analysis to adjust the size of the vehicles and other equipment for harvesting and other farming tasks, which has reduced its consumption of fuel by 20% over the past five years.

–Its analysis of crop growing and harvesting equipment and techniques has reduced labor requirements by 10% to 15%. In one example, it changed the design of grape trellises so farm laborers could harvest grapes without having to bend over–which relieved their pain and increased productivity.

The software also allows Sun World International’s executives to move quickly when trouble strikes, as it did seven weeks ago when Australia restricted the import of California table grapes because of concerns about the spread of a breed of fruit flies. Using business intelligence software,  the company’s sales executives quickly sized up potential customers in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Taiwan, and elsewhere in Asia to take up the slack. “We could react quickly,” says Robertson.

By being smart and fast, Sun World International proves that you don’t have to be a giant to compete successfully against them.

Technorati Tags: Applied Analytix, IBM, Sun World