You have a car that can talk to a mechanic, to signal the fact that it needs a repair; you have store shelves that can talk to a supply chain when they’re running low on inventory of a certain product. You have hundreds of billions of smart things — sensors, cameras, cars, shipping containers, intelligent appliances, tiny, traceable chips by the hundreds of millions — all becoming interconnected and making the smallest exchange more productive, efficient, and better.

Today’s smarter products represent a new generation of capabilities that provide increasingly multi-dimensional and personalized functions.  And as these devices talk, they create systems that didn’t exist before.

Here’s an example from this week (click on the image for larger view):

The IBM Curiosity Shop on Flickr

Technorati Tags: animations, BodyMedia, IBM, picture stories, Smarter Healthcare, Smarter Products & Services, The Internet of Things

One of the pioneers in the field, BodyMedia Inc. in Pittsburgh, has just introduced an update of its BodyMedia FIT system that not only tracks physical activity but also provides personalized feedback. The system includes software from IBM that is most often used by businesses–but in this case helps individuals improve their well being. “This is a big step for us,” says Ivo Stivoric, the chief technology officer at BodyMedia and one of its founders. “This helps consumers connect the dots. They don’t just see the data. They get recommendations on what they can do to get back on track.”

The system demonstrates the potential for a combination of sensor technology, analytics software and easy-to-use interfaces to unlock the mysteries of the human body and produce insights that people can immediately put to use to make themselves healthier and happier.

BodyMedia got its back in the late 1990s, after Stivoric and Astro Teller met on the soccer fields at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Teller was working on a PhD in artificial intelligence and Stivoric, an industrial designer, was running the university’s wearable computing lab. Their initial idea, which they conceived along with co-founders Chris Pacione and Chris Kasabach, was to create sensor-packed garments for use in healthcare monitoring. While that’s still one of the company’s markets, the main focus is now on consumers.

The company is one of the leaders in the market for fitness monitors, both with its own brands and with devices and software that it provides to other companies, including 24 Hour Fitness, Jenny Craig and Jillian Michaels. One of its devices was featured on The Biggest Loser TV show. BodyMedia FIT consists of an armband monitor, online activity manager, wristband display and downloadable applications for mobile devices.  The system tracks key metrics that affect a person’s health, including the number of steps taken, the intensity of physical activity, calorie burn, sleep duration and sleep quality. Rather than just using a pedometer, which measures activity on a single axis, the system uses a 3-axis accelerometer, which tracks motion in any direction. The device contains three other sensors, as well: a temperature sensor, a galvanic skin response sensor and a heat flux sensor.

The feedback function is an important advance because it turns data gathered by the sensors into useful insights and advice. The feature was developed by Summa, a technology services company in Pittsburgh, using IBM Decision Management software. The software sizes up a person’s data,  determines whether they’re meeting their goals and suggests things they can do to meet them before the end of the day. The system can be customized to reflect the fitness philosophy of  BodyMedia partners. Over time, BodyMedia expects the system to become more and more personalized.

For Stivoric, this is just the beginning. BodyMedia is working on new designs that will turn the wearable devices into fashion statements. “We want it to be so cool that you’ll wear it as a badge of honor. You’ll want to show people that you’re taking care of yourself,” he says. Stivoric also sees a great potential for using the data BodyMedia collects to classify people according to their “lifestyle signatures” and make wellness and disease prevention recommendations based on the health outcomes for people who are like them. “We’re helping to kick off a revolution,” he says. “We’re revolutionizing healthcare by giving people the tools they need to take care of themselves.”

This is a payoff from all those years of tinkering by the pioneers of wearable computers.

Technorati Tags: BodyMedia, IBM

Today, IBM is convening a conference, US Competitiveness: the Next 100 Years, to generate ideas for rekindling America’s competitiveness in the years ahead. For live blogging from the event, check in between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. Please Tweet to #uscompetes.

The latest:

4:45 p.m. Close – Jonathan Fanton, Roosevelt House Fellow:

“A vision of a fair, just and humane society will advance our economic gains, if we can achieve it.”

We can’t count on government alone or industries to carry the burden of our reinvention.

We’re at an inflection point. All of us need to think differently We need to take responsibility for coming up with fresh thoughts for making our economy more vital.

“It’s individual initiative we have to find ways to unleash.”

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The Start: 2:00 PM

Welcome – Jennifer J. Raab, President Hunter College:

She points out that the Roosevelt House is an apt place to hold a competitiveness event. 70 years ago the US was struggling with the Great Depression and IBM was struggling to stay in business. They came together to create Social Security—the biggest accounting application of all time. Ultimately, it became the foundation for economic security for American citizens. The idea for Social Security was hatched here when FDR met with Frances Perkins, later his secretary of labor, when he was president elect in early 1933.

She says there are no more important public private partnerships than those that support public education. At Hunter College, $5000 a year in tuition will buy you a world-class education. “We’re training the next generation of America’s workforce and applying those skills to society and business.” We can’t boost our economy without creating qualified employees for the workforce.

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2:45 PM

Keynote – Bridget van Kralingen, IBM General Manager, N. America:

Our theme today is the importance of public-private partnerships in helping to restore America’s global competitiveness.

It’s needed to be the catalyst for change and innovation.

There are some great examples of public-private partnerships that helped transform society. Social Security didn’t just build a safety net. It also gave people confidence in the ability and willingness of US businesses to play a constructive role in society.

The US space program, another public-private partnership spawned a number of industries.

We believe that PPPs can play the same important role today.

We have several challenges. Economic. BRIC growth has sustained and 115 countries in the world are growing faster than the US. Our competitive environment. We talk about creating jobs. “I’d argue that if you create skills, you create jobs. Skills create jobs.” The US now ranks 7^th among the OECD countries in spending on R&D—down from No. 1.

“We have a couple of dysfunctional behaviors. The recession has led to a lot of grinding and short term thinking, which works against innovation.”

“We have to create the future, not just focusing on fixing the symptoms today.”

There are great current examples of public private partnerships.

One example is a partnership of IBM and New York City. We’re creating a technical high school in Brooklyn, with two extra years of schooling. They’ll earn an associates degree. We’re in the process of announcing a similar program with the city of Chicago.

We’re also doing a partnership with New York State—investing with the state and other companies to create the next generations of chip technology.

“We put our money where our mouth is.”

We can use these partnership to drive growth and regain the US competitiveness that we need.

——

The Context:

Here’s van Kralingen’s post on the A Smarter Planet Blog.

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3 p.m. PM

Keynote – Robert Steel, Deputy Mayor, NYC

The good news is New York City is growing. Most US cities are not growing. We’ll add 1 million people in the coming decades.

We launched Plan NYC in 2007. Mayor Michael Bloomberg laid out wherewe want New York to be over the next decade. The goal is to create a sustainable city.

We have 3.7 million jobs. Health care, finance, retail and business services are the four largest categories.

Unemployment is still unacceptably high, though. We don’t want to live in a city with high unemployment. The headline number is 8.6% but it actually understates the problem. For men of color in the Bronx, the unemployment rate is probably 40%. That’s unacceptable.

Also, unemployment is longer term than in past recessions.

Jobs and innovation are the key themes for economic development.

There are four pillars of economic vitality in New York. 1) Improve the quality of life in the city. 2) Create a pro business environment. 3) Invest in the future. 4) Innovation and economic competitiveness are key.

A good example of a public-private partnership is the High Line, a former elevated rail line that has been converted to a park—which has stimulated a lot of economic development. The city invested $120 million. There’s $75 million of private money. A lot of buildings are being constructed and remodeled. Thirty buildings are done or on the drawing boards. “We look for situations where public money encourages private money.”

Concerning talent: After the financial crisis the economic development corp. in the city surveyed employers to find out the skills that would be needed for the future. The answer was science and technology. Our R&D per capita is too low. So our of this came the idea of trying to turn NYC into a new Silicon Valley. This is the Applied Sciences NYC program. We had seven submissions from a total of 17 academic institutions.

We give advice, real estate and up to $100 million in funding What do we get for it? The range of proposals goes up to a 2-million square foot campus and $2.5 billion in investment.

“This is a big idea. It’s about innovation, thinking ahead and planning. It’s about thinking ahead and changing the nature of the city’s economy.”

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The Context: Robert Steel talks about the Applied Sciences NYC initiative, a public-private partnership aimed at creating a larger pool of people with technical skills in New York City.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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3:30 PM

Panel – New Thinking on Public/Private Partnerships

Moderator: Stan Litow, IBM vice president for corporate social responsibility, asks about entrepreneurialism and education

Participants:

John Seely Brown – Author

No skills last that long. We have to create a disposition to learn. You have to connect to learn, and you have to learn continually. “The half life of skills today has gone down to about five years.”

In the past, people defined themselves only by what they created themselves. Today, the kids are saying: ‘I am what I create, what I share, and what other people build on.’

Kathryn Wylde –CEO,  Partnership for New York City

Ronald Reagan popularized the concepts of public private partnerships. He understood that it wasn’t about business taking over government responsibilities but investing around government priorities.

We’re working with the business community to create early state investment funds. It’s a stream of activity, not one offs. We have set up technology media labs. We have startup incubation labs. We work in partnership with the city’s economic development corporation.

Robert Steel – Deputy Mayor, Economic Development, NYC

We can’t develop a clear vision of that a new science and engineering university in the city should be. We need ideas from organizations that know how to do this.

Some of the institutions are making joint submissions, and some of them chose corporations to be part of their submissions. IBM is one.

“We had a dating service for these guys to come together.”

Expect an announcement in January.

Bridget van Kralingen – IBM, General Manager, North America

You have to keep changing your business models and operating models. We’ve gone through significant changes. We are going much broader with the ecosystem of companies we partner with, and many of them are small companies and innovative startups. We have an entrepreneurships program where we’re helping more than 1000 startups develop their offerings and their business capabilities. We’ve extended it to a program with cities worldwide, called The Smarter Cities Challenge. We do a little project with each of them. We identify innovations and improvements. We offer the skills to build, produce and deliver.

John Seely Brown

We have to reinvent the notion of the land grant college which helped build the US economy in the 20^th Center.

You need to have a dialogue between the universities and the ecosystem of innovation around them. It’s not one way—with all the ideas coming from the university and then being developed out in the economy.

In the Applied Science NYC project, where more than one dozen universities are making proposals for a new science and engineering university in New York, every participant will be a winner. They’re all transforming their thinking through this project.

Robert Steel

“None of us should go to sleep tonight not worrying about the plight of public education. We’re cheating our children and other people’s children.”

“Better public education solves about nine problems.”

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4 p.m. Q&A with the panel:

John Seely Brown – Author, on the role of technology in improving national competitiveness.

“Knowledge is being created so there’s too much to know. We need machines like IBM’s Watson to help us figure things out.”

Kathryn Wylde –CEO,  Partnership for New York City

Robert Steel – Deputy Mayor, Economic Development, NYC, on access for people with disabilities.

“The honest answer is we’ll do a better job by having advocates keep us informed. When we have groups that have special needs, we’ll have to address it by find out what are the best practices.”

“We’re dealing with the issue of taxies. Do we retrofit every taxi or do we dispatch special taxis to help people with a disability. We’re debating the issue right now.”

New York competes not just with Chicago and LA. We have to compete with Boulder and Austin. People can live in a lot places. “Dealing with the quality of life can’t be underestimated.”

The Context:

Here’s a video of John Seely Brown talking about collaborative innovation and other innovation issues:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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4:15 p.m. Presentation – David McQueeney, IBM Research, talks about IBM’s Watson, the computer program that beat former grand champions at TV’s Jeopardy!

We’ve been building computing systems for 100 years, and now we’re asking computing systems to take on more and more challenging problems.

Computers can tackle thinking problems, which for a long time humans thought were reserved for out domain. Watson is one of those.

The Watson project in IBM Research shows that the kind of leaders you want in a research division are people who can pull together a large number of complex technical threads and build something that none of the individual researchers could have done by themselves.

“Watson changed the way people think about what computing might be useful for.”

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McQueeney talks about the government’s capabilities for taking advantage of vast amounts of data to improve services for citizens and enable collaboration.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: IBM, national competitiveness, new york city

Igor Jurisica, Ph.D, uses the power of World Community Grid to conduct his cancer research.

When Igor Jurisica started doing cancer research 11 years ago, he worked with about a dozen colleagues using a handful of scientific workstations in a small lab in Toronto, Canada.

How times have changed.

Today, Jurisica, a senior scientist at Princess Margaret Hospital, Ontario Cancer Institute, conducts his research with the help of nearly 300,000 people spread across 100 countries running his calculations on over 900,000 devices.

This global “team” comprises volunteers who donate their idle computing time to the World Community Grid, creating a virtual supercomputer devoted strictly to humanitarian research. Jurisica’s project, Help Conquer Cancer, is one of nine initiatives that currently share the grid’s massive computing power — free of charge — to conduct critical scientific inquiry.

Jurisica’s research involves computationally intensive calculations to understand the protein crystallization process in general, with a special focus on the structure and function of cancer-related proteins. With conventional computing resources, this project would take at least 186 years to complete.

By using the grid, Jurisica will be able to finish it in just under four years.

“World Community Grid has not simply sped up this research, it has enabled it,” Jurisica said. “The grid has completely transformed the scope of our work and enabled us to finally address our problem in the correct way, in a realistic time frame.”

Visionary cancer research, viable at last

Help Conquer Cancer uses World Community Grid to analyze protein crystals and help improve researchers’ understanding of cancer biology.

Jurisica is using World Community Grid to analyze and classify 115 million images of more than 12,500 human proteins. Each image, created through a process known as x-ray crystallography, displays unique features that must be carefully annotated.

“No human would be able to go through this number of images in a consistent way and accurately classify them,” Jurisica said. ”The grid is the only environment where we can even attempt to do this kind of comprehensive and systematic analysis.”

The results of this project will expand researchers’ understanding of the crystallization process, protein biochemistry and cancer biology and potentially help determine an individual’s predisposition to certain cancers. It may also help improve therapy planning, treatment prognosis and drug development.

Supercomputing power without supercomputer costs

For institutions using World Community Grid, it’s a dream come true: they get all the computational power of a supercomputer without the prohibitive costs and enormous responsibilities.

“Even if somebody gave me Blue Gene or some other machine that could sustain this kind of computation, it’s not feasible because I wouldn’t have the space, power, cooling capacity or the staff necessary to maintain it,” Jurisica said. World Community Grid’s distributed computing model eliminates the headaches of operating a centralized system and lets Jurisica do what he cares about most: focus on his research.

“With the grid, some machines may go offline, new ones will come online, and our computations might move from machine to machine,” Jurisica said. “But I don’t have to concern myself at all with that level of detail.”

Cycling for a cure

When Jurisica is not conducting research, supervising graduate students, traveling to conferences, lecturing or consulting, he likes to go cycling. Since 2008, he has ridden in the annual Ride to Conquer Cancer — a 2-day, 200-mile bike ride from Toronto to Niagara Falls. His IBM-OCI-Roche Integrative Discovery cycling team has raised over C$250,000 for cancer research to date.

“I signed up for my first ride not because I was regularly bicycling, but because of the cause,” Jurisica said. “But since then I have come to love cycling and I’ve even changed my lifestyle to some degree.”

Each summer, Jurisica participates in a 2-day, 200-mile bike ride to raise funds for cancer research.

With his current grid-based research scheduled to wrap up later this year, Jurisica is looking ahead to the next phase of his project, which he hopes to continue running on the grid.

“As a computer scientist, I have great interest in developing new approaches and resources to do complex data analysis and visualization,” Jurisica said. “But it’s really gratifying when this research eventually leads to a clinical test that can hopefully start changing the lives of actual patients. That’s what this is all about.”

World Community Grid pools the surplus computer processing power of more than 1.8 million PCs registered by over 570,000 people in 88 countries to tackle projects that benefit all of humanity, like fighting childhood cancer, developing clean energy solutions or designing better treatments to fight AIDS. Volunteers simply download free, secure software that runs quietly in the background when their computer isn’t in use and crunches numbers for humanitarian research initiatives. In terms of pure processing power, the grid is comparable to one of the world’s top fifteen supercomputers.

To read more World Community Grid Person for a Smarter Planet posts, click here.

Technorati Tags: cancer research, help conquer cancer, Igor Jurisica, protein crystallization, world community grid, x-ray crystallography

So why not give doctors some computing intelligence to help improve their results?

That’s one of the challenges that that inspired scientists at IBM Research – Haifa  to help transform healthcare globally. In fact, the Haifa lab is the lead location for healthcare-related work among IBM’s 9 laboratories worldwide–and making the most of medical information is one of its key focuses. “The important thing to realize is that data is king in healthcare. We can transform decision making, and we can use genetic insight to make personalized medicine possible,” says Haim Nelken, manager for integration technologies at IBM Research – Haifa.

It’s no surprise that the topic for the colloquium being conducted there today is The Future of Healthcare. The colloquium is part of an IBM centennial program designed to convene thought leaders – including leading scientists, academics, leaders of industries, public policy makers and IBM clients — for a series of talks and panel discussions on transformational technologies and their potential impact on the world.

The Haifa colloquium will include presentations by IBM scientists and outside experts, including Jonathan Halevy, director general of Israel’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center, who will speak about the doctor-patient relationship in the Internet era, Dieter Enzmann, chair of UCLA radiology, who will discuss the digital transformation of medical imaging, and Itsik Pe’er, professor of computer science at Columbia University, who will speak about the role of computation in human genetics. The main focus is on the transformation of the decision making process.

The IBM research team in Haifa is working on technology that could provide physicians valuable new tools to help with diagnosis and treatment. They’re experimenting with natural language processing and machine learning, just like the core capabilities in the Watson machine. But, in addition, they’re exploring the possibilities of infusing new data and knowledge—including know-how from physicians about best practices and genetic data.

Nelken says the research is done with the awareness that all of the participants in the healthcare ecosystem will use the new information science tools in ways that researchers can’t predict. That means the solutions they come up with have to be flexible. For example, we might even see something like a smartphone app store specializing in applications and services that help people use medical information. One service might review the medical information from a family and predict the diseases and medical conditions to which the family members are vulnerable. This will allow people to get check-ups and early warnings of looming problems–or allow them to change their lifestyles to reduce the potential for having specific health problems. Perhaps insurance companies will even offer special policies for individuals based on genetic  information.

Many scientific and policy challenges that will have to be overcome for this vision to become a reality. “We’re beginning to have access to a lot of genetic information, which could lead to truly personalized medicine. But tailoring medicine to an individual is no trivial matter,” Nelken says.

But that’s the goal of the  healthcare research team in Haifa. Through collaboration with other IBM researchers around the world and experts like those speaking at the Haifa colloquium, they hope to take much of the uncertainty out of the practice of medicine.

Technorati Tags: Haifa, IBM, Israel

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.

——————-

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.

———————–

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.

—————-

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

Update:

Teams of three students from MIT/Sloan and HBS take on IBM’s Watson. (This is only the second contest matching Watson against collegians. In the previous contest, Watson beat teams from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Pitt came in second, much to the chagrin of rival CMU!)

Harvard wins the first question, with “What is Belize?” Answering: countries in central America, ending with “e”

But then Watson takes over, running the category.

The machine picks “Who’s Your Daddy Company?” as the next category, eliciting a huge hook of laughter from the audience.

They finished the Jeopardy! round, with Watson, $8600; Harvard, $5200  ; and MIT,  $-200 .

(I got disconnected from HBS’s Wi-Fi at a crucial moment, destroying the coverage of the second round. Grrrrr)

Final Jeopardy!

Clue: Finding the spot for this memorial caused its creator to say “Americans will march across that skyline.”

The question: Mt. Rushmore.

Harvard and Watson answer correctly. MIT does not.

Final score: Watson, $53,601; Harvard, $42,399; MIT, $100.

!!!!!

—————-

The Start:

9:45 a.m.

Erik Brynjolfson, MIT Sloan School of Management, kicks off by talking about a concern these days about technology and its role in society. Some people are saying that innovation has been stagnating, and that’s contributing to the slowness of the economic recovery.

“The issue isn’t that technology is stagnating, but that we haven’t been keeping up with technology. Societies, institutions and structures haven’t advanced rapidly enough to keep up with the advances. We’re creating a lot of wealth through technology, but the benefits aren’t going to regular people in the middle of the income distribution.”

This has been a great decade for productivity growth, even better the 1990s. It has contributed to income growth per capita. Yet median income growth has not improved much. “A lot of wealth has been created that goes to the people at the very top of the income brackets.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

———-

The context: Here’s the new book by Erik and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine.

—————-

10 a.m.

IBM Fellow David Ferrucci talks about the making of Watson, IBM’s question-and-answer machine, which in February beat the top past champions on the TV game show Jeopardy! (He’s speaking again this afternoon, so I’m going to go into detail on that.) For now, here’s another IBM Fellow, Bernard Meyerson, talking about the importance of Watson.

Click here to view the embedded video.

——————

10:40 a.m.

Question to IBM’s David Ferrucci about Watson: How long until Watson can program itself?

Ferrucci:

It already does that, but will do so more in the future.

“I can imagine a situation where you’re searching for different models, different weights to answers, and it automatically programs itself to do that.”

He wouldn’t predict when.

——————–

10:45 a.m. Panel: What Can Technology Do Today and in 2020?

Andrew McAfee of MIT asks the question: Why are we seeing these astonishing advances now?

Afred Spector of Google: The Web makes it possible to combine a lot of information and access it via the Web. We also have a huge amount of feedback from users. And we have a large amount of software components. We can combine things and piece things together. “We’re solving a collection of problems which are acceptably probabilistic.”

Rod Brooks, an AI and robotics expert at MIT and entrepreneur: We have enough computer power to solve bigger and more complex problems. “Using machine learning and statistics we’ve managed to come up with algorithms which learn things acceptably well.”

David Ferrucci of IBM: “What’s exciting is the ability to generation hypothesis using induction and then track them back and evaluate evidence during an inductive process.”

———————

11 a.m. Panel: What Can Technology Do Today and in 2020?

Andrew McAfee of MIT asks the question: Why can’t computers do things that a two year old child can do?

Rod Brooks, AI and robotics entrepreneur “There is progress but it’s in narrow subfields. But it can do great things. Google cars are an example: They don’t do a lot of things but they do a few things very well.”

Afred Spector of Google:  Google Translate is another example. We’re up to 69 languages. We’re working on quality. “We want to get to the languages that are less spoken so all those populations will have access to the Web. We want to make the knowledge available to everybody.”

Another project: Making it possible so the machine automatically understands things so well that we can translate an image into a text description, or visa versa.

Brooks: He talks about the problem with manufacturing in the US. We keep going to high tech manufacturing, but that makes us too narrow. Not enough jobs created. He says we need to develop manufacturing that can employ a lot of people, by automating the low value pieces more but produce a wide variety of products.  “The answer is in the masses–creating robots that people can interact with and use.”

David Ferrucci of IBM: “I see a future where computers can act as intelligent mediators that enable informed collaboration, for instance, between you and your healthcare team, so you can make better decisions about your treatment.”

—–

Here’s McAfee talking about the coming capabilities of machines and their impact on jobs and job creation:

Click here to view the embedded video.

——————-

11:20  a.m.

Panel: What Can Technology Do Today and in 2020?

Andrew McAfee of MIT asks the question:  What would accelerate your work the most: data, computing power, or smart researchers?

Rod Brooks, MIT professor, and AI and robotics entrepreneur : We have enough computing power and data. “I have a bunch of smart PhDs, but you have to direct them in the right direction. You need the right reward structure for research.”

“We’d be better off if universities were smaller, had fewer people working form them, and focused on deep fundamental research. Let organizations like IBM do the applied research.”

Afred Spector of Google: “When we go to universities we’re surprised and disappointed that the faculties aren’t doing more high-risk research.”

Google sees a need for vastly more computing power. We need to do “deep learning.” It’s a new level of machine learning. Google has 5,000 PhD’s in computer science. “We need even more talent.”

“We need all three to get better.”

David Ferrucci of IBM:  “Researchers, data and machines, in that order.”

————

12:20 p.m. Panel: How Will Technology Affect Productivity and Employment?

Erik Brynjolfson, MIT Sloan School of Management, asks: What does technology mean for technology and jobs?

David Autor, economics professor at MIT:  There’s a long running debate. Does technology eliminate jobs? The stock answer is to call people who ask it Luddites.

We’ve seen incredibly rapid technology change over the past century and it eliminated a lot of farm jobs, but it created jobs elsewhere. “We’ve seen rising employment rates; and it raises productivity and incomes.”

However, there’s another side to this. Technology increases our efficiency but it can compete with workers and their skills. “Technology changes much faster than people can adapt.”

Middle-education and middle-skilled jobs are the vulnerable ones. That’s manufacturing jobs and administrative jobs.

“This creates real challenges. We should be worried. The set of opportunities are far more bifurcated than then used to be.”

“It’s leading to even more unequal distribution of wealth.”

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, former IBM executive and MIT lecturer:  He says he has been focusing on technology based innovation in the service economy. So many of the new jobs are in services. About 80% of the service jobs are information-based jobs. Technology will be used more and more in this area. So these jobs will increasingly come under pressure, too.

This is another period of creative destruction.

New industries will be created that will create the mid-skilled and mid-education jobs. “I don’t know the answer”

“The top-down approaches to job creation aren’t working. We have to rely more on bottoms-up approaches—entrepreneurialism.”

Frank Levy, a labor economist at MIT: Keeps things in perspective. Everything we see today is colored by the recession. It doesn’t have a lot to do with technology—but with the collapse of the housing bubble.

At the same time, the middle-skill job problem is very real.

“Because of the recession, it’s going to be hard to get kids to get advanced education at the same time that the jobs that will come will require advanced educations.”

———

12:45 p.m. Panel: How Will Technology Affect Productivity and Employment?

Erik Brynjolfson, MIT Sloan School of Management, asks: How do we create new jobs for mid-skilled people?

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, former IBM executive and MIT lecturer: Cloud computing and other technologies can help entrepreneurs get started and build companies and hire people. So a lot of small companies will spring up—not the high tech companies but companies that take advantage of technology.

David Autor, economics professor at MIT: That’s good, but it won’t produce a lot of jobs. “Most people want to be employed. They want to work for somebody. If they have a choice, that’s what they do.”

Frank Levy, MIT: He calls for apprenticeships and case-based education to bring up the skills.

Wladawky-Berger: Germany has done a better job at creating the mid-skilled jobs.

Autor: The Germans have adapted more quickly than other developed economies. They brought up the skills and reduced wages for mid-skilled people, which made the people and the country more competitive.

There are decent middle-skilled job in health care, repairs, the trades. But all require post-high schools investments in skills. “But you can’t go to the Harvard of plumbing.”

Wladawsky-Berger: Can’t community colleges help fill the void.

Autor: “They’d like to, but their funding is being cut by states and communities.”

—————————-

1 p.m. Panel: How Will Technology Affect Productivity and Employment?

Question from the audience: “I’m worried about how we communicate about the new capabilities of machines and their impact on jobs. Will people react against it?”

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, former IBM executive and MIT lecturer: There’s a consensus that just as we transitioned from the agricultural age to the industrial age, and literacy and education went up, in today’s world you need the next level of education. You need information-based literacy, and teamwork literacy. People who learn to use these tools can make a good living. If we can communicate that we’ll be okay.

Frank Levy, MIT: We should be clear about what machines can do and what they can’t do, and not talk a lot about the “singularity”—the point in the future when machines will be able to truly think.

“Just tell it straight in terms of what we know now. Don’t try to scare people.”

Here’s Wladawsky-Berger talking about the future of job creation:

Click here to view the embedded video.

——-

1:25 p.m. Remarks from Martin Fleming, chief economist at IBM:

There have been five waves of technological change over the past three centuries. With each wave, the new technologies fundamentally altered the way business—and work—was done. “The business changes because the technology makes it possible to do so.”

With IBM’s Watson, for example, you enable the democratization of clinical decision making. The practice of healthcare can be fundamentally changed. Evidence-based medicine is made possible.

Each wave was also accompanied by an economic crash, typically at the time when the new technology is impacting the old ways of doing things but has not yet produced all of the productivity gains that are coming on a mass scale.

We’re now entering into a period where the economy is beginning to open up opportunities for the deployment of significant new innovations. “Radical new technologies will be deployed. New industries will be created.”

“This is about the transformation of the economy.”

——

At Harvard Business School now…

3:30 p.m. David Ferrucci, head of IBM’s Watson project, talks about how Watson came to  be and where the technology is going.

Watson was a grand challenge aimed at driving important scientific advances. It gets people to think about the implications of technology–where is it today and where might it go.

Watson beat former grand champions at TV’s Jeopardy! quiz show.

He points out how much more difficult it is for a computer to have a conversation with a person than it is to play chess–a previous grand challenge that IBM took on in the 1990s when one of its machines beat the best chess player in the world. That’s because, in conversation, “context defines meaning.”

It’s a very difficult problem. Computers can’t relate words to experience.

“Jeopardy! helped us push the kind of technology that interprets natural language to determine meaning.”

————————-

4:00 p.m. David Ferrucci, the father of Watson, talks about how the technology came about and where it’s going.

We did 8000 experiments to develop Watson’s capability. There were lots of growing pains. Example: New York Times Headlines: An exclamation point was warranted for the “end of” this” in 1918. Watson’s answer: “a sentence.”

The project took 4 years.

Originally, running on a single PC, it took two hours for Watson to answer a single question. “The producers insisted that that would make for a boring game.” So they scaled the machine up to a 2880-core computing system.

The important thing about Watson is that it collects evidence and builds confidence in an ansers. when we think about applying it to medicine or law, we don’t think it’s providing the answer but providing useful suggestions–based on an evidence profile.

We’ll give a human decision maker the top answers to a question and the evidence and analysis that led Watson to those answers. This is about empowering the decision maker.

——————

Here’s Ferrucci talking about how the software program can help transform the healthcare industry.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: Harvard Business School, HBS, IBM, MIT

Ashifi Gogo, Sproxil CEO

For Ashifi Gogo, commercial success and social benefit are inextricably linked. In launching his cell phone-based drug authentication service, Sproxil, in emerging markets, Gogo saw great opportunity to combat a major problem and make a real difference. He also saw a great business opportunity.

“I had long been upset by the lack of global start-ups with solutions that make an impact in developing nations,” Gogo said. “With our technology, we had an opportunity to operate in emerging markets and solve a critical social problem while doing well commercially. For me, the two sides have always been self-combined.”

Gogo learned about the counterfeit drug epidemic in West Africa while a graduate student at Dartmouth College, where he developed his technology and ultimately started Sproxil. The death of 84 infants in Nigeria from tainted teething syrup in 2009 drove home the need for action — and Gogo took on the challenge.

He launched with Sproxil’s first client in February, 2010 to empower Nigerians to avoid fake drugs, help the government fight counterfeiting and help legitimate drug makers regain market share.

Scratch cards vs. starting from scratch

Sproxil’s Mobile Product Authentication (MPA™) solution lets customers scratch-and-text an item-unique code off a drug label to get an instant text response telling them whether the drug is real or fake. If it’s indicated as fake, the consumer knows not to use it (thereby potentially saving his or her life) and is instructed how to report the counterfeit medicine to the proper authorities.

Consumers who text the code off their drug label receive an instant response indicating that the drug is either "OK" to take or "Fake, Don't Use." If fake, the consumer is told how to alert the authorities.

In creating Sproxil, Gogo leveraged the nearly ubiquitous use of mobile phones and scratch cards across the developing world.

“It’s much better than starting from scratch because in that case you’d have to educate hundreds of millions of people how to use the service,” Gogo said. “With scratch labels, consumers know exactly what to do when they see our labels.”

To date, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson and Merck’s distributor all employ the Sproxil service in Nigeria — and over 400,000 consumers have sent in texts to verify drug authenticity.

Eventually, Sproxil may be applied as an anti-counterfeiting solution for other products, such as luxury goods. But drugs make a much better starting point, Gogo said. ”People can die when they take fake drugs, but people rarely die when they wear fake jewelry,” he said.

A life-changing decision

Gogo’s work in Nigeria is not far from Ghana — the country where he was born and, as a teenager, made a key decision that helped get him where he is today.

Just as he finished high school, a strike by university professors created a backlog of incoming students and meant Gogo would have to wait two years until he could apply to college in Ghana.

“I was just sitting at home one day and a couple of friends said there’s this [U.S. college admissions] test called the SAT, why don’t we go take this exam,” Gogo said. “So I tagged along and got pretty decent scores.”

Gogo received a full scholarship to Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington followed by full scholarships to Dartmouth for his masters degree and Ph.D. At Dartmouth, Gogo was a fellow in the engineering school’s Ph.D Innovation Program, where he gained entrepreneurial skills to help see his solution through to the marketplace.

Some advice for social entrepreneurs

Gogo and Sproxil have received a great deal of recognition, including a grant from the Clinton Global Initiative. After proving itself in Nigeria, Sproxil has raised $1.8 million from socially-minded venture capital firm Acumen Fund in New York. Boosted by venture capital, Sproxil has begun operations in three new countries: Kenya, Ghana and India, and has already closed deals with multiple Indian pharmaceutical companies.

—————————————————————————————————————————

Video: Countering Drug Counterfeiters with Small Resources that Produce Big Results

Click here to view the embedded video.

Video description: Ashifi Gogo, CEO of Sproxil explains how his company uses simple text messaging technology to help consumers avoid buying counterfeit drugs while providing pharmaceutical companies with crucial data on growth markets.

————————————————————————————————————————–

As Gogo broadens Sproxil’s reach, driven by his humanitarian and commercial goals, he is realizing a new model that successfully delivers both societal and business value. Gogo hopes this model will one day be embraced widely, and has some insights to offer other social entrepreneurs:

“One thing I’ve learned is that many countries are increasingly seeing the value in having frank business discussions and collaborating to solve problems,” Gogo said. “So it’s important to go into new countries with an open mind and largely wave away stereotypes so you can unlock people’s potential to collaborate and do business.”

Gogo also urges entrepreneurs to consider the intersection of technology and people. “That’s where the magic happens,” he said.

“Even in low electricity environments, people understand technology in some very interesting ways,” Gogo said. “Don’t focus too much on the sexy aspect of the technology, but actually understand why people want to use certain technologies. Then, work from there to really provide solutions that have value and answer their needs.”

Sproxil provides software and services that capture market intelligence and help protect consumers in emerging markets via cell phones. Currently the company is focused on deploying its key offering, Mobile Product Authentication (MPA™), to combat the widespread presence of counterfeit drugs. The MPA solution lets customers scratch-and-text an item-unique code off a drug label to get an instant response telling them whether the drug is real or fake. This technology helps consumers avoid buying counterfeit drugs and can save lives. Sproxil was a finalist in IBM’s 2010 SmartCamp competition, which identifies and mentors early-stage entrepreneurs aligned with IBM’s Smarter Planet vision.

Technorati Tags: Ashifi Gogo, counterfeit drugs, Pharmaceuticals, Sproxil

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

It has been a decade since the excesses of the tech bubble began to unwind, and a shadow of doubt was cast over the technophile’s vision of a new world in which people would buy books without thumbing through the pages, order groceries for home delivery, make friends at the click of a mouse, and gain instant access to the latest movies and music without getting off the couch.

Many innovative companies that had first sold us this vision are no longer around but have left in their wake a wave of strong successors that have turned what were once novelties into an essential part of our daily lives. Amazon, Apple, and Netflix are among a large stable of companies that have vindicated the vision of the early technophiles and have reinvented markets once dominated by brands such as Borders, Tower Records, and Blockbuster. Although the extent of its reach has been variable across industries, the explosive growth of information technology (IT) has touched every sector of the economy. Low touch industries with low barriers to entry, such as consumer retail, have been forever changed by IT, while high touch industries with high barriers to entry, such as healthcare, have largely escaped its grasp.

The current regulatory and reimbursement structure, privacy concerns, technical challenges, cost, workflow disruption, and the medical community’s reluctance to embrace technology without convincing evidence of its benefits are just some of the factors that have slowed the adoption of health IT. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that in 2009, only 6.9% of office-based physicians in the US had fully functional electronic medical record systems.

On the demand side, however, the picture looks very different. OECD’s 2009 survey showed that 63.5% of US households had access to broadband, and Nielsen reported that smartphones accounted for 40% of all mobile phones in the US as of July 2011. NCHS’ 2009 survey also showed that 51% of adults aged 18-64 used the Internet as a reference for health information in the preceding 12 months.

The current gap in IT penetration between the suppliers and the consumers of healthcare services will rapidly close over the next decade, as software innovators and investors increasingly focus their attention on healthcare, which accounts for 17% of the US GDP. The gap will be further narrowed as IT demonstrates its value by improving healthcare quality and lowering costs in the clinic and as patient demand grows for telehealth services.

Innovative companies like ZocDoc, Hello Health,  Practice Fusion, PatientsLikeMe, and Voxiva have already begun to sketch out the future of healthcare. This will be a world in which patients will be able to search online to find physicians who can accommodate their  schedule, videoconference with  physicians who can e-prescribe medications and update medical records accessible on the cloud by other healthcare providers. They will be able to connect with a community of other patients with like medical conditions for moral support and for collective wisdom about the latest treatment options and set up delivery of timely medical information and reminders to their mobile devices to promote healthy behavior.

This concept of healthcare delivery may seem as unconventional as online purchasing of books and groceries may have seemed a decade ago, but regardless of whether these innovators go the way of Webvan and not Amazon, the ideas they are currently testing will reshape the landscape of healthcare. The survivors will drive the healthcare delivery system closer to a patient-centered model, where patients will be armed with specialized information and have more choices over how they access healthcare, choosing the time, the place, the mode of communication, and the healthcare provider.

In this push to redefine the healthcare system, numerous IT enterprises have begun to tackle secondary activities such as health data management, claims processing, and social media; however, developing IT solutions to improve healthcare’s primary activities – diagnosis, treatment, and prevention – presents a more compelling challenge.

Distinguishing sick from non-sick is arguably the most important step in patient care, but according to a 2005 meta-analysis funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, misdiagnosis accounts for 10-30% of medical errors. This study cited time and resource constraints of healthcare providers in addition to cognitive errors as sources of potential diagnostic errors but concluded that IT could help address the problem of information overload. The reliability and utility of clinical decision support systems such as Isabel and GIDEON have increased dramatically, and these systems have begun to gain acceptance by many members of the medical community.

IBM’s Watson has the potential to advance clinical informatics further with its DeepQA technology, which was successfully validated in the historical Jeopardy! tournament in February 2011. These systems could help decrease the number of medical errors by generating more robust differential diagnoses and flagging medication errors.

Natural language processing, the technology underlying Watson, will become important in cataloging and digesting voluminous medical knowledge that is doubling every five to seven years. The pace of innovation in medicine is exceeding the frontline healthcare providers’ ability to effectively incorporate the latest findings into practice, particularly in non-academic settings. Medical diagnosis is an iterative process, and new tools like Watson could help clinicians systematically rule in or rule out the most consequential diagnosis sooner, thereby improving outcomes and saving costs. The utility of natural language processing in healthcare could extend beyond diagnostics to support comparative effectiveness research as well.

Healthcare delivery is on the cusp of a radical revolution that will be driven by advances in IT. Democratization of medical knowledge and expert systems such as Watson will accelerate the ongoing shift from inpatient to outpatient care and increase patient autonomy

Yong Suh is a medical student at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Prior to medical school, Yong worked as a healthcare analyst and completed a research fellowship at the National Institutes of Health.