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Steve Hamm in
You name it. The faculty members at Carnegie Mellon University who are connected with the Center for Sensed Critical Infrastructure Research (CenSCIR) are busy applying smarter-planet technologies and thinking to practically any system of physical infrastructure. Now, in connection with IBM, the organization’s leaders are creating a physical place to serve as sort of a clubhouse for researchers and organizations that want to tap into their brain power.
The IBM Smarter Infrastructure Lab, announced today, is going to be a 1,000-square-foot facility within one of the the university’s buildings. It will be equipped with engineering workstations, 3-D displays, a telepresence set up, massive data storage capabilities, and access to powerful clusters of number-crunching computers. “Here, people can organize and visualize their work. It will be a showcase for what we do,” says James H. Garrett, Jr., the co-director of CenSCIR and head of CMU’s civil and environmental engineering department.
LA has the reputation, deserved or not, for having some of the worst traffic jams. Well, the pressure’s off. A first-ever global survey of motorists in 20 large cities conducted by IBM shows that when it comes to traffic, LA is practically commuter nirvana compared to some of the world’s other metropolises. On a scale of 0 to 100, taking into account such variables as commuting time, stuck-in-traffic time, and driving-caused stress, Beijing, Mexico City, and Johannesburg were practically off-the-charts painful, with scores of 99, 99, and 97. Meanwhile, LA scored 25, just six points higher than New York City. The best places were Stockholm, with a score of 15, and Melbourne, 17.
The results of the survey point to a growing global need: Better management of transportation systems to get people where they want to go faster. “In the mega cities in fast-developing countries, they need to address these issues with a high level of urgency or their transportation systems will break down completely. Every street could become a parking lot,” says Naveen Lamba, the industry lead for intelligent transportation in IBM’s Global Business Services division.
The detailed results of the survey show that many of the efforts to take the pressure off highways aren’t catching hold. For instance, carpooling gets only low-single-digit participation in most of the cities. New Delhi, with 11%, and Johannesburg, with 8%, are a couple of the relative bright spots. More typical are Buenos Aires’ 4% and Houston’s 3%. In the United States, neither the establishment of HOV lanes or commuter parking lots has made much of a difference. The ranks of telecommuters are sparse all over, too. Just 4% of those in Johannesburg work at home–the highest rate. It’s zero in Madrid, Moscow, Beijing, and Mexico City.
Indications are that the situations in some burgeoning cities will only get worse. Right now only 39% of commuters in Beijing drive their own cars, compared to 92% in LA. But the situation is changing fast. The number of new cars registered in Beijing in the first four months of 2010 rose 23.8% to 248,000, according to the Beijing municipal taxation office. Clearly, when more people in Beijing own cars, the authorities will have to add even more ring roads to the ever-growing network of highways encircling the city.
Fortunately, Beijing authorities aren’t counting on highway projects alone to address their exploding transportation needs. Beijing’s total investments in its subway system are projected to be nearly $50 billion through 2015 as the city more than doubles its current reach, according to Beijing Infrastructure Investment Co., Ltd.
Across the globe, relief will come only when cities and metropolitan regions consolidate authority over all or most transportation modes on a single agency–or a small handful of agencies. Lamba says they need to coordinate the operations of everything from roads and bridges to ferries, trains, and subways. That way, they can put together a package of incentives and disincentives that redistribute commuters to different modes of transportation–with the primary goal of removing many one-person cars from the roads at peak travel times. Such an approach is working in Singapore and London, and is beginning to work in Dubai.
I saw one bright spot in the survey results that gave me a little bit of hope for the future: a handful of cities where large numbers of people bicycle or walk to work. For instance, 23% of Amsterdam’s commuters use bicycles as a primary mode of transportation; and 10% of the people in Buenos Aires walk. Unfortunately, in many cities, the places where people work and live have been divorced from each other, so there’s little hope of changing the situation in any meaningful way. Or, maybe that’s too bleak a conclusion. What if cities set up something like those airport people conveyors on sidewalks or streets? Weather’s a factor, sure, but maybe there’s a way it could be done.
Mexico City’s congestion problems
Posted by
Adam Christensen in
Click on the image above to launch a video player of IBM CEO Sam Palmisano’s full presentation at the Smarter Cities Summit in Shanghai.
Rather than belabor the recap of the speech, I’ll let you watch and draw your own conclusions. The total video is 25 minutes.
If you missed the prior recaps see the previous few posts on other insights from today’s sessions, and be sure to watch here more tomorrow for many more. You can follow the conversations live on Twitter as well. Let us know your thoughts by adding a comment below.
Posted by
Karl Roche in
How often have you been told to ’stop doing that’ because x,y and z is bad for you? Plenty, if you’re anything like me.
We get these sorts of messages everyday with the earliest examples usually from our parents and schools. It’s a common theme throughout life that usually continues after school into work. Quite honestly, people stop listening, especially when the reason for not doing something isn’t adequately conveyed.
If we take the environment, which probably contains the largest number of groups telling people to stop doing this, that or the other, people begin to push back. People don’t like being told what not to do. Even reasonable people think that being told not to drive but use public transport when it will take them longer and will cost them more is just crazy – they want the alternative to be better.
So lets flip it. Lets ’start’ something. Today in London, IBM announced that it will be the exclusive partner for a nine day summit in September 2010 called surprisingly, START. It aims to explore what business can do for sustainability and what sustainability can do for business. In many ways it is just a start. Even though it is an event, START is also a national (UK) initiative of the The Prince’s Charities Foundation will continue way past September and a street in London coming to communities across the UK.
Over nine days, IBM summit at START will bring together a brains trust of thought leaders to come up with ideas that organisations can sign up to because it makes sense for them and their business – not just the environment. All the ideas, findings and debates will be published online. Each day will focus on a different topic, such as new skills, the future of cities, energy and transport. You can see that in all cases that no single organisation or government is responsible for everything within these topics, it requires a number of bodies to come together and work together. So the summit will try to build a community of collaboration, discuss ways we can all work together to make stuff really happen, to make the alternative better than what we have now.
At the launch in London today, Steven Leonard, Chief Exec for IBM UK said, “the challenge [is] bringing all the necessary constituents together to develop and deliver more complex solutions to make the world – literally work smarter.”
Collaboration between organisations, public and private, is essential to make this initiative work. I for one am excited about the opportunities that this could bring up, such as the need to develop new skills myself and the push it will give to widen the use of social tools within business. Is it going to be easy? No. Will it all happen in 9 days? I very much doubt it, but there needs to be a point where we say, things have to change and we mark the beginning with this event.
But before the event we have a few weeks, time in which partners and invited companies will be starting to collaborate using our collaboration tools. So that the final agenda for each day will be built on the basis of the combined expertise. Essential to begin as you intend to go on.
Caroline Taylor, VP leading Project Start in IBM raised an essential point at today’s launch about the next generation: “If sustainability is about securing the future, young people are that future, and they will be vital in ensuring we define genuinely 21st century and forward thinking solutions.” Day 4 and 5 are devoted to new skills and starting young.
It’s not all work, work, work…there will also be a 12 day public festival that apart from being great fun will also give clear, simple and positive ideas on how people can start doing things that will help them lead a sustainable future. There will be plenty of big names in attendance, including two of my favourite comedians, secret gigs, mystery artists and a host of other good stuff.
Where’s this all happening? IBM summit at START will be hosted in Lancaster House, The Mall, London, September 8th – 16th. with the START garden party happening right next door in Green Park. Hopefully we will also be able to broadcast large parts of the business event over Livestream, no doubt we will have more updates here.
Prince of Wales (centre) at the launch of the "IBM Summit at Start" which will be held over 9 day in September 2010
The Start founding partners include: IBM, B&Q, Virgin Money, M&S, Asda, EDF Energy, Addison Lee, BT Group plc and Waitrose. Full list of supporting organisations on the web site.
Read more about IBM Summit at Start.
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Posted by
Adam Christensen in
In less than a week, political and business leaders, experts and academics will descend on Shanghai for the next global Smarter Cities summit. As we’ve done in Berlin, and in New York City, our goal is to convene leaders representing all the systems in a city to surface the challenges and opportunities for charting the next phase of the world’s urban centers.
As the world’s largest city in one of the largest and fastest growing economies, Shanghai provides the perfect backdrop to explore the converging realities of massive urbanization and a scarcity of resources. It’s no coincidence that the summit is at the head end of the six-month long long Shanghai Expo. With the theme-appropriate “Better City, Better Life” urban sustainability will be a recurring theme throughout the Expo.
In support of the Smarter Cities summit, we’ll feature a number of city-centric posts, and during the event itself, June 2 and 3, we’ll share on the blog and on Twitter as much of the major insights stemming from the event as we can about the major themes of the conference: transportation, education, public safety, health care, water management and energy. Stay tuned, as they say.
In the meantime, spend some time exploring the interactive SmarterCity experience for a deeper IBM perspective on the city as a system of systems. Just click on the graphic below.
(for a non Flash version, go here).
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
This has happened to you. You’re motoring down the highway when you hear a bulletin from one of those all-news-all-the-time radio stations telling you there’s trouble ahead. A tractor trailer has flipped and is blocking two lanes. So you hop off at the next exit and …… come to a grinding halt in gridlock traffic. Everybody else has the same idea you did. When you finally arrive at your destination, late, a colleague tells you they made it on time using the highway. The accident had been cleared. %@#+*!
Timely traffic information. It’s a promise that is often made but rarely fulfilled. The reason: Most systems for monitoring traffic and alerting people about problems have latency issues–maybe as much as 20 minutes. Even the traffic information services on iPhone and other GPS-enabled devices isn’t always up to date.
A big idea that IBM scientist Nagui Halim had back in 2003 is about to finally make traffic information truly an up-to-the-minute phenomenon. More about Halim in a minute. First, today’s news:
Scientists from IBM and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden are collaborating to bring real-time traffic info to Stockholm–which likely will make it the first city in the world to possess such a capability. Over the past year, IBM has been working with the city to monitor traffic flow during peak hours. The congestion management system has reduced traffic by 20 percent and reduced average travel times by almost 50 percent. Now we’re putting some of our newest analytics technology, called InfoSphere Streams, to work there, too. The plan is to gather information germane to traffic congestion from a wide variety of sources, including sensors in taxi cabs and delivery trucks, on-time performance updates from transit systems, and weather information–then making it readily available to travelers so they can make the best decisions about driving routes, travel times, and transit alternatives. “This is the first application of real-time analytics to traffic,” says Halim.
Picture this: A resident could send a text message to the traffic monitoring system listing their location and destination. The system would instantly spit back a recommendation.
Back to Halim. He was working at IBM Research back in 2003 when he saw the need for technology that could monitor multiple streams of data, real-time, and then mash it up to create actionable knowledge. At the time, most so-called real-time systems weren’t real time at all–or they were highly specialized systems. He saw the opportunity to create an approach that could be applied to any number of purposes.
It took a while. There were glitches and dead ends. Some of Halim’s colleagues thought he was crazy. But now its here. IBM last year began working with clients to build applications for the technology in health care, financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, water management, radio astronomy, and particle physics. In February, we formally launched InfoSphere Streams as a product–in a new version with substantially improved performance.
Here’s how it works: Data comes into the computing system from the network. The system can handle thousands of streams of information concurrently. It breaks the flow into a series of small steps, recognizing the kind of data that’s coming in and quickly sending each chunk to a microprocessor that best able to deal with it. Then, through a method called “sensor fusion,” the system weaves the strands of processed data into usable information. “It’s all about gathering and making sense,” says Halim.
Depending on what you want to do, you can run a stream computing application on a supercomputer, a blade server, or even a laptop. You can analyze something relatively simple like a flow of Twitter Tweets on your laptop.
How big could stream computing be? Halim, who is now director of the InfoSphere Streams product group in IBM software, won’t put a big number on it. But he points out that there are potentially game-changing uses for the technology in one industry after another.
By the way, that IBM TV commercial you’ve seen of a baby blanketed in colorful strands representing the data from monitoring its vital signs? That’s stream computing. But that’s another story.
Posted by
Karl Roche in
Is your city looking a bit rough around the edges? Do you wonder what it will be like in 20 years time? Does it even feel like your city?
After moving to London 17 years ago it took me a while to feel like this was home and that I had a right to complain or think that things could be done better – possibly because I lived in a new borough every year. I suppose only now that one of my kids attends a school and we have been in the London Borough of Sutton for 7 years that I truly feel like I have a stake in this city. I’m really starting to think about the decisions that are being made around planning and developing of local provisions such as getting my kids into a good school, the availability healthcare (the hospital both my kids were born at has been under threat of closer) and if we have an ample local supply of power and water and are we protected against floods? Not to mention how will we all get around the cities we live in.
As more and more of us live in urban settings, these cities are going to have to get better, get smarter and serve inhabitants better just to remain as viable places to live and work. Some cities will do this better than others which will mean a shift of populations to those that get it right, away from those that don’t. Employers and especially talented individuals will move to places that serve them better. It’s not just about growth, but about cities working better. The competition between cities is more alive now than ever, and it will change faster than ever before.
I can see the problems in my own city of London, but also the opportunities. We have a huge number of talented and creative people in the UK. I hope for my kids we can improve things and set the bar high.
City of Dreams
These 6 short films highlight some of the challenges UK cities face in some of those areas that will decide whether we stay or go, including transport, energy, education and healthcare. With interviews from senior leaders in the public and private sector, alongside IBM technology and business specialists, each gives their insights into the opportunities that exist to transform the way our cities function.
More of these videos plus a 3D version of City of Dreams at ibm.com/uk/cities
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I had the opportunity to be involved with the launch of IBM’s new Smarter Cities Technology Centre in Dublin. Public and private sector are partnering together to make this a reality in Ireland.
IBM opens its first Smarter Cities Technology Centre in Dublin, Ireland
Irish governmental ministers speaking to media at event
A smarter city needs a smart hub – a place where experts and researchers from different disciplines can meet and collaborate with local authorities, central government and academia, developing and applying technologies that will help the city make more informed, better decisions for its citizens.
For Dublin and its wider city region, this hub will be IBM’s newly announced Smarter Cities Technology Centre.
Several IBMers, representatives from the Irish Government and Dublin City, as well as a number of Irish media, gathered for the announcement, which took place on Wednesday, March 24th at the Royal College of Physicians, a renowned city centre venue.
What does this announcement mean for IBM?
The new Centre will be based at IBM’s Technology Campus in Mulhuddart, just outside Dublin. This location is already home to the Ireland Development Lab and a number of significant missions: in particular, the Water Management Centre of Excellence was at the centre of significant collaborations with the Marine Institute of Ireland (SmartBay project) and the Environmental Protection Agency (Splash project) last year, in the area of Smarter Water.
The Smarter Cities Technology Centre aims to employee 200 people over the next three years, building a highly-skilled, cross-disciplinary team that will work with local authorities, universities, small and large businesses with the ultimate goal of helping cities better understand and manage their systems and resources such as transport, energy and water. The team will research, develop and commercialise new ways of making city systems more connected, sustainable and intelligent.
Michael Daly, IBM Ireland Country General Manager, commented: ‘IBM has been in Ireland since 1956 and continues to evolve its presence in Ireland towards higher value, knowledge intensive activity. This announcement highlights the critical role that Ireland continues to play in IBM’s success.’
Minister O'Keeffe with Dr Frase and Pat Toole
Speaking at the announcement was also Dr Katharine Frase, IBM Vice President, Industry Solutions and Emerging Business. During her speech, she passionately stated: ‘The IDA team [Industrial Development Agency] and the City leaders in Dublin have been a delight to work with.’
Minister O’Keeffe with Dr Frase and Pat Toole Explaining why Dublin was the ideal location for IBM’s first Smarter Cities Technology centre, she mentioned the necessity to have the centre in a place where IBM could collaborate with an ecosystem of partners willing to test, in the real world, technologies such as Cloud, Stream and High Performance Computing, advanced analytics and visualisation. Her statement was echoed by Batt O’Keeffe, Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Innovation, who mentioned Dublin City’s recent announcement of its intention to collaborate with IBM as a ‘test bed’, embracing technology to stimulate economic activity and growth.
Dr Frase also thanked Pat Toole, IBM Alumni and former Senior Vice President, who was present in the audience and who in her words ‘is the inspiration behind many things IBM does’. In fact, Mr Toole was instrumental in ensuring that IBM heavily invested in Ireland in the mid-nineties and in securing the 100acre site that was to become the IBM Technology Campus in Mulhuddart.
Overview of the announcement, including highlights from each of the speakers:
Alex Ingle, IBM Ireland Strategy, Development and Innovation Manager, explains what key projects and activities the new centre will be looking at
Ho Chi Minh City Credit: Andre Lettau
Ho Chi Minh City is engineered to accommodate about three million people, but its population now tops 7 million–and it seems like half of them are riding motorbikes at any given time of day. So chaotic traffic was the first fact of life that struck members of a team of six IBMers when they landed in the city on Feb. 20 to begin the process of helping local leaders put together a plan for upgrading the city’s infrastructure. “The two-wheeler traffic was the highest I’ve seen on the planet,” marvels one of the IBMers, Guruduth Banavar, the former head of IBM Research in India.
Banavar, who is now the chief technology officer for IBM’s Public Sector business unit, was part of the team that spent three weeks in Ho Chi Minh City as part of IBM’s Corporate Service Corps. program. We send small groups of top-talent employees to emerging markets to help improve economic development, government services, and the like. The group that worked in Ho Chi Minh City was the first to be made up of executives. It was also the first to help a city in an emerging market look at all of its challenges holistically and come up with a master plan for taking them on. As a result of the engagement, Ho Chi Minh City and IBM have now formed a Smarter Cities alliance.
The city has adopted a 10-year redevelopment plan and will work with IBM on seven pilot programs in areas ranging from transportation to food safety. IBM will also help the city set up academic programs to prepare young Vietnamese to launch careers in technology services. “We think they can leapfrog their peers in other cities in eight to 10 years,” says Banavar.
One of the top priorities is dealing with traffic, of course. In one of the the pilot projects, IBMers will re-use a software tool developed in 2007 for analyzing traffic patterns in Singapore. They’ll monitor downtown Ho Chi Minh City traffic and create a model for predicting when intersections will clog–so the city can change traffic signals or deploy traffic cops to re-direct traffic and avoid grid-lock.
The lessons IBM learns in Vietnam will help it refine its approach to Smarter City projects in developing nations. One of the challenges that the government of Ho Chi Minh City has to overcome is the fact that there’s little coordination between the city’s government bureaus. Yet the systems they oversee, from traffic to water to electricity to public safety, area all interrelated. One of the goals of the new city plan is to bridge between the departments with coordinated strategies and shared data. These insights will be useful in other emerging-market cities, as well. “We can help change the governance structure of cities,” says Banavar.
Congressman Earl Blumenauer, Oregon at IBM's Smarter Transportation Forum
Rather than provide only my own recap of the highly insightful sessions at last week’s Smarter Transportation event in Washington D.C., let me simply point you to the recap from Sean Barry, from Transportation For America, and give you direct access to all the videos of the sessions.
Barry points out two session highlights in particular on the T4America blog, the first from Dr. Leo Kroon of the Netherlands Railway and second from Gunnar Soderholm, of the Stockholm. We’ve talked about Stockholm quite a lot here on the blog, so I’ll focus Dr. Kroon’s comments:
“Kroon described the importance of rail in his “tiny country,” whose 16 million people make it extremely dense. According to Kroon, rail market share between some Dutch cities reaches 50 percent, an amount that would be unheard of in the United States. And rather than force anyone onto the train, Kroon says the Netherlands Railways “seduces” them instead, through continued technological improvement that makes travel convenient and a commitment to reliability and affordability.”
The concept of “seducing” travelers into transit is one we could do well to emulate elsewhere. Even here in New York City, where transit is quite effective and ridership is relatively high, I would hardly consider the riding the subway a seductive experience (though, it does have it’s own charm.
Cost and efficiency are critical pieces of creating a public transportation system that seduces ridership. But it’s beyond simple utility.
Think of premium brands: Apple, BMW, etc. They seduce you on a level above pure functionality. You pay more for the experience. I could find mp3 players far cheaper than the iPod with similar (sometimes better) functionality, yet I willingly pay more so I can have an iPod in my pocket.
What if we applied a similar approach to transit? I’m not naive about the realities we face, nor the challenges of this kind of approach. But surely there’s more we can do to entice transit ridership.
Click here for video archives of the entire event, which included remarks from the following:
- * Dr. Robert Bertini, Deputy Administrator, Research & Innovative Technology Administration (RITA), US DOT
- * Dr. Leo Kroon, Logistics Consultant, Netherlands Railways
- * Gunnar Soderholm, Head of Environmental & Health Administration, City of Stockholm
- * Judge Quentin Kopp, Member and Former Chairman, California High Speed Rail Authority
- * Tom Wright, Executive Director, Regional Plan Administration
- * Janet Kavinoky, Director of Transportation Infrastructure, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
- * Michael Replogle, Global Policy Director, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy
- * Congressman Earl Blumenauer, Oregon, 3rd District
Update: As noted in the comments below, I’ve corrected the Netherlands population number to “16″ million in the quote.
