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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.
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jamesmathewson in
Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Wayne Balta, vice president, environmental affairs and product safety at IBM. It emphasizes that sustainability is not a new concept for IBM, nor is it a short-term commitment. Sustainability is woven into the fabric of IBM’s business.
IBM just issued its 20th environmental report–an annual tradition that began in 1990, long before most companies climbed on the “green” bandwagon or became transparent about their environmental activities. In addition to climate change and energy efficiency, IBM reports on pollution prevention, waste management, material selection and water stewardship to capture the full scope of its environmental impact.
In 2009, IBM’s energy conservation projects across the company delivered savings equal to 5.4 percent of our total energy use (exceeding our goal of 3.5%). These conservation projects also saved almost $27 million in energy expense.
From the way IBM runs its business, to the products and solutions we sell, to the way we manage our supplier relationships, IBM uses its expertise, global reach, innovation and technology in our commitment to protect the environment. Sustainability is systemic to IBM’s business along with technology and services that promote the company’s vision for a smarter planet.
The company looks to design energy-efficient offerings to help provide clients with products that protect the environment. Consider data centers. Toyota Motor’s 20, 000 square foot data in California uses a high-tech system of sensors developed by IBM to detect wasted energy on the manufacturing floor. The sensors deliver a color-coded 3D view of where heat is being produced. This same system helped IBM cut its 2009 energy consumption and has saved nearly 350,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions for clients.
IBM is partnering with companies around the world on thermal management, virtualization, consolidation, software, and even construction to improve data center energy efficiency. And the Green500 just put out its 2010 list of the most energy efficient supercomputers; IBM dominates the list with 17 of the top 20.
Our sustainability also stretches to the realm of patents. The Eco-Patent Commons creates a free exchange of intellectual property to solve environmental challenges. Since the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and IBM launched the Eco-Patent Commons in 2008, 12 companies have joined the effort, contributing more than 100 patents to protect the environment, and we strongly encourage other companies to contribute.
For some companies, corporate responsibility is merely an adjunct; a set of activities disconnected from the core business. At IBM, the company’s strategic business priorities are tightly aligned with our social responsibility efforts. This shared ambition is to enable the systems that make life on this planet more efficient, accessible and sustainable.
Wayne Balta is vice president, environmental affairs and product safety, IBM
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Steve Hamm in
When communities set out on massive, multidimensional civic improvement projects, a necessary first step is gaining agreement from the principle players in government, business, and the non-profit sphere on what they want the city or region to be–its brand, if you will. This is a conclusion IBM executives have drawn from dozens of Smarter Cities engagements in communities scattered all over the globe.
That ambition is more easily stated than accomplished, but some of the work IBM is doing in Poland points to lessons that could help community leaders elsewhere.
Katowice, with a population of about 300,000, is the unofficial capital of the Silesa region in southern Poland, which is known for its coal mining, steel making, and other heavy industries. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the region has suffered economically. Its coal mines, in particular, became less competitive, resulting in a loss of tens of thousands of mining jobs.
Fortunately, the city and the region have some inspired and energetic leaders, among them Katowice Mayor Piotr Uszok. The goal is to shift to high-tech and service industries–supported by improvements in the transportation system. Uszok asked IBM for help in devising an economic renewal plan, and, as a first step, we sent in a five-person team from our Corporate Service Corps to help size up the situation.
The CSC, which has been called a “business” version of the Peace Corps, sends small groups of IBMers with diverse talents into countries or cities to help them craft economic development strategies, beef up government services, and improve systems such as transportation, health, and water. Some of the teams, such as the one that went to Poland, are made up entirely of executives–bringing a higher level of expertise and management skills to the projects.
Visiting Katowice this spring, the team engaged with a group of community leaders who have been jointly developing regional strategies for several years. At the same time, they’re open to new ideas, particularly along the themes of attracting foreign investors to create new jobs, improving the quality of life, and updating the transportation system.
The team members met with about 200 people from government, academia, and businesses. From these conversations they drafted a set of recommendations, which they presented to mayor Uszok in a marathon five-hour meeting. (The mayor demonstrated his commitment to strategic planning by continuing the meeting even though the city was under a severe flood threat.)
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).
Earlier today at the Intelligent Transportation Society of America’s annual meeting in Houston, IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano shared the stage with the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood, and delivered the day’s keynote speech. We’ll have more insights and feedback from the speech in the coming days, but I want to call out a few of the key points as they underscore some of the thinking here around a path forward for transportation in America by applying a level of systems thinking.
From the speech:
Over the past year and a half, IBM has been working with cities and nations around the world to improve many kinds of systems and make them smarter – with particular success in transportation.
In doing so, we have learned that our transportation system isn’t, in fact, a system. It’s a collection of related industries, operating in close proximity to one another.
The opportunity is that as we think about transportation as a true system, we have the opportunity to reinvent transportation for the needs of the 21st century. But what exactly is a systems approach? From Sam’s speech:
- First, there must be clarity on the system’s purpose or goal – a vision of its end-state.
- Second, its elements must actually be connected – which is another way of saying, interfaces matter.
- Third, we must be able to know, continually and with confidence, the status of the system and its critical components.
- Finally, the system must be able to adapt as conditions change, often in real time.
Now, translating that for the transportation industry, here are some implications, in my own paraphrasing:
- A vision of its purpose. In short, a traveler-centric system that is oriented around people. Sam cited airline passenger rights and the livable streets movement as examples of this.
- Connected elements. The components of a transportation system – vehicles (in the broad definition), pathways and terminals – must be connected to the governmental agencies and regulations, manufacturers, and service providers to share data and information across the system. And ultimately, the human in the system must be able to connect with each other.
- Status is known. This is well-worn territory on this blog. As we instrument the system at all access points, collecting and analyzing the data, we begin to understand with confidence the status of the system – its health, its opportunity, its weaknesses, its strengths. All of this leads to better, more informed decisions by all parties.
- Adaptability. This is about scale. As demand and population grows, the system can’t just grow linearly. We need to find ways to do things differently. And we understand what to do differently through data. Data matters.
Sam closed with a clear call to action for all the participants in the ITSA forum. Actually, four calls to action. We’ll probe further on each of these in the coming weeks.
First, standards: We must establish agreed-upon data standards for transportation. This is long overdue, but I am hopeful that it will soon be accomplished. As we do, however, it is essential that those standards be open. That’s the only way to interconnect processes and data sets across the whole system. On this, you need to be an active voice.
Second, smart systems by design: In anything as complex, interdependent and fluid as the transportation ecosystem, the qualities we seek cannot be “bolted on” after the fact. We need to build in the key criteria of interconnectivity, system knowingness, analytics and security from the beginning, by design.
Third, moving to a true transportation system will enable – and require – far more collaboration: I’m not just talking about the familiar idea of “private sector-public sector cooperation.” A diverse, multi-stakeholder world requires all the parties actually working together, shoulder-to-shoulder on a daily basis. Yes, we all have particular responsibilities – to customers, to partners, to regulators, to citizens. But in today’s world, fulfilling those responsibilities requires that we also fulfill our responsibilities to the system as a whole. That will be transformative. But it will also require change.
And by the way, speaking of collaboration… let’s come together and use the next nine months to educate members of Congress on incorporating smart technology into the nation’s transportation infrastructure – in preparation for passing the full, six-year surface transportation authorization bill.
Finally, policy and ethics: From new models of technology… to the changing form of the corporation… to the changing role of the individual in modern life… to new expectations for sustainable living… we are entering a very different world. We must come together around clear guidelines on how to operate and manage our organizations and industry, from an ethical and societal point of view.
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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