Technorati Tags: IBM, Rio

Update:

Here’s Ginni Rometty, IBM’s senior vice president for Sales, Marketing and Strategy (and IBM’s next CEO) talking about how to build a smarter city.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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9:00 a.m. Special Address: Economic Recovery, Urbanization and The City, by Alfonso Vegara Gómez, President, Fundación Metrópoli.

Cities have transformed themselves with such intensity. The challenge of the 21^st Century is to build a better urban environment.

“We can’t build cities in the conventional way. We would destroy the planet.” We have to use smart technologies and ideas to build cities in a sustainable way, and a way that provides jobs and economic growth.

In the future there will be super cities and mega metropolitan areas. Between Washington DC and Boston, for instance. We’ll need new transportation systems. The cities in the corridor will share talents.The same in Europe: From Lisbon to Madrid; ultimately you’ll get a huge cluster of connected cities in Europe. “This is the new scale in which you can compete.”

Some exampled of smart cities: Singapore, the new city state. They bet on a port economy. They have smart transportation. They attract talent focusing on IT, media and bio-med. In compact urban spaces they have combined expertise and creativity.

Bilbao, Spain. It integrated all of the systems. It integrated art with urban architecture. Bilbao hasn’t been successful in attracting talent. This will be a big challenge. It has to compete with other cities in a knowledge economy.

The challenge is to build a new urban development park, which will include all of the modern elements: architecture, art, communications, and improved infrastructure.

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9:30 a.m. A Conversation with: Pablo Allard, Decano de Arquitectura y Arte de la UDD y Asesor Senior de Reconstrucción Urbana; Dr. Néstor Bercovich, Coordinador ECLAC, Plan Regional para la Sociedad de la Información de América Latina y el Caribe ECLAC; and Wilson Ferreira Junior., President, CPFL Energia.

Bercovich: We need to rethink the state so we can rise to the challenges of urbanization. A wide variety of stakeholders need to cooperate and innovate.

The free market has created distortions in the social fabric of cities. There’s a huge disparity in wealth and services. This needs to be addressed.

Smarter platforms are the base from which we make the systems of cities and regions work better. For instance, broadband needs to be made available widely and affordably.

Allard: Urban centers, if they’re smarter, can begin to address some of the inequities. They can be a source of economic opportunity for the people of the favelas.

In the future the rate of population growth will go down, and that will make it possible for personal income to come up. Latin American cities will get wealthier and offer new opportunities. “We will have a population that demands a better quality of life.”

“Favelas are full of small entrepreneurs who will make the most of the opportunities that are offered to them.” Little by little, they’ll reach the middle class.

But we need smarter systems in the cities to make this possible.

The context:

Pablo Allard, dean of architecture and art, Desarrollo University, Chile, talks about why he’s “addicted to smarter cities.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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10:30 a.m. Special Address: Smart Investments in Cities: Managing for the Long-Term, by Luciano Coutinho, president, The Brazilian Development Bank.

The quality of life in cities and the city ecosystem constitute key factor in innovation going forward. Traditionally we saw that innovation was is driven by three pillars: big private companies, government subsidies and universities. But that’s the old paradigm. Now there are additional factors: cities, NGOs and society.

If we can make cities more efficient we can increase their creative output. A smart city doesn’t just need to be efficient. It needs to have quality of life and creativity. “A city is an ecosystem that encourages innovation and creativity.”

Technological progress will increase in the coming years. Mobile computing is going to be an important factor. Broadband access is increasing greatly. We need to deploy sensors, and large scale databases.

All of this makes information about what’s going on in the city and how it’s working widely available to everybody.

“The city is becoming a new thing.”

In Latin America and Brazil, cities are a bigger factor than they are in other areas of the world. We have 34 cities in Brazil with 45% of the population, and Rio and Sao Paulo have 25% of the GDP of the country. “We need to reinforce the mid-tier cities and prevent them from falling into the same traps as the mega cities, with their traffic and pollution problems.”

We’re at a critical moment in Brazil. We must have a high level of performance and competitiveness. Our public services must be more efficient and more creative.

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11:00 a.m. A Conversation with: James W. Breyer, partner, Accel Partners, Luciano Coutinho, president, The Brazilian Development Bank, and Marcelo Haddad, executive director, Rio Negócios. Discussion leader: Marcus Regueira, founding partner, FIR Capital.

Breyer: I’m interested in investing in Brazil. We think through the cultural attributes of great entrepreneurs. Is there a common characteristic?

“The people we like to back have passion, think about long term impact and think about building high impact team from the beginning.”

We’ve seen many of these characteristics in Brazil. We see entrepreneurs building strong teams of co-founders. Every location is a little different. In Silicon Valley today we’re finding very young breakthrough technologists. When I first met Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook I took him out to dinner and I offered him a glass of wine, but he said he was not yet 21. He’d have a Sprite.

Brazil will be one of our three most important countries for investments in the coming years.

Coutinho: In Brazil, we need to create an ecosystem for entrepreneurship. The Brazilian capital markets are still a step behind. “We need to create an atmosphere for entrepreneurship by young people. That’s vital to creating smarter cities.”

Regueira; What we need for venture capital to take off in Brazil is a quarter of a billion dollar exit.

Breyer: The city and country have to minimize the difficulties for young people to get going. One thing we have lost in the US is the idea of allowing small businesses to thrive without uncertainty and significant regulatory overhang.

You need a partnership between great entrepreneurs, people who come in early to help them scale the company—without losing the entrepreneurial spirit, and also partnerships with large and important companies.

“The first trillion dollar valuation company could come from Brazil.”

Here’s the video of the panel:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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11:30 a.m. Special Address: How to Build a Smarter City, by Ginni Rometty, IBM’s senior vice president of sales, marketing and strategy—and next CEO.

“Brazil is a country full of natural resources. We think of information as the world’s next important national resource.”

We’re heard a lot about why people should build smarter cities. My focus today is on how.

So how does a city actually get started? Over the last year or so, we’ve reviewed thousands of Smart City initiatives. We’ve identified three common steps that are taken in successful projects.

–By instrumenting different city systems, the city can leverage data as a strategic tool to understand the performance of those systems, and be in a position to managing them better–responding to changes in those systems more rapidly and effectively.

–Once a city has developed that solid foundation, they can start to think about integrating key processes within and across systems.  You can take the data and use it across departments and functions.

–Cities can start to optimize their systems and transform service delivery. Analytics become key here. “You can start to re-imagine the art of the possible.” It’s not just about using analytics to examine the past, but to predict the future.

Value goes up with each of these three steps.

We have also identified key leadership skills for Smarter cities.

–The complexity of cities requires us to understand the city as a system-of-systems and manage it accordingly.

–“We need to build a culture of analytics versus gut-check decision making.”

–Managing and coordinating across city systems will require all city leaders to collaborate with one another, with local business leaders, and other influencers in new ways.

I hope that we’ve been able to provide some guiding principles here that we’ve learned from hundreds of Smarter City engagements, and that have opened our eyes as to what it takes for cities to be successful.

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Noon: A Conversation with: Jorge Gerdau Johannpeter, chairman of Gerdau, Gerdau Steel, and a private sector leader in Brazil’s economic development; and Kenneth Schwartz, dean, School of Architecture, Tulane University. Discussion Leader: Ginni Rometty, IBM’s senior vice president for sales, marketing and strategy, and the next CEO.

Schwartz: Tulane was impacted by Hurricane Katrina. We had to shut it down for months.  Now we’re back and the city of New Orleans is back. We’re both building more sustainably and smarter.

We’re using the school of architecture and technology from IBM to see if we can achieve significant carbon use. We’ll take what we learn to other buildings on the campus.

Instrumentation was relatively easy. Integration was harder. We had to get our school, IT and facilities to work together.

“We think of buildings as the building blocks of cities.” You can experiment in buildings and a university campus and then model solutions that you can use city wide.

Gerdau: We started a movement to build the economy of Brazil based on using management technologies.

The public sector is inefficient.

“What decides a country’s wealth today is its management competency.”

Cities have to be build and rebuilt by seeing them as an integrated unit. Technology is important for gathering information, but it’s not enough.

You need to do management with efficient technology. But it only works when your have good governance aligned with strategy.

Political will is perhaps the biggest challenge. I like to talk to government leaders. I feel there’s lack of policy. We have to transform cities. It requires the kind of strategic thinking I don’t see now.

We have to get our communities involved so they see this is the way forward. Maybe it’s in our education. Time is being wasted. How can we harness all of this?

“We have to change culture.”

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12:15 p.m. Key Observations from Sam Palmisano, IBM’s CEO.

We operate in 170 countries and every political system. All societies are going through a transition. The same goes with companies. You can be optimistic or see it as concerning. How do some do it better than others?

Your have to re-prioritize. You have to take things that were done one way in the past and come up with new approaches.

Mayor Paes of Rio surrounded himself with professional managers. “Good management is the key to getting things done.”

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Breakout session

Emergency Management: Learning from the Leaders

Moderator: Guru Banavar, CTO, Global Public Sector, IBM; Pedro Almeida, Director, Smarter Cities Strategy, IBM Brazil; Pablo Allard, Dean of Architecture and Art, Desarrollo University; Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary for Conservation & Public Service, City of Rio de Janeiro; and Pablo Escudero, general director, Madrid Police Department

Banavar: There’s an impression that more disasters are happening. Part of it is that because of modern communications, we know more about what’s happening. But it’s true for floods, perhaps caused by global warming. There are also man-made disasters, such as nuclear disasters. These kinds of massive events require a long term planning, preparedness and response system.

Factoid: $265 billion total global economic losses due to natural disasters in the first half of 2011.

We can do a lot to prevent these kinds of losses.

We’ll look at four types of events: natural disasters, terrorism, industrial accidents and large-scale events like protests and riots, but also the World Cup and the Olympics.

The density of communities in coastal communities has  been increasing, and those populations are the most vulnerable

Four stages for managing disasters: Mitigation, such as building codes; short-term preparedness, responding to warnings; response with full situational awareness of what’s happening; recovery and long term rehabilitation.

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Breakout session

Emergency Management: Learning from the Leaders
Second installment

Moderator: Guru Banavar, CTO, Global Public Sector, IBM; Pedro Almeida, Director, Smarter Cities Strategy, IBM Brazil; Pablo Allard, Dean of Architecture and Art, Desarrollo University; Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary for Conservation & Public Service, City of Rio de Janeiro; and Pablo Escudero, general director, Madrid Police Department

Osorio: We have two major challenges in Rio. We have a history of natural disasters mainly caused by heavy rains and flooding and mudslides, and we have a history of dealing with large scale events.

We were very poorly prepared to face natural disasters.

Every five or six years on average we have a major natural event, but we have flooding every year. We have had two big events in the past two years. It seems to be a pattern. It could be global warming.

In the past we’d say it’s god’s will. We just reacted.

The city decided to approach the situation head on. We felt it was our obligation to meet the challenge in a different way.

They mayor who is 42 started his political life as deputy mayor in part of the city. He was in charge of the region when it had a disaster about 14 years ago.

When he became mayor, he was the emergency response plans and felt it wasn’t enough. Early 2009. He ordered a study.

We had a major disaster–incredible rain. More than 70 people died here. We used the plan to some extent, but not enough

We decided to have an emergency response center but later decided to make a city operations center to handle a wide variety of situations.

We had an organization with many fiefdoms, but, in order to respond to disasters, you have to cooperate. They mayor made people work together.

So we have become much more agile.

We’re facing big events coming to Rio, including the World Cup and Olympics. They’re a big challenge for us. They’re big and complex events. The operation center is a major tool to enable our preparations and response.

This year, we had the Rock in Rio festival with 700,000 people. The last edition was 2001 and was a total disaster. Nobody could move in the area. But this year the operational part worked well. We reacted very quickly, and the operations center was instrumental. We think we’ll be ready for what’s coming.

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Breakout session

Emergency Management: Learning from the Leaders
Installment 3

Moderator: Guru Banavar, CTO, Global Public Sector, IBM; Pedro Almeida, Director, Smarter Cities Strategy, IBM Brazil; Pablo Allard, Dean of Architecture and Art, Desarrollo University, Chile; Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary for Conservation & Public Service, City of Rio de Janeiro; and Pablo Escudero, general director, Madrid Police Department

Allard: In Chile we had the large earthquake and tsunami, and it was also widely dispersed. We had more than 700 kilometers of land affected. The disaster affected the three main metro areas in Chile and many smaller cities. Five major highways were broken. Many buildings fell—even some built in the past few years. More than 500 people died. 370,000 houses were destroyed or damaged.

The neighboring communities had to come and help the ones that were affected.

First response, lasted 33 days. It was coordinated by the emergency ministry.

Reconstruction is expected to take four years.

I worked on the reconstruction.

We opened a voluntary record for families that had suffered damage. This helped us relocate them. They received vouchers.

We arranged for houses to be rebuilt by private companies. These projects were subsidized.

Six months after the catastrophe we had 60,000 emergency houses built, where people could stay while their permanent houses were built.

It was a huge management challenge. We had to track people’s identity and map it to their location and what was being done for them.

We invited companies to present different kind of building systems. We had a fair where the families could go and chose the type of house.

We had voting by the people to chose the best designs. The winners started quickly.

But we also wanted to use the rebuilding to create smart options. We studied the risks in locations by the coast.

For places that were especially vulnerable, we designed the houses to be resilient to quakes and tsunamis.

By this September we had more than 60,000 houses built and more than 200,000 under construction. We expect to have all the houses built in February 2014.

Lessons:

–Be prepared for the worst case scenario.

–Manage the expectations of the people after the disaster.

–Communicate complexity and time frame.

–Reinforce local capacity and leadership.

Here’s Allard talking about why he’s a “smarter cities addict.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Emergency Management: Learning from the Leaders
Installment 4

Moderator: Guru Banavar, CTO, Global Public Sector, IBM; Pedro Almeida, Director, Smarter Cities Strategy, IBM Brazil; Pablo Allard, dean of Architecture and Art, Desarrollo University, Chile; Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary for Conservation & Public Service, City of Rio de Janeiro; and Pablo Escudero, general director, Madrid Police Department.

Escudero: We created an emergency response system in 2006 that turned into a crime fighting system as well.

Here’s a look at Madrid’s emergency management system:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: Brazil, IBM, Rio de Janeiro

Here’s Sam Palmisano’s speech:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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The Start:

2:20 p.m.      Welcome by Ricardo Pelegrini, General Manager, IBM Brazil

Two years ago, IBM started talking about a smarter plant. “Today, it’s an urgent necessity for cities to be smarter.”

Around one million people worldwide migrate to cities every week. By 2050, 70% of the world’s population will be living in cities. This urbanization represents great economic opportunities and also important social and environment challenges.

Nowadays, cities consume 75% of the world’s energy, release 80% of polluting gases and waste 20% of their water due to leaks and inefficiencies in the infrastructure. “The good news is we can change our cities to make them more sustainable, and achieve growth and progress at the same time.”

Technology is available that can be used to enhance urban security, decrease traffic jams and avoid the waste of energy and water.

In the next two days, let’s analyze how cities are modernizing their systems and their infrastructure to encourage economic development, generate innovation and improve the education of the population.

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2:55 p.m.   SmarterCities: Crucibles of Global Progress, Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM

We have come to Rio because it is a compelling example of a new kind of actor that has appeared on the world stage – the smarter global city.

We face many challenges today. “It can seem as if the world is getting the better of our leaders.” But we see that progress is still happening and it’s being driven by forward-thinking mayors and other innovators in business, universities and non-governmental organizations in cities.

How is it that mayors are getting things done, while other leaders seem stuck?

–“These city leaders are non-ideological. They get things done.”

–Smarter city leaders think in terms of systems. An example is Rio’s intelligent operations center, which  coordinates information from more than 20 city departments.

–Smarter city leaders think – and manage – for the long term.

Amidst all the tumult in the world today, there is another model taking shape. This new generation of leaders is seizing upon the vast quantities of data their cities generate to drive growth and sustainability. “The flip side of every crisis is a vast new opportunity for progress.”

I believe future historians will look back on this moment as the dawn of a new golden age of innovation, widely shared economic growth and global citizenship.

So, let’s use the next two days to think together about what this new urban age could be and then roll up our sleeves for a collaborative work session on how to build it.

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3:20 p.m.   Special Address: The SmarterCities Agenda: The Transformation of Rio de Janeiro, by Eduardo Paes, mayor of Rio

“People talk about the triumph of the city, because it’s the place where people can fulfill their destinies.”

Cities start with services that meet people’s needs. Smarter cities provide a better way to organize and interact in positive ways. Technology progress allows use to got to places we never could go before.

The creative class gathers in cities, and promotes its development.

But there are huge challenges, such as violence and environmental impacts. We face many challenges. We in Rio see these problems on a large scale.

We have prioritized the improvement of services, so we have focused on investments in technology. I monitor the progress of the city with technology every day.

I don’t know how earlier mayors were able to manage their cities without the help of these technologies.

We have been able to increase the collection of taxes without having to increase taxes, for instance.

In future days we’ll reach even higher steps.

Our intelligent operations center allows us to integrate many of the operations of the city so we can provide better services. We have been able to organize ourselves in the face of chaos—when big storms come.

For 400 years public authorities weren’t able to respond to floods and landslides. But now we can mitigate these catastrophies. We can manage risks. We can coordinate better.

We simulated heavy rains and flooding. The control center connects the mayor’s house. I had to wake up at 5 a.m. and participate in the simulation. It was sunny, but we simulated a storm. This is the kind of capability we’ll have.

We have weather information coming in. We have 400 video cameras around the city, and more are coming. IBM scientists created a high tech tool for modeling weather in the city and predict where the rains will fall, so we can react.

Thanks to the control center, we now can have constant awareness and monitoring of what’s going on in the city.

We leaders can sleep because the control center never sleeps. “It’s driving change for the way we manage the city.”

All the departments are connected up 24/7 and they’re aware of what’s going on, and they coordinating their activities. It shows that humans do need to work together.

Rio had a brain drain for a while, but now it has the capacity to attract back and retain these talents. It’s no longer just a tourist spot. Now foreigners are leaving places where there’s a crisis and coming here for opportunities.

We’re developing public-private partnerships.

Rio’s doors are open.

We hope that Rio will be one of the smart cities of the world.

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3:45 p.m. Eduardo Paes, mayor of Rio, talks with Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM and Fareed Zakaria, CNN host.

Paes:

“Every city needs to decide what it wants to be. After Rio lost the capital of the country it spent 40 years about what we weren’t any more.”

“Cities are where the world is run.”

Every city has its own assets. In Rio, the environment is key. People decide to move here or invest here based on it.

“For a while, it was very popular to be a gang leader in some of our communities. They felt they were robbing from the rich and giving to the poor.” The situation got very bad.

Now we drive the criminals out of the favelas, one after another. Then we bring in the police and social services. We can transform society.

20 years ago people would say don’t touch the favelas at all. These days, we have a different situation. We can’t have more favelas. We can provide housing for the people. We have to provide transportation so they can get to work faster. Today, it might take 3 hours for poor people to get to work.

We have 600 favelas, They won’t go away. We’ll leave people where they are and bring them public safety, public works and social work.

In 2020, we’ll have all the favelas urbanized.

Palmisano:

You’re going to create a modern transportation system. I encourage you to think of it end to end, coordinate the different modes of transportation, so people can make connections and save time.

“This is systemic thinking. It’s a total system, not just a collection of separate elements.”

Predictability is key. People need that.

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Here’s a video of the panel discussion:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Here’s a look at how IBM worked with the Rio to set up an intelligent operations center:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nearly a year since inaugurating its city operations center, Rio is working with IBM to add new capabilities to city’s emergency response system by giving citizens information that will help them better manage their daily lives.

The new automated alert system will notify city officials and emergency personnel when changes occur in the flood and landslide forecast for the city. Under the previous system, notifications were manually relayed. The new alert system is expected to drastically reduce the reaction times to emergency situations by using instantaneous mobile communications, including automated email notifications and instant messaging, to reach emergency personnel and citizens.

The new alert system, developed by IBM’s Software Labs, can track the receipt of messages to ensure response is immediate and effective. Because responses to each emergency are tracked from start to finish, the alert system also provides a wealth of data available for analysis after the fact.

Another benefit Rio citizens can enjoy today is access to daily data feeds from the Rio Operations Center. The Center’s profile on Facebook and Twitter provide frequent updates on weather and traffic, as well as recommended alternative routes around the city on days of special events including concerts, soccer matches and festivals.

Citizens can follow the Rio Operations Center updates on Twitter @OperacoesRio and Facebook at Centro de Operações Rio.

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4:50 p.m. Special Address: The Transformation of Mega Cities, by  Johnny Araya Monge, mayor, San Jose City, Costa Rica.

The world’s urban population is already larger than the rural population. By 2050 it will be more than 70%.

Our big challenge will be to design a new urban paradigm. We want cities that are more democratic, more sustainable and more competitive. In the knowledge-based society, this means smarter cities. So we need smarter administration of the world’s cities.

We’re talking about the transformation of mega cities. ‘Mega cities are now a mega problem.”

All of the cities with 12 and 15 million inhabitants are in the Third World, or emerging nations. Poverty and social inclusion are part of the mix. This makes city administration very difficult.

We have the capacity to avoid such large cities being developed. We need a new paradigm for cities. We need to break down the definition of what is city and what is countryside, and what environments are protected.

It seems smart to encourage development of second-tier cities. Ideally countries should have a network of intermediate size cities and towns that are interconnected.

“Think of cities as a habitat, a space shared with plants and animals.” There should be agricultural areas, ecological protected areas and urban areas blended together.

In Costa Rica, we’re trying to reverse some of our old ideas about urbanism. Many cities were created around the idea of the freeways. These cities are spread out—they’re inefficient.  They also lead to social segregation. “A city must be a shared territory for all.”

We’re promoting growth in high-density ways, so the city is more compact. “The compact cities are always the most successful ones in the world.”

We’re using a lot of renewable energy sources, and we’re aiming to be carbon neutral as a nation.

We’re repopulating and transforming the downtown part of the city. It was abandoned. It was taken by gangs and drug leaders. We’re now rebuilding the social tissue of the downtown. We’re also promoting urban forests, using native trees along streets and avenues.

We’re putting in a tramway, and creating pedestrian streets. We’re rehabilitating the area where gangs and drug dealers were. “Thousands of people are walking downtown and it’s booming.”

The context:

Here’s Costa Rica President Laura Chinchilla talking about establishing a responsible country:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Update:

6:00 p.m. Special Address: At the Intersection of Globalization and Urbanization, by Fareed Zakaria, CNN host.

I want to paint the broader picture for you. At the end of the day it’s all about improving the living standards of people around the world—giving people access to the American Dream or the Brazilian Dream.

Growing up in India, I was fascinated about the wealth, the opportunity, the dynamism of America. That’s what attracted most people to America. Behind it was the freedom and rule of law and the constitution.

Today in the US you see a lot of pessimism. But the American Dream is alive and well in Rio, in Shanghai. This is where the optimists are.

You’re seen a switch from closed systems to open systems, from isolation to engagement. These changes unleashed political stability and a reduction in warfare; economic convergence—globalization and the adoption of best economic and business practices; and technological connectivity—the information revolution.

It unleashes enormous opportunities. Brazil has been able to take advantage of these changes and plug into the global economy and play.

The challenge for the future is this extraordinary opportunity. Everybody is moving through this at the same time. A lot of people in Asia and Latin America prospered. Governments just had to do simple things, and they got economic growth.

Now you have reached some degree of saturation of the easy path to rising per capital GDP. We’re entering a more challenging phase.

“This is the final phase of industrialization. Everything in your society has to be modernized. Everything has to be smart.”

It’s a lot more than supply and demand. You have to straighten out your infrastructure, your legal system. You have to improve productivity growth.

You have to deal with traffic and pollution. You can only deal with that with improved labor productivity. That’s increasingly difficult to do it because you live in a competitive world. “You’re in a competitive race with other cities around the world.”

To see where real growth is happening, don’t look at the mega cities of the world. There are a few exceptions, like New York and London, because of the financial industry. The real growth is in the 600 middle-tier cities underneath them. They may form themselves into clusters, tapping new transportation and communications infrastructures.

In the US, American companies like IBM are doing extraordinarily well in this global world. They master the shifts in technology. But the average American worker, the American city—they’re struggling.

People in the United States will have to adapt like hell. I’m optimistic, though.

Look at all the things happening around the world. It’s easy to get gloomy. But the pressures of globalization are forcing innovation, productivity gains and better governance.

“Ultimately this is going to have a beneficial effect.”

“This is all about unleashing human talent in away that we’ve never seen before and on a scale we’ve never seen before.”

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Here’s Fareed’s speech:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Here are wrap-up comments by Bruno Di Leo, IBM’s general manager for the growth markets.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: Brazil, IBM, Rio de Janeiro

(Editor’s note: Keinan will be one of the hosts of IBM’s two-day Smarter Cities conference in Rio de Janeiro this week. Follow live blogging from the event on Nov. 9 and Nov. 10.)

A year and a half ago, torrential rains in Rio de Janeiro caused floods and landslides that brought much of the city to a standstill and killed more than 100 residents. Eleven inches of rain beat down in a 24-hour period. In a city with a history of tropical rainstorms and flooding, Brazilians demanded to know why the authorities were not better prepared.

Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, vowed that such a disaster would not happen again. He moved decisively to bolster the city’s defenses against weather-related disruptions. Today, the city has a new state-of-the art intelligent operations center where managers monitor dozen of screens for data concerning weather, traffic, police, medical services, and other city departments on a real-time basis and anticipate looming problems—putting defenses in place to diminish their impact.

The mayor’s actions demonstrate convincingly how bold leaders can harness the power of sophisticated technologies to transform the way a city operates—and make life better for their constituents. The technology underpinning the Rio Operations Center, which was set up by IBM consultants and software architects, has matured since the center went live almost a year ago. Now, this kind of management system is becoming available to cities of all sizes—including via a cloud computing offering, which makes it faster to deploy.

These advances represent an important moment in the evolution of cities.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Over time, cities have gradually adopted technologies to monitor and control discrete systems—such as subways, stop lights, air traffic, and the like. What’s different today is that for the first time all of the functions and activities within a city can be integrated with one another. It’s like a conductor directing an orchestra rather than each musician playing his or her own melody.

Integration of streams of information is important because all of the natural and man-made systems that play roles in the life of a city are interdependent. If you do something that affects one of them, others likely will be affected as well. And, also, if you fix one thing, you may unintentionally break another. For example, in the United States, the construction of a highway across one of the boroughs of New York City made it possible for cars to traverse the city more quickly, but also contributed to the decline of whole neighborhoods that were cut in half by the thoroughfare. So it’s crucial to recognize the interconnectedness of systems, and to take that into account when trying to solve complex urban problems.

In Rio, Mayor Paes recognized the importance of integrating data from multiple sources  into a comprehensive view of the city. The system even enhances the communications with other organizations, including the police department, which is managed by the state, and the news media. There’s a media center in the building so the city can alert citizens about problem situations via a variety of news outlets.

Right now, because of the 2010 flooding, weather is the hot button in Rio. IBM researchers created a computer analysis model that combines current weather conditions and forecast data with detailed information about topography and transportation. With the model, they can accurately predict potential flooding and mudslides down to the block level up to 48 hours in advance. That gives city operations managers plenty of time to order evacuations, close off streets pro-actively and position equipment to be at ready. In the end, this is about saving lives.

But there was another incentive for Mayor Paes to create an operations center capable of monitoring and managing the functions of the city. He foresaw that such a system would be vital for Rio to deal with the upcoming World Cup Soccer tournament in 2014 and Olympics in 2016. The next phase of the project is likely to address public transportation. Better coordination of the various transportation systems could make travel easier for citizens and visitors, and more efficient for the city—plus reduce traffic congestion.

Mayor Paes and the Rio intelligent operations center demonstrate the potential for cities to be managed much more efficiently and effectively. What’s required is decisiveness, a willingness to make long-term investments and a deep understanding of how cities really work. These are key ingredients of what it takes to create a smarter city. 

Technorati Tags: IBM, Mayor Eduardo Paes, Rio de Janeiro

Click here to view the embedded video.

As DC Water discovered, bringing greater intelligence and connectedness into its operations would go a long way toward creating a truly integrated and smarter water system; and, most importantly, satisfying its thousands of customers.

And as all the FOAK projects are proving, it is the dynamic nature of this close interaction with IBM clients and the changing forces of the real world that drives innovation and brings it to market at an ever-quickening pace.

The following is a guest post authored by Ben Hodges,  Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin Center for Research in Water Resources.

Although many of us are sweltering in record-breaking heat, a recent Wall Street Journal story about the race to shore up aging, damaged levee systems along the Mississipi River reminds us that flood season is just around the corner.  And according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the multi-billion dollar restoration won’t be done by spring.

Deciding where to begin is a complex task.  But with the right mix of technology and expertise, engineers could have a snapshot of how a river and its tributaries will behave in flood situations and other extreme weather conditions, allowing them to prioritize levee restoration efforts according to which areas are at highest risk of flooding, and when that’s likely to happen.

As part of a Research collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin, IBM has come up with a new technology that could provide such a snapshot. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

This new flood prediction technology can simulate tens of thousands of river branches at a time and could scale further to predict the behavior of millions of branches simultaneously. By coupling analytics software with advanced weather simulation models, such as IBM’s Deep Thunder, municipalities and disaster response teams could make emergency plans and pinpoint potential flood areas on a river.

Floods are the most common natural disaster in the United States, but traditional flood prediction methods are focused only on the main stems of the largest rivers – overlooking extensive tributary networks where flooding actually starts, and where flash floods threaten lives and property.

As a testing ground, the team is presently applying the model to predict the entire 230 mile-long Guadalupe River and over 9,000 miles of tributaries in Texas. In a single hour the system can currently generate up to 100 hours of river behavior.

By combining IBM’s complex system modeling with UT Austin’s research into river physics, we’ve developed new ways to look at an old problem. Unlike previous methods, the IBM approach scales-up for massive networks and has the potential to simulate millions of river miles at once. With the use of river sensors integrated into web-based information systems, we can take this model even further.

In addition to flood prediction, a similar system could be used for irrigation management, helping to create equitable irrigation plans and ensure compliance with habitat conservation efforts. The models could allow managers to evaluate multiple “what if” scenarios to create better plans for handling both droughts and water surplus.

Technorati Tags: flood prediction, IBM Research, river modeling, Smarter Water, university of texas

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

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

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

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

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the Burlington plant, IBM creates huge quantities of purified water for washing delicate components during the semiconductor manufacturing process–1.7 million gallons a day.  The bill for purified water is nearly $10,000 per day, including the cost of water, chemicals and energy. It used to be much higher–more like $20,000. But, starting more than a decade ago, under pressure to cut costs, IBM’s managers realized that situation was unsustainable. So they launched a water management initiative that ultimately became a data-rich system for managing all of the water used in the plant. And that system grew up to be the company’s Smarter Water business. “Burlington has helped IBM change the way it thinks about itself,” writes Fishman. “IBM wants to do for its customers–for companies, for cities, for utilities, for whole natural ecosystems–what it has done in IBM Burlington.”

For IBM, natural resource management has evolved over the past decade from an internal discipline into an expression of global advocacy. The company’s annual corporate social responsibility report lays out the internal benefits of conservation and environmental sustainability.  For instance, IBM saved over $50 million in electricity expenses and conserved 523,000 megawatt hours of electricity since 2008.  The company’s global conservation program involves 3,100 conservation projects at more than 350 IBM facilities in 49 countries.  Conservation is a good investment, too. Over the years, IBM estimates that its focus on environmental sustainability has realized savings and avoided costs at a rate of approximately $1.60 for every $1.00 spent.

As the Smarter Planet business initiatives continue to develop, those savings will increasingly be supplemented with new revenues.  IBM’s experience points to a big, convenient truth: conservation is good for business.

Burlington’s water management odyssey started in earnest about a decade ago when the plant shifted from making chips mainly for IBM to making them for the commercial market and competing with low-cost Asian manufacturers. The pressure was on to cut costs. The operations managers performed deep analyses of all of their supplies and processes, and water came into sharp focus.

More than half of the water the plant used was ultra-pure, meaning it’s 10 million times cleaner than tap water. Ninety percent of water-related costs were connected to the ultra-pure stuff. So that’s were the savings had to come from. Less than one third of the cost was for the water itself. The rest came from electricity,chemicals, filters, labor and the energy used to warm chilly Lake Champlain water to 70 degrees, says Jeff Chapman, the plant’s pure-water engineer.

The first steps were monitoring and measuring. The operations team set up a sensor-based monitoring system that tracked movements and temperatures of water and the cost of energy in each step of the purification process. Then they borrowed the statistical process control system that was being used in the chip fabrication process to help analyze their processes so they could tweak them so they used less water and energy. One major source of savings was using heat created in the manufacturing process to warm up the ultra-pure water to room temperature. Now they make additional efficiency improvements each year.  “We optimize the resources, the systems and the relationships between the systems. We’re the ultimate smart enterprise,” says Janette Bombardier, the director of Burlington site operations.

Bombardier and her colleagues enjoyed Fishman’s visit when the traveled to Burlington for a tour of the site last year. He seemed especially impressed with the massive plumbing system. Eric Berliner, the water manager at the plant,  told Fishman, “When you start to think like we think, you don’t see water in the pipes. You see dollar signs.” Fishman liked Berliner’s comment so much that he put it in the book.

These days, the flow of dollars is definitely slowing. Overall, the total annual cost of water at the plant has gone down $3.6 million over the past decade in spite of a 66% increase in water rates and a 30% increase in manufacturing output. The Burlington plant has become a showcase for smart water management.

Technorati Tags: Burlington, Charles Fishman, IBM, The Big Thirst

To see a live video of the event, click here. To learn more about the event, click here. To follow or participate via Twitter, use #icities.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Anne Altman, general manager, Global Public Sector, IBM, talks about why cities are so important to having a sustainable planet.

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5:51 p.m. Closing Remarks

Chase W. Rynd, president and executive director, National Building Museum, announces that Data Materialized wins the prize for the best of The 24-Hour City Project experiments.

Also, an Intelligent Cities exhibition is coming.

Also a book.

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5:15 p.m. Town Hall Meeting
A panel of municipal leaders discuss how we can collectively build intelligent cities.

One of the key points is the recognition that many American cities were built after the introduction of the automobile, and their design (or lack thereof) is based on the availability of cheap gasoline. So how do cities designed for the automobile proceed when that approach is no longer sustainable?

One example is Raleigh, North Carolina, which got the nickname “Spraleigh” because of its sprawl pattern. The city has very little available land for development and an aging population that won’t  be driving in the not-too-distant future.

Mitchell Silver, director of planning for Raleigh, says the city leaders began their long-term planning process with a series of discussions, which included a heavy dose of citizen input, about what it means to be a 21st century city. “A city has to understand its purpose. The public has to understand its purpose. The elected officials need to understand its purpose. Then you can understand what it is as a system,” he says.

In the end, they came up with a plan to develop 8 growth centers that will accommodate most of the community’s growth. They were able to get 96% support from the public. One crucial factor: They showed that the community would save hundreds of millions of dollars over the next 30 years by pursuing this plan.

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5:00 p.m. Designing a Collaborative Built Environment

“I never let the data trump my intuition about what my community values.”

–Maurice Cox, past mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia and former director of design at the National Endowment for the Arts.

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4:16 p.m. Designing a Collaborative Built Environment

Nicholas de Monchaux, architect, urbanist, writer, and assistant professor of Architecture & Urban Design at University of California, Berkeley: “Recently, I was asked who is the Jane Jacobs of social media? Well, Jane Jacobs was the Jane Jacobs of social media. She was the first to identify the layers of urban social relationships that are the essence of social media just like they are the essence of healthy cities.”

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3:55 pm – Thought Vignette: Community and Social Interaction in the Wireless City

Keith Hampton

Keith Hampton, assistant professor, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, is exploring the social benefits of using new technology in cities. He is presenting the results of his studies seeking to address three questions:

- Do new communication technologies reduce the use of traditional settings such as public spaces?
- Do new communication technologies reduce in-person interaction with others?
- Do new communication technologies make communication possible where it wasn’t before?

Hampton’s  data shows that people who use a variety of new media are more likely to visit public spaces – for example, bloggers spend a lot of time going to parks and cafes, and interacting socially. As a result of this kind of socialization, people have more diverse networks, and are physically and mentally healthier, creating higher levels of trust and tolerance.

There is a perception, he says, that people have less serendipity and pay less attention to the world around them due to social media. But his study shows that while that is true to a degree, many of the things people do online tend to be socially active, for example, increasing political participation.

In one of his studies, 25 percent of those interviewed had not visited the public space before wireless Internet was available at that location. Seventy percent of those who previously visited said they visited more often due to availability of wireless internet. And they almost always came alone, yet they are interacting with a lot of people online while they were in those public spaces– mostly interacting on social networking Web sites. Ten percent observed in an extended interaction with a stranger; 12 percent participated in a more modest social exchange;  and 1 in 6 maintained contact over time, forming a relationship.

In answering the question: Can social media make communication possible where it wasn’t before, Hampton tested lower-income neighborhoods with a low likelihood of access to technology.  The study found that in low-income neighborhoods, new communication technologies can help produce local cohesion and collective action in new and exciting ways.

The bottom line? The built environment hasn’t declined in importance and new technology doesn’t detract from the built environment.

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2:40 p.m. Imagining a Healthier City

A question to members of the panel: Look out 50 years. What do we need to anticipate now?

Climate change, says Patrick L. Kinney, professor of environmental health sciences, Columbia University. “The scientific community is essentially unanimous in the conclusion that we have seen climate change over the past 30 years, and no matter what we do we won’t be able to change things in the next 30 years,” he says.

Larger hurricanes are coming, like Katrina, because of the warming of the oceans. At the same time, cities along the seacoast will have to deal with rising sea levels.

If you’re interested in exploring some ideas about how cities can reach to rising and increasingly angry seas, check out this design project, Rising Currents, sponsored by New York’s Museum of Modern Art–the output of which was put on display in the museum’s galleries last year.

The project brought together five interdisciplinary teams to re-envision the coastlines of New York and New Jersey around New York Harbor at a time in the future when the sea level will be much higher. Their visions of the city of the future give new meaning to the concept of  “open space.”

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2:20 p.m. Imagining a Healthier City

Don’t leave home. That’s the advice of William Lucy, professor of Urban and Environmental Planning, University of Virginia. He says the mortal threats to humans in metropolitan areas area traffic accidents and murders. Most murders happen at home, but most traffic accidents, of course, don’t. Since there are many more traffic fatalities in metros than there are murders, the more time you spend at home, the less likely you are to die an early death.

That also means that the dangerous areas in a metropolitan area are the ones that are considered to be safest—the outer areas. That’s where you get the traffic fatalities.

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12:36 p.m.  During the lunch break

In one of the National Business Museum’s galleries, they’re presenting some experiments that have come out of  The 24-Hour City Project, launched in D.C., which project organizers call “a wild experiment to hack the city.”

The purpose of the project is to explore the intersection of the built environment, data, the arts and information technology. In a beta conducted in recent weeks, teams competed to develop physical and digital interventions at the museum, which were opened to the public over the weekend.

One cool one: Data Materialized. A group gathered data about the education levels of people in D.C., arranged by location, and represented it in a three-dimensional graphic—which they displayed in physical form in one of the National Building Museum galleries. Notice in the video the huge spike of education in D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In November, the 24-Hour City Project competition will launch citywide in D.C. and, the organizers hope there will be parallel events in Boston, New York, Chicago and elsewhere around the world.

To see what’s going on, visit the Intelligent Cities Tumblr blog.

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12:25 p.m. Regionally Thinking: Transportation, Affordability, and Equity

Robert Puentes, senior fellow, Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, says one of the problems is that suburban towns think about their relationships to the cities and not how they relate to one another. We have hub-and-spoke transit systems. “If you’re trying to get between suburbs you have tremendous challenges,” he says.

He says we have to fundamentally rethink and remake our transport corridors so it makes it easier to live work shop and play: “We have to remake the suburbs for the 21^st century.”

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12:00 p.m. Regionally Thinking: Transportation, Affordability and Equity

Robert Puentes, senior fellow, Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, recently concluded a study of accessibility to work in metropolitan areas in the United States. The good news is that 70% of metro residents had some sort of transit. The bad news is that the transit isn’t convenient enough. On average, people can only get to 30% of the jobs in their metropolitan area within 90 minutes.

The conclusion I draw from this info is that you can’t solve the problem by brute force–building a lot more rail or other transit infrastructure. You’ll be able to move quicker and cheaper if you concentrate in the near-term on better coordination of what exists, which requires collaboration between different regional and municipal transit organizations. The transit systems have to not only intersect but their schedules need to sync up.

Scott Bernstein, president and founder, Center for Neighborhood Technology, says, “We need a jobs-to-people strategy, not just a people-to-jobs strategy.” He urges government leaders to provide incentives to companies to move the jobs to where the people are. That’s much less expensive than making massive new investments in mass transit systems.

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11:15 a.m. Thought Vignette: Democracy and Inclusion in the Intelligent Cities

Ceasar McDowell, professor of the Practice of Community Development, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explores ways of democratizing data and city development.

He argues that in the social networking world, people, not corporations, should have should have control over their data. He proposes what he calls a “personal digital commons.” Individuals should be able to place digital information about them on the Web in four buckets: free use, limited use, collective community use and no use. Once people have decided how their information can be used, the way is clear to start using it in potentially powerful ways.

He has the concept of “collective framing.” Rather than organizations or city governments setting agendas and announcing them to the public, why not engage the public in setting the agenda from the get-go?

He says even if you ask people to provide input  via an online survey, the way you ask the questions is limiting. He encourages open-ended questions.

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10:10 a.m. The City as a Lab.

Government is in ill-repute in some quarters these days, but good government leadership is absolutely vital to leading and coordinating the development of more successful cities.

Dustin Haisler, director of government innovation, Spigit, and former CIO, Manor, Texas, says government leadership is vital, even at a time when municipal governments are pressed financially. “Don’t accept the constraints you’re given,” he says, adding later: “The city is a lab now. They’re experimenting and solving problems.”

Mark Cleverley, director of strategy, Global Government Industry, IBM, says, “I challenge the notion that government isn’t innovative. You have to find a way to let those people free and work together across city agencies. The message has to be that it’s okay for that to happen.”

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9:55 a.m. The City as a Lab.

Mark Cleverley, director of strategy, Global Government Industry, IBM, says,  “We can think of creating solutions in many more places than we could just a few years ago.”

We’re engaged in smarter cities projects all over the world.

One example is IBM has been working with the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to help city leaders transform the management of their operations.

The impetus for the overhaul was a series of floods and mudslides that claimed the lives of 100 people back in April 2010 combined with preparations for the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. The city and IBM are collaborating to create what Rio leaders call their City Operations Center, where they’re integrating information from more than 20 city departments for for real-time visualization, monitoring and analysis of incidents across the city. It will help meteorologists, geological surveyors, field operations people and security managers work together to dramatically speed emergency responsiveness—no matter what happens.

As part of the agreement, IBM Research scientists have developed a high-resolution weather forecasting and hydrological modeling system, which can predict heavy rains up to 48 hours in advance. Essentially, they’ve created a giant mathematical model of how the city’s weather interacts with its water management systems.

The center is the first in the world to integrate all the stages of a crisis management situation: from the prediction, mitigation and preparedness, to the immediate response to events, and finally to capture feedback from the system to be used in future incidents.

Rio Operations Center

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9:35 a.m. Keynote Conversation: What Makes an Intelligent City?

Susan Piedmont-Palladino, curator, National Building Museum: “I look forward to the day when a city isn’t considered beautiful unless it’s sustainable. You won’t get an architectural award unless you pay attention to how the building is oriented toward the sun.”

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9:17 a.m. Keynote Conversation: What Makes an Intelligent City?

One of the keys to making cities manageable and data really useful is developing technology systems that allow city leaders to see data, make sense of it, and make better decisions based on their new knowledge.

IBM has has been working with cities for decades, and, three years ago, when it launched its Smarter Planet strategy, it began bringing new thinking and new technologies to bear on cities’ problems and opportunities—combining the availability sensors for collecting data, the ubiquity of networks and new analytical software tools. Initially, most of the software had to be written from scratch.

Not so any more. Today, coinciding with the Intelligent Cities Forum, the company introduced a new software product, the IBM Intelligent Operations Center for Smarter Cities, which pulls together functionality from more than a dozen IBM products and integrates it into a single package. The software gives cities of any size a holistic view of information across city departments and agencies and a central point of command and collaboration.

This package came together really fast. “We’re laying track as we cross it,” I was told by Michael Kehoe, the IBM product manager in charge of building the Intelligent Operations Center.

To me, one of the coolest aspects of the software is its awareness of the interrelationships between systems—called event correlation. Data from different city services is integrated so, for instance, if the water department records that a particular fire hydrant is out commission, the fire department will be alerted to connect to a different hydrant if they get called to a fire in the area.

Click here to view the embedded video.

IBM’s Michael Kehoe talks about the importance of event correlation in managing cities.

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9 a.m. Keynote Conversation: What Makes an Intelligent City?

Dr. Xavier de Souza Briggs, associate director for General Government Programs, Office of Management and Budget, The White House, points out that the building industry has historically been slow to change. Unlike the auto industry, where there are a relative few players and they can develop and adopt new standards rapidly, the building industry is highly fragmented. His point is that there’s a role for government here in helping to set standards—which is one of the things he does at the White House.

The tech industry provides another model. It’s a healthy combination of market competition, industry standards bodies, and standards bodies such as NIST and ICANN setting standards.

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8:40 a.m. Keynote Conversation: What Makes an Intelligent City?

Richard Stengel, managing editor, TIME:  “In my city, New York, Robert Moses used data to create parts of cities that were inimical to the interests of the communities. What’s different now? A lot of those endeavors destroyed parts of cities.”

He asks, What’s different now?

Anne Altman, general manager, Global Public Sector, IBM, says we have a project at IBM called Cities in Motion. We capture information about where people are and how they’re moving, and when they’re moving. We use cell phones and other sensing devices. “People can see if we want to have green space we can  put it in a place where people can get to it. If we’re building roads, how can we design them so people aren’t just sitting in traffic jams. Having the data means we can improve everything from transportation to leisure activities.”

Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, says one of the differences now is that a lot of data is transparent. People in communities can see it and get involved in projects. They can use the data to make a case that a major city project isn’t really in the public interest.

The Federal government and New York City, among others, are making large amounts of data available to the public.

John Tolva, the chief technology officer in Chicago, built City Forward, a city data sharing organization and Web tool, when he was at IBM previously. Visit there to see how people in dozens of cities around the world have used data to understand what’s really happening in their cities.

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8:05 a.m. Keynote Conversation: What Makes an Intelligent City?

Rudith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation: “We’re seeing a tsunami of urbanization”

“Urbanization is an engine for sustainability, but it’s also a gathering place for poverty.”

“We need technology. But we need it to be inclusive. If we don’t answer ‘Intelligent for what?’ and ‘Intelligent for whom?’ then we aren’t going to build the intelligent city of the 21^st century.”

This is an important reminder. Rigging a city up with sensors, wiring and data dashboards won’t make a big difference unless the parties involved first come up with a vision of what they want the city to be and how they want it to work. Another key: involving people from throughout the community in helping to shape this vision.

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8:00 a.m.: Chase Rynd, president and executive director, National Building Museum, tells the crowd of 300: “We’re at the convergence of two major events in history. For the first time in human history more than 50% of the people on the planet are living in cities. But it may be a way to make a more sustainable world. People in cities have a lower carbon footprint. But cities face challenges.”

The National Building Museum has been working for six months to gather information about cities as systems. It has published infographics on its own web site and on Time Magazine’s site–also surveying people about their attitudes and reactions.  So far, more than 5000 people have responded. The info can be found here.

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IBM uses the term smarter cities. It’s an essential piece of the overall Smarter Planet strategy. The company believes that smarter cities drive sustainable economic growth by leveraging information to make better decisions, coordinating resources to operate more effectively and anticipating problems so they can be resolved before they get too big. If cities manage their knowledge wisely and aggressively, they’ll become better places to live and will create abundant economic opportunities for their citizens in a rapidly changing world. IBM’s Smarter Cities business has grown to nearly 2,000 engagements with cities globally in the last two years.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Intelligent Cities

To see a live video of the event, click here. To learn more about the event, click here. To follow or participate via Twitter, use #icities.

IBM uses the term smarter cities. It’s an essential piece of the overall Smarter Planet strategy. The company believes that smarter cities drive sustainable economic growth by leveraging information to make better decisions, coordinating resources to operate more effectively and anticipating problems so they can be resolved before they get too big. If cities manage their knowledge wisely and aggressively, they’ll become better places to live and will create abundant economic opportunities for their citizens in a rapidly changing world.