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IBM has plenty of company when it comes to deep concern and deep thinking about the future of cities. Today, at the Intelligent Cities Forum in Washington, D.C., hundreds of urban planners, city leaders and data mavens are gathering to share insights on ways to make cities more successful and sustainable using data, analytics, collaboration and foresight. The A Smarter Planet blog will feature live blogging from the event, so please return here frequently to see updates.
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.
Anne Altman, general manager, Global Public Sector, IBM, talks about why cities are so important to having a sustainable planet.
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Steve Hamm in
IBM has plenty of company when it comes to deep concern and deep thinking about the future of cities. Monday, at the Intelligent Cities Forum in Washington, D.C., hundreds of urban planners, city leaders and data mavens will gather to share insights on ways to make cities more successful and sustainable using data, analytics, collaboration and foresight. The A Smarter Planet blog will feature live blogging from the event, so please return here frequently to see updates.
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.
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In the next couple of years, there are expected to be 2 billion people connected to the Internet. At the same time, the instrumentation and interconnection of the world’s human-made and natural systems is exploding–which could mean that there soon will be more things connected to the Internet than there are people who are connected. This Internet of Things promises to give people a much better understanding of how complex systems work, so they can be tinkered with to make them work better. But it also opens up a whole new sphere of insecurity. Each of those sensors is, potentially, a point of vulnerability to people who write malicious code for fun, or profit, or to further their political goals.
Andreas Wespi
Harm could come in many forms, but some of the most hurtful scenarios for attacks on the Internet of Things include electrical power and communications blackouts, disruption of air traffic and roadway traffic lights, interruption of oil and gas exploration and contamination of water. So far, these concerns are mostly theoretical, but the spread of Stuxnet, the computer worm that targets control systems at nuclear power plants, shows just how dangerous such attacks can be. The worm knocked out about 1,000 centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant last year–and atomic energy experts warn that it has the capability of creating Chernobyl-like disasters. “We have to understand the new threats and understand how to protect our own infrastructure,” says Andreas Wespi, a cybersecurity expert at IBM Research’s Zurich laboratory.
Attacks will likely come in two ways: to the sensors and to the servers that gather, store, and analyze information from the sensors. Both kinds of vulnerability must be addressed.
As IBM celebrates 100 years of innovation, we’re exploring how the company has pursued progress over the last century in three ways: Pioneering the science of information, changing the way the world works, and reinventing the modern corporation. As we both reflect and look ahead, it’s interesting to note how the world around us has also changed and to imagine what it will look like in another hundred years.
Over the last century, global water usage has increased at twice the rate of population growth, impacting society across the board from public health to economics to energy consumption. Obviously, this supply and demand ratio isn’t sustainable, and big changes in the way we manage this precious resource are an imperative.
Collaboration among companies, municipal and government leaders, water managers and citizens will be essential as we continue to look for new ways to innovate in the water management industry. And while much data is being collected, we’ve got to find better ways of using that data to make difficult decisions about how, when and where we’re using our water supply. Data collection is one thing – but finding value in vast amounts of data, streaming in realtime or near realtime from a wide variety of sources, is another. The advent of the deep QA (Question and Answer) technology that powers the Watson computing system presents a unique opportunity to rapidly analyze information and find answers to difficult questions.
Cameron Brooks, IBM’s director of smarter water management, takes a closer look at the implications for Watson in the water management field here.
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Steve Hamm in
Source: Wikimedia Commons
America’s Cape Cod has long been celebrated as a summer paradise where vacationers enjoy swimming in the surf, digging for clams, and fishing. But there’s trouble in paradise. The Cape is essentially a large sandbar that sits over an aquifer from which residents and visitors draw their water. They have to be very careful about what they take out of the ground and put into it. Most of the houses on the Cape dispose of waste water through septic systems, and that’s causing environmental problems. Nitrogen is building up in the bays on the Cape, depleting oxygen levels and killing shellfish and beneficial plants, and producing blooms of algae. If this keeps up, the Cape won’t continue to be attractive to vacationers–who provide the financial lifeblood of the economy.
The people of the Cape are faced with some uncomfortable truths. They must address the waste water problem, most likely by building sewer systems and water treatment facilities. This will cost billions of dollars, which likely will have to come from taxes and user fees.
In an effort to head off environmental and/or financial calamities, the Cape Cod Commission, a regional planning group, has engaged with IBM to create the Smart Cape Cod initiative. The plan is to use sensing, networking, data management, and data analysis technologies to track a wide array of information related to water quality. By understanding the problem better, the commission and the governments of the 15 towns on the Cape hope to be able to address it most effectively–safeguarding the environment and easing the financial burden on residents and businesses. “We have to take innovative approaches,” says Paul Niedzwiecki, the commission’s executive director. “We have a substantial problem but not a lot of existing infrastructure. If we’re smarter about the solutions, we can do it less expensively–without breaking the backs of the year-round residents of the Cape.”
The Cape has just 220,000 year-round residents, but the population can triple during the tourist season. So the new waste water treatment systems will have to be built to handle peak demand. The commission believes that if the people of the Cape address the problem themselves and use innovative technologies and approaches, the fix-up can be done for about $3 billion. It’s possible that only about 40% of the homes will require sewers. But if the towns tarry and are forced to act by state or federal agencies, or courts, the tab could be much higher.
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Kevin Winterfield in
You can now help your city track creek health and identify areas of concern by using your iPhone as a clean water monitor with Creek Watch, a new app developed by IBM researchers and featured on People for a Smarter Planet.
Got an iPhone? Download Creek Watch now!
Click the image to download the Creek Watch iPhone app
Think about how many times you walk, bike or even drive past a creek or stream in your city. Some of us have a favorite creekside trail we jog on the weekends. Many of us drive over a bridge every day on the way to work. These creeks and streams are sometimes sometimes full, sometimes dry and many times littered with trash. With so many waterways in one city, sometimes flowing through private property, it’s hard for one team of officials to appropriately monitor them. With IBM’s Creek Watch iPhone app, members of the community can easily become ‘citizen scientists,’ and in 4 easy steps, make a difference: snap a photo, and select the water level, the water flow and the amount of trash nearby. The app provides three easy buttons to choose from as indicators, and even gives you explanations of each.
IBM computer scientists live for big data problems. Creek Watch provides a great opportunity to apply decades of data and analytics expertise to positively impact the environment. “Creek Watch lets the average citizen contribute to the health of their water supply – without PhDs, chemistry kits and a lot of time,” said Christine Robson, IBM Research. “Harnessing the crowdsourced data movement for a cause people care about is a win-win-win for citizens, water quality programs and IBM’s desire to solve big data challenges.”
“We need many eyes on our creeks to help us track their health,” said biologist Carol Boland of San Jose’s Watershed Protection Division. “We’re thrilled that IBM has provided an easy tool that engages citizens in contributing to a database on creek health.”
You can read more details about the project on the IBM Research news blog. And download the Creek Watch iPhone app here.
Join People for a Smarter Planet
Click on the image to check out People for a Smarter Planet
Creek Watch is an excellent example of what People for a Smarter Planet (P4SP) is all about. People for a Smarter Planet offers a dynamic and intelligent network of activities, conversations and discussions you can participate in to help build a sustainable and smarter world. Or, if you just want to hang around and listen, that’s okay too. And if you have a project you think we should feature on P4SP, let us know.
Join People for a Smarter Planet today. Help build a Smarter Planet.
Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Cameron Brooks, director, Smarter Water Management, IBM Big Green Innovations.
Science has made some pretty impressive advancements with water in recent years. We can, for example, harvest fog as a water source — it’s fairly effective in foggy havens like the coast of Chile. We also have the technology to turn certain groundwater contaminants (i.e. the nitrates used in fertilizer) into fuel. But for all the progress we’ve made, our water management systems are sadly lacking. Many municipalities across the U.S. lose up to 30% of their water through leaks, and for the majority of water agencies, there is no way to detect leaks preventively — residents have to quietly wait for disaster to strike before local governments repair or upgrade their utilities.
It doesn’t have to be that way, though. There’s no reason we should settle for this water loss rate given the technologies that are available today. With smart water grids, in which a sophisticated monitoring system composed of sensors, meters and data analytics are installed, we can use real-time data to dramatically reduce water loss rates. We can identify leaks in minutes, if not seconds, and make enlightened decisions about how to allocate resources. A solid IT system would require an up-front financial investment, for sure, but the alternative is to wait for a crisis situation before paying obscene sums of money to repair water lines piece by piece.
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Game fanatics have been enjoying simulation games ever since SimCity was first introduced in 1989, and electronic games are used for military and corporate training, but IBMer Phaedra Boinodiris designs so-called serious games to help people solve complex business and social problems.
Today, IBM is releasing her latest creation, CityOne, an on-line game that can help city leaders, businesses, and students figure out how to make cities work better by simulating transportation, environmental, business and logistical problems. The free game challenges players to complete missions involving energy, water, banking, and retailing. “It’s like an onion,” she says. “You can jump in and play it for 20 minutes, or you can stay and go deep and learn how cities are actually using different technologies.”
If Boinodiris doesn’t seem like a prototypical IBMer, it’s because she’s not. She was previously an entrepreneur and founder of two companies–one an Internet game portal and the other a game consulting company. Both her parents are IBM retirees, though.
Fittingly, it was a game of sorts that brought Boinodiris and IBM together. Three years ago, when she was studying for an MBA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she participated in a business case competition versus another university. The task, posed by IBM, was coming up with an innovative way to get business people interested in business-process management software. Her idea was to draw them in by designing an electronic game that would simulate how BPM software works in an imaginary business. One of her teammates was so sure that IBM would never accept a game as a solution that he up and quit the team on the spot. He was wrong. Sandy Carter, an IBM vice president in the software group who was one of the judges of the competition, liked the idea so much that she hired Boinodiris as an intern–with the task of designing the game she had proposed.
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There’s no shortage of contests for tech startups in this world, but IBM’s SmartCamp is different. The focus is on companies that aim to make the world work better, and is aligned with our Smarter Planet agenda. We launched the program last year in Dublin and conducted regional contests this spring and summer in Stockholm, Boston, Tel Aviv, London, and Silicon Valley. (This video tells the Silicon Valley story.) There are still two contests left, in Paris on Sept. 24 and Copenhagen on Oct. 7, before the finals in Dublin on Nov. 16. So there’s time for entrepreneurs to get involved. Check it out at www.ibm.com/ie/smarterplanet/smartcamp.
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Steve Hamm in
Abundant rains this year ended California’s three-year drought, but, long-term, the need for responsible water management and conservation continues. California Gov. Arnold Schwazenegger has asked the people of the state to reduce their water use by 20 percent by 2020.
In Sonoma County, one of the premium wine regions of the world, the competing demands for water from people, fish, and the wine industry requires the Sonoma County Water Agency to be smart about the way it manages water. It’s developing a new management system that gathers data from numerous sources and allows the water agency and its retailers to share data and coordinate the supply and demand of water.
What struck me when talking to leaders in Sonoma is how much collaboration and transparency matter in situations like this. With them, conflicts can be resolved. Without them, problems tend to end up being dealt with in court.
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It’s Water Week, so there’s plenty of water-related activity at IBM. Here are three items that are particularly interesting.
–The Nature Conservancy and IBM announced plans to launch a Web site called Rivers for Tomorrow, where watershed managers can map, analyze and share data about the health of local freshwater river basins to help out with cleanup programs.
–IBM’s World Community Grid, a network of PC owners helping scientists solve humanitarian challenges, announced three new projects, in China, Brazil, and the U.S.’s Chesapeake Bay.
–IBM Research has launched a project called Creek Watch, an iPhone application that enables people to help monitor the health of their local watershed. Whenever people pass a local waterway, they can snap a photo and report how much water and trash they see. The data is collected and shared with local authorities so they can respond to whatever’s going on. Here’s a blog post about the program.
