Copyright 2009, John Cronin
At its Smarter Cities Forum, held today and tomorrow here in New York City, IBM is presenting a 21st century, real-time vision of the nation's, and the planet's, urban centers.
This afternoon, IBM CEO Sam Palmisano hosted conversations with Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg, and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg before a standing room audience at the Rose Theater at Lincoln Center. They described a future where everything, moving and immovable, will be instrumented. Sensors will deliver information in real-time about the operations of urban systems, behavior of the local environment, where people and traffic are located, and where energy is needed.
Electronic health records will provide up-to-the-minute information available to the patient anywhere, and in any medical office, anytime she or he wants them.
Education programs will emphasize STEM skills (science, technology, engineering, math) and develop an urban workforce to innovate the next generation of smarter cities.
Cities themselves will be living laboratories of instrumentation, increasing efficiency and providing information about every aspect and condition of their services, radically improving the management, and reducing the costs, of the urban infrastructure.
To get the ball rolling in NYC, IBM's Palmisano announced a new urban analytics center in Manhattan that will be home to 550 IBM experts. IBM's most recent Smarter City Forum took place in Berlin last June. Its next will be in Shanghai in 2010.
During his remarks, Mayor Bloomberg announced an iPhone app for the city's 311 online information system.
During an onstage dialogue with Melody Barnes, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, Palmisano said that companies like IBM are not in the business of making policy but they can make policy "operational." On its Smarter Cities website IBM says:
A morning session on water added to the real-time flavor of the IBM vision. Panelists described instrumented field workers giving live reports on the condition of water systems, online GIS programs that would present visual, site-specific information about every aspect of a water supply, and sensors that would measure the condition of drinking water before it ever reached the tap.Last year, our planet reached an important milestone: for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s population resided in cities. This shift from a rural concentration of people to an urban one took tens of thousands of years to achieve – and now it's accelerating at rapid speed towards unprecedented urbanization.
Without a doubt, this is one of the greatest issues of our lifetime.
My home institution, Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries, is collaborating with IBM and Clarkson University on the development of a River and Estuary Observatory Network that will deliver real-time information about the physical, chemical and biological conditions of the Hudson and St. Lawrence Rivers. During the water panel in which I participated this morning, I proposed a revamped Clean Water Act that is attuned to 21st century innovations, offers significant incentives to companies and research institutions that advance the state of water technologies, and sets new, specific national goals for the elimination of the discharge of pollutants as an impetus to the development of a pollution elimination industry.
Also see my preceding posts on Clean Water Act.
