Smart Cities, not only new Research Papers but also exiting forecast!

The debate about SMART CITY is booming, both as an opportunity to drive a more sustainable economic development and an incubator of innovation and transformation that can merge the Virtual World of Mobile Services, Internet of Things and Social Networks with the Physical Infrastructures of Smart Building, Smart Utilities (i.e. electricity, heating, water, waste, transportation, and unified communication&collaboration infrastructure).

William J. Mitchell stated it many years ago “Our cities are fast transforming into artificial ecosystems of interconnected, interdependent intelligent digital organisms”, but now there is a growing agreement about leading advisors like Forrester, McKinsey, Pike Research, ABIResearch and investors, including public ones like the EU SETIS Roadmap (next figure), that the transformation of the metropolitan landscape is driven by the opportunity to embed intelligence into any component of our towns and connect them in real time merging physical world of objects, humans and virtual conversation and transactions.

EU SmartCity Roadmap

Let’s start with some examples of smart city investments:

· South Korea : Songdo (Incheon) privately developed city : $35-$42 billion, climbing, flagship of Cisco’s Smart + Connected communities, ubiquitous tele-presence

· India: Lavasa, IPO $437 million (planned), Hindustan Construction Company ,Wipro and Cisco; Kochi: 90K new jobs, Nano City,

· China is the country where the transformation is more quickly: 18+ cities have announced smart city plans. Ningbo:“smart city action plan” $6.4 billion in 5 years, 87 individual projects. premier Wen Jiabao speech @Wuxi: “Internet + Internet of Things = Wisdom of the Earth.” Plus: Caofeidian ($450 billions by 2030) Beijing, Shanghai, Wuxi, Chengdu, Wuhan, Kunming, Foshan, Shenzhen, Shenyang ($40 million), Hunan cluster (8 cities) and Guangzhou.

· United Arab Emirates: Masdar, $22 billions (Project by Norman Foster)

· Many other leading Smart Cities: King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC, Saudi Arabia),Malta, Skolkovo (Russia), PlanIT Valley (Portugal), Dubuque (US:Iowa), Holyoke (US:Massachusetts), San Diego (US: California), Amsterdam (NL EUR1,1 billion by 2012), Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam), Singapore, Sydney, Yokohama & Fujisawa (Japan), Curitiba (BR).

Recently several analysts provided some exciting forecasts, for example:

· ABI Research on smart city : $8.1 billion spent in 2010, $39.5 billion by 2016. There are 102 active or completed smart city projects (EU 38 cities, NA 35, APAC 21, MEA 6)

· Pike Research on smart city : over $100 billion will be spent in next 10 years

· Lux Research: “Technologies for Future Cities: Integrating Efficiency, Sustainability, and Environmental Concerns”: by 2032, over $40 trillion should be required to retrofit and expand dated urban infrastructure in Brownfield cities, adding to investment for building new Greenfield efficient future cities like Masdar in Abu Dhabi: $22 billion and Songdo in Korea: $42 billion.

There are many consulting companies that have dedicated teams on smart cities that are publishing new reports, for example:

· McKinsey has previously stated that “Over the next 15 years, 600 cities will account for more than 60 percent of global GDP growth” and provided a tool “Global Cities of the future” for “Exploring the globe and view data on the dramatic urban growth expected by 2025”, in another research focused on How green are China’s cities?, and in “What Matters online” has identified the “What matters about Cities” as a core topic in which is involving some of the best thinkers from around the world in the discussion.

· Forrester launched a Smart City Tweet Jam and published many researches addressing the different segment of Smart City stakeholders, for example: Helping CIOs Understand “Smart City” Initiatives, Securing Smart City Infrastructure, Smart City Leaders Need Better Governance Tools.

Not for profits organization are also working seriously on this topic, for example:

· As part of the SMART2020 program The Climate Group has published, Information Marketplaces: The New Economics of Cities, that was written in partnership with, Arup, Accenture, Horizon and the University of Nottingham, in order to investigates how technology can be used in cities to meet the growing challenges of expanding urbanization.

· ICLEI, that published the Global Report “Financing the Resilient City, A white paper” seeks to build Sustainable Communities and Cities by enabling local governments achieve justice, security, resilience, viable economies, and healthy environments. The four initiatives are: Resilient Communities and Cities, Just and Peaceful Communities, Viable Local Economies, and Eco-efficient Cities. For an overview you can read the Resilient Cities profile brochure.

Smart City revolution is coming to Italy, too. Some early projects were already done in the past, for example European Smart Cities project compared Ancona (51th), Perugia (52th), Trento (45th) and Trieste (49th) with other early smart EU cities, more recently the Rete città intelligenti was promoted by ForumPA with IBM, including smaller towns effort like Monteveglio with Transition Town or those involved in the ZeroCO2 Communities project.

But it was the FP7 European Initiative on Smart Cities that has ignited many local Public administrations, such as Genova, Torino, Bari, Firenze, Milano, Parma, Palermo to launch new initiatives in order to take advantage of the opportunity of funding (10 000 – 12 000 M€ for a total of 40 000 M€ ). Obviously competition is hard since EU will co-finance only 25 large cities (>500 000 inhabitants) and 5 very large cities (>1 000 000 inhabitants) committing to implement the proposed demonstration, testing and deployment programmes in the 3 sectors – buildings, energy networks and transport and to go beyond the 2020 EU climate and energy targets.

There are also many other efforts in place, one of the most forward looking is at the heart of the design of the EXPO 2015 exhibition (6 month since may 1st 2015, 20 million visits planned), inheriting the legacy of EXPO 2010, whose theme “better city better life” was already connected to the development of sustainable smart cities . Digital Smart City Expo 2015 will be built and operated on state of the art technology, in order to propose a model for Smart Cities of the Future, in terms of infrastructure, operations and services to visitors/citizens. It will also “empower visitors to become food-aware citizens, combining groundbreaking technological services with environmental sustainability as a template for our future cities”.

Donato

More on Cloud Computing and Green ICT

In my previous post Cloud Computing and Green IT I’ve already referenced some interesting examples about the role of booming cloud services in getting an higher percentage of direct (total electricity use by data centers in 2010 of about 1.3% of all electricity use for the world, and 2% of all electricity use for the US according to this report by Analytics Press, author: Jonathan Koomey : “Growth in Data center electricity use 2005 to 2010”) and indirect (mobile devices, social networking) impact to GHG ICT emissions but also the opportunities of reducing both the cost and the environmental impact of internal, on premise, ICT by migrating services to the cloud. Since then I’ve added some comments to provide new interesting links, but everything is moving very quickly in the sky, since the cloud is the enabling technology for a radical change, driven by the power of social networking, globalization of services, the replacement of PC by mobile devices, the emerging role of the Internet of Things.

For example on Dec, 15th the: GreenPeace campaign for pushing Facebook to use clean energy has achieved a major milestone: Greenpeace and Facebook have announced that they will collaborate on the promotion of renewable energy, encourage major utilities to develop renewable energy generation, and develop programs that will enable Facebook users to save energy and engage their communities in clean energy decisions.

The campaign involved 700,000 online activists, which called on Facebook (setting a world record for the most comments on a single Facebook post in one day: 80,000) to power its data centers with clean energy instead of coal, leveraging social network to push changes. “This move sets an example for the industry to follow,” said Tzeporah Berman, Co-director of Greenpeace’s International Climate and Energy Program. “This shift to clean, safe energy choices will help fight global warming and ensure a stronger economy and healthier communities.”

Previously GreenPeace got Google to provide more with numbers on their annual energy use and their carbon footprint in the new section called “The Big Picture” of their Google Green site. Both Google and Facebook made also public statement about their choice to build new Data Centers for Cloud in locations where they can leverage the availability of renewable energy source and get almost free cooling:

· Google newest facility in Hamina, Finland, uses a unique seawater cooling system that requires very little electricity

· Facebook is to build its first data center outside the United States in the northern Swedish town of Lulea. It will be the northernmost of its size on Earth and will serve more than 800 million users. Lulea, because its cold climate would save energy for cooling, and it could use environmentally friendly (and low cost) hydro-power connected with a reliable grid.

IT will be interesting to see now how all the other companies involved in the GreenPeace campaign “Facebook: Unfriend Coal” based on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube will react to the pressure from this NGO. Meanwhile GreenPeace keeps on updating the Guide to Greener Electronics, which has in the 6 years of its existence, now 17th edition, a scorecard for ranking 15 leading consumer electronics companies (mobile phone, TV and PC manufacturers) on policies and practices to reduce their impact on the climate, produce greener products, and make their operations more sustainable. It’s interesting to notice that HP is now “the top scoring company – strongest on sustainable operations and energy criteria but could improve on green products criteria”.

The greater opportunity for Cloud is not only to become more sustainable by itself, but in providing a more efficient and sustainable solution to customers. Jonathan Koomey is Consulting Professor at Stanford University and has researched and written extensively on electricity use by IT equipment. In a recent blog he gave four reasons why he thought cloud computing is (with few exceptions) significantly more energy efficient than using in-house data centres:

· It’s cheaper for large cloud computing providers to make efficiency improvements because they can spread the costs over a larger server base and can afford to be more focused on addressing energy use.

· With more users who are spread across different locations, computing loads are spread over the day, allowing for increased equipment utilisation. Cloud facilities for major vendors can be in the 30-40% utilization range, compared with 5-15% for in-house data centres.

· Cloud installations more often use virtualization and other techniques to separate the software from the physical servers, which allows for the greater optimisation of servers.

· Cloud computing sidesteps organizational issues, such as the problem of IT driving server purchases but facilities paying the electric bill. Cloud providers generally have one data centre budget and clear responsibilities assigned to one person.

Many other studies on this topic are being published: one of the most important is the study from CDP & Verdantix Cloud Computing – The IT Solution for the 21st Century help to understand that “large US companies that use cloud computing will be able to save $12.3bn in energy costs and 85.7 million metric tons of CO2 emissions annually by 2020. The energy savings are enough to power 5.7 million cars for one year. ”

There are also new studies sponsored by ICT companies to prove benefits of moving to cloud, for example:

· The Google study on Gmail is an example of how cloud-based services can be much more energy efficient (up to 80 times) than locally hosted services, helping businesses cut their electricity bills.

· WSP Environment & Energy, that has already done the study for Microsoft and Accenture, published the March 2011 research study on saving provided by the cloud based CRM supporting the statement that A salesforce.com transaction is on average 95% more carbon efficient than when processed in an equivalent on-premises deployment (64% more carbon efficient versus a private cloud deployment). The following is an example of daily saving claimed by Salesforce on http://www.salesforce.com/company/sustainability/impact.jsp (a calculator “Measure your impact” is also provided to help customers in evaluating how they can reduce their carbon emissions by moving their business to the cloud).

Please, let me know if you find this topic valuable by providing me some feedback, I should have much more information to share, and a presentation on this topic (sorry it’s in Italian) that I did at the IT Director Forum 2011 (Executive Circle) by Richmond Italia that is available to members of “Acquisti&Sostenibilità” on the portal in the studies section
Donato Toppeta

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Micro Economy, KickStart Sustainable Creative Projects

In the post “Six Social Media Trends for 2012“, December 12, 2011 by David Armano on HBRBlog I noticed this trend:

“The Micro Economy. Lastly as we roll into 2012, watch for a more social approach to solving business problems through a sort of micro-economy. Kickstarter gives anyone with a project, the opportunity to get that initiative funded by those who choose to (and patrons receive something in return). A crowdsourcing platform for would be inventors called Quirky lets the best product ideas rise to the top and then helps them get produced and sold while the “inventor” takes a cut. Air BnB turns homes into hotels and travelers into guests, providing both parties with an opportunity to make and save money. These examples may point to a new future reality where economic value is directly negotiated and exchanged between individuals over institutions.”

I decided to further learn about it since platforms for micro lending are an interesting component of sustainability, and searched about sustainable projects on Kickstarter

“the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. Every week, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields.A new form of commerce and patronage.This is not about investment or lending. Project creators keep 100% ownership and control over their work. Instead, they offer products and experiences that are unique to each project.”

where I found this interesting example:

Green economy board game, A Board & Card Games project in Honolulu, HI by Scott Cooney

“Clean Tech? Sustainable Food? Green Building? Green jobs? Hawai’i? The triple bottom line? This game has it all! “

It reminds me about Monopoly and it’s aligned with the gamification trend, but above all it’s about sustainability awareness in economic decisions and a successful proof of crowd sourcing funding by ICT enabled portal.

On KickStarter you can find other projects related to sustainability, some are already funded such as “PHX-1 : Design Tool Set Combining Hi-Tec-C, Signo DX, Hobby-Knife, Designer Ruler, & a Sustainable Bamboo Case: We love using great pens like the Hi-Tec-C and Uni-ball Signo DX (UM-151) series, but feel that the standard plastic housing doesn’t match the performance that the cartridges provide. So, we created a clean, unbranded, stainless steel body that works with BOTH cartridge brands & series”. Other ones are still waiting funding such as Freight Farms: Grow Fresh Food in Any Environment

Donato Toppeta

Low Power Computers/Devices are closer!

Intel has demonstrated an experimental (not commercial) low-powered microprocessor, based on Near Threshold Voltage (NTV) Processor technology (circuits operate at 400-500mV), that can be powered by a small solar cell (same size as a postage stamp). Code named Claremont, it consumes < 10mW when workload is light, and combined with the Hybrid Memory Cube was capable of running a PC using the Linux OS (the design was based on the Pentium, but much more energy efficient).

The Hybrid Memory Cube, is a concept DRAM developed by Micron in collaboration with Intel, delivering a 7-fold improvement in energy-efficiency over today’s DDR3. Hybrid Memory Cube uses a stacked memory chip configuration, forming a compact “cube,” and uses a new, highly efficient memory interface which sets the bar for energy consumed per bit transferred. Those new technologies raise the prospect of greener computing, allowing longer battery life for mobile devices and powerful, energy-efficient, extreme power saving processors for other scenarios such as extreme scale computing. One goal of the NTV research is in fact to enable architectures where power consumption is so low that entire devices could be powered not only by solar energy, but also by vibrations, thermoelectricity or ambient surrounding wireless signals.
I remember that this scenario was already proposed by Gunter Pauli in his “Blue Economy” book and in many lectures/posts, but now it’s more clear that our future mobile and embedded (IoT) devices will be less dependent from batteries (reducing also pollution due to e-waste) and that the future datacenters needed for the cloud will not keep on wasting so much power using “heat-sink free” CPU.
Intel has in fact a company-wide goal of delivering 300-fold improvement in energy efficiency in high-performance computing over the next 10 years. Meanwhile Intel has announced in march 2011 that it will deliver in 2012 four new processors for the category that span 45 watt high performance to sub-10 watt, all with advanced server features such as 64-bit, Virtualization Technology and Error-Correcting Code. More recently Intel has stated that they are working on a new class of platform power management for Ultrabooks™ that will aid in the delivery of always-on-always-connected computing. Both Google and Microsoft are working with Intel and will leverage Ultrabooks in their Android and Windows 8 platforms.

Smart City from IBM and Innovatori JAM

IBM has presented yesterday, during the Smarter Cities Europe analyst briefing in Milan, a new, very interesting solution (including a Lecture by Colin Harrison, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Master Inventor):  the IBM Intelligent Operations Center for Smarter Cities for building a more resilient society starting from sustainable smart cities using and holistic, ICT enabled approach. IBM Italy also showed a new demo room: “Major Smart Office” based on it (even if personally I was not too excited about the early version of the demo itself, because integration from some of best of breed projects missed a clear focus to the specific needs of a public local administration, as those that are common in Europe; probably the role based dashboard can be improved to make it more effective). This solution is a framework, delivered as part of the IBM Government Industry Framework , that  “synchronizes and analyzes efforts among sectors and agencies as they happen, giving decision makers consolidated information that helps them anticipate—rather than just react to—problems. By using these tested approaches, cities can manage growth and development in a sustainable way that minimizes disruptions and helps increase prosperity for everyone”.  It was derived insight from about 2,000 smarter cities projects around the world (20% in EU) in which IBM was involved or leaded (one of them “Bolzano Living safe”, presented the same day, related to health monitoring of elderly living alone in urban environment, was my favorite), aiming to enable the real-time communication and collaboration, reduce the impact of crisis situations and the overall cost of maintenance and repairs, minimize life-threatening issue and disruptions to public services and activities for citizens and city users. Various ICT components, such as Business Intelligence and prediction, where IBM has a strong reputation, and technologies from selected partners, such as sensors and smart grid and building can be selectively configured to specific needs (even if my first impression was that a monolithic “company ERP like” or “operating system architecture” approach might have influenced the design, that sounds to me more appealing for the new big smart cities of APAC). What makes it more interesting , in my opinion, is that the solution is made available also for IBM SmartCloud, with a subscription model that makes it attractive, in an CAPEX constrained public sector scenario, above all for medium size cities (or consortium of smaller towns). Obviously the core advantage of this SAAS solution  is related to the opportunity of quickly leveraging the outcomes of leading smart cities projects, the gateways to external data sources (including a rich partner ecosystem) and ability of IBM Global services to tune the system to the specific rules, issues and constraints of a local administration, ability to provide quick dynamic power and capability to specific planned events (such as Olympics games or world EXPO), or provide a new infrastructure after a major catastrophic event. You can find the IBM solution brief here . You can also browse IBM redbooks for Smarter Cities Series starting from: “A Foundation for Understanding IBM Smarter Cities”.

I also take the opportunity to invite you (or at least Italian speaking ones)  to the Innovatori Jam 2011 on September 14^th-15^th, a social Web 2.0 based event, that allow up to 20000 people to discuss and interact on 10 topics (forums), one of them is “Smart Cities” J. This Jam is organized by the” Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri – Agenzia per la diffusione delle tecnologie per l’innovazione” with IBM as technology partner and il Sole 24 ore as a media partner with the support of many “communities” including Think! For Innovation (a not for profit Innovation knowledge foundation) that I support, where you can find my related paper: The Smart City vision: How Innovation and ICT can build smart, “liveable”, sustainable cities.

It will be very interesting to test this brainstorming tool in the Italian scenario, since one year ago in England, the Coventry City Council held a three-day IBM Jam (CovJam) to engage in substantial conversation with its citizens and stakeholders about the city’s future. Martin Reeves, Chief Executive of Coventry City Council, stated: “People know that we can’t change overnight, that we need to take baby steps to being a smarter city with low-cost, practical projects. I was really impressed with some straightforward, not very costly ideas that people would like us to implement over the next few years.”

The five  topics for CovJam were:

• The Rebirth of Coventry – thinking of ways to improve the urban landscape of Coventry
• Sent to Coventry – discussing what Coventry wants to be renowned for
• Aspiring Coventry – looking at how to raise the expectations of Coventry and its citizens
• Community Cohesion – examining how people in Coventry can get on with each other
• Citizens in the Driving Seat – discussing how Coventry residents can have control of the city

JRC: a new Smart Grid report

From the JRC a very interesting news on smart grid:

“Brussels, 7 July 2011 – Intelligent electricity networks – smart grids – are a key component in the EU energy strategy, but substantial investments are needed to make them a reality. A new study from the European Commission’s inhouse science service, the Joint Research Centre (JRC), presents a review of 219 smart grid projects Europewide. The vast majority of investments, amounting to about €5.5 billion, were made in old Member States (“EU15″), while new Member States (“EU12″) tend to lag behind. By providing a complete catalogue of the projects to date, the report showcases how smart grids can help integrate more renewables, accommodate electric vehicles, give more control to consumers over their energy consumption, avoid blackouts and restore power quickly when outages occur. “

More information and full report are available here

Ningbo a leading chinese example of smart city

Smart cities are booming in Asia as urbanization is moving at the same pace there.  21 megacities already account for 9% of the world urban population; 97% of the fastest growing cities are in growth markets, 8 in China, 11 in India.  The China’s urban population has expanded rapidly in recent years. McKinsey estimated in a report in 2009 that an additional 350 million people, more than the population of the U.S., would move to the cities by 2015. More than 220 Chinese cities will have more than one million people (there are currently only 35 in Europe). This help to explain why in China, as many as 18 cities (according to a Lux Research report) have announced smart city plans. These include some of the biggest cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, and a number of small to medium-size cities, such as Ningbo, Wuxi, Chengdu, Wuhan, Kunming, Foshan, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou.

Ningbo is a seaport city in Zhejiang province, not too far from Shanghai since 2008, when a 33 km cross-sea bridge was built, allowing travel to Shanghai in less than two hours, with a population of 7.6 million inhabitants. Last year Ningbo released its action plan for developing as a Smart City (2011-2015) and soon it will held the “China Smart City Technology & Applications Expo”. According to the smart city plan, RMB 40.7 billion  will be invested in projects in the next 5 years (12th Five-Year Plan period). The plan address Five “Speed Ups”: Speed up construction of international strong port, building a modern metropolis, industrial restructuring, building a Smart City, construction of ecological civilization and improvement of life quality. There are 87 individual projects covering logistics, manufacturing, public services, energy, social administration, traffic, healthcare, residential site management, and entertainment services. For example IBM Smart Logistics Center, Ningbo Branch Corporation of Tata of India, BT Cloud Computing Center, Shuguang Cloud Computing Center have come to settle in.  Recently 100 companies and research institutes in Ningbo have formed a huge industrial chain of Internet of Things. The IoT is to generate an output value of RMB 5000 billion in coming 10 years. Currently, the Ningbo companies of IoT are mainly engaged in application solutions, sensors, transmission and telecom, computing, etc. Last year, they generated income of 10 billion yuan (excluding those from operators). With the progress of the Smart City construction, a number of application demo projects featuring the IOT technology are being undertaken, such as smart logistics and smart health care. With regard to infrastructure, the city has had a high-speed intranet and internet that covers all the urban areas, with the outlet bandwidth of 580 G. There are 10.55 million mobile phone subscribers, 840,000 3G subscribers. 1.77 million households have had internet access. With the progress of the Wireless Ningbo project, the 3G-based wireless wideband network has reached every corner of the city. A new-generation wireless network with TD-LTE as the core is to be built soon.  Also Smart Grid is part of the effort: during the 12th “Five-year Plan” period, Ningbo will invest 16.5 billion into the construction of the power grid. In fact  the electricity consumption in Ningbo will maintain a relatively rapid growth, with an expected average annual growth rate of 9.8% in its maximum load and 9.0% in its power supply volume in 2015. Ningbo power grid will develop photovoltaic power and wind power projects, adding an energy capacity of 100Mw. It will strive to achieve a 10% coverage of clean energy including natural gas, wind power, solar energy and biomass energy, thus furthering optimizing the proportion of energy supply. Ningbo will speed up also the construction of rechargeable power stations, three of medium-size and 60 rechargeable piles in the first phase. An official from Ningbo Power Bureau stated that “The average time of power failure will be drop down, from current 45 minutes down to 5 minutes or so. Power failure notification and pre-control can be accurate to every household. People can make reasonable electricity plans, control home appliances, watch TV through power line and so on, all with the help of smart interactive system.”
“China Smart City Technology & Applications Expo” will open from September 2 to 4 in Ningbo, it is China’s first and largest expo on the subject of smart city, and it will consist of the exhibitions and forums. The 21,000 m2 exhibition area has been fully booked by over 300 companies. Information from the organizing committee shows that 70% of the exhibiting companies are engaged in IT business, including 12 world top 500 companies, such as HP, IBM, Microsoft, NEC, HUAWEI, SIEMENS, etc, 4.4 billion purchasing funds by government. It is estimated that the fair is to attract 35000 visitors, including 10,000 professionals and 25000 common people.

The official government site states: “The city has made great progress in major projects for smart city construction. A meeting held on July 8th 2011 stated that the schemes for three pilot programs have been completed, which are about smart logistics, smart health care and smart social management. Some breakthroughs have been made and a large number of major projects have been settled so far; a number of other programs have been started, such as smart transport, smart Chengguan, smart manufacturing, trade, energy use, home services, etc.”

Senseable lab: from the Copenhagen wheel to PURBA

Most of you should remember of the Green Wheel, by MIT Mobile Experience Lab and Smart Cities Group, a smart mobility system in a wheel, that collects energy while riding the bicycle and releases it when needed.  Additionally it provides remote monitoring. The Copenhagen wheel (presented at COP15 Copenhagen) is a further evolution, developed by the peer MIT SENSEable Lab in cooperation with Ducati. It transforms ordinary bicycles into hybrid e-bikes that also function as mobile sensing units. In fact it can map pollution levels (carbon monoxide, NOx), noise, ambient temperature and relative humidity, traffic congestion, and document road conditions in real-time. Controlled through a smart phone, the Copenhagen Wheel it allows to lock the bike, change gears and select how much the motor assists you, capture your effort level and those of your surroundings if you agree to share those information with your friend community, or city administration, that will get granular data in real life traffic condition.

New applications keep on being developed by the Senseable Lab, directed by Carlo Ratti, in order to build a real-time city: “ The increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics in recent years is allowing a new approach to the study of the built  environment. The way we describe and understand cities is being radically transformed – alongside the tools we use to design them and impact on their physical structure.” The lab has produced: 200+ scientific papers, 35+ real-world projects, 25+ exhibitions, 100+ conference keynote addresses, numerous awards and representation in the global media.

The Senseable Lab is defined by the anthropologist Luca Simone as a “transdisciplinary” research group that “studies the interface between cities, people and technologies and investigates how the ubiquity of digital devices and the telecommunications networks that augment our cities are impacting urban living”.

Recently the MIT Senseable Lab organized  the First Workshop on Pervasive Urban Applications (PURBA) that took  place in conjunction with the 9th International Conference on Pervasive Computing in San Francisco, CA, USA on June 12-15, 2011, bringing  together researchers and practitioners to discuss and explore the research challenges and opportunities in applying the pervasive computing paradigm to urban spaces. It promoted “multi-disciplinary contributions that reveal interesting aspects about urban life and exploit the digital traces to create novel urban applications that benefit citizens, urban planners, and policy makers”. In my understanding the proposed scenario was the following:

• Digital networks and operations has produced an unprecedented wealth of information about URBAN LIFE.
• Handheld electronics, location devices, telecommunications networks, and a wide assortment of tags and sensors are constantly producing a rich stream of data reflecting various aspects of urban life.
• For urban planners and designers, these accumulations of digital traces are valuable sources of data in capturing the pulse of the city in an astonishing degree of temporal and spatial detail.
• We move toward achieving an augmented, fine-grained understanding of how the city functions – socially, economically and yes, even psychologically (“the city as a social archipelago”).

Many Papers were submitted to the PURBA best student paper award, the following ones were elected for final selection:

• Identifying and Understanding Urban Sport Areas using Nokia Sports Tracker
• Robust Land Use Characterization of Urban Landscapes using Cell Phone Data
• A centralized real-time Advanced Driver Assistance System based on smartphones
• Exploratory Study of Urban Flow using Taxi Traces
• Sensing The Urban: Using location-based social network data in urban analysis

Radical Innovation in ARPA-E

ARPA-E (Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy) invests in risky, but potentially disruptive, early-stage research on clean, affordable, energy technologies – much as the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) invested in radical ideas for defense (with funding from the U.S. military sector, a “dedicated customer”, while ARPA-E target open market and commodity applications). DARPA was the DOE agency responsible for successful technological innovations such as Internet and the stealth technology found in the F117A.

ARPA-e: Advanced Research Project Agency – Energy

It’s already a long story: recognizing the need to reevaluate the way the United States spurs innovation, the National Academies released a 2006 report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm”, that included the recommendation to establish ARPA-E within the Department of Energy (DOE). ARPA-E was created in 2007, but it didn’t receive a budget until April 2009 with $400 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), when President Obama launched it in a speech at NAS. In its first year, ARPA-E awarded $363 million in Recovery Act funding to 121 groundbreaking energy projects, with approximately 39% of projects led by universities, 33% by small businesses, 20% by large businesses, 5% by national labs, and 3% by non-profits. Funding was recently at risk and reduced as explained in http://www.innovationpolicy.org/arpa-es-semi-new-lease-on-life even if U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced in April 2011 that up to $130 million from ARPA-E will be made available to develop five new program areas that could spark critical breakthrough technologies and secure America’s energy future, two months earlier ARPA-E announced six of its projects have secured more than $100 million in outside private capital investment.

Radical innovation as in ARPA-E http://arpa-e.energy.gov/ means seeking:

• Entirely new tech approaches to existing problems, in order to bring a freshness, excitement, and sense of mission.
• Seeking and developing disruptive concepts to build “Disruptive” capabilities in entirely new areas with broad impact. “The best way to predict the future is to help create it”
• Opportunities to bring together silo-ed disciplines, in order to attract many of the best and brightest minds—those of experienced scientists and engineers, and, especially, those of students and young researchers, including persons in the entrepreneurial world;

It can be achieved by these ARPA-E organizational and cultural attitudes:

• STRUCTURE: distinct, nimble, flexible, “flat” and sparse org;  capable of sustaining for long periods of time those projects whose promise remains real, while phasing out programs that do not prove to be as promising as anticipated; Risk-taking, committed PMs.
• DNA: highest standard of excellence, aggressive, always questioning assumptions, output oriented
• FOCUS: high-risk/high-reward, at the forefront, addressing white space, translational stage projects; creative “out-of-the-box” transformational energy research where success would provide dramatic benefits for the nation
• APPROACH: promoting breakthrough technical advancement with rigorous consideration for commercialization, deployment, and impact at every step of the process. Conceived as a new tool to bridge the gap between basic energy research and development/industrial innovation. Honest broker among competing approaches. Success depends on its relationships with other organizations and its understanding of the current and projected security context.

Therefore ARPA-E as an R&D funding agency, identifies and supports high-risk, high-reward,  advanced energy technologies, helping to forge alliances between the innovators and adopters – in whatever country or industry they might lie, but it aims to provide:

• commercialization support, not just to solve technical challenges,
• national (US) security through economic and environmental one, too:
  • Reduce Energy-Related Emissions
  • Reduce Energy Imports
  • Improve Energy Efficiency
  • Ensure U.S. technological lead

Among its programs are initiatives (partially related to ICT) for:

• higher-energy-density batteries for electric vehicles (BEEST, Batteries for Electrical Energy Storage for Transportation: to allow electric cars with longer 300 miles range and lower life-cycle cost than gasoline cars),
• more energy-efficient cooling systems for buildings (BEETIT Building Energy Efficiency Through Innovative Thermo-devices),
• grid-scale energy storage (GRIDS, Grid-scale Rampable Intermittent Dispatachable Storage, to address high variability, up to minutes, in renewables, by 2-5 cheaper solutions with minimized response time, compared with pumped hydro and underground compressed air, to enable wide deployment), a different project is addressing Thermal Energy Storage with Supercritical Fluids.
• software and hardware to radically improve power grid management and transmission (GENI Green Electricity Network Integration)
• efficient conversion of sunlight to fuels (Electrofuels by electricity + non-photosynthetic microbes etc.).

Arun Majumdar, Director, ARPA-E, stated in 2010: “The widespread use of fossil fuels has long driven the engine of economic growth, and yet our dependence on these fuels severely threatens our national and environmental security due to our growing foreign energy dependence as well as climate change. Business as usual is not an option, as the outcome will be devastating. This is true not only for the US, but also for all nations in this interconnected world. The nation that successfully grows its economy with more efficient energy use, a clean domestic energy supply, and a smart energy infrastructure will lead the global economy of the 21st century.” And in 2011 at the 2011 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit: “What ARPA-e does best is identify the opportunities and create the competition. And eventually, the market will pick the winners.”

ICT companies focused on smart city effort (CISCO CUD)

Several ICT companies (e.g. IBM: Smart Planet, Accenture: Intelligent City Network, CISCO: Connected Urban Development, Ericsson Smart City, etc.) and research institutions (e.g. MIT: Smart City SENSEable lab,  Terreform One, etc.) already offer services and solutions’ components that can help to build more livable, sustainable cities by innovative ICT usage. It is not easy to evaluate how much are they applicable and compatible to specific scenarios and constraints, even if in many towns such as Boulder or Amsterdam many ICT companies are working together with utilities, universities and other organization to provide integrated solutions. Since I recently had the opportunity to listen to the presentation “Cisco Smart Connected Communities: Evoluzione dei Servizi al Cittadino” by Fabio Florio, I’ll start to present my understanding of CISCO CUD vision, that is strongly connected to the role of networking and internet based services in driving changes (“If it’s Connected to the Internet, it can be Greener.”)

CISCO: Connected Urban Development

San Francisco, Amsterdam, Seoul, Birmingham, Hamburg, Lisbon, and Madrid as member of Connected Urban Development (CUD) cities, aim to demonstrate how to reduce carbon emissions, delivering innovative, sustainable models for urban planning and economic development. ICT, above all high connectivity and collaboration, allow introducing fundamental improvements in the efficiency of urban infrastructure. The CUD effort is supported by Cisco, aligned with the “Clinton Global Climate Initiative” since 2006, with the contribution of MIT Mobile Experience Lab. It envisions a future “where the intelligent use of networking architectures can transform society not only by boosting productivity and spurring economic growth, but also by supporting environmental sustainability and enhancing the quality of life in urban environments”.

The CUD scope refers to the following areas:                                                                  

•  Increasing efficiency of traffic flow, service offerings and manageability of public transportation, also to avoid that urban mobility problems can rapidly turn into an urban mobility crisis
• Establishing new distributed delivery models for city services to its residents
• Creating sustainable real estate models which incorporate energy efficiency and new work environment models (remote worker, collaboration, shared space)
• Enabling new resident services to self-manage carbon footprint

Success metrics defined for CUD include:

• Decrease of Transport Demand (in terms of traffic volume)
• Increase of Transport Speed (in terms of traffic speed and throughput)
• Reduced tonnage of emissions: CO2, NOx, PM10
• Increased efficiency of public transport: timeliness, safety, utilization rates
• Increased energy efficiency of buildings and of energy grids

The CUD blueprint is based on a broadband infrastructure which enables new solutions for Work, Mobility, Energy and Buildings. For example the Cisco EnergyWise relies on the intelligence of the network to communicate messages that measure, report and control energy across the enterprise/building. It specifically focus on these goals: 1) It allows companies to be environmentally friendly by saving energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions; 2) It make clear to customers that they can reduce Energy consumption cost and understands why this is important in today‘s world climate; 3) It support Government directives around the globe that are requiring companies to be greener and increase sustainability.

The CUD approach is based on these principles:

1. ICT directly contributes both to energy usage and CO2 reduction.
2. Deploying urban pervasive, broadband-based, ICT applications and services improves energy efficiencies in Connected and Sustainable cities: Built Environment, Mobility, Work and Energy. It can enable radically innovative practices in the areas of urban form and planning, energy policy, new working practices, and new lifestyles.
3. ICT and broadband connectivity have become enablers of combined, citywide urban policy, and of previously disconnected (siloed government initiatives) operational programs.

For example the” Connected Public Transit” addresses the following features: Current transit conditions (crowding and delays); trip optimization to minimize time, financial and environmental costs; transit vehicle arrival; park & ride information; mapping and guidance to nearby public transport stops/stations, and destinations; integrated payment systems of public transit (including multiple agencies), taxi, and related services, able to accommodate variable rates and special discounts; on-board wireless services, for  work and entertainment stations, similar to first-class airline services; transit priority in traffic signal controls; vehicle performance monitoring, such as driving profile, on-time reliability, passenger crowding.The CUD toolkit, that is intended to structure and institutionalize the outputs of CUD projects, is one of the outcomes. It actually contains the Executive Presentation, Project Recap / Whitepaper, Proof of Concept / prototype, Technical Architecture, Value Case and Other Tools for these efforts:

• MOBILITY: Smart mobility and eco-footprint monitoring, The Connected Bus: San Francisco; Personal Travel Assistant: Seoul and Amsterdam; Smart Transportation Pricing: Seoul; Intelligent traffic management: Hamburg
• WORK: Smart Work Centers: Amsterdam (108 SWC in 2011 www.w-smartwork.nl );
• BUILDINGS AND ENERGY: Urban Energy Management: Madrid; Smart Urban Energy for Schools: Lisbon; Connected and sustainable work and living solutions: Amsterdam EnergyWise buildings and ICT: Birmingham                                   
• ICT AND SOCIO-ECONOMICS: Urban EcoMap: San Francisco
•  MIT Research Projects: Urban Development, Personal Travel Assistant, Connected Home, Sustainable Transportation