Future Cities Conference´13 / Pól Mac Aonghusa - "Future Life and Services"

IBM Research - IrelandIBM Research - Ireland

© 2012 IBM Corporation

Future Life and ServicesShake up your City

Pól Mac Aonghusa,IBM Research – Ireland



By the middle of this Century, most of humanity will live in Cities that are increasingly instrumented & interconnected. In 2013 we expect to generate >850 Exabytes of Internet data. Most of it will be user contributed content (versus traditional enterprise sources).

Global access to technology is already driving trends like ‘virtual citizenship’, ‘virtual employment’ & ‘social innovation’

City + Citizen contributed content will become a core strategic economic resource – and the most scalable natural resource a City possesses.

Mobility, Openness & connection

will matter more than presence & rigid structures

Imagining Future Life: Interactions and Expectations

On-demand interaction will increasingly be the norm for a global community of virtual citizen innovators … who expect their experience of a City to be as simple as using an appliance



Imagining Future Services: Interdependency and Complexity

We have built a world of massive complexity and interdependency….

….and along with progress, we have brought on massive risks we don’t manage well

24 Hours of Air Travel Global Trade Global Financial Markets

Nuclear Technology

Pandemics Global Financial Crisis Nuclear Disasters



Some Good News: The future is already here -- it’s just not very evenly distributed*

• Linz, Austria• Solar City, an entire district exclusively using solar power for energy.

• Milan, Italy, Southampton, UK, Salzburg, Austria• Unified smart card access across services, i.e., bus, library, museum, bikes, and EV rental.

• Stockholm, Sweden• Congestion charging and real-time information from taxi and lorry GPS, traffic and pollution sensors, transit

systems, and weather • 20% reduction in city traffic, and halving the average travel time• 40% reduction in GHG, such as CO2

• Barcelona• EV innovation: >250 charge points, all with real-time status, free city parking and charging, 3% of parking spaces

reserved for EVs.

• Madrid• Fully integrated its emergency management systems (fire, police, ambulance) with responsiveness increased by

25% (>8 minutes)

• Amsterdam• Public/private platform to collaborate on aggressive goals:

• Municipal organizations climate-impact neutral before 2015• 20% renewable energy by 2025, • 40% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2025

*William Gibson



Three urgent challenges on the Future Cities roadmap

• Assimilate Data at Internet Scale– Diversity, heterogeneity

– Accuracy, sparsity, resilience

– Volume, provenance, privacy

• Model Human Demand– Understand how people use the

city infrastructure– Infer demand patterns

• Factor in Uncertainty– Operations and planning– Organise and open data and

knowledge, to engage citizens, empower universities and enable business



ReasonableCity: Learning Systems to Help Diagnose the City

ProblemHow can we provide City decision makers predict and diagnose events and anomalies in real-time from massive, rich, complex, heterogeneous and dynamic urban data?

Research Challenges• Identifying relevant data and information• Capturing and representing time-evolving

knowledge• Combining and correlating time-evolving

knowledge from heterogeneous data sources

• Advanced fusion of data

ApproachA system that identifies the nature and cause of changes and explain logical connection of knowledge across space and time

• Identify a common (semantic) representation layer for causality detection and analysis

• Develop a reasoning engine that interprets causality for diagnosis

• Demonstrate the prototype with DCC Data

• Improve the flexibility of causality detection (through ML techniques)


© 2012 IBM CorporationDiagnosing Cities: A Road Traffic Congestion CaseFreddy Lecue, Anika Schumann, Marco Sbodio

Example … simplify decision making with smart systems that learn



Pervasive Technologies Datasets as Digital Footprints

Understand how people use the city's infrastructure

Mobility (transportation mode)

Consumption (energy, water, waste)

Environmental impact (noise, pollution)

Applications

Improve city’s services Optimize planning

Minimizing operational costs

Create feedback loops with citizens to reduce energy consumption and environmental impact



• Objectives

• What is the relationship between the on-line and physical communities … and what does it mean?

• Can we use this data to help adapt or anticipate service demand?

• Can we characterise city spaces for service operation and planning?

Example … interpreting human behavior to model demand

ApplicationsHelp region and city to better plan or adjust operations

Adjust service catchment areas (e.g. hospital serviced neighbors)

Plan new transit systems to help connecting areas with low interaction



…and uncertainty is everywhere!

River basins, coastal bays and estuaries

Households

Water treatment and distribution networks

Water shortagesIncreased costs

Water quality issues

Water shortagesIncreased costs

Water quality issues

Stress on water qualityFloods

Stress on water qualityFloods

Capacity shortagesIncreased investment and operating costs

Capacity shortagesIncreased investment and operating costs

Population growth

Climate change

Renewable energy

Water consumption

Rainfall patternsModel accuracy Measurements

Economicclimate

All these systems are connected in some

way – their IT solutions should be

too!Equipment failure

And…solutions should address uncertainty for robust design, planning, and information sharing



Valve PlacementValve Placement

Active and Robust Water Distribution Network Management

• Robust pressure management with uncertain demand profiles– Optimization model* includes network hydraulics, and scales to very large urban

networks– Places valves and recommends outlet pressures to reduce leakage while satisfying

customer requirements

• Case study: Chapelizod District Metered Area (DMA) in Dublin– Up to 44% reduction in average pressure– Estimated 66 (16%) additional households can be served

Optimal valve placement Resulting pressure reduction

* Assistance from HRL on initial model



What could you do if you had access to all the public data of a city? Could you make the city run better, faster, cheaper? What new economic opportunities would emerge? (Dublin City Manager, 2011)

ChallengeHow can we make a ‘Future City’ as consumable and accessible as email?

Observation“After the telephone was introduced more than a century ago, Kurzweil says, it took 50 years for a quarter of the American population to get one. After the cell phone was introduced, it took only seven years.”

…. ‘Future Cities’ in < 7 years

Email was 40 years old in 2012!



Working harder is not sustainable

Cities require innovative approaches

Join Us: http://www.ibm.com/ie/research

Future Cities Conference´13 / Pól Mac Aonghusa - "Future Life and Services"

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