10 Cities Raise Tech IQs In IBM Challenge
IBM's Smarter Cities Challenge helps 100 cities around the globe improve education, infrastructure, public safety and economic development. Look how 10 winning cities are tackling tough problems.
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IBM is well known for its Grand Challenges, from developing Deep Blue, the chess-playing super computer, to Watson, the language-aware, question-and-answer computer that beat two human champions on the game show Jeopardy. IBM's three-year Smarter Cities Challenge is the company's largest-ever philanthropic initiative, bringing a $50 million competitive grant program to 100 cities worldwide.
Launched in 2010, the Smarter Cities Challenge has already seen grants awarded to two waves of winning cities from among more than 400 applicant cities seeking innovative, technology-driven solutions to major challenges such as economic and workforce development, transportation and infrastructure planning, downtown revitalization and urban planning. The latest round of 31 winning cities was announced at the November 15 Smarter Cities Summit in Palisades, N.Y., where mayors, city CIOs and other policymakers and technology innovators gathered to review successes and share strategies.
The grant program assigns six IBM experts to study the problems identified by each city. The grant work culminates in a three-week, pro bono consulting engagement through which these experts meet with local stakeholders and deliver recommendations on how cities can work smarter, taking advantage of technology to make the best use of scarce resources. Among the cities that have been through this process, Boston is developing an open data platform aimed at better sharing information, and it's working toward developing a cross-agency master traffic control system. Chicago is looking to develop a Silicon Valley of its own, but to do that it needs to develop a tech-savvy workforce. IBM is working with the city on math and science education initiatives across primary and secondary schools.
[ Want more background on how forward-looking cities are using technology to plan smarter? See our sister site, UBM's Future Cities. ]
In Louisville, Kentucky, breathing disorders such as asthma are seen at higher-than-average rates, so the city is dispensing GPS- and Bluetooth-enabled rescue inhalers that gather data on asthma attack outbreaks so the city can find causes and work on cures. Philadelphia is divided between digital haves and have-nots, with more than 40% of households lacking a computer and access to the Internet. The city is working with cable provider Comcast to provide low-cost packages bundling laptops and Internet access, and IBM has advised the city on coordinating data, content and programs aimed at addressing a gap in education and training.
IBM's consulting engagements in each city are valued at $400,000, but it's a smart philanthropic investment that could lead to commercial rewards. IBM's recommendations often point toward data-integration projects, analytics deployments and case-management systems projects that might cost upwards of tens of millions of dollars. Even where such projects are subject to competitive bidding requirements, the Challenge Grant work gives IBM deep insight into city systems and IT challenges, and, more importantly, goodwill and close working relationships with city leaders and technology stakeholders.
Read on to learn about the tech innovation plans in Boston; Chicago; Durham, N.C.; Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; Louisville, Ky.; Malaga, Spain; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; St. Louis, Mo.; and Syracuse, N.Y.
Boston's challenge was sharing data across departments to avoid redundant data-collection efforts and improve city decision making. Data sharing is a common problem for many cities, and it's one Boston has addressed with the launch of an open data platform. "We think we have a nice platform and it does simple things like replace the need for Freedom of Information Act requests, but there's lots more to be done," said Boston CIO Bill Oates (pictured above). "Part of that challenge is to remediate data quality issues and the siloed nature of our systems."
Boston's 2012 IBM Smarter Cities Challenge Grant bolstered efforts to reduce traffic and carbon emissions within the city. An IBM team surveyed more than 75 stakeholders in June and found that agencies including the Boston Transportation Department (BTD), an Environmental and Energy Services Cabinet and the city's Department of Innovation and Technology could all make use of traffic data that wasn't being shared. Recommendations included standardizing traffic data models and formats, automatically sharing BTD traffic data with other agencies, and consolidating access to videocameras across departments as the basis of a master traffic-control system.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (foreground right) has made attracting software and technology firms a high priority for the city. Chicago sought and won a Smarter Cities Challenge Grant in 2011 to help the city align public school math and science education with economic development goals. "With the curriculum that IBM will be developing with Chicago Public Schools, we'll be giving students a better chance at a future in the most promising area of employment, and that's in technology and computer sciences," Emanuel said during a 2011 press conference.
IBM has since worked with the city to develop a long-range plan and short-term strategies to connect public school programs and the city's community college system to the city's economic agenda. "There were disconnects between the courses being taught, the success rates of students in key subjects and the economic development strategy," Stanley Litow, IBM's VP of corporate citizenship & corporate affairs (foreground, left), told InformationWeek at the November 15 Smarter Cities Challenge Summit in Palisades, N.Y.
The city's new plan is to develop, track and analyze data on graduation rates by subject area, courses taught in community colleges, credentials of schools and instructors by subject area, and skills gaps in Chicago's available workforce. "If there's a disconnect between the data and the economic development strategy, you either have to change your strategy or change your approach to student preparation," Litow concluded.
Even in Durham, N.C., a city with low unemployment and an anchor of North Carolina's technology-rich Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Research Triangle, the problem of poverty and "disconnected youth" weighs on the city's economy. Mayor William V. Bell (inset photo) said 4,500 to 6,000 city youth from age of 14 to 25 are disconnected from schools and paths to employment. It's estimated that high school dropouts experience three times the poverty rate of those who have attended even one year of college, according to Bell. The long-term cost to the city is lower tax rolls and higher costs for policing.
Durham won a Smart Cities Challenge Grant in 2011 to study ways to keep youth in school or to go back to school to become positive, contributing members of the community. "If we can reconnect even 3,000 of these youth, we could save the city as much as $42 million per year," Bell said at the November 15 Smarter Cities Challenge Summit.
In a March public report, IBM's Challenge Grant team recommended a comprehensive service delivery model designed to coordinate the fragmented services of multiple city agencies. Recommended technologies included a case-management system with early warning alerts to flag youth in need of preventative or recovery actions. IBM also recommended a digital service-provider catalog with workflows to manage client referrals and handoffs from agency to agency. Bell said Durham is now in the first phase of a four-phase, three-year implementation project on the recommendations.
As part of its 2009-2018 strategic plan, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, has adopted a "Vision Zero" goal for fatalities and serious injuries related to traffic accidents. The goal is ambitious given that this sprawling city had 27 traffic-related fatalities in 2010. The city won a Smarter Cities Challenge Grant in 2011 to develop ideas to improve the integration, analysis and dissemination of traffic-safety data. IBM's team recommended that the city create an analytics center of excellence and improve data governance within the city's Office of Traffic Safety. IBM also recommended ways to simplify safety performance measures, improve public access to traffic-safety and transit information with social media, and step up collaboration with industry and academia.
Edmonton has since responded to the report by engaging IBM to study integrating data on weather, road closures, road maintenance and police-enforcement activities. The goal is to create a real-time feed to inform traffic routing and traffic safety decisions. Edmonton is also working with Siemens on sensor-equipped transportation infrastructure and with analytics vendor PTV America on traffic-data monitoring and traffic-flow simulation.
Residents of Louisville, Kentucky, have a higher-than-average rate of breathing disorders such as asthma, but studies of pollutants and allergens in city's Ohio River Valley topology have been inconclusive. The city embraced a data-driven approach to the problem early this year by partnering with Asthmapolis, a Madison, Wisconsin-based company that developed a GPS- and Bluetooth-enabled inhaler and companion smartphone app that precisely logs when and where patients administer their medication. The app makes it easy for patients and doctors to track the use of medication while healthcare providers and municipalities see the bigger picture: precisely mapped data on breathing incidents.
Louisville won an IBM Smarter Cities Challenge Grant in March to bolster its data-driven approach. "We wanted advice on what other data sets to mash up against this new data on asthma episodes," Ted Smith, chief of economic growth & innovation for Metro Louisville, told InformationWeek.
Louisville has data available from air pollution monitors and traffic sensors, which Smith described as obvious data sources, but following a three-week fact-finding trip to Louisville in July, IBM recommended, among other measures, developing data-sharing plans with the Commonwealth of Kentucky, area healthcare systems, school systems, the housing authority and the tree advisory board, among other stakeholders.
"The IBM team brought a number of different angles to the problem, including bringing the schools into the discussion," Smith said, noting that data on absenteeism will help shed light on the impact of asthma on area youth. "They also pointed out data available from the federal government and the state that we didn't know existed."
IBM's report was issued in September and about half of the 500 Asthmapolis inhalers the city has purchased have now been distributed, so the bulk of the data collection, integration and analysis work has yet to be done.
The beautiful city of Malaga on Spain's Costa del Sol counts on tourism as the backbone of the local economy. But the financial downturn and credit crisis that has rocked southern Europe has not spared this city. Unemployment has more than doubled in Malaga over the last five years to more than 30%, while the rate among youth aged 18 to 25 is a staggering 50%. Public programs have helped incubate more than 100 new businesses in the region, yet few of those businesses have thrived and become significant employers without ongoing public support -- an untenable situation in the face of government austerity measures.
Malaga won a Smarter Cities Challenge Grant in early 2012 to promote sustainable economic development and diversifying the city's tourist-dependent economy. A three-week study carried out by an IBM team this summer yielded recommendations on economic development, public-private cooperation, branding efforts and technology development. Malaga's economic development strategy was found to be fragmented and lacking clear measures. It's hoped that private-sector collaboration will tie educational and entrepreneurial initiatives with emerging industries in the area. Branding campaigns are seen as a way to promote Malaga as a business center as well as a hub for tourism. Public data sharing, meanwhile, is expected to highlight technology as part of Malaga's business-friendly culture.
Speaking at an IBM Smarter Cities event in November, Malaga's Mayor, Francisco de la Torre (inset photo), said he's confident the proposals will help the city drive technological development and improve the city's employment problem, but he also voiced concern about educational bureaucracy. "To address our structural problems we need high-quality education, but that's not in the mayor's hands because the provinces and the state government control the schools," he said. Several mayors in attendance, including Mayor William Bell of Durham and Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia, echoed de la Torre's concern that mayors can't always address all aspects of a city problem.
With more than 100 colleges and universities in greater Philadelphia, the area is one of the most education-rich cities in America. Yet more than 500,000 city residents fall below adult literacy levels. What's more, only 24% of city residents have college degrees and only a third of city residents are qualified to fill the positions that are available.
All of these stats, cited by Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter (inset photo), figured in the city's 2011 win of an IBM Smarter Cities Challenge Grant. A digital divide in the city starts with the fact that until recently more than 40% of city households lacked access to a computer or the Internet. Thus, a cornerstone of the city's plan was to create Digital On-Ramps to bring online education and training opportunities to youth and adults.
Working with cable provider Comcast, the city set up an Internet Essentials package including a laptop computer, modem, Internet access and training for $9.95 per month for qualified households. The city also established 77 public computing centers across the city, concentrated in neighborhoods with limited Internet access.
Access to the Internet is just a start. IBM's Smarter Cities team recommended developing an interactive, online guide to schools, courses and training programs. Scores of agencies and programs were found to be working on bits and pieces of the literacy challenge, yet they weren't collaborating or sharing data. IBM recommended creating a federated, cloud-based view of the populace built on data pulled together from multiple sources, including public schools and community colleges. The team also recommended engaging Philadelphia's business community, including trade associations, chambers of commerce and business councils to align courses and training programs with entry-level skills required in growing city industries including education, medical services and tourism.
"The Smarter Cities plan validated our concept, gave us an operational plan and helped us land on concrete, early-action projects," said Nutter. Suggested "quick win" projects included using predictive analytics to spot students in danger of dropping out of school to trigger intervention programs; developing a credentialing system and digital badges to recognize proficiency and provide a permanent electronic record of employable skills; and launching projects to better understand the needs of low-literate adults and to serve them with neighborhood-based adult-learning communities and tutoring programs.
Pittsburgh is now experiencing its third renaissance since overcoming the collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s, according to Mayor Luke Ravenstahl (inset photo). After decades of decline, the city's population is now rebounding, according to the latest Census figures, with young people staying and working in Pittsburgh rather than leaving after graduating from area colleges and universities, Ravenstahl said. Growth has put a coordinated traffic plan on the top of the city's agenda, and in March it won a Smarter Cities Challenge grant to study rail, bus, auto, bicycle and walking path options. IBM's Challenge Grant team recently wrapped up its report.
"They walked our streets, rode our buses, visited our economic development zones and saw our pilot projects and, as a result, they developed valuable recommendations that we'll use to plan our future transportation system," Ravenstahl told attendees of the November 15 Smarter Cities Challenge Summit in Palisades, N.Y.
In one example, IBM recommended better sharing of information and expanded use of sensor-based systems. A "Park PGH" program, for example, gives drivers access to real-time information on parking availability, but it's currently limited to a few sensor-equipped lots. In another example, the city this year reduced traffic congestion in an economic development zone by 20% by using smart, computer-coordinated traffic signals. That project was spearheaded by Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, and the mayor said he wants the technology installed citywide.
"The technology changes the light from red to green when it needs to be changed, and it eliminates one of my pet peeves, which is paying police officers to change traffic signals when they're better suited to the more important work of keeping us safe," Ravenstahl said.
St. Louis, Missouri's 2011 IBM Smarter Cities Challenge Grant was focused on the problem of crime and public safety, a problem that has marred the city's image and hampered economic development. Mayor Francis G. Slay sought recommendations on ensuring that information on crime would get to the right people across the entire public safety ecosystem, including the mayor's office, police department, circuit attorney, circuit courts and parole and probations.
IBM's team found that individual agencies had separate, siloed systems for tracking offenders. To create a unified view, the Challenge Grant team recommended creating a common language and data model for sharing information across agencies. IBM also offered a number of recommendations about improving accountability and using data to spot crime trends, target police patrols and measure performance improvements. Yet no amount of technology or data analysis could overcome a gap in the chain of command in St. Louis whereby the city's police department was not accountable to the mayor.
"Our recommendations highlighted this issue, and they've just changed the regulatory structure in St. Louis so that the mayor does now have control over the police department," said Stanley Litow, IBM's VP of corporate citizenship & corporate affairs, in an interview with InformationWeek. "People had been talking about the issue for years, but being able to say, 'a team of outside experts identified this as a core problem,' may have been part of the impetus for getting the problem solved."
Syracuse, N.Y., a 2011 winner of a Smarter Cities Challenge Grant, sought IBM's help with the problem of foreclosures. Exacerbated by an exodus of jobs and population to surrounding suburbs, foreclosures lead to properties moving off the tax rolls and ending up in the city's hands. Stephanie Miner, elected mayor in 2009, wanted a data system that could predict the properties most likely to go off the tax rolls before the city faced the problem.
A prototype "Vacant Property Predictive System of Systems" designed by IBM used available housing and tax-roll data and turned up some interesting correlations, according to IBM.
"The smaller the lot size, the more likely it was to be abandoned, and we also found that male heads of household in the city were more likely to have a problem with poverty," Ari Fishkind, an IBM spokesperson told InformationWeek.
The predictive system performs "situational analysis" whereby recommendations are prioritized based on the state of the surrounding neighborhood and the likelihood that individual vacancies might tip neighborhoods into a distressed state, according to IBM.
"We're moving from having a sense of what's important for neighborhoods and housing to putting in a system in place where we actually have objective data so we can prevent vacancies and bring properties back online," said Mayor Miner in a video about the city's Challenge Grant project.
The road to building a smart city has speed bumps and potholes, cautions Sarah Wartell (inset photo), president of the Urban Institute. First, it's easy to get too smart about solving problems. "It's very cool and sexy to have computational scientists and researchers figuring how much data they can gather, but you want to make sure you're not overlooking much simpler solutions to problems," she warns.
Second, partnerships with the private sector are often touted, but Wartell said government agencies have to learn how to innovate and develop the capacity to sustain programs on their own after private entities have moved on.
Finally, the big data drive has cities looking for any and all sources of information to fuel data-driven decisions, but it's essential for cities to make sure they have comprehensive information. "Some data sets don't do a good job of measuring all citizens, and the people most in need often get missed," she says. "You want to make sure your data perspective is inclusive and fair."
The road to building a smart city has speed bumps and potholes, cautions Sarah Wartell (inset photo), president of the Urban Institute. First, it's easy to get too smart about solving problems. "It's very cool and sexy to have computational scientists and researchers figuring how much data they can gather, but you want to make sure you're not overlooking much simpler solutions to problems," she warns.
Second, partnerships with the private sector are often touted, but Wartell said government agencies have to learn how to innovate and develop the capacity to sustain programs on their own after private entities have moved on.
Finally, the big data drive has cities looking for any and all sources of information to fuel data-driven decisions, but it's essential for cities to make sure they have comprehensive information. "Some data sets don't do a good job of measuring all citizens, and the people most in need often get missed," she says. "You want to make sure your data perspective is inclusive and fair."
IBM is well known for its Grand Challenges, from developing Deep Blue, the chess-playing super computer, to Watson, the language-aware, question-and-answer computer that beat two human champions on the game show Jeopardy. IBM's three-year Smarter Cities Challenge is the company's largest-ever philanthropic initiative, bringing a $50 million competitive grant program to 100 cities worldwide.
Launched in 2010, the Smarter Cities Challenge has already seen grants awarded to two waves of winning cities from among more than 400 applicant cities seeking innovative, technology-driven solutions to major challenges such as economic and workforce development, transportation and infrastructure planning, downtown revitalization and urban planning. The latest round of 31 winning cities was announced at the November 15 Smarter Cities Summit in Palisades, N.Y., where mayors, city CIOs and other policymakers and technology innovators gathered to review successes and share strategies.
The grant program assigns six IBM experts to study the problems identified by each city. The grant work culminates in a three-week, pro bono consulting engagement through which these experts meet with local stakeholders and deliver recommendations on how cities can work smarter, taking advantage of technology to make the best use of scarce resources. Among the cities that have been through this process, Boston is developing an open data platform aimed at better sharing information, and it's working toward developing a cross-agency master traffic control system. Chicago is looking to develop a Silicon Valley of its own, but to do that it needs to develop a tech-savvy workforce. IBM is working with the city on math and science education initiatives across primary and secondary schools.
[ Want more background on how forward-looking cities are using technology to plan smarter? See our sister site, UBM's Future Cities. ]
In Louisville, Kentucky, breathing disorders such as asthma are seen at higher-than-average rates, so the city is dispensing GPS- and Bluetooth-enabled rescue inhalers that gather data on asthma attack outbreaks so the city can find causes and work on cures. Philadelphia is divided between digital haves and have-nots, with more than 40% of households lacking a computer and access to the Internet. The city is working with cable provider Comcast to provide low-cost packages bundling laptops and Internet access, and IBM has advised the city on coordinating data, content and programs aimed at addressing a gap in education and training.
IBM's consulting engagements in each city are valued at $400,000, but it's a smart philanthropic investment that could lead to commercial rewards. IBM's recommendations often point toward data-integration projects, analytics deployments and case-management systems projects that might cost upwards of tens of millions of dollars. Even where such projects are subject to competitive bidding requirements, the Challenge Grant work gives IBM deep insight into city systems and IT challenges, and, more importantly, goodwill and close working relationships with city leaders and technology stakeholders.
Read on to learn about the tech innovation plans in Boston; Chicago; Durham, N.C.; Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; Louisville, Ky.; Malaga, Spain; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; St. Louis, Mo.; and Syracuse, N.Y.
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