A Smarter Planet Blog

Building a Smarter City in Cambridge, Ontario

2010-09-08T17:22:03Z

Editor’s note: Following is a guest blog from Mike Hausser, the director of asset management for the City of Cambridge in Ontario, Canada:

How do you start building a smarter city if you are a rapidly growing municipality of 125,000 with over 200,000 assets like buildings, sewer systems and roadways valued at more than $1.2 billion across 50,000 locations?

Here at the City of Cambridge, Ontario, we think we’ve got what it takes. And we have combined vision, technology and collaboration with the public and private sector to make it happen.

Today, in partnership with the Federal Government of Canada and IBM, we announced how we are using the Canadian Federal Government’s Gas Tax Funding to better manage critical city information and assets.

The Federal Gas Tax fund (GTF) is a key component of the Building Canada infrastructure plan. The plan’s intent is to strengthen Canada’s communities by providing predictable and long-term funding in support of municipal infrastructure that contributes to cleaner air, cleaner water and reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

Technological advances now allow cities to be instrumented, making it easier than ever before to collect data points and use that information to make real-time decisions in areas like traffic flow, water usage, sewage flow and overall water management, We believe a smarter city goes to work for its citizens. It measures and influences more aspects of their operations. These interconnected cities allow free flow of information from one discrete system to another, which increases the efficiency of the overall infrastructure. Finite resources are optimized.

Vision and creative leadership at a municipal level are critical. For example, some cities have used the gas tax funding to repave roads. We’ll do some of that too, but we have decided to take a more innovative, forward-thinking approach that lays the foundation for a smarter city in a number of key areas:

Water: It is a precious resource which is becoming increasingly scarce worldwide. Our new water management process calculates the outdoor water use volumes by customer. Through the interconnection of several independent systems, the collective datasets allow us to analyze the volume of sewage from homes and businesses against the volume of water coming in from ground water or rainfall. Problem areas can then be quickly targeted for detailed inspection. This process is helping improve the efficiency of our sewer systems and is reducing environmental impacts.

Traffic: We want to make driving easier for citizens of Cambridge. Traffic is counted and loaded into the new system automatically alongside collision records. This helps us do safety audits to more efficiently determine the need for changes in intersection design, speed limits, traffic calming and traffic control. This information is also automatically used to classify roads to determine the severity of road defects and prioritize repairs.

Our approach to traffic management also includes sidewalks. We have started mobile inspection of sidewalks. The computer is mounted on a bike which is ridden across nearly 800 kilometres of sidewalks each summer. The system tracks what sidewalks have been inspected and safety hazards and defects are identified on a map by the operator. Defects and safety hazards that fall within certain thresholds are queued and the IBM system then creates automatic service requests to generate the appropriate work order, or job ticket, for repair crews. Progress is monitored to ensure defects are resolved within expected time frames.

Natural events that affect traffic are also managed using IBM software systems. For example, to better manage snow storms, we developed a set of response plans and templates. Resources are deployed based on the severity of the forecasted storm. These plans setup a series of work-flow controlled work orders. Each job ticket assigns work to resources in their respective routes or locations on a preliminary timeline that ranges from 24 hours to 24 days in the case of a severe storm.

Plow and salt route areas for roads and sidewalks are created for various levels of response and each area is reflected in the IBM system as a location. Based on the weather forecast, the manager in charge inputs an internal service request choosing the appropriate classification which represents the level of storm expected. The service request presents the Manager with questions that record the expected duration, nature, and extent of the forecasted storm.

The IBM system then generates the appropriate ‘package’ of work (based on the classification) with a series of job tickets each with an initial target start/end time, assignment to the appropriate manager, and appropriate routes and locations. These job tickets are currently paper-based. Our plan is to replace the current paper output with a “system-to-system” link by installing on-board computers in the plow trucks. In this scenario, the appropriate route is sent to the selected operator and the system will provide onboard navigation of an optimized route, re-optimizing on the fly to account for blocked streets.

Digital Infrastructure Management: Digital closed circuit television robot units crawl through sanitary and storm pipes to inspect structural and operational condition of pipe assets. The video and data is automatically loaded back into the system. Defects that need immediate attention generate a work order. Higher defect rates will trigger capital renewal/rehabilitation projects.

Being able to automate and more efficiently manage City services like leaf pickup, snow removal, water and traffic infrastructure gives us the ability to better service the citizens of Cambridge – today and in the future.

I believe we are living proof that a smarter city is reachable for all sizes of municipalities. With bold leadership and vision to use funding creatively, plus state-of-the-art technology and a commitment to bettering services and protecting precious resources, anything is possible.

Photo caption: A cambridge city worker uses computer system on bicycle to inspect sidewalks. The computer is mounted on a bike which is ridden across nearly 800 kilometres of sidewalks. Defects and safety hazards that fall within certain thresholds are queued and the IBM system then creates automatic service requests to generate the appropriate work order, or job ticket, for repair crews.

Live from the IBM Summit at Start

2010-09-08T08:51:08Z

Today we open the doors for 9 days at the IBM Summit at Start, just as a YouGov poll of over 2,000 consumers revealed that 47 per cent of British adults feel the plethora of information on sustainability is confusing and often conflicting.

The business community didn’t fair much better as 50 per cent of the public rate the way organisations convey their sustainability policies as ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’. How can we change that?

May be changing that perception over the 9 days of IBM Summit at Start is asking a lot but we can begin to get things rolling. The key to the event is asking, what can sustainability do for business? This is a more authentic way to approach the subject so as to arrive at a place where the output makes sense to business and it’s consumers.

Over the nine topics we will look at those people and businesses doing it right, talk to those with the big ideas and dreams and see how, through collaboration, we can all make business, people and cities work better. It’s a tall order but if you don’t start, you never get going.

We have a packed agenda and we will bring you much of the action via Livestream, Twitter @ibm_start (#ibmstart) and our news hub as is humanly possible.

Along-side the IBM summit is the Start Garden Party that is focusing on what individuals can do. The summit will deep dive into the issues and questions that help and hinder the take up of sustainable business practices.

Some of the sessions at the Summit are going to be held under Chatham House Rules, simply to encourage a full and frank exchange of views. However, the output will be collated and published after the event, probably in October.

We have a number of keynotes and panels sessions with speakers such as Wayne Hemingway, Designer and Entrepreneur; Dame Ellen MacArthur, Sir Martin Rose, CEO M&S, and many more. Full details here.

We hope you can join us and participate in the on-line debate around this topic of our times.

IBM to hold summit on sustainability (computing.co.uk)
I’ll be at IBM Start this week (and next!) (greenmonk.net)

Technorati Tags: business, Ellen MacArthur, environment, IBM, ibmstart, london, sustainability, Wayne Hemingway

China Emerging as a Global Pioneer of Data-Centric Healthcare

2010-08-31T13:21:28Z

Click here to view the embedded video.

China is fast emerging as a pioneer of data-centric healthcare. IBM’s collaboration with Guangdong Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, featured in this video, was one of the examples called out in a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal about advances in healthcare in China. The Guangdong solution is being designed to help doctors identify treatment plans combining Western and traditional Chinese medicine from statistics drawn from patient records. IBM’s Healthcare Solutions Lab, which is working with Guangdong Hospital, is one of 12 finalists in the newspaper’s annual Asian Innovation Awards contest.

But Guangdong isn’t the only place where IBM is pushing the technology envelope in Chinese healthcare. IBM Research is working with Peking University People’s Hospital to build an evidence-based patient care system that will consolidate patient records and make it easier for clinicians to discover and share best practices in diagnosis and treatment. It’s one of those First-of-a-Kind projects that Research engages in with clients. The hospital expects to roll out the system to selected hospital and community clinics starting early next year.

Technorati Tags: Guangdong Hospital, healthcare, IBM

Global security threats have reached record levels

2010-08-25T21:47:55Z

Editor’s note: Many of the smarter planet initiatives we talk about on this blog depend on better security technologies. From health records to financial data to sensitive city infrastructure information, managing massive data streams over the Internet requires as much security innovation as data integration, interconnectedness and intelligence. Enter X-Force–IBM’s answer to studying these challenges with the kind of depth we use in all smarter planet initiatives. The following is a post by Tom Cross, the manager of the IBM X-Force Research Team, to explain how X-Force is helping organizations across the globe meet these challenges.

Today we released the IBM X-Force Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report that gives insight into the latest Internet threats, trends among attackers, and a projection on future potential risk areas like cloud security.

The report is the industry’s most comprehensive analysis of vulnerabilities and security threats. IBM is the only company with an extensive primary research team that uncovers, researches and catalogs vulnerabilities with a database that goes back 15 years. Our Web crawler is second only in size to Google, allowing us to uncover malicious sites and categorize web pages. We manage more than 20,000 security devices to gain firsthand insight into the types of attacks organizations face today. As X-Force, we sign up for a lot of spam to stay in the know so that we can protect clients and educate the industry.

Click here to view the embedded video.

X-Force findings for the first half of 2010

Having this breadth and depth gives us an insightful, and sometimes surprising view into the security landscape. One of the first things to note within the research findings is that the total number of vulnerabilities escalated to an all-time high, growing at a rate of 36 percent over the first half of last year. The interesting observation here is the community in general is getting more diligent about reporting vulnerabilities and increasing public disclosure rates.

Other top findings include:

–Web application vulnerabilities have surpassed all other threats to now account for 55 percent of all disclosures.

–There are increasingly sophisticated attacks–especially with JavaScript–by computer criminals to hide their exploits within document files and web pages.

–While phishing volume actually declined, financial institutions are still the number one phishing target, representing almost half of all phishing emails.

A trend to watch is virtualization. This is an area our report explored since historically there wasn’t a lot of vulnerability data existing. In the report, you’ll see that out of the vulnerabilities within this space, 35 percent open a door to the hypervisor, or core layer of the network. Once an attacker has access to the hypervisor, they essentially have unfettered access to the data, systems and operations powered by the virtual network.

Why are tracking and identifying vulnerabilities important? Vulnerability counts aren’t just impacting the IT security community. As the world becomes more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent, it means that power grids, cars, airplanes, utilities, food safety and many other products and industries are dependent on software and digital connections. Any vulnerabilities can pose a threat to each of us on a daily basis. The need for organizations to protect their computing infrastructure is becoming more critical every day.

Our goals in issuing this report are simple—to raise awareness and understanding of computer security issues and to shine a light on vulnerabilities to preempt disaster. By understanding the vulnerabilities and risks within software, we can mitigate catastrophic events.

If anything, this report underscores how security is an increasingly complex undertaking for any organization. In addition to the X-Force research team, IBM brings to bear a vast portfolio of resources to help clients strategically manage information technology and operational risk, including: six worldwide research labs, nine security operations centers, and 200 security-related products, and the world’s largest security services practice — 3,500 skilled security services professionals.
As you’ll see in the report, we’ve packaged the data in a way that you can easily put them into your own reports and presentations to share what is happening in security. You can also read updates on the findings of the reports and the latest threat information at the X-Force blog.

Many eyes word cloud of vulnerabilities against other word usage on the Web

Many eyes visualization of victims of phishing attacks

Many eyes visualization of the growth of web application vulnerabilities over the last decade

Tom Cross is the manager of the IBM X-Force Research Team. He is based in Atlanta, GA.

On a Smarter Planet, the Digital Infrastructure Must be Secure by Design

2010-08-25T10:18:12Z

Intel’s purchase yesterday of security software maker McAfee, detailed in this News.com story, signals a shift in the tech industry’s view of how to better secure computers, networks, and software programs: Security has to be built in, rather than added on later. It’s the concept of “secure by design.”

At IBM, the secure-by-design concept extends to encompass our Smarter Planet agenda. These days, its not enough to secure the traditional computing infrastructure. You’ve got to protect all of the devices and networks that are now being used to monitor, manage, and analyze everything from smart electrical grids to health care systems. “All of the physical assets of the world are becoming digitized, instrumented, interconnected and intelligent,” says Kristin Lovejoy, head of IBM security strategy. “But the sad reality is that as people develop and design these new technologies they’re not thinking enough about the issue of security. These devices are so critical that if they’re unavailable or if they’re tampered with, it could have a significant negative impact on an individual or a large population.”

When security is an afterthought, it tends to be expensive and not that effective. Plus, organizations typically find out about a vulnerability after it has already been exploited by malicious software programs.

We believe that only by designing products to be secure can organizations gain the protection they need at a reasonable price. With that principle in mind, IBM has established what we call a secure engineering framework. It’s a set of specifications that we are beginning to use in all of our design processes, for hardware and software alike.

Now that the world’s critical infrastructure is being wired and networked, security is becoming more important than ever before. Business-as-usual in the tech industry isn’t good enough any more.

Technorati Tags: IBM, security, Smarter Planet

Big Data Could Help NC State Bring Faculty Innovations to Market

2010-08-11T19:25:48Z

Salmonella, Source: NIH

The world’s research universities are crucibles of innovation, yet universities face significant challenges when it comes to shepherding their research breakthroughs into the marketplace. It’s a painstaking process–akin to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. Until now, that is. By harnessing the power of Big Data, North Carolina State University and IBM have collaborated to create a highly automated system for matching university-invented technologies to potential business opportunities.

Here’s how it works: NC State officials identify promising inventions that are contained in their research database. Then they launch a search of the Web for pages containing pertinent information–clues that could lead the university to companies that might be interested in licensing its technology and taking it to market. The program uses a handful of sophisticated IBM software tools that were created to handle so-called Big Data challenges–data sets with millions of pieces of information drawn from multiple sources. BigSheets, a specialized search engine, makes it possible to get insights from very large data sets easily and quickly. IBM Cognos Content Analytics focuses on unstructured data, the kind that isn’t stored in formal data bases. And IBM LanguageWare is a text analytics tool that understands the context around words, and is capable of decoding scientific jargon.

The university ran a couple of pilot projects to test the system. One involved new strains of Salmonella that faculty researchers are developing for use in vaccines. It took less than one week to search 1.4 million Web sites, including blogs, social networks, and sites containing scientific papers, and come up with a short list of potential business partners. Using manual search methods, the investigation would likely have taken months–and might not have uncovered some promising leads. “The kind of searches we do are very difficult to to replicate with people,” says Chris Spencer, an emerging technologies strategist in IBM Software Group.

Spencer understands the challenges of university technology transfer first hand. While a graduate student and IT employee at NC State in the 1990s, he developed an online authentication system and then licensed it back from the university and launched a start-up company to commercialize it. The company, Sentri Systems, had a promising start but failed in the big dot-com bust of 2001.

The current project with NC State has got Spencer’s entrepreneurial juices flowing again. IBM and a university-affiliated organization, the Center for Innovation Management Studies (CIMS), are considering marketing the tech transfer search engine to other research universities. There are a lot of needles in those Internet haystacks.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, BigSheets, IBM, North Carolina State University, Salmonella, technology transfer

How Cloud-Based Services Deliver Smarter Security

2010-08-10T16:57:35Z

Organizations today are fortunate to have access to a growing influx of new technology – from sophisticated data analytics to cloud computing – that will allow for faster innovation and growth. However, as part of the Smarter Planet, these organizations also recognize the dire need to keep their dynamic IT infrastructure constantly secured.

As evidenced by the latest IBM X-Force threat insight quarterly report, the number of IT security vulnerabilities is continuing to rise. New threats and increasingly wily attackers have companies looking for better ways to not only detect but anticipate and mitigate vulnerabilities before they become a problem. Emergency patch management should be a thing of the past.

[Click below to read more and see a screen shot of the tool]

Available this week, the improved IBM Managed Security Services hosted vulnerability management is a cloud-based network scanning service that helps companies to identify vulnerabilities across network devices, servers, web applications and databases to help manage risk and reduce the cost of security operations. By now offering this hosted vulnerability management as a cloud-based service, companies of all sizes can quickly and easily take advantage of the sophisticated security that was previously available only to the largest organizations. Additionally, IBM’s lifecycle-based approach to vulnerability management provides a solution that can help clients more easily address compliance mandates. For example, IBM is an Approved Scanning Vendor (ASV), qualified by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC). Now IBM can help companies establish a risk management program and demonstrate industry compliance with little or no hardware, software, or maintenance requirements.

After the service scans vulnerabilities in your networks, operating systems, web applications, and databases, it provides a prioritized report of vulnerabilities with actionable advice so that you know which ones to correct immediately and how to go about doing so. Is the vulnerability exploitable with common hacker tools that would require a patch or is it something more ominous? The quality of the scan narrows down false positives and negatives, can help you figure out what to worry about and then recommend which patches you need to apply and where to get them. For example, it can tell you that if you apply three patches, your 29 vulnerabilities will be fixed.

In addition, you don’t need an army of internal security experts to help you. IT staff can spend the hours they would have used for detection and emergency patch management to accomplish other critical business projects. The remediation advice gives the internal security staff credibility with the operational team. In sum, security intelligence is packaged automatically in this system – all part of IBM’s “Secure By Design” plan.

However, hosted vulnerability management is only one part of the whole cloud security package. As more companies look to adopt cloud but worry about security concerns, market analysts expect cloud security services to grow into a $3 billion market by 2012 (source: 2009, Boston Consulting Group). Check out the new IBM whitepaper on things to consider when looking for cloud-based security services: ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/sew03020usen/SEW03020USEN.PDF

For more information on the new hosted vulnerability management service, go to http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/index.wss/offering/iss/a1026968

A Family Doctor’s Perspective on Smarter Healthcare

2010-08-10T11:32:51Z

The following is a guest post from Dr. Randall Oates, president of SOAPware and a fellow member of the American Academy of Family Physicians. After more than 20 years of operating a successful Family Medicine practice, Dr. Oates made the tough decision to phase down his medical practice and focus on new technology to help transform healthcare and create a bridge to a better system.

Imagine learning that your doctor has been told by an administrator that they shouldn’t spend any more than 7 minutes meeting with their patients face-to-face, and that they were encouraged to include as many billable services as is possible in that time. All of this is because of a “pay for procedure” healthcare system that devalues actually taking care of patients. Does that sound a bit like insanity? I’ve been there as a physician, and the probability is that you are now there as a patient.

Recently, I had the great pleasure of traveling to several places on the planet where healthcare is smarter. In particular, I was pleased to visit Denmark. Some recent healthcare data from Denmark shows that:

· The cost was less than half that in the U.S.

· Outcomes were dramatically better.

· The system received high marks from both patients and physicians.

From a physician perspective, it seemed almost too good to be true. I extended my stay an extra week, traveling through the countryside, visiting practices, pharmacies and hospitals, to confirm that it really is possible to have a system that is more patient-centered. It is very similar in character to what is described in the illustration How Smarter Healthcare Works. In other nations I visited, and in some smarter practices I visited in the U.S., there is a consistent formula for success:

1. Empowerment of primary care via a closer equivalence, both in status and monetarily, to specialist care.

2. Practical information technologies that have a focus on enhancing the patient-physician relationship.

Several initiatives within healthcare reform have some promise of bringing our system into better balance. For example, if Accountable Care Organizations can be created on a strong foundation of Patient Centered Medical Homes, better quality of care and new efficiency will follow.

The recent announcement by IBM and ActiveHealth may well be a major milestone on the path to smarter healthcare as well. I am pleased to have been able to work with and advise teams within IBM and ActiveHealth over the past three years attempting to serve as a bridge to bring advanced information technologies to the patient-physician interface.

Founded by a physician, for nearly two decades, SOAPware, Inc. has adhered to a simple philosophy of delivering affordable technology to healthcare providers. Improving healthcare and the quality of life, by empowering medical professionals and patients with innovative technology and services is the mission we are committed to achieve.

Technorati Tags: healthcare, Smarter Healthcare

Illustration: How Smarter Healthcare Works

2010-08-05T16:39:26Z

Click below for a larger version:

Credit here goes to our colleague Chris Luongo, the storyteller behind the “The Tale of…” videos, among many other creations.

A Cloud Computing Service that Could Revolutionize US Healthcare

2010-08-05T16:22:15Z

Back in the dot-com era, Netscape co-founder Jim Clark, frustrated with the fact that his medical records were scattered all over the place, started a company called Healtheon to address the problem. It was a great idea, but premature. Now, more than a decade later, the US government the healthcare industry seem determined at last to bring the full benefits of digitization and connectivity to healthcare in the US. At the same time, the maturation of cloud computing makes it possible to pull together an individual’s health information from a wide variety of sources and place it at the finger tips of healthcare providers.

That’s the backdrop for a significant new service announcement today by IBM and ActiveHealth Management, a subsidiary of Aetna. Collaborative Care, a new cloud service, gives physicians and patients access to the information they need to improve the quality of care without requiring healthcare organizations to invest in owning new technology. Using Collaborative Care, hospitals and physicians can access, share, and analyze a wide range of clinical and administrative information; automate the measurement and reporting of treatment outcomes; and improve patient care by using Aetna’s decision-support system. In addition, patients can be more actively involved in their care through a Web portal. “This partnership puts in place a new model that can drastically improve the way care is delivered,” says Robert Merkel, vice president and healthcare industry leader, IBM Global Business Services.

Think of the service as a virtual healthcare system located in the computing cloud.

Click here to view the embedded video.

IBM and ActiveHealth Management are co-investing in the business. While other companies offer piece-parts of the service, nobody else offers such a comprehensive solution. Sharp Community Medical Group, an association of primary care physicians and specialists in San Diego, Calif., is testing the service.

Challenges remain. Many independent physicians and smaller healthcare organizations don’t yet have electronic medical records systems, and even some of the larger healthcare organizations don’t yet have full interconnectivity within their own departments. But, starting next year, the US government’s Health InformationTechnology for Economic and Clinical Health program provides strong incentives for going digital.

At last, Jim Clark’s vision seems to be coming to fruition. But, these days, he has left his aspirations to transform healthcare behind and is a real estate developer in Florida, so these advances aren’t doing him any good–financially, anyway. Still, they could end his frustrations with the splintering of his own health information.

Technorati Tags: ActiveHealth Management, Collaborative Care, IBM

A Smarter Planet Blog

Building a Smarter City in Cambridge, Ontario

Live from the IBM Summit at Start

Related articles by Zemanta

China Emerging as a Global Pioneer of Data-Centric Healthcare

Global security threats have reached record levels

On a Smarter Planet, the Digital Infrastructure Must be Secure by Design

Big Data Could Help NC State Bring Faculty Innovations to Market

How Cloud-Based Services Deliver Smarter Security

A Family Doctor’s Perspective on Smarter Healthcare

Illustration: How Smarter Healthcare Works

A Cloud Computing Service that Could Revolutionize US Healthcare