Friday 20 April 2012, Senate House, University of London

By Koen van Dam

CASA, the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at UCL chose “Smart Cities: bridging physical and digital” [pdf] as the theme of their conference held at the Senate House in Central London on the 20th of April 2012. Smart cities and digital… of course DCE had to be there.

Prof Michael Batty, chair of the management board of CASA, opened the conference by going back 40 years in the past to highlight the many advances of the digital age, most notably the rise of the internet, and how they have changed life in cities. Batty went on to explain that cities can be considered as networks of connected computers, and that smart cities present planners with new challenges because they address the short term operation of the places we live in rather than long-term strategies. The question is now what the next 40 years will hold. The presentations at this conference might offer a glimpse of that future. The real challenge, according to Batty, is that after the transition from “real” to “digital”, we now have to move back from “digital” to “real” and to see the changes of digital services on daily life.

The first speaker of the conference was Prof Carlo Ratti, Director of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab. He provided an image which would turn out to be a metaphor central to the whole day: the idea that a F1 racing team can no longer just win races by having the best car and the best driver, but that real-time data processing of all things happening in the car and on the track is absolutely essential now. Bringing this back to cities: they have become control systems (also strengthening Batty’s claim about short term operation being more central). Prof Ratti spent most of his talk introducing wonderful examples of analysis of data, digital design and real applications, ranging from analysing telecom signals during the world cup football, measuring drought by counting green pixels in digital photos, interactive walls made of water to early prototypes of the Copenhagen Wheel, a way to store power in a bicycle while also providing the rider with real-time data on for example air quality. Finally, Ratti made very clear that in the past key publications were made by one author from one discipline, but that today the most influential articles are in fact written by many authors coming from various scientific backgrounds.

The other speakers of the day were all researchers at CASA. Jon Reades and Joan Serras gave a great overview of the analysis of transport data (e.g. Oyster journeys on London’s transport network) with many beatiful maps. James Cheshire and Martin Austwick looked at cycle hire schemes, showing how much we can learn and infer from just looking at the status of docking stations around the city without having to know exactly which trips were made. One of the key advantages of using OpenStreetMap (instead of for example Google maps) is that you get a lot more information about the usability of the roads for, for example, cyclists, and the team took this into account in their routing algorithms.

Next up was a slightly controversial, but highly interesting talk by Prof Sir Alan Wilson, who developed a model of the riots in London August 2011. Using epidemic models (c.f. Epstein) they try to replicate the attractiveness of certain site to rioters and looters, taking for example the number of police officers present into account to determine the chance for arrest. One of the members of the audience, quite rightfully, pointed out that in some riots a high police presence is actually the cause for escalation instead of serving as a way to keep people under control. Also, the highly political impact of research would make it hard to develop objective simulation models. Still, this was one of the few examples at the conference of using data to inspire predictive models and using them for decision support.

George MacKerron showed us Mappiness, a way to study how people feel in certain locations based on an iPhone app which asks people to state their own happiness after having been prompted at random times. Analysis of this data could show in which environment people feel most happy.

Richard Milton discussed data stores and real-time data, raising the all-important question of data analysis: how to find something you don’t know was there. Organising data by spatial elements, it becomes, for example, possible to overlay population density maps with energy infrastructures for gas and electricity, showing striking matches. Maptube a tool developed at CASA for mapping data sets and building mash-ups, was introduced after which Steven Gray took over the microphone to present another tool offered by CASA, namely GEMMA engine for mapping. The idea is that these tools could become a “Big Data Toolkit” for visualisation and analysis of data. As a perfect illustration of the kind of events we might be able to infer from data, a lady on the tube wondering “it’s not usually this busy, what happened??” made clear that we need predictions as well as data analysis to get a better overview of systems.

Andy Hudson-Smith, CASA director, showed the Tales of Things project, explained as the “Internet of Second-hand Things”, paraphrasing the concept of the Internet of Things. Oxfam used this approach in their charity shops, allowing people to tell stories about the objects they were donating.

The final speaker at the conference was mapping guru Oliver O’Brien. He showed the CityDashboard displaying in real-time a number of views of a city, enabling the user to discover if there is something “wrong” (e.g. by linking travel disturbances, weather and popular news items) and help to make the right decisions on for example departure time or routing. Perhaps a bit disappointingly, the dashboard does not contain any “intelligence” or predictions, but the presentation gave a valuable overview of the data used as well as the standards in which they are made available, and the API would enable others to build on top of this dashboard by accessing the same information. Furthermore, Oliver highlighted that in order to compare different cities, more standards are required.

During lunch and tea breaks, participants were able to see the brilliant visualisations, apps and games developed by the CASA researchers up close and personal. Many of the stands were interactive, and we flapped our arms as we flew over London, we watched air planes circle over the city, placed police units in riot hot spots, looked at agent-based models of people moving about, and studied how pedestrians changed their behaviour as we adjusted the urban footprint of their virtual world using wooden blocks. Furthermore, it was a chance to stare at the recently released map of every bus trip in London and several other impressive visualisations at the border of art and science.

The conference ended with a panel discussion, in which several of the speakers took place to discuss issues such as which real insights can we get from visualisation and which sectors they predict would be the next big application after transport (which was clearly the most studied subject). In answering these questions, the panel members discussed the gap between sensing to activating and put forward health and justice (Alan Wilson), education (Ratti) and retail (Batty) as future domains to study.

On a final note, two statements of great importance to our Digital City Exchange programme were made during the panel discussion. Batty stressed that while we have a lot of data, we still know very little about the processes underlying decisions and actions of people. Hudson-Smith then said that what is needed next is an integrated model bringing together things that happen in different sectors. We are working on it!

Wednesday 28 March 2012, Crayon London

By Koen van Dam and Claire Thorne

The “Internet of Things”, the vision of a world where physical objects are connected and part of a world-wide information network, has been a buzzword for more than a decade now. With the widespread use of smart phones, the availability of cheap sensors and microcontrollers and the rise of data sharing platforms such as Pachube (pronounced as “patch bay”), groups of enthusiastic people are working on making this idea come true and developing business plans taking advantage of the recent momentum.

In cities around the world people are gathering at monthly “IoT Tech Meetups”: informal, evening discussion groups with speakers presenting their work/ideas/businesses. And there’s free beer. The IoT Tech Meetups are founded by Ed Borden (Pachube, Chief Business Development Officer) and Alex Deschamps-Sonsino (who also was a panellist at one of Digital Economy Lab’s Guardian Tech City debates). The meetings are held in different – interactive and interesting – venues each time, courtesy of space sponsors. We joined the 6th meetup in London at Crayon in Oxford Circus.

Tech Meetup attendees seem to range from the techy enthusiast who tinkers with sensors in their spare time, to the d-i-y app developer and the business-savvy start-up sponsor. Everyone there was genuinely passionate about ‘big data’ and ‘building things’.

The evening started with a brief introduction of the Air Quality Egg – a new project to set up a community-based sensor network for local air quality. They are currently raising money online to implement it via kickstarter. In the first of three talks the “mbed-based gateway” (slides) was presented, which kindled a discussion on what we need first: applications and sensors, or gateways which collects data from (wireless) sensors and allows for them to be connected to the Internet. Without gateways sensors are not part of the IoT, but without sensors and attractive applications people will not purchase a gateway…

The second talk addressed open telematics and introduced the E:drive app (slides and Beta registration) taking advantage of data which is collected under the bonnet of all modern cars. This could be used for personal journey data collection and in visualisation apps, showing fuel economy management with a social, competitive personal ‘rating’. Potential applications include total energy use/management (car and household), smart roads, car sharing schemes, real-time traffic flow monitoring, and police investigations into car crime.

The last talk of the evening was about Data Citizen Driven City and the work of MediaLab in Madrid. For example, some of their six research projects focus on data visualisation (see their façade project) and engaging citizens in data capture (see their City Sense competition entry). They have a strong focus on documenting every step and making this publicly available and acting as a mediation hub bringing people with the same interests together. Also, they have ongoing open calls for collaboration.

Digital City Exchange touches on several aspects of the Internet of Things, including challenges and opportunities of dealing with dynamic and distributed sensors, access to data and making it available to others, and finally the development of applications and services on top of such data.

We’re certainly keen to participare in future sessions. Note that the IoT Meetups are usually booked up well in advance – before all speakers or even the venue have been confirmed! Another clear sign that this is not just a series of presentations but a community of people who share a common vision and want to make things happen.

Watch this space…

Tuesday 6th March, Imperial College Business School

By Antoine Vernet

Anthony Finkelstein, dean of the Faculty of Engineering Sciences at UCL and a professor of Computer Science was at Imperial College Business School on March 6, to give a talk entitled “Engineering Challenges of the Digital Economy”. His talk addressed discrepancies between technical issues of software development and the necessity to address consumer demand and to build sustainable business models for software companies.

The discipline of software engineering needs to rise to the challenges presented by the digital economy. In his talk, Anthony Finkelstein addressed 10 challenges facing software engineering in the digital economy. These can be roughly separated in two groups: first, those that have to do with software architecture, software design and software requirements. Second, those, perhaps harder to overcome, that concern software development tools, modelling and middleware.

The risk is that the influence of software engineering as a discipline on practice will decrease. If software engineering wants to train the next generation of software engineers, it needs to address those challenges.

1. The question of the evolution of architecture needs to be explicitly stated. Software architecture has been addressed predominantly in an ad-hoc way. The relation between requirements and architecture needs to be clarified and studied more formally.
2. The discipline has to move to an evidence-based practice and rely less on anecdotal and quasi evidence-based practice. It needs to encourage reproducibility, and reorganize the curricula to reflect an evidence based approach.
3. Scalability. Problems of scalability need to be addressed and studied in depth, not just approached on an ad hoc and in a learning-by-doing fashion.
4. Reconcile web standards and software engineering standards: w3c and OMG. This is a major challenge and work on the technical side as well as negotiation to set new standards are necessary.
5. Resources estimation. Probably the main challenge mentioned in Anthony’s talk: there is very little we know about estimation of development cost and time. Getting a better understanding of cost and time estimation for system development implies studying programmer productivity in depth, along with rethinking of curricula in software engineering, making business models an important object in software engineering.
6. Software as a service: the challenge is in maintaining quality of service and allowing for interoperability. Clients also need to have a clear idea on how to walk away if they want to change provider. Data hosting, security and ownership are critical issues here.
7. Think about apps as channels. More and more, apps needs to be thought of and conceived as channels capable of evolving and changing what they deliver. Another step is to use apps as building blocks for user-side customization of apps through personal combinations.
8. Adaptive system. We need to develop ways of building systems that account for themselves.
9. Reconcile business and software engineering.
10. Inter-product and inter-supplier dependencies are not properly addressed: the field has to move away from a “garage” approach to development to supply chain or software ecosystem thinking.

Finally, Anthony Finkelstein ended his talk by stating that, in his opinion, the biggest challenge was to reach a point where business model and software would be co-designed simultaneously.

An MP3 of the talk may be found here, and the slides from the talk may be accessed here.

Wednesday 8th March, Imperial College Business School

By Richard Foulsham

Lem Lasher, as Group President of Global Business Solutions and Chief Innovation Officer of CSC is in a unique position to assess the influences upon and potential future direction of the digital economy, having both the analytical capabilities of a leading edge consultancy and a business that’s involved in the day to deployment of IT around the world within his remit.

During this lecture he shared with us some of the “points of view” that his organisation has developed around “next practice”, likely developments that clever players in the IT market can use to gain an advantage, and identified some of the areas that he thinks will grow and become important as the digital revolution gets underway.

This revolution in technology has been brought about by the growth of the internet. Mr Lasher predicts that we are barely into the foothills of this revolution with another 20 years of change ahead of us. This development will consist of  a relatively predictable advance in the technology, but Mr Lasher sees the real source of disruption being the development in business models that will take place in this new, connected environment.

The drivers of the current market as Mr Lasher sees it are globalisation and everything that overworked word entails – increased competition, the rise of China and India – but more interestingly he also identified a consistently difficult regulatory environment as being something that is affecting companies ability to differentiate their products. One interesting thing to ponder is whether the technological revolution and the  process of globalisation are really parallel or dynamically entwined. It is hard to imagine the economic growth of India without the business space that has been opened up by technology. Equally, the globalised markets that are the bain of many democratic politicians’ existence have grown up around the opportunities offered by a digital market place.

Organisations have responded to these challenges by becoming more complex and adopting a greater variety of forms than has been the case previously. Mr Lasher identifies a process that could be described as a “democratisation of technology” which has affected the way technology advances:  technologies are available at low enough cost and can be operated by non-experts – the iPad and the child are given as an example and anyone whose watched toddlers playing Angry Birds will find it hard to disagree – meaning that public bodies and private corporations cannot dictate to the market, but rather they have to respond to the market in a way that keeps revenue intact and minimises risks from regulation.

These effects are not consistent across sectors, and Mr Lasher then went on to describe a matrix for predicting the degree of business model disruption likely to result from these changes in a particular industry. He identifies two major predicting factors: whether the organisation deals in physical product or data, and the degree of regulation in the industry. This model has a remarkable predictive power which two examples will suffice to illustrate. The music industry – no physical product and little regulation (or at least little ability to enforce what regulation exists) – has gone through an exceptionally torrid time recently, whilst banking, dealing largely in data, but doing so  in a highly regulated environment, has itself suffered little in the way of disruption whilst, ironically, wreaking havoc on the rest of the economy.

Mr Lasher ended his presentation by describing a number of specific areas that he sees as likely to become increasingly important in the future. Some are predictable, others more of a surprise.  There was also a list of things that may prove to be the downside of the bright, shiny digital future that glistens enticingly at us from the cover of a thousand company brochures.  Whatever happens, it’s not going to be boring.

You can access a recording of Mr Lashers presentation here.

Technology Visionaries RAEng lecture series

Wednesday 22 February 2012, the Royal Society, London

By Claire Thorne and Koen van Dam

Unsure of how many notable FREng’s to expect in the audience, we arrived at the Royal Society (the current base for the RAEng during their refurbishment). With twenty-four FREng’s on the delegate list, including one on stage, we weren’t disappointed (but possibly just a little underdressed!).

The lecture by Prof Nigel Shadbolt FREng (Prof of Artificial Intelligence, University of Southampton) was part of the RAEng’s Technology Visionaries series and promised a whistle-stop tour through the vast topic that is Open Data.

Presenting in his current Government role as co-director of the Open Data Institute (ODI) [pdf] (along with WWW inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee) Nigel set the scene by highlighting the historical significance of data (c.f. the Copernican revolution and the realisation that cholera is spread by contaminated water). He went on to sail through current innovation and the big issues surrounding: open data, smart cities, linked open data (and his 5-star rating for the release and structuring of data, open standards, unique resource identifiers and linking data) the latest UK Government developments, and data visualisation.

Open Data and the power of the crowd

Nigel illustrated the power of open data using the standard examples of:
•    the Government’s open data initiative and the data.gov.uk website;
•    the London DataStore (“open the data and the apps will follow”);
•    the variety of ways Ordnance Survey’s OpenData is already being utilised;
•    the exercise of producing a Postcode Paper, with content generated using illegally reproduced, but so-called ‘open’ Government data (preceding the data.gov.uk website).

One of his more inspiring examples of using open data for real-world societal and often unexpected impact was the mapping of earthquake-hit Port-au-Prince. Within days of the earthquake, the first detailed map of the city was produced for Open Street Map, via the power of the crowd. Open data does not just work one way, for people to consume; it also allows members of the general public to contribute and to improve data sets.

Open Data and smart cities

There was some mention of research on smart cities and, in particular, reference to UCL’s research in this area, the CASA group headed up by Prof Michael Batty. Nigel suggested that cities were one of the clearest examples of places where open data is collected and used.

The evolution of the humble mash-up through to complex data visualisation was demonstrated by examples of a UK crime heat map as well as combining data-sets on cycle hire and pollution. If you’re looking for a striking example of how this can impact our lives, check out the local crime and policing website, for England and Wales. Thanks to the ‘opening up’ of data on this platform (and therefore the plethora of opportunities for useful applications to be built on top of the data which followed) police officers now have a better view of crime, than they had of the same data set while it was closed.

For anyone interested in open data and cities, that the UK’s first Open-Data Cities Conference will be taking place in Brighton on 20 April 2012.

The web of linked open data

Nigel discussed the concept of the semantic web, thought to be the next step forwards from the WWW in which documents (and data) are linked – but now in a way that is ‘computer-understandable’. The more recent view of this concept is to consider instead a web of data. In principle it’s the same idea as the semantic web, but the web of data better captures the concept of interlinked sets of data. The DBpedia project is a clear example of how data from the better-known ‘-edia’, Wikipedia, can be structured, categorised and interlinked. Nigel showed us a graph of the network effect of such structured data, where more and more resources can be linked, greatly improving the power of the whole.

Note that the lecture’s URI is to be confirmed…

Citizen Science

The field of citizen science – the seemingly limitless opportunities it offers the public to engage with technology and repurpose data, and for creative design and education – is an area Nigel referred to during the Q&A as particularly exciting. Although he had little time to go into this in detail, he did flash up a slide featuring the Galaxy Zoo iPhone App (based on the success of Galaxy Zoo) during the lecture… co-developed by a former colleague from Imperial College London’s Astro group, Dr Joe Zuntz!

The latest UK Government developments

Nigel raised new infrastructure requirements and issues of security and privacy amongst his concerns, or indeed areas to focus on, for the future (c.f. a book Nigel co-authored The Spy in the Coffee Machine: The End of Privacy as We Know It).

Following on from issues of security and privacy, the BIS ‘midata’ project is working with retailers, telecomms and energy companies to explore issues surrounding the use and control of individual’s personal data. The midata aim is to return the economic value of the individual’s data back to the consumers. (Note the synergies with Digital City Exchange’s research and our focus on new business opportunities, jobs and growth).

Who’s the ‘winner’ of open data?

It was unfortunate that the evening’s ‘in conversation with’ part focused more on the future challenge for the UK education system in equipping employees with the necessary technology/logical-thinking skills, and less on Nigel’s ‘vision’ of the future of data, its use(s) and its potential impacts.

Nigel was however given the chance to elaborate on the impact of his vision when he was asked ‘who would be the winner of open data?’. He argued that the ‘winner’ is not only the governments who receive direct input from citizens and the “free” applications built on top of government data sets. He said the ‘winner’ is not only the businesses who can make better-informed decisions. He said the ‘winner’ is not only the people who get access to information which wasn’t previously available to them (and are therefore demanding/implementing greater transparency). Nigel said that all parties involved would benefit.

Of course the issue of privacy was addressed as it is hard to avoid in this context, but his enthusiasm and belief that this is the right path are both infectious and convincing. Unfortunately Nigel could not yet answer the question how all of this would affect research, but that is a challenge for us digital economy researchers to take home.

Watch Nigel’s lecture online: In the spirit of all things open, view the talk online.

We’ll be keeping an eye out for forthcoming lectures in the Technology Visionaries series – see you there!

29th November – 2nd December 2011, Barcelona, Spain

by Francesca Bria

The first Smart City Expo hosted more than 50 cities around the world, 118 businesses, over 6000 participants and 2000 panellists. The Expo announced the creation of a global Network of Smart Cities coordinated by the City of Barcelona, encompassing cities and businesses around the world. The objective is to promote policy actions and activities in this new field, by creating global common standards and criteria for the effective implementation of smart cities at a global level. The Expo was a meeting point for professionals active in the field of digital future cities, including heads of public administrations, practitioners and academics. Barcelona has made extensive investments and policy commitments with the intention of becoming one of Europe’s leading smart cities, promoting big innovation policy initiatives such as launching Barcelona Smart City Campus next to the 22@ district, an urban hub for businesses, innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity. The conference organisers invited speakers of the highest rank such as Carlo Ratti, Director of the MIT SENSEable City Lab, Anthony Townsend Research Director of the Institute for the Future, Jeremy Rifkin founder of the Foundation on Economic Trends, Abha Joshi-Ghani Manager of Urban Development of the World Bank, Neil Gershenfeld, Director of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, Adam Greenfield, founder and managing director of Urbanscale.

Developing the smart and sustainable cities of the future is not an easy undertaking at a time of urgent societal challenges such as financial crises, environmental disasters, climate change, ageing populations and increasing unemployment. All these issues will require innovative solutions that challenge traditional ways of doing things. Organisations are required to move from closed innovation models to open and collaborative innovation models that can unleash the power of social production and collective intelligence.

It’s not just about the technology

One of the most challenging issues addressed during the different panels at the Expo was  that smart cities are clearly not only about ‘plumbing’ or a ‘technological fix’. On the contrary smart cities need to solve societal challenges through future technologies following a holistic approach that integrates technological innovation with urban planning, sociology and anthropology. For instance ‘defining innovative social meaning of technologies and investigating how urban technologies will impact public services and people’s lives’ are, according to Jonathan Wareham Vice-Dean of Research at Esade Business School, amongst the most exciting research questions. Integrating non technological elements, such as social relationships, institutions and social norms is going to be challenging, but that’s where the big impact will lie, leading to the discovery of new services that will transform people’s lives.

Innovation in smart cities

These issues focussed on civic innovation were further discussed during a panel moderated by Esteve Alimirall titled ‘Open innovation for developing smart cities’. I was one of the panellists together with Jake Barton and Peter Corbett, both members of Code for America, one of the most interesting projects worldwide on open innovation in the public sector. In the panel I emphasised the importance of creating collective action and awareness, moving beyond the things that IT is already good at doing (such as data aggregation, sensing, tracking) to more complex aspects of social and collective intelligence. As Jeremy Rifkin reminded us in one stimulating debate during the Expo, what is happening with the smart cities is a new revolution in which new distributed energy models will shift towards a system similar to an ‘internet of global energy’, with a multitude of nodes with the capability to produce and distribute energy. This revolution according to Rifkin will provide an opportunity to create thousands of businesses and millions of jobs. From a more critical perspective Adam Greenfield, the author of Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing stressed the need for open civic innovation to emerge. According to Greenfield, there is no such a thing as a smart city, the city should empower people that can become smarter and collectively shape and transform the urban environment.

Cities in the driving seat

The public sector, and specifically cities, have an important role to play as the orchestrators of urban innovation platforms. Urbanization is occurring at a rapid rate; in 2050 75% of the population will live in cities. Cities can then set the rules of the game, building smart cities as open cities that facilitate innovation ecosystems to emerge, creating new entrepreneurial opportunities and jobs for future generations. This is why the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development is supporting 13 pilots in European cities that are developing smart applications in areas ranging from transport, education, health and environment.

Smart City Expo & World Congress will host again the second edition next November 2012.

Thursday 24th – Friday 25th November 2011, Utrecht, the Netherlands

By Koen van Dam

The University of Utrecht organised and hosted a LERU Research Seminar and invited researchers of members of LERU, the League of European Research Universities, to discuss a proposal of a Joint Programme Initiative (JPI) on dimensions for new research under the Urban Europe research programme. Participants came from the Netherlands (Utrecht, Amsterdam and Leiden) as well as France, Germany and Belgium (Paris Sud, Munich and Leuven). The United Kingdom was represented by Professor Phil Allmendinger from Cambridge and Dr Koen van Dam from Imperial College London. The delegates came from a wide range of academic backgrounds, including computer science, geography, spatial planning, regional economics, cultural anthropology as well as childcare and education.

Professor Peter Nijkamp (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, chairman of the scientific advisory board of JPI Urban Europe and former president of the Netherlands Research Council NWO) presented the “Urban Europe strategic research framework” which has been prepared over the previous months with input from stakeholders and researchers in a number of meetings and workshops held in 2010 and 2011. Peter Nijkamp and Karima Kourtit co-wrote the document describing the proposed framework.

The Joint Programme Initiative is a concept of the European Union to involve individual countries (governments, funding agencies and universities) wanting to work together in research. It is a bottom-up approach allowing countries who want to work closer together on common topics to organise themselves and speak with a united voice. As such it provides a framework to coordinate national research programmes and helps simplify projects which cross borders. Currently urban issues are not yet part of any existing European frameworks, so in 2010 the JPI Urban Europe was started to coordinate research and make better use of European funding for studies improve cities in Europe. See the JPI Urban Europe website for more information.

The framework is based around four “urban images” namely Entrepreneurial City 2050 (Transforming urban areas in Europe as hubs of innovation and creativity), Connected City 2050 (Realising eco-friendly and intelligent intra- and inter-urban transport and logistic systems), Pioneer City 2050 (Ensuring social cohesion, integration) and Liveable City 2050 (Reducing the ecological footprint and enhancing climate neutrality), each highlighting the strategic dimensions of the initiative. From these three research issues have been identified: Urban Megatrends, Urban Networks and Connectivity and finally Socio-ecological Sustainability of City Systems. For each of these issues a number of research themes and illustrative research questions have been defined, providing a clear overview of the broad scope of the JPI. During the seminar three additional “experimental” projects were introduced. The first relates to monitoring and information systems and the drivers of long term urban developments, the second to behaviour, technology and planning in urban patterns, and the third to resilience, efficiency and social participation in cities as a response to new challenges.

From this strategic research framework the next step is to go towards a call for projects in a pilot phase. The seminar participants were asked to give feedback to the strategic research framework as well as to the proposed call. At the next Governing Board meeting in Oslo (14-15 December 2011) this work will continue and the supporting funding councils will meet in January. It is expected the call can be launched shortly afterwards with the first projects starting towards the end of 2012. The idea is that these initial projects, with an expected duration of two years, showcase the added value of European cooperation as well as the relevance of the theme to Europe. Eventually the aim is that the theme could become a part of the next EU funding programme Horizon 2020 – the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, because governments, funding agencies and research institutes have shown commitment to this research direction.

During the seminar the participants had the chance to comment on the described research theme as well as the plans for the proposed call for projects. I was able to introduce the Digital City Exchange programme, the specific challenges and our aims, and stress the importance of the cross-departmental organisation and cooperation. Discussing the JPI Urban Europe research themes I questioned, among other things, the fact that energy was not explicitly mentioned as one of the challenges underlying the framework, even though this touches all aspects of living and working in cities. Regarding the proposed call, I asked if the plan was to encourage synergy between the projects funded, or if this is not a requirement. It was explained that individual projects will be funded based on their own merit. Given the common subject of study, it is of course hoped that projects will have closer links and that findings and results can be shared. Furthermore, I suggested it is important to make cross-disciplinary research a fundamental requirement to study cities – and not just “things that happen to be in cities” – to ensure the themes are really addressed and phenomena not studied in isolation, which received support from the other participants.

Finally, I asked if the initiative could perhaps also be used to map existing projects in Europe and encourage cooperation of people working projects which are already running or are based on other sources of funding. The answer was that this was indeed part of the plan and that an overview of projects studying cities and urban areas has been prepared and will be made available. Furthermore, organising workshops or facilitating the organisation between the institutes would be another possibility which could encourage interaction between researchers across institutes and borders. The aim is thus not only to launch a call and organise European funding, but to start build an Urban Europe community.

Driving New Business Development: From Insights to Innovation

18:30-19:30, 22^nd November 2011, Imperial College Business School

Blog by Richard Foulsham

The world has changed. A company like Ericsson cannot rely on developing its current technology to generate income in the future. That was the message that Magnus Karlsson, Director, New Business Development & Innovation at Ericsson left us with when he came to deliver a distinguished guest lecture at Imperial College Business School. We are moving towards a networked society. It is becoming cheaper and cheaper to connect ‘things’ to the internet and along with this diversity of things come a far wider number of participants and a consequent breakdown of traditional industry boundaries. To work in this world requires openness, partnerships, knowing your organisations place in the value chain and, seemingly most important, a more market and user centred approach to innovation.

Innovating in the networked world

So how does a company like Ericsson, with its distinguished track record in networks and systems, adapt to this new environment? Traditional R&D departments are no longer the sole answer as they cannot hope to cover all the areas where opportunities may lie.  The answer that Magnus described was to introduce a diffuse culture of innovation throughout the organisation. This was designed to be a combination of both top down – a new CEO took the opportunity to introduce a new mission statement – and bottom up initiatives that aimed to get people within the organisation thinking about what might be “the next big thing”, and importantly also to capture those ideas for Ericsson when they occurred.

The top down process involved the development of a number of scenarios based around what a customer might need in 2020. These provided a strategic focus for the entire enterprise. Interestingly these scenarios were not only analysed through good old-fashioned SWOT analyses, but they were also illustrated using narratives and games to provide insight into the user requirements and broaden the scenarios impact.

The bottom up process captured ideas for innovation at all levels of the organisation through an “ideas funnel”. This was a multi-party entity tasked with receiving, analysing and, potentially, developing ideas from all sources. An important way that the sources of ideas were diversified was through the introduction of ‘ideas boxes’. These boxes provided categories for innovative ideas. Each box has a manager whose job is to capture and champion innovative thinking. Once captured, the idea is examined by the members of the ideas funnel and, if judged to be worth investigating, the originator of the idea is given the time and “a small amount of money” to develop the idea. Not all ideas become operational and a transparent feedback mechanism providing reasons why ideas are not selected, or indeed if they had already been attempted and failed, is an important part of the innovation process.

Catching ideas

People always have ideas, but Magnus identified the creation of a culture of innovation within the organisation as one of the most difficult aspects to instigate. The new CEO helped as already mentioned, but there were other mechanisms. A source of tools and information – the Ericsson Academy – was developed. Identification and education of a leadership community who appreciated the value of innovation to the organisation, and who know what to do when they see it, was an important part of Ericsson’s approach. These activities had the additional advantage of creating a common language of innovation which allowed ideas to move around the company and reach people who were able to assess them and assist in their development.

And the result? Magnus said that the scenarios generated resulted in a number of new partnerships, and more generally, around 1 in 40 new ideas were eventually implemented. The diversified ideas base had not resulted in a great change in the origin of innovative ideas.  The sources of ideas were still dominated by already existing networks and contacts, with further innovations coming from other companies. The ultimate test will be whether Ericsson continues to be a force to reckoned with in the new, networked world.

Thursday 17^th November 2011, St. James’ Park, Newcastle

By Claire Thorne

Just in case you were exhausted from Day 1, or you weren’t quite paying attention at 9 am, Prof Don Marinelli was on hand. Delivering his keynote, entitled ‘A Curriculum for the 21st Century: Storytelling, Architecture, Technology & Experience’ , with all the gusto and drama of (a State-side) Brian Blessed, Don spoke and we all listened. He presented the innovative and multidisciplinary Master of Entertainment Technology – focusing on Storytelling, Architecture, Technology and Experience – at Carnegie Mellon University which he co-founded (watch co-founder Randy Pausch’s ‘last lecture’). The course abandons all traditional, formal teaching methods, valuing ‘edu-tainment’ and choosing to view “education as business”, boasting Star War’s C-3PO amongst its Faculty. In practice, this means a questionable non-curriculum of zeppelin rides and white-water rafting, students owning all IP and Don enforcing a somewhat brutal ‘no scholarship rule’.

Don’s examples of MET outputs included MyStoryMaker (software designed to encourage children into Carnegie Library to write, rather than borrow, books) and synthetic interviews for bringing late, scientific legends ‘back to life’. Don’s vision of the future, “making Computer Science a performing art”, includes progress in the areas of augmented reality, 4D immersive experiences and casual gaming.

[Dates for your diary: The 2012 Digital Economy All Hands, hosted by dot.rural, the Aberdeen research Hub, will take place at the Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre on October 23-25 2012.]

Dr Dominic Price’s (Horizon Digital Economy research Hub) contribution to the Crowd-sourcing session, entitled ‘A Framework for Crowd-Sourcing Personal Data’, introduced the Datasphere application as a ‘personal container’ . The Datasphere offers a way for individuals to track and manage access to their personal information, maintaining privacy levels by granting selective access in response to third party ‘queries’.

In the Open Data and Security session, Dr Andrew Garbett presented Lincoln University’s work on ‘Using social media to drive public engagement with open data’ . Referring to the ‘HM Government 2011 Making Open Government Data Real: a public consultation’ publication and the importance Government places on engagement with data for new revenue streams, Andrew emphasised “the need for public services to interface with this [crime, NHS, travel and transport] raw data”. The London Live Tube Map, the London Bike Share Map and Mash My Gov were just a few example applications Andrew mentioned where the service is good but not quite tailored to the user. Andrew’s work on FearSquare – where UK crime statistics (based on location habits) and social media are combined for a user-personalised local crime app – echoed many of the applications showcased at DE All Hands 2010 (e.g. VoiceYourView ) and at the recent Silicon Valley Comes to the UK appathon . FearSquare raised some concerns from the audience; namely the developer’s responsibility to stop perpetuating negative connotations of Open Data, reinforced by nomenclature like FearSquare.

Dr Jenny O’Connor and I popped off for a quick tour of the conference venue: St James’ Park (aka ‘the Sports Direct Arena’ )…

The afternoon session on ‘Support Services for Assurance and Reassurance’ spanned the topics of privacy, energy and access. When presenting on ‘Privacy Preserving Personalisation via Dataware’, Dr James Goulding declared “in the Digital Economy, data is currency” before featuring… quilting! James then went on to categorise the current market place as an Oligopoly with just two to three major players dominating each service sector, leaving little/no motivation for innovation. James’ future work will be based on combining Dataware (a Chrome application which builds a model of you, based on your interest areas) with Horizon’s Geostore. In the same session, Ian Dent presented Horizon’s work on ‘Creating Personalised Energy Plans’ and the DESIMAX project, demonstrating strong links with Low Carbon London. As Ian and his colleagues jostle with 20-year old data sets, he appealed for access to data and suggested opportunities for collaboration.

Unfortunately the quick-fire session, like the workshops, offered few exciting updates on (repackaged) work featured at last year’s DE All Hands meeting . Meanwhile, there were just a couple, rare glimpses of Social Science research and any realised/projected Impact(s) in the DE space, i.e. the work and context that promise to put the ‘society’ in the Digital Economy.

So, what’s the verdict? Two (and a half) days later and I’m left wondering: Where’s the ‘global’ in all of this? Where’s the ‘economy’? Cue Digital City Exchange (paper [pdf], poster (low resolution) [jpg]).

Wed 16th November 2011, St. James’ Park, Newcastle

By Claire Thorne

Dr John Baird (Head of RCUK’s Digital Economy programme) launched the second, annual Digital Economy All Hands meeting with an overview of UK DE portfolio, highlighting recent major investments including Digital City Exchange (£6M over 5 years) and MediaCity UK.

John took the opportunity to summarise the DE programme’s achievements to date: investment of more than £138M, funding 96 projects with 400 users since 2008. He went on to announce the four DE sub-themes – Communities and Culture, IT as a Utility, New economic models, and Sustainable Society – in the context of the DE networks call.  [Other notable calls to be announced soon include Research Centres in End Use Energy Demand and Future ICT-Enabled Manufacturing]

If you’re a Computing Scientist, Engineer or Social Scientist working in DE and just getting to grips with it being ‘multidisciplinary’, its time to move on. According to John, the DE is really “post discipline”.

Wrapping up with the current DE challenges, John asked “what is the Digital Economy programme’s place in international research?”. Food for thought indeed… Unfortunately though this was the first, and last, reference to any wider, international context; a missed opportunity at a conference centering on research in the digital space, which is, by definition, geographically unbounded.

Prof James Hollan (University of California, San Diego) delivered the day 1 keynote entitled ‘History Enriched Computing’ , presenting the changing forms of computers, the notion of history-enriched digital objects and drawing parallels across the disciplines with “History is about stories, Science too is about stories…In Computer Science, we make our stories true by code; In Engineering, we make our stories true by building things”. ChronoViz was presented as an example of a data visualisation tool offering analysis capabilities and integration with paper-based notes. James went on to discuss the data collection revolution, exclaiming: “…More data can’t be the answer… We’re drowning in data”. For James, the future of Science lies in linking these data and these disciplines.

The keynote was an impressive showcase of existing tools but, instead, I was hoping for the presentation of a ‘grander vision’. When you are itching to discover what aspects of the Digital Economy, for example the US and Asia, are focusing upon, I was left searching for a global reference point to ground our DE research.

Themes emerging from the industry panel session with Gary Moulton (Microsoft), Ian Marshall (from the perspective of the Financial Services industry), Dr Aart van Halteren (Philips Research), Dr Alan Whitmore (from the perspective of the pharmaceutical industry), Dave Sharp (Binary Asylum) and Chaired by Prof Feng Li (SiDE Digital Economy research Hub ) included:

• barriers to the use of products, programmes and services, the Connected Living Report and the growing importance of middle-aged women in product and service development and the adoption of technologies.

• the challenges associated with the pace of change vs the arthritic nature of infrastructure.

• the barriers to getting digital solutions to end-users and the need for sustainable solutions and real progress in Business Model Innovation.

• Open Innovation encompassing industry-academia collaborations.

The standard delegate list is often the key to maximising your networking during conference breaks and workshops. Was anyone else wondering where the list, for ‘Digital Engagement’, was hiding?

The ‘How to share mobile trace data to enable applications in the transport sector’ workshop – co-presented by Prof Derek McAuley (Director, Horizon Digital Economy research Hub), Prof Eddie Wilson (University of Southampton), Prof Nigel Davies (Lancaster University) and Dr Dominic Price (Horizon Digital Economy research Hub) – touched on intelligent traffic lights, experiences with collecting user traces, privacy issues associated with personalised travel advice with crowd-sourcing approaches, technology constraints (such as battery life), and prototyping data stores. Nigel welcomed opportunities to collaborate on developing a common platform for storing and re-purposing participant’s journey data.  Meanwhile, Dominic invited more people to use the Geostore – less of an application, and more an infrastructure for research projects with multiple trials.

Highlights of the rest of the day’s activities included: Dr Silvia Elaluf-Calderwood’s (Information Systems and Innovation Group, London School of Economics) talk on ‘Digital Innovation on Mobile Platforms: A Business Model Analysis’; reference to MIT’s Senseable City Lab; and the research poster session.

Digital City Exchange’s Orestis Tsinalis presented our poster (low resolution) [jpg] (and paper [pdf]) to a curious bunch in the atrium of the Great North Museum.

And the prize for the conference’s first mention of an “ecosystem” went to Silvia!

More news from Day 2 to follow…