Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

By Claire Thorne

Wednesday 1 May 2013 #rcaktn

Hosted by Innovation RCA, the Technology Strategy Board’s Knowledge Transfer Networks, and Open City Labs. 

What is citizen-centred design? And what does it mean in the context of future transport? What could, and should, future transport modes, networks and offerings look like? And how do we get ‘there’?

Whatever insights the day’s discussions promised, I turned up to the Dyson building, Battersea, sure of at least one success: The Royal College of Art had managed to bring a hugely diverse group of people [delegate list, pdf ] together under one (very stylised) roof.

The aim of the Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) workshop was to scope out one/more potential ‘citizen-centred design for future transport’ multi-institute research programme(s) to take forward.

Here’s my summary of the day’s discussions and key themes:

In a lecture theatre that resembles no other natural sciences, engineering or business school lecture theatre I’ve ever seen* the facilitator (with seemingly endless enthusiasm!) brought together representatives of Open City Labs, local authorities, the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities, the Technology Strategy Board, Transport for London, the Greater London Authority, and organisations like Useful Simple … and of course Digital City Exchange (Imperial College London’s smart cities research programme).

* There are a host of reasons, but for a start, it had windows. And lots of them.

There wasn’t just variety to be found in the participant’s disciplines and sectors; all age groups were represented – refreshing indeed…

[Multi/cross/intra-disciplinary, multi/cross/intra-functional, multi/cross/intra-sectoral, multi/cross/intra-institute, multi/cross/intra-… we hear it everywhere in HEIs (and there’s no denying its value) but it never seems to go far enough. Where’s the equivalent promotion of multi/cross/intra-generational research and academia-industry collaboration?]

Nevertheless, I noted that we seemed a tad short on ‘techies’ (engineers, developers etc) whilst Beatrice Rogers (Creative Industries KTN) was wondering where the policymakers were… Perhaps they were there, or perhaps they got waylaid by other, more outdoors-y activities…

That special combination of a creative space coupled with creative minds led to, well, creative thinking and lively (but friendly) discussions… all manifested through the power of the humble post-it note, taking over every wall.

[By the way, is there an app that can take a photo of multiple post-it notes, and generate a word (or other) document with all the content? (with the text appropriately coloured, and sized proportional to its importance). Anyone? That could be handy/slightly terrifying…]

Duncan Wilson’s  (Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities)  keynote [full slides, via slideshare] highlighted his ‘top 10’ thematic issues/opportunities for citizen-centred design for future transport:

1. Interfaces e.g. wireless electric vehicle charging mechanisms

2. Systems approach

3. Transactions

4. Peer-to-peer

5. Business Models

6. Nudging (i.e. often incentivised, behavioural change) e.g. Chromorama (gamification of London journeys, using Oyster card data)

7. Connected

8. Integrated

9. Feedback

10. Personal space

(and note they’re not sector-specific, and hence pretty much apply to any ‘smart cities’ initiative). Check out the city issue map – presented at the World Economic Forum approximately five years ago. Now in 2013, how has this landscape of issues changed?

During our very first task there was a struggle to get past the wording of the workshop’s title: Should we be talking about Citizen-centred design? People-centred design? User-centred design? Or other?

I wondered what role future transport could play in, not just moving people between sites, from A to B, but in building communities along the way. Jump on a bus in, say, Aberdeen, and if you don’t see someone you know, soon enough you’ll have sparked up conversation with someone you’ve not met before. (Of course this is in stark contrast to London, and undoubtedly some prefer it this way). Could the journey on the city bus become our modern-day ‘village hall’, or ‘community centre’?

Aside from the access to existing data-streams, I think Digital City Exchange would be keen to explore

• the role of big/open data (and particularly real-time predictive modeling)
• incentivising users’ behavioural change

in citizen-centred design of future transport solutions.

A great day, a tonne of data (thanks Rakesh Gaur, Head of Reliability, Availability, Maintainability at TfL!!) and… some transport trivia:

• A London black cab costs £38,000.
• In 1900, 90% of travel was on public transport (e.g. street cars).
• There are 300,000 users of mobility scooters in the UK.
• The majority of transport use in London is for journeys of ~3-5 miles.
• What’s the most common reason why older people don’t use public transport? (it’s not about fare prices, fear of unsociable behaviour, or waiting for connections in the cold weather)… Guaranteed proximity to public toilet facilities!
• The reason why General Motor’s genius (or dubious?) business model was really a success(!)

Thursday 7 February 2013, Queen’s Tower Rooms, Imperial College London

DCE co-host ‘teacamp’ event on Open Data and Smart Cities

On February 7th, Imperial’s Digital City Exchange, the Digital Economy Lab and Sustainable Society Network+ hosted a special, one-off teacamp.

So, what is ‘teacamp‘?

Teacamp is an established series of informal, free, discussion events hosted via the Government Digital Service (GDS, Cabinet Office).

“Teacamps are informal gatherings for digital people who work in and around government and also outside of government. They are usually two hours long including a slot for a speaker and chatting over a cup of tea, hence the name ‘teacamp’…”

What made this teacamp special?

The February teacamp, hosted at Imperial’s South Kensington campus, was planned to coincide with the launch of the Urban Prototyping London 2013 festival, and to focus the discussions on to big and open data.

Speakers

Around seventy people from a range of disciplines and professions came along to interact with the panellists during this one-off event, organised by teacamp founder (Jane O’Loughlin, @teacampLondon) and DCE’s Dr Cathy Mulligan (@API_Economics, DCE Research Fellow) and Claire Thorne (@clairethorne, DCE Programme Coordinator).

(After some last minute tweaks!!) The panel consisted of:

• Richard Foulsham (@DELaboratory) – Programme Coordinator – IOP and Digital, Digital Economy Lab, Imperial College London
• Dr Jenny O’Connor (@Jenny0C) – DCE Research Associate exploring citizen engagement, technology development and adoption, data ownership, and the human aspects of privacy and security in relation to various categories of use.
• Dr Koen van Dam (@Koen_van_dam) -  DCE Research Associate, developing an agent-based model of city systems based on spatial and temporal data from multiple sectors.
• Dr David Boyle – DCE Research Fellow investigating city data-streams and the sensing landscape.
• James Smith (@floppy) – A developer at the UK Open Data Institute and lead organiser for @cleanwebuk

The discussions

For an overview of the discussions, check out Ross Atkin’s comic-style sketch notes (@rossatkin) and @Puffles2010‘s blog post, capturing all the action!

If you’d like more info on upcoming teacamps, keep an eye on the teacamp site/Twitter feed…

Istanbul,13-14 September 2012

By Pantelis Koutroumpis

The first of its kind World Intelligent Cities Summit took place in Istanbul on the 13-14 September. The agenda included prominent figures from the Turkish government and local authorities together with international experts presenting best practices for the development of connected and sustainable cities. While primarily a business and policy summit it was a rather interesting meeting in terms of the common direction towards a more sustainable future where ICT plays a critical role.

Idris Gulluce, Deputy & Chair Committee on Public Works, Reconstruction, Transportation and Tourism of the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TBMM) talked extensively about the importance of local culture and social understanding for the success of smart policies in cities. He underlined the increasing impact of behavioral sciences in designing, implementing and benchmarking policies and took some distance from ‘all-purpose’ EU guidelines and regulations that often oversee social cohesion and wellbeing in favor of preset targets. Gulluce outlined the list of major transport projects planned or underway in Istanbul like the Marmaray rail tunnel under the Istanbul Strait, the Istanbul Strait Road Channel Crossing, the Gebze-Orhangazi-Izmir Highway and the North Marmara Highway including the third Bosphorous Bridge in the city. In response to the decision to go on with these projects, Gulluce was criticized by the press in the room for a lack of planning and communication in the design and launch phases. From the lively discussions it became evident that Istanbul has changed dramatically during the last fifteen years. As he noted, Hurriyet – a newspaper with national circulation – offered coupons for gas masks back in 1994 to address the problem of air quality in the city. Today the most significant problems come from excessive traffic primarily due to the size of the city (~13m residents) and a historic lack of urban building plans. Besides the economic performance of the area continues to lure more young people to the city from the other regions of the country further affecting the local traffic.

Egemen Bagis, Minister of EU Affairs, went on to explain the increasing impact of cities’ social capital in the development of sustainable-living strategies. Transport, energy, water management, manufacturing and financial services all need to change their practices to address the evolving techno-economic ecosystem. He also highlighted the major improvements in Istanbul describing his experiences when access to drinking water was a major issue for the citizens and ‘hair dressers used soda water to work with’. Moving beyond the darker past he mentioned that people are now already beyond the hostilities of the past and that ‘asking for more tulips’ to decorate green areas is evidence for this improvement. In terms of actions by the government Bagis said that 16m tablets have been distributed to students and identified this policy as a critical broadband demand stimulation measure. The gradual shift from military expenditures towards education is another clear sign of the set of policies that Bagis continues to support.

Pierro Fassino, Mayor of Torino, discussed the transformation of a former industrial city into a modern sustainable landscape. His policies include a successful cycle hire scheme and a plan to reduce carbon emissions by 40% by 2020, in line with the 20-20-20 EU agenda. As explained policy-makers have to find the right mix of tools to ‘marry’ digital applications with social cohesion. Direct communications to the officials through social media or simple apps are a global trend that redefines active participation and democratic representation. His policies include a system of systems approach in managing the city linking all information feeds from energy, water, transport, telecommunications and manufacturing to a central location. Fassino described himself as a proponent of the digitization of public data as the only way to efficiently manage modern metropolises.

Hakki Tok, Chief Information Officer of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, pointed to the progress of the city in the digitization domain and announced that a domain name TSD extension has been granted to Istanbul; from 2013 local servers will have the option to be host under the .ist extension, slightly departing from the country’s .tr TSD. Along with mayors and municipal authorities he showed iPhone and Android apps already in operation that notify the IT centers of local municipalities for urgent or everyday citizens’ needs.

Other presentations included pilots for real life Living labs in cities (Hungary, Switzerland and Turkey), water and wastewater applications as financially viable solutions with significant reuse of resources, smart grid applications and local generation of electricity, applications for buildings and retrofits for households to meet the new model of ‘Plus Homes’ by the Fraunhofer Institute and many more.

In a nutshell, this summit showed that Istanbul is turning into a city-model for Turkey and the world both in terms of its size and the digital applications coupled with policy initiatives already in progress. It is also a great place with nice views to Bosphorous early in the morning and exquisite dietary combinations in Taksim Square a little bit later.

RCUK-TSB Internet of Things R&D roadmapping workshop
11-12 July 2012, Loughborough University

By Orestis Tsinalis

The Internet of Things (IoT) R&D roadmapping workshop was an event co-organised by the Research Councils UK (RCUK) and the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) that brought together participants from both academia and industry, with the objective of mapping “the current research landscape relevant to the Internet of Things, the research and R&D challenges for research institutions and businesses in the Internet of Things space, and the future skills needed and challenges to enable the UK to lead internationally in delivering and realising the IoT capability”.

In the introductory session Dr. Maurizio Pilu of the Technology Strategy Board presented TSB’s view on the Internet of Things (IoT). He stressed that there are various, often contradictory, perspectives about the IoT that need to be considered when designing a holistic IoT research strategy. The major challenge that TSB identify in the IoT space is to “help the UK gain an early advantage in the Internet of Things adoption, applications, and services development”. The angle that TSB adopt towards the IoT is an “horizontal” information value-chain view in order to deliver user-centred services through the digital enablement of “things”.

The second talk in the introductory session was given by Professor Rahim Tafazolli, who presented a view of a shared agenda for the IoT between RCUK and TSB. He highlighted the importance of the IoT in terms of the gains efficiency and simplicity that it can bring about, but also the social challenges that it can help us manage, in areas such as healthcare and assisted living, sustainability and smart energy, and security. According to Professor Tafazolli, the major challenges in the UK that prevent the IoT from taking off are the fragmented domains and diverse technologies that are employed, the uncoordinated research activities, the foggy business opportunities’ landscape, and the barriers to user adoption.

After the introductory session, the delegates were divided into four groups, each one exploring a different aspect of the Internet of Things: (i) Social, Legal and Ethical, (ii) Culture and Creativity Design, (iii) Economics and Business, and (iv) Technology. I will begin with the final findings of each group, and then present in more detail the discussions in the Economics and Business group breakout sessions.

The Social, Legal and Ethical group, led by Professor Bill Dutton from the University of Oxford, highlighted the tensions that exist in the IoT domain, between open and proprietary, formal education, and hacking and tinkering, standards and heterogeneity, mandate and incentives. They also emphasised the need to view the IoT from the perspective of social welfare.

The Culture and Creative Design group, led by Professor Rachel Cooper from Lancaster University, identified a number of research themes around which design research in the IoT should concentrate on. These themes were: play as a research process, making data tangible, understanding the role of physical bodies, changes in the working life in the future, digital life and death, sustainability, and storytelling and user experience.

The Economics and Business group, led by Dr. Colin Upstill from the University of Southampton, defined short-term and long-term goals of the business-related research on the IoT, as well as the key messages that every researcher or organisation should keep in mind when working within the IoT domain. In the short term we should aim at creating a unified IoT framework and platform to understand how all different aspects fit together, understanding how we can get, measure and show value in the IoT, and identifying the market enablers and economic blockers in the process of IoT adoption, such as the new business models and the interoperability issues that arise. In the long term we should focus on resolving framework issues (trust, governance, interoperability), capturing and making use of dynamic value chains and evolving value constellations, dealing with cross-border issues, and managing the complexity in relation to user engagement. The key messages of the group are that, at present, in the space of the IoT, we need value and not technology demonstrators, understand that we cannot predict disruption but can only facilitate it, and invest in meaningful skills for the future generations that will live and create in an IoT world.

The Technology group, led by Professor Hamid Aghvami from King’s College London, categorised their suggestions in four main areas: data processing and its applications, network architecture, things and radio links, and security and privacy. As regards data processing research should be focused on semantic connectivity, data discovery and federation, and coping with incomplete and noisy data. On the hardware side, researchers should investigate low power devices and energy harvesting, as well as how to achieve efficient use of the radio spectrum, and reduce the signalling overhead in communications so as to build a scalable IoT infrastructure. Finally, there are major issues regarding security and privacy of transactions and interactions in the digital space, such as proof of identity in transactions, and adaptability of security systems to changing conditions.

At the Economics and Business breakout session Dr. Upstill pointed out that the Internet of Things is a technology proposition now, and we need to work towards turning it into a business proposition. Dave Carter of the Manchester Digital Development Agency suggested to concentrate on user-driven open innovation and the future of production, in terms of the future skills that will be needed when “every house will have a 3d-printer”. TfL’s Head of Technical Services Group Simon Reed talked about tailoring information in order to make it relevant to individuals through personalised services, like a personal journey planner, and highlighted the need to depart from single-data-stream applications towards multi-source data integration on top of which new services can be built. Piotr Cofta of Trusted Renewables underlined that suppliers don’t understand the risk of smart technologies, and they don’t accept liability for failures. He concluded that new technologies, as the IoT, encompass “a high degree of risk that nobody wants to take”. Liz Brandt of Ctrl-Shift talked about understanding the value of user-created data, empowering individuals through ownership and control of their data, and building trust into the Internet of Things. Professor Irene Ng from the University of Warwick talked about the need to understand dynamic value constellations, and “putting data into context”.

The final outcome of this workshop will be a white paper highlighting the 2-3 big issues that surround the realisation of the Internet of Things. These challenges will serve as the foundation for proposing robust R&D projects in the future towards the direction of tackling them.

Sean Mahdi’s speech identified fundamental c hanges of the banking industry in the past decades. Building revenue heavily on financial leverage is no longer suitable due to increased regulatory intervention and industrial competition. A new business model is required to fully utilise digital technology to seize the opportunities among the customers, especially for those who have broadly interacted with the Internet.

In order to have a better understanding of this challe nge, research has been conducted by PwC with almost 3000 banking customers across the major markets. It demonstrates that the majority of customers prefer new financial services introduced by their primacy banks (see Figure 1). Due to the deteriorated public trust towards banks, this high level of consumer inertia will not be sustainable because of a concerted effort from regulators around the world to make the process of switching banks easier.

Figure 1

On the customer side, there are five key elements of changing customer behaviour:

1. Customers expect to receive more va