Posts Tagged ‘Digital City Exchange’

1st City Protocol Workshop: Building together better cities
16-17 July 2012, Barcelona, Spain

By Orestis Tsinalis

The 1st City Protocol workshop was an event co-organised by the Barcelona City Council, Cisco, and GDF SUEZ with participants from 22 companies, 33 cities, 19 organisations, and 17 universities. Imperial College London was represented in the workshop by a team of researchers from the Digital City Exchange programme.

The City Protocol is a new initiative that aims to bring together stakeholders from the industry, city councils, non-governmental organisations, and the academia with the goal to create a common global-scale framework for collaboration and innovation in cities.

Going to the workshop with no prior knowledge of what the City Protocol is (as with most participants), I didn’t know what to expect. The analogy to the Internet Protocol, which was implied by Vint Cerf (one of the creators of the TCP protocol) being one of the speakers, served part as a way to picture what the workshop would be about, and part as a confusing metaphor from the techie world. But let’s get started.

The City Protocol vision

On the first day, the welcome talk was given by Manel Sanromà, CIO of the City of Barcelona. His talk was a call for collaboration in order to create the cities of the future, which can be summarised in his phrase: “It’s about what we build together, alone we fail”.

The next speech by Vint Cerf was delivered through video as he couldn’t be there. The three main suggestions that he made, regarding what an initiative like the City Protocol should do in order to succeed, were:

1. Create a pool of the kinds of applications that could be built on top of the City Protocol
2. Rapid-prototype pilot projects to test ideas, and keep in mind that the ultimate goal should be to facilitate creating and finding the best ideas
3. Always document the process

Vicente Guallart, Chief Architect of the City of Barcelona, presented the vision of the City Protocol. He stressed the importance of having a vision of what will happen in 50 years and preparing for it by taking decisions. He also highlighted that “the Internet has changed our lives but not our cities, yet” , therefore we need novel strategies to add value in our cities through technology. Guallart summarised two basic directions towards that goal:

1. From product- and site-oriented cities to service-oriented cities
2. From centralised to distributed management of resources, from one-to-many to many-to-many

He concluded his talk by suggesting that “cities need a common language”, and that the City Protocol could be this language.

Carlos Moreno, Scientific Advisor of the President & CEO with GDF SUEZ, presented cities as complex systems and proposed a methodological framework for understanding them as such in order to effectively intervene.

Anil Menon, President of Cisco’s Globalisation Smart+Connected Communities, underlined that “ICT is like water and electricity” for our cities, and we should not think about ICT after we build our buildings and infrastructures. He presented five elements that are needed in order to realise our vision of the sustainable cities of the future:

1. Visionary leadership, not utopian thinking
2. Global standards: We need to become globally-aware
3. Smart regulation: The current regulation is not suitable for digital cities
4. Intelligent public-private partnerships, not of the “avoid cost-avoid risk” kind
5. Common language: We need to bring disparate ecosystems together, collaborate and support open innovation to achieve a common purpose

Why a City Protocol?

The first group session of the workshop was titled ‘Why a City Protocol?’. Counter-intuitive as it may seem the participants of the four groups were asked to define why cities need a City Protocol when nobody (or at least very few) knew what a City Protocol is. This was a reasonable question that many of us had, so Manel Sanromà gave us his idea of what the City Protocol is: “An open community that produces agreement in rough consensus mode”.

There were two sub-questions that we had to answer during the session, what the benefits of and the impediments towards the realisation of the City Protocol would be. On the one hand, the potential benefits of the City Protocol that the teams identified were:

• Service-orientedness
• Accelerated innovation
• New business opportunities
• Consolidation of standards
• Facilitation of knowledge sharing
• Collective action
• Emergence of a multi-actor view in cities

On the other hand, the impediments could be:

• A lack of vision (short-term vs. long-term)
• Problems of scoping the project (high-level vs. specific)
• Financing
• Resistance to change by various stakeholders
• A lack of transparency
• A lack of concrete deliverables
• The need for customisation for different cities (global vs. local)
• The governance model of the City Protocol itself

What should a City Protocol produce?

The second part of the first day started with a talk by Vicente Guallart who suggested the directions along which the City Protocol should move to define its deliverables. He said that the City Protocol “should produce agreements”. According to Guallart, these City Protocol Agreements (CPAs) should revolve around three areas:

1. Standards and recommendations
2. Projects and policies
3. Indicators and certification

“We are moving from a world of regulations to a world of indicators”, Guallart remarked.

Naturally, the aim of the second group session that followed was to identify more specifically the ‘what’ of the City Protocol. The groups identified the following deliverables, which I’m quoting here in the original wording:

• A citizen-centred approach
• A key performance indicators (KPI) framework
• Business models for open data
• A model of cooperation among the stakeholders
• Technology guidelines
• A tangible programme
• Integrated planning
• Prioritisation of issues
• Customisation for local requirements
• A portfolio of use cases in order to convince citizens
• Experimentation (pilots, small projects)
• A governance model that addresses ownership, accountability, and control issues
• Standards

As it becomes obvious from the above, the discussion revolved around thinking about the effects of or managing and controlling what the City Protocol will produce, which is not there yet, and addressed the ‘what’ question only tangentially. In my opinion, the ‘what’ in a project as the City Protocol should be about very well-defined and tangible deliverables, which, apart from some notable exceptions, didn’t came up. I will address this issue in the final section of this post, because it is important to relate my remarks with the ‘how’ of the City Protocol, which is the subject of the next section.

How should a City Protocol be developed and how should it evolve?

On the second day, Manel Sanromà, presented his vision of the City Protocol Society, the body that will produce and loosely manage the City Protocol. The idea for the City Protocol Society is inspired from the way the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Society operate.

The IETF is the main body that determines the standards that allow the Internet to function, which is an open community with no formal membership, and operates through self-appointed deliverable-oriented and limited time-scoped working groups. The working groups produce draft documents called requests for comments (RFCs), and the RFCs that are approved by the community after discussion and modifications eventually become standards. The operating principle of IETF is “rough consensus and running code”.

The Internet Society is the formal organisation that manages the IETF. It has formal membership, is led by a Board of Trustees, owns the output of the IETF, and has 90 local chapters around the world.

Sanromà proposed a similar structure for the City Protocol. Effectively, according to Sanromà’s vision, the City Protocol will be the ‘task force’ that is responsible for the development of the protocol using an open, collaborative, rough consensus-based approach, and producing written documents (CPAs, similar to RFCs). In this scheme, the City Protocol Society will be responsible for the governance of the City Protocol ‘task force’, with formal membership, and will supervise and own the City Protocol. The society will be led by a board elected by the constituencies. The first CPA, CPA0, which was presented at the workshop and was signed by the participants, can be found on City Protocol’s wiki.

The task of the group session that followed this talk was to identify the ‘how’ of the City Protocol, although, in my view, the discussion should have preceded the talk, because, in a way, almost everyone felt like we would discuss about something that had been already fixed. The ‘how’s’ that the groups proposed were (again I’m using the original wording):

• Guarantee the commitment of the City Protocol participants, politicians, policy makers, community and citizens
• Create a knowledge base of existing projects
• Create a masterplan/roadmap with clear goals
• Write an elevator pitch for the City Protocol
• Concentrate on some quick wins
• Set up formal and flexible governance for the City Protocol
• Create a collaborative virtual space for the community
• Identify specific subjects
• Define the scope of the City Protocol
• Balance the interests of cities and companies
• Establish city labs to test ideas
• Find out how the City Protocol can be ‘sold’ to interested parties
• Identify the leaders

A document that summarises the outcomes of the workshop can be found here.

Closing remarks

I personally strongly believe in open and collaborative initiatives like the City Protocol, and my participation in the workshop was very rewarding from many perspectives. This is why I decided to sign the first agreement, CPA0, as a member of Digital City Exchange. There is a significant potential in such efforts and I certainly view positively the City Protocol project. There are, however, certain important issues that I would like to address at this point, with the sole aim of constructive criticism, and I hope they will be viewed with this in mind by the City Protocol community.

In my opinion, politically, the City Protocol and City Protocol Society pair makes perfect sense. However, I can already see an a priori dichotomy between development and governance that is not at all evident in the case of the Internet organisations. More precisely, in the case of the Internet, the people who develop the Internet (the IETF) and the people who manage the outcomes (the Internet Society) are not different (not by definition at least). In any open technological space leaders emerge through their contributions, and managers are often the most active contributors of working code too (see Linux as a good example of what I’m talking about). In short, there is a tight coupling of innovation and its management in terms of the people who participate in these areas.

On the contrary, from what I experienced at the workshop, many participants would want to appoint leaders before anything tangible is produced, and create a quite artificial border line between development and governance. This rationale tries to replicate old institutional forms in an open and collaborative setting, an act which, in my opinion, will make the project dysfunctional, and cause it to move slowly. And, especially at the very start, we need fast decisive steps by building things. Leadership will then naturally emerge. I don’t see why and with what criteria leaders can be appointed before anything is built.

I also have to admit that I was quite frustrated by the fact that some participants perceived the ‘why’ of the project as something that can be used for ‘selling’ the City Protocol from day one. Again, I don’t understand how we can sell something that is not made yet, and I feel that this urge by some participants to take up the ‘sales’ roles before the project begins emphasises the aforementioned dichotomy between development and governance, and, ultimately, puts the openness of the project into risk.

On a more technical point, as with any kind of smart cities-related project, data is a competitive advantage through which innovation distribution is controlled. I believe that for a project as the City Protocol, which is based upon the premise of openness and collaboration, it would be useful to see who of the participants are committed to open up their data, to whom, and under what conditions. If there can be no viable agreements and solutions to the lack of openness in the data domain, it will be very difficult to proceed in the project.

A related issue is that I got the impression that the majority of the participants in the workshop view technology as secondary in the City Protocol effort. For them, technology is the ‘tool’ that will realise whatever is decided at the governance level. In my opinion, the City Protocol has a very significant technical component, which is precisely the ‘running code’ of the project. Therefore, the City Protocol community should understand the importance of technology in the project, and define more precisely what the running code is.

I believe that the Internet analogy is a very apt one for the City Protocol, and by addressing and resolving the development-governance dichotomy, the lack of data openness, and the lack of well-defined running code, the City Protocol could be a project that will shape the future of our cities.

Ovum-DCE Smart Cities Europe 2012

The Lancaster, London 19-20 June 2012

You can find the Chirpstory for the event here.

In many ways the event revealed the broader problems with discussions around smart cities. There is the aspirational vision – cleaner, less-congested, less polluted and more prosperous cities – contrasted with the complex reality of current “smart” ICT projects, often mired in difficulties around business models, administrative jurisdiction, privacy and security issues and any number of other complex multi-stakeholder problems that crop-up when you try and integrate the physical and digital worlds; problems which go far beyond the scope of a simple technological fix.

The day started with an intoduction by Larry Hirst of the Digital City Exchange and Imperial College and Neelie Kroes of the European Commission, and a laying-out-of-issues by David Gann, the principle investigator of the Digital City Exchange.  The vision of the Digital City Exchange is to create the equivalent of a telephone exchange for a city’s data. This platform will then be accessed by citizens, businesses and city administrators to assist decision making, create products and services and inform city management. The key point about this exchange is that it seeks to be an exchange for all types of sectoral data: energy, transport, health, waste, environmental and any other areas you can think of to place a sensor. This goes far beyond the sectoral approach we see in many projects.

The imperative for such projects was underlined by Manel Sanromá, CIO of the City of Barcelona who pointed out that the human race is becoming steadily more urban, a process that has been going on for millennia. A result of this fact is that it is the quality of life that is available in the cities that is going to determine how we live in the future, because although you “can’t guarantee that France, the United Kingdom and the United States will be around in a thousand years, you can be virtually certain that Paris, London and New York will be”.

As such, cities themselves, through offices such mayors and other municipal offices that currently seem to be  undergoing a renaissance, are going to be the source of the impetus for moving to a smarter urban future.

Interesting themes that emerged from subequent sessions included:

The human element: the unpredictability of human nature and the risk of making any broad predictions about how the “human agent” will react when embedded in a smart city. A point raised in both the Transport session by panellists Sue Flack, Anders Roth and Jeremy Green, and by Nilay Shah in his “View from the Top” session as he tried to imagine what a smart city would look like using the tools of process engineering.

What is a smart city?: This is likely to differ from city to city, but what are the essential elements and what is the essential infrastructure needed before you can even think about calling yourself one?

Governance: we may use phrases such as “managing the smart city”, but more often the level of decision making is unclear, a hierarchy and decentralisation are often suggested but we still don’t know who to go to for a particular kind of decision.

Who will pay?: Something of an old warhorse in debates about almost any topic, but one that is particularly uncertain when business models are as contested as they are in the digital environment. A point made strongly by Allan Mayo of the UK’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills who said the assumption that it was all going to be paid for by advertising was naïve.

The smart cities agenda suffers from a certain amount of tension between a bottom-up versus top-down approach. The former is responsive, but limited in scope by barriers between sectors and the latter is slow to develop and ill-defined, but necessary if the full potential of the agenda is to be realised. Hopefully the Digital City Exchange will go some way to filling this lacunae.

Tuesday 22 May 2012, Crayon London

By Koen van Dam

After previously attending the Internet of Things Meetup Meetup #6, it was only a matter of time before DCE would return to another edition of this informal get-together of a community focused on machine to machine communication, open data and trying to change the world. For IoT Meetup #8 the talks had a smart city/smart home/energy focus.

Before the three speakers gave their short presentation sparking off some interesting debates, Owen Davies explained the recent rebranding of Pachube to Cosm. In addition to providing a fresh new design and a name which is easier to pronounce (no more feeling smug hearing other people struggle with this after finally getting it right yourself), the new website wants to offer users more than just a place to store their data to be processed elsewhere. New graphs, maps and data visualisation are part of this. Furthermore, Cosm wants to be a stronger community-based platform, making it easier to see what others are doing and how they use their data and to facilitate discussions.

Claire Rowland, service design manager at AlertMe, a company specialising in home energy and security monitors, gave an inspiring view of how the user experience with smart home devices should look like. She stated that “a home is not a computer”, not the least because homes can be messy and things are not black or white as would be the view of a computer. A clear example of this would be a teenager sulking in the bedroom: present in the house (so don’t set the burglar alarm) but not really actively interacting with the rest of the family at that point either (so don’t go in there and ask if the temperature is right). Furthermore, the house is the last place you want to feel out of control and computers sometimes do make us feel like we’re not fully in charge (especially when they are not working as they are supposed to). As a result, Claire stated that any technology incorporated in the home should feel “homely”. An alarm system using terms like “armed” or “disarmed”, for example, make it sound as if there is a war going on instead of providing you with peace of mind before going to bed. Finally, what other companies building home energy management systems or a burglar alarms do wrong, is that they create devices that require more attention, not less. It will be interesting to see how AlertMe is going to address these challenges, especially when we see a world in which more choices may have to be made by the consumer (e.g. which energy supplier to use, when to run the washing machine so it’s the cheapest, at what time to charge an electric vehicle so the carbon emissions are the lowest, etc). If devices don’t bug us for the ordinary tasks it could make life simpler, but on the other hand we would give up some autonomy as well… and we’d have to trust the algorithms to make the right choices.

Paul Tanner shared his search for a low-power home hub. Such a device would sit in between the sensors and actuators in your home and the (cloud-based) services that can do something useful with the data and allow you to control it. Since a hub would always be turned on, low energy use is a key requirement. Of course the hub needs to speak different languages and protocols to talk to all possible devices, and can be programmed in a flexible and efficient way (for example using Node.js). Unfortunately, Paul hasn’t yet found the ideal device… but surely he’ll keep on looking and playing around with what is currently available on the market.

Tracy Hopkins of machine to machine technology and network provider Neul explained why she thinks white space – the license-free UHF broadcasting frequencies that became available after the switch to digital television – is key for enabling the internet of things. Current wireless networks are not ready for the large volume of data that will be transmitted by sensors and other devices and to solve this Neul promotes a new open communication standard called Weightless. This would offer a low cost way to transmit data since, after an initial investment in a base station, people could operate their own networks. Tracy expects that smart cities will drive the internet of things, and they have already done some trials in this domain (e.g. refuse collection based on bins that tell the council they are full).

So, we need good user experience for home (energy) management, a low-power hub to tie it all together within the house, and a wireless network to turn this into a smart city. It’s a good thing all these issues are being addressed with the same enthusiasm!

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…

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!

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…