Building A Smarter Planet

This evening, we discovered a new stall inside Thomson Plaza food court selling Thai food, advertised as “Gourmet Thai food”.  Gourmet-ness is relative.  But inside a food court that sells hopelessly tasteless food, this new stall has way exceeded my expectation.  Over dinner, towards the end of a sumptuous gourmet meal , I recalled that I had a gourmet Penang food in the office’s canteen this afternoon.  It was a one day only food festival.  In a suburb like where I work, variety in food is a rarity.  Many in my office complain about eating the same food every day.  I am OK with that.  I have high endurance.  Whenever I look at the same dish every afternoon, I think about my dog in Hong Kong.  He too eats the same food every day.  He never complains.  And he eats with unparalleled enthusiasm.

Cynthia and I are both working in the banking industry.  Naturally, many assume that we talk about work, after work.  The answer is quite the opposite.  I hardly know what she does and she certainly has no clue what I do at work.  Over dinner, I shared with her my lunch story with my usual healthy dose of enthusiasm, “I had Penang Laksa, Penang Char Kway Teow, one Penang dessert, and a glass of pineapple juice.  And it only costs $6!”  $6 is a lot of money, especially when you are working in the suburb.  I often pay below $4 for lunch, which includes a main course, a serving of fresh fruit, a cup of yogurt, and at times, a bowl of soup (depending on special promotion).  But today was special.  It was suburban Penang food festival.

Of course, my meal today did not come from Thailand or Penang (Malaysia).  Nor did my food produced entirely locally, if at all.  Where does my food come from?  Shall I care?  Does Singapore inspect all the foods that enter our border?

I think not.

That brings me to the intend of this post: Building A Smart Planet.  Last week, I have attended a blogger event hosted by IBM.  Building A Smart Planet is a global initiative on how to build a smarter planet by instrumenting the world’s systems, interconnecting them, and making them intelligent.  IBM has shared many ideas and case studies with us.  And I am sharing a highlight of some of the materials that speak to me.  If you wish to know more, head over to the IBM Smarter Planet Website.

• The world’s electrical grids today are incredibly wasteful, due to inefficiencies of managing a dynamic global network of energy supply and demand.  Because of the lack of intelligence in balancing or monitoring power flows, the annual wastage is enough to power India, Germany, and Canada for the entire year.  The solution?  Introduce an intelligent utility system that can be linked to the global power sources.  Use the power of analytics to produce insights that empower individuals and businesses, utility companies, governments and societies to make informed decisions on how energy should be supplied and consumed.
• Due to accelerated urbanization, in 2007 and for the first time in history, the majority of our population lived in cities.  That places strain to the world’s traffic.  In US, 3.7 billion hours are lost every year to people sitting in traffic, 2.3 billion gallons of fuel are burned needlessly.  That translates to $78 billion per year.  Piecewise improvement to the road system no longer works.  We have to look at the relationship across the entire system and all the touch points, including how the people and the cities live and work.  In Stockholm, a dynamic toll system based on the flow of vehicles into and out of the city has reduced traffic by 20%, deceased wait time by 25%, and cut emissions by 12%.  In Singapore, controllers receive real time information through sensors to model and predict traffic scenarios with 90% accuracy.
• In the past, food on our tables came from the local farmers.  Today, we depend on a global web of growers, fisheries, packers, and entities that process our food, distribute our food.  How can we ensure that the standards for quality are consistent when only a tiny percentage of those foods are inspected when they cross our borders?  Did you know sixty years ago, we could create a calorie of food with less than half a calorie of fossil fuel?  Today, a single calorie of food bought from a supermarket requires 10 calories of fossil fuel to produce.  Hence, supply chain efficiency is important.  In Norway, one of the largest food suppliers uses RFID technology to trace meat and poultry from the farm through the supply chain to the store shelf.
• Imagine a smarter healthcare system with better interconnectivity and sharing of quality data between the doctors, patients, and insurers.  Real-time information such as patient records is analyzed and turned into actionable knowledge.  We should be able to own our medical records.  Moving away from paper records translates to reduced medical errors and improved efficiencies.  A public healthcare service in Spain has built a regionally integrated system that allows patients to visit any health centers knowing that the doctors will have their up-to-date medical record.  The result?  Lower healthcare cost and better care to the patients and the community.
• Did you know that it takes 700 gallons of water to make a cotton T-shirt, 2,000 gallons to make one gallon of milk, and 39,000 gallons to make a car?  In the last 100 years, global water usage has outpaced the rate of population growth by double.  Global agriculture wastes 60% of the 2,500 trillion liters it uses each year.  Municipalities lose 50% of water through leaky infrastructure.  One in five people today still lacks access to clean and safe drinking water.  United Nation predicts that nearly half of the world’s population will experience critical water shortages by the year 2080.  The solution?  Use technology to monitor, measure, and analyze the entire water ecosystem – from rivers and reservoirs to the pumps and pipes in our homes.  Smart metering for the individuals and the businesses helps to raise awareness and empower demand management.
• What about urban crimes? Instead of merely responding to crimes and emergencies after the fact, what if we could analyze, anticipate, and working to prevent them?  Sounds like a science fiction?  Here are some examples.  New York police commanders use analytics and visualization tools to see crime patterns as they are forming.  The city’s Real Time Crime Center system is capable of querying pieces of information to uncover previously unknown data relationships and points of connection.  The result?  A 27% drop in crime since 2001.  New York is now ranked as the safest large city in the US.  In Chicago today, 911 dispatchers have access to video from surveillance cameras citywide with advanced analytics built to assist the operator with potential “eyes-on-the-scene” in the vicinity.  Right services can be dispatched in time.

To bring us back to local context, what does a smarter planet mean to you?  What can be done to your country in that regard?

External Link: IBM Smarter Planet Website