Robots Will Make Leeds the First Self-Repairing City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emiko Jozuka at Motherboard: “Researchers in Britain want to make the first “self-repairing” city by 2035. How will they do this? By creating autonomous repair robots that patrol the streets and drainage systems, making sure your car doesn’t dip into a pothole, and that you don’t experience any gas leaks.

“The idea is to create a city that behaves almost like a living organism,” said Raul Fuentes, a researcher at the School of Civil Engineering at Leeds University, who is working on the project. “The robots will act like white cells that are able to identify bacteria or viruses and attack them. It’s kind of like an immune system.”

The £4.2 million ($6.4 million) national infrastructure project is in collaboration with Leeds City Council and the UK Collaboration for Research in Infrastructures and Cities (UKCRIC). The aim is to create a fleet of robot repair workers who will live in Leeds city, spot problems, and sort them out before they become even bigger ones by 2035, said Fuentes. The project is set to launch officially in January 2016, he added.

For their five-year project—which has a vision that extends until 2050—the researchers will develop robot designs and technologies that focus on three main areas. The first is to create drones that can perch on high structures and repair things like street lamps; the second is to develop drones that can autonomously spot when a pothole is about to form and zone in and patch that up before it worsens; and the third is to develop robots that will live in utility pipes so they can inspect, repair, and report back to humans when they spot an issue.

“The robots will be living permanently in the city, and they’ll be able to identify issues before they become real problems,” explained Fuentes. The researchers are working on making the robots autonomous, and want them to be living in swarms or packs where they can communicate with one another on how best they could get the repair job done….(More)

Push, Pull, and Spill: A Transdisciplinary Case Study in Municipal Open Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jan Whittington et al: “Cities hold considerable information, including details about the daily lives of residents and employees, maps of critical infrastructure, and records of the officials’ internal deliberations. Cities are beginning to realize that this data has economic and other value: If done wisely, the responsible release of city information can also release greater efficiency and innovation in the public and private sector. New services are cropping up that leverage open city data to great effect.

Meanwhile, activist groups and individual residents are placing increasing pressure on state and local government to be more transparent and accountable, even as others sound an alarm over the privacy issues that inevitably attend greater data promiscuity. This takes the form of political pressure to release more information, as well as increased requests for information under the many public records acts across the country.

The result of these forces is that cities are beginning to open their data as never before. It turns out there is surprisingly little research to date into the important and growing area of municipal open data. This article is among the first sustained, cross-disciplinary assessments of an open municipal government system. We are a team of researchers in law, computer science, information science, and urban studies. We have worked hand-in-hand with the City of Seattle, Washington for the better part of a year to understand its current procedures from each disciplinary perspective. Based on this empirical work, we generate a set of recommendations to help the city manage risk latent in opening its data….(More)”

Role of Citizens in India’s Smart Cities Challenge

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Florence Engasser and Tom Saunders at the World Policy Blog: “India faces a wide range of urban challenges — from serious air pollution and poor local governance, to badly planned cities and a lack of decent housing. India’s Smart Cities Challenge, which has now selected 98 of the 100 cities that will receive funding, could go a long way in addressing these issues.

According to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, there are five key instruments that make a “smart” city: the use of clean technologies, the use of information and communications technology (ICT), private sector involvement, citizen participation and smart governance. There are good examples of new practices for each of these pillars.

For example, New Delhi recently launched a program to replace streetlights with energy efficient LEDs. The Digital India program is designed to upgrade the country’s IT infrastructure and includes plans to build “broadband highways” across the country. As for private sector participation, the Indian government is trying to encourage it by listing sectors and opportunities for public-private partnerships.

Citizen participation is one of Modi’s five key instruments, but this is an area where smart city pilots around the world have tended to perform least well on. While people are the implied beneficiaries of programs that aim to improve efficiency and reduce waste, they are rarely given a chance to participate in the design or delivery of smart city projects, which are usually implemented and managed by experts who have only a vague idea of the challenges that local communities face.

Citizen Participation

Engaging citizens is especially important in an Indian context because there have already been several striking examples of failed urban redevelopments that have blatantly lacked any type of community consultation or participation….

In practice, how can Indian cities engage residents in their smart city projects?

There are many tools available to policymakers — from traditional community engagement activities such as community meetings, to websites like Mygov.in that ask for feedback on policies. Now, there are a number of reasons to think smartphones could be an important tool to help improve collaboration between residents and city governments in Indian cities.

First, while only around 10 percent of Indians currently own a smartphone, this is predicted to rise to around half by 2020, and will be much higher in urban areas. A key driver of this is local manufacturing giants like Micromax, which have revolutionized low-cost technology in India, with smartphones costing as little as $30 (compared to around $800 for the newest iPhone).

Second, smartphone apps give city governments the potential to interact directly with citizens to make the most of what they know and feel about their communities. This can happen passively, for example, the Waze Connected Citizens program, which shares user location data with city governments to help improve transport planning. It can also be more active, for example, FixMyStreet, which allows people to report maintenance issues like potholes to their city government.

Third, smartphones are one of the main ways for people to access social media, and researchers are now developing a range of new and innovative solutions to address urban challenges using these platforms. This includes Petajakarta, which creates crowd-sourced maps of flooding in Jakarta by aggregating tweets that mention the word ‘flood.’

Made in India

Considering some of the above trends, it is interesting to think about the role smartphones could play in the governance of Indian cities and in better engaging communities. India is far from being behind in the field, and there are already a few really good examples of innovative smartphone applications made in India.

Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (translated as Clean India Initiative) is a campaign launched by Modi in October 2014, covering over 4,000 towns all over the country, with the aim to clean India’s streets. The Clean India mobile application, launched at the end of 2014 to coincide with Modi’s initiative, was developed by Mahek Shah and allows users to take pictures to report, geo-locate, and timestamp streets that need cleaning or problems to be fixed by the local authorities.

Similar to FixMyStreet, users are able to tag their reports with keywords to categorize problems. Today, Clean India has been downloaded over 12,000 times and has 5,000 active users. Although still at a very early stage, Clean India has great potential to facilitate the complaint and reporting process by empowering people to become the eyes and ears of municipalities on the ground, who are often completely unaware of issues that matter to residents.

In Bangalore, an initiative by the MOD Institute, a local nongovernmental organization, enabled residents to come together, online and offline, to create a community vision for the redevelopment of Shanthinagar, a neighborhood of the city. The project, Next Bengaluru, used new technologies to engage local residents in urban planning and tap into their knowledge of the area to promote a vision matching their real needs.

The initiative was very successful. In just three months, between December 2014 and March 2015, over 1,200 neighbors and residents visited the on-site community space, and the team crowd-sourced more than 600 ideas for redevelopment and planning both on-site and through the Next Bangalore website.

The MOD Institute now intends to work with local urban planners to try get these ideas adopted by the city government. The project has also developed a pilot app that will enable people to map abandoned urban spaces via smartphone and messaging service in the future.

Finally, Safecity India is a nonprofit organization providing a platform for anyone to share, anonymously or not, personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. Men and women can report different types of abuses — from ogling, whistles and comments, to stalking, groping and sexual assault. The aggregated data is then mapped, allowing citizens and governments to better understand crime trends at hyper-local levels.

Since its launch in 2012, SafeCity has received more than 4,000 reports of sexual crime and harassment in over 50 cities across India and Nepal. SafeCity helps generate greater awareness, breaks the cultural stigma associated with reporting sexual abuse and gives voice to grassroots movements and campaigns such as Sayfty, Protsahan, or Stop Street Harassment, forcing authorities to take action….(More)

How smartphones are solving one of China’s biggest mysteries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ana Swanson at the Washington Post: “For decades, China has been engaged in a building boom of a scale that is hard to wrap your mind around. In the last three decades, 260 million people have moved from the countryside to Chinese cities — equivalent to around 80 percent of the population of the U.S. To make room for all of those people, the size of China’s built-up urban areas nearly quintupled between 1984 and 2010.

Much of that development has benefited people’s lives, but some has not. In a breathless rush to boost growth and development, some urban areas have built vast, unused real estate projects — China’s infamous “ghost cities.” These eerie, shining developments are complete except for one thing: people to live in them.

China’s ghost cities have sparked a lot of debate over the last few years. Some argue that the developments are evidence of the waste in top-down planning, or the result of too much cheap funding for businesses. Some blame the lack of other good places for average people to invest their money, or the desire of local officials to make a quick buck — land sales generate a lot of revenue for China’s local governments.

Others say the idea of ghost cities has been overblown. They espouse a “build it and they will come” philosophy, pointing out that, with time, some ghost cities fill up and turn into vibrant communities.

It’s been hard to evaluate these claims, since most of the research on ghost cities has been anecdotal. Even the most rigorous research methods leave a lot to be desired — for example, investment research firms sending poor junior employees out to remote locations to count how many lights are turned on in buildings at night.

Now new research from Baidu, one of China’s biggest technology companies, provides one of the first systematic looks at Chinese ghost cities. Researchers from Baidu’s Big Data Lab and Peking University in Beijing used the kind of location data gathered by mobile phones and GPS receivers to track how people moved in and out suspected ghost cities, in real time and on a national scale, over a period of six months. You can see the interactive project here.

Google has been blocked in China for years, and Baidu dominates the market in terms of search, mobile maps and other offerings. That gave the researchers a huge data base to work with —  770 million users, a hefty chunk of China’s 1.36 billion people.

To identify potential ghost cities, the researchers created an algorithm that identifies urban areas with a relatively spare population. They define a ghost city as an urban region with a population of fewer than 5,000 people per square kilometer – about half the density recommended by the Chinese Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development….(More)”

How big data and The Sims are helping us to build the cities of the future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Next Web: “By 2050, the United Nations predicts that around 66 percent of the world’s population will be living in urban areas. It is expected that the greatest expansion will take place in developing regions such as Africa and Asia. Cities in these parts will be challenged to meet the needs of their residents, and provide sufficient housing, energy, waste disposal, healthcare, transportation, education and employment.

So, understanding how cities will grow – and how we can make them smarter and more sustainable along the way – is a high priority among researchers and governments the world over. We need to get to grips with the inner mechanisms of cities, if we’re to engineer them for the future. Fortunately, there are tools to help us do this. And even better, using them is a bit like playing SimCity….

Cities are complex systems. Increasingly, scientists studying cities have gone from thinking about “cities as machines”, to approaching “cities as organisms”. Viewing cities as complex, adaptive organisms – similar to natural systems like termite mounds or slime mould colonies – allows us to gain unique insights into their inner workings. …So, if cities are like organisms, it follows that we should examine them from the bottom-up, and seek to understand how unexpected large-scale phenomena emerge from individual-level interactions. Specifically, we can simulate how the behaviour of individual “agents” – whether they are people, households, or organisations – affect the urban environment, using a set of techniques known as “agent-based modelling”….These days, increases in computing power and the proliferation of big datagive agent-based modelling unprecedented power and scope. One of the most exciting developments is the potential to incorporate people’s thoughts and behaviours. In doing so, we can begin to model the impacts of people’s choices on present circumstances, and the future.

For example, we might want to know how changes to the road layout might affect crime rates in certain areas. By modelling the activities of individuals who might try to commit a crime, we can see how altering the urban environment influences how people move around the city, the types of houses that they become aware of, and consequently which places have the greatest risk of becoming the targets of burglary.

To fully realise the goal of simulating cities in this way, models need a huge amount of data. For example, to model the daily flow of people around a city, we need to know what kinds of things people spend their time doing, where they do them, who they do them with, and what drives their behaviour.

Without good-quality, high-resolution data, we have no way of knowing whether our models are producing realistic results. Big data could offer researchers a wealth of information to meet these twin needs. The kinds of data that are exciting urban modellers include:

  • Electronic travel cards that tell us how people move around a city.
  • Twitter messages that provide insight into what people are doing and thinking.
  • The density of mobile telephones that hint at the presence of crowds.
  • Loyalty and credit-card transactions to understand consumer behaviour.
  • Participatory mapping of hitherto unknown urban spaces, such as Open Street Map.

These data can often be refined to the level of a single person. As a result, models of urban phenomena no longer need to rely on assumptions about the population as a whole – they can be tailored to capture the diversity of a city full of individuals, who often think and behave differently from one another….(More)

New traffic app and disaster prevention technology road tested

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Psych.org: “A new smartphone traffic app tested by citizens in Dublin, Ireland allows users to give feedback on traffic incidents, enabling traffic management centres to respond quicker when collisions and other incidents happen around the city. The ‘CrowdAlert’ app, which is now available for download, is one of the key components utilised in the EU-funded INSIGHT project and a good example of how smartphones and social networks can be harnessed to improve public services and safety.

‘We are witnessing an explosion in the quantity, quality, and variety of available information, fuelled in large part by advances in sensor networking, the availability of low-cost sensor-enabled devices and by the widespread adoption of powerful smart-phones,’ explains  coordinator professor Dimitrios Gunopulos from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. ‘These revolutionary technologies are driving the development and adoption of applications where mobile devices are used for continuous data sensing and analysis.’

The project also developed a novel citywide real-time traffic monitoring tool, the ‘INSIGHT System’, which was tested in real conditions in the Dublin City control room, along with nationwide disaster monitoring technologies. The INSIGHT system was shown to provide early warnings to experts at situation centres, enabling them to monitor situations in real-time, including disasters with potentially nation-wide impacts such as severe weather conditions, floods and subsequent knock-on events such as fires and power outages.

The project’s results will be of interest to public services, which have until now lacked the necessary infrastructure for handling and integrating miscellaneous data streams, including data from static and mobile sensors as well as information coming from social network sources, in real-time. Providing cities with the ability to manage emergency situations with enhanced capabilities will also open up new markets for network technologies….(More)”

Open Data Impact: How Zillow Uses Open Data to Level the Playing Field for Consumers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniel Castro at US Dept of Commerce: “In the mid-2000s, several online data firms began to integrate real estate data with national maps to make the data more accessible for consumers. Of these firms, Zillow was the most effective at attracting users by rapidly growing its database, thanks in large part to open data. Zillow’s success is based, in part, on its ability to create tailored products that blend multiple data sources to answer customer’s questions about the housing market. Zillow’s platform lets customers easily compare neighborhoods and conduct thorough real estate searches through a single portal. This ensures a level playing field of information for home buyers, sellers and real estate professionals.

The system empowers consumers by providing them all the information needed to make well-informed decisions about buying or renting a home. For example, information from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey helps answer people’s questions about what kind of housing they can afford in any U.S. market. Zillow also creates market analysis reports, which inform consumer about whether it is a good time to buy or sell, how an individual property’s value is likely to fluctuate over time, or whether it is better to rent or to own in certain markets. These reports can even show which neighborhoods are the top buyers’ or sellers’ markets in a given city. Zillow uses a wide range of government data, not just from the Census Bureau, to produce economic analyses and products it then freely provides to the public.

In addition to creating reports from synthesized data, Zillow has made a conscious effort to make raw data more usable. It has combined rental, mortgage, and other data into granular metrics on individual neighborhoods and zip codes. For example, the “Breakeven Horizon” is a metric that gives users a snapshot of how long they would need to own a home in a given area for the accrued cost of buying to be less than renting. Zillow creates this by comparing the up-front costs of buying a home versus the amount of interest that money could generate, and then analyzing how median rents and home values are likely to fluctuate, affecting both values. By creating metrics, rankings, and indices, Zillow makes raw or difficult-to-quantify data readily accessible to the public.

While real estate agents can be instrumental in the process of finding a new home or selling an old one, Zillow and other platforms add value by connecting consumers to a wealth of data, some of which may have been accessible before but was too cumbersome for the average user. Not only does this allow buyers and sellers to make more informed decisions about real estate, but it also helps to balance the share of knowledge. Buyers have more information than ever before on available properties, their valuations for specific neighborhoods, and how those valuations have changed in relation to larger markets. Sellers can use the same types of information to evaluate offers they receive, or decide whether to list their home in the first place. The success that Zillow and other companies like it have achieved in the real estate market is a testament to how effective they have been in harnessing data to address consumers’ needs and it is a marvelous example of the power of open data….(More)”

A multi-source dataset of urban life in the city of Milan and the Province of Trentino

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Gianni Barlacchi et al in Scientific Data/Nature: “The study of socio-technical systems has been revolutionized by the unprecedented amount of digital records that are constantly being produced by human activities such as accessing Internet services, using mobile devices, and consuming energy and knowledge. In this paper, we describe the richest open multi-source dataset ever released on two geographical areas. The dataset is composed of telecommunications, weather, news, social networks and electricity data from the city of Milan and the Province of Trentino. The unique multi-source composition of the dataset makes it an ideal testbed for methodologies and approaches aimed at tackling a wide range of problems including energy consumption, mobility planning, tourist and migrant flows, urban structures and interactions, event detection, urban well-being and many others….(More)”

Slowly but surely, government IT enters the 21st century

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica: “Government IT departments have a mostly deserved reputation for being behind the times. While private companies keep giving customers new and better ways to buy products and learn about their services, government agencies have generally made it difficult for residents to interact with them via the Internet.

But this is slowly changing, with agencies from the local level to the federal level focusing on fixing broken websites and building new tools for Americans to get what they need from the government….

“Improve Detroit,” a smartphone app launched in April this year using technology from SeeClickFix, has helped Detroiters find out how to get things done. In its first six months of availability, 10,000 complaints were resolved in an average of nine days, “a vast improvement from when problems often languished for years,” the city said in an announcement this month.

Improve Detroit was used to get “more than 3,000 illegal dumping sites cleaned up; 2,092 potholes repaired; 991 complaints resolved related to running water in an abandoned structure; 565 abandoned vehicles removed; 506 water main breaks taken care of; [and] 277 traffic signal issues fixed,” Detroit said….

At the municipal level, Oakland is also planning to pass its hard-earned wisdom on to other cities. “Our goal is to create a roadmap for cities big and small,” Oakland Communications Director Karen Boyd told Ars.

Like Detroit, Oakland partnered with SeeClickFix and Code for America after experiencing tough economic times. “Oakland was particularly hard hit by the mortgage crisis [in 2008], a lot of predatory loans were made to our low-income folks,” Boyd said.

Property tax revenue plummeted and the city lost about a quarter of its government workforce, Boyd said.

“Governments were finding themselves way behind the curve on technology. We looked up and realized this was no longer sensible to try to do more with less. We have to do things differently, and technology is an opportunity,” she said.

Working with Code for America in 2013, Oakland made RecordTrac, a website for requesting public records and tracking records requests. Obtaining government documents is often a convoluted process, but Ars Technica’s own Freedom of Information Act enthusiast Cyrus Farivar told me that RecordTrac “is the best (albeit imperfect) public records process I’ve ever used.”…

One of the best examples of a government agency using the Internet to engage residents comes from NASA. The space agency has had an online presence since the early years of the Web, said Brian Dunbar, who has been the content manager for nasa.gov since 1995.

The website has allowed NASA to distribute huge amounts of photos and videos from missions and broadcast an online TV service. There’s even live video feed of the Earth from the International Space Station.

NASA is all over social media, with nearly 700,000 subscribers to its YouTube channel, 13 millionTwitter followers, 13 million Facebook likes, 5.4 million Instagram followers, and a big presence on several other social networks. That’s not even including individuals like astronaut Scott Kelly, who has been tweeting from the International Space Station.

NASA has nearly 100 people editing its website, with content generally capitalizing on current events such as the recent Pluto flyby. NASA gets a lot of feedback when there are video problems, “but we’ve been lucky in that the problems have been not been overwhelming in either number or size, and we get a lot of positive feedback from the public,” Dunbar said.

This is all a natural extension of NASA’s core mission because the legislation that created the agency in 1958 charged it “with disseminating information about its programs to the widest extent practicable,” Dunbar said….(More)”

 

Can Mobile Phone Surveys Identify People’s Development Priorities?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Leo and Robert Morello at the Center for Global Development: “Mobile phone surveys are fast, flexible, and cheap. But, can they be used to engage citizens on how billions of dollars in donor and government resources are spent? Over the last decade, donor governments and multilateral organizations have repeatedly committed to support local priorities and programs. Yet, how are they supposed to identify these priorities on a timely, regular basis? Consistent discussions with the local government are clearly essential, but so are feeding ordinary people’s views into those discussions. However, traditional tools, such as household surveys or consultative roundtables, present a range of challenges for high-frequency citizen engagement. That’s where mobile phone surveys could come in, enabled by the exponential rise in mobile coverage throughout the developing world.

Despite this potential, there have been only a handful of studies into whether mobile surveys are a reliable and representative tool across a broad range of developing-country contexts. Moreover, there have been almost none that specifically look at collecting information about people’s development priorities. Along with Tiago Peixoto,Steve Davenport, and Jonathan Mellon, who focus on promoting citizen engagement and open government practices at the World Bank, we sought to address this policy research gap. Through a study focused on four low-income countries (Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe), we rigorously tested the feasibility of interactive voice recognition (IVR) surveys for gauging citizens’ development priorities.

Specifically, we wanted to know whether respondents’ answers are sensitive to a range of different factors, such as (i) the specified executing actor (national government or external partners); (ii) time horizons; or (iii) question formats. In other words, can we be sufficiently confident that surveys about people’s priorities can be applied more generally to a range of development actors and across a range of country contexts?

Several of these potential sensitivity concerns were raised in response to an earlier CGD working paper, which found that US foreign aid is only modestly aligned with Africans’ and Latin Americans’ most pressing concerns. This analysis relied upon Afrobarometer and Latinobarometro survey data (see explanatory note below). For instance, some argued that people’s priorities for their own government might be far less relevant for donor organizations. Put differently, the World Bank or USAID shouldn’t prioritize job creation in Nigeria simply because ordinary Nigerians cite it as a pressing government priority. Our hypothesis was that development priorities would likely transcend all development actors, and possibly different timeframes and question formats as well. But, we first needed to test these assumptions.

So, what did we find? We’ve included some of the key highlights below. For a more detailed description of the study and the underlying analysis, please see our new working paper. Along with our World Bank colleagues, we also published an accompanying paper that considers a range of survey method issues, including survey representativeness….(More)”