Azmak Okan et al in the Journal “Big Data”: “Until now, most large-scale studies of humans have either focused on very specific domains of inquiry or have relied on between-subjects approaches. While these previous studies have been invaluable for revealing important biological factors in cardiac health or social factors in retirement choices, no single repository contains anything like a complete record of the health, education, genetics, environmental, and lifestyle profiles of a large group of individuals at the within-subject level. This seems critical today because emerging evidence about the dynamic interplay between biology, behavior, and the environment point to a pressing need for just the kind of large-scale, long-term synoptic dataset that does not yet exist at the within-subject level. At the same time that the need for such a dataset is becoming clear, there is also growing evidence that just such a synoptic dataset may now be obtainable—at least at moderate scale—using contemporary big data approaches. To this end, we introduce the Kavli HUMAN Project (KHP), an effort to aggregate data from 2,500 New York City households in all five boroughs (roughly 10,000 individuals) whose biology and behavior will be measured using an unprecedented array of modalities over 20 years. It will also richly measure environmental conditions and events that KHP members experience using a geographic information system database of unparalleled scale, currently under construction in New York. In this manner, KHP will offer both synoptic and granular views of how human health and behavior coevolve over the life cycle and why they evolve differently for different people. In turn, we argue that this will allow for new discovery-based scientific approaches, rooted in big data analytics, to improving the health and quality of human life, particularly in urban contexts….(More)”
Who you are/where you live: do neighbourhood characteristics explain co-production?
Paper by Peter Thijssen and Wouter Van Dooren in the International Review of Administrative Sciences: “Co-production establishes an interactive relationship between citizens and public service providers. Successful co-production hence requires the engagement of citizens. Typically, individual characteristics such as age, gender, and income are used to explain why citizens co-produce. In contrast, neighbourhood-level variables receive less attention. Nevertheless, the co-production literature, as well as social capital and urban planning theory, provides good arguments why neighbourhood variables may be relevant. In this study, we examine the administrative records of citizen-initiated contacts in a reporting programme for problems in the public domain. This co-production programme is located in the district of Deurne in the city of Antwerp, Belgium. A multilevel analysis is used to simultaneously assess the impact of neighbourhood characteristics and individual variables. While the individual variables usually found to explain co-production are present in our case, we also find that neighbourhood characteristics significantly explain co-production. Thus, our findings suggest that participation in co-production activities is determined not only by who you are, but also by where you live.
Points for practitioners In order to facilitate co-production and participation, the neighbourhood should be the first place to look. Co-production benefits may disproportionaly accrue to strong citizens, but also to strong neighbourhoods. Social corrections should take both into account. More broadly, a good understanding of the neighbourhoods in the city is needed to grasp citizen behaviour. Place-based policies in the city should focus on the neighbourhood….(More)”
Smarter as the New Urban Agenda: A Comprehensive View of the 21st Century City
Book edited by Gil-Garcia, J. Ramon, Pardo, Theresa A., Nam, Taewoo: “This book will provide one of the first comprehensive approaches to the study of smart city governments with theories and concepts for understanding and researching 21st century city governments innovative methodologies for the analysis and evaluation of smart city initiatives. The term “smart city” is now generally used to represent efforts that in different ways describe a comprehensive vision of a city for the present and future. A smarter city infuses information into its physical infrastructure to improve conveniences, facilitate mobility, add efficiencies, conserve energy, improve the quality of air and water, identify problems and fix them quickly, recover rapidly from disasters, collect data to make better decisions, deploy resources effectively and share data to enable collaboration across entities and domains. These and other similar efforts are expected to make cities more intelligent in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, productivity, transparency, and sustainability, among other important aspects. Given this changing social, institutional and technology environment, it seems feasible and likeable to attain smarter cities and by extension, smarter governments: virtually integrated, networked, interconnected, responsive, and efficient. This book will help build the bridge between sound research and practice expertise in the area of smarter cities and will be of interest to researchers and students in the e-government, public administration, political science, communication, information science, administrative sciences and management, sociology, computer science, and information technology. As well as government officials and public managers who will find practical recommendations based on rigorous studies that will contain insights and guidance for the development, management, and evaluation of complex smart cities and smart government initiatives.…(More)”
(US) Administration Announces New “Smart Cities” Initiative to Help Communities Tackle Local Challenges and Improve City Services
Factsheet from the White House: “Today, the Administration is announcing a new “Smart Cities” Initiative that will invest over $160 million in federal research and leverage more than 25 new technology collaborations to help local communities tackle key challenges such as reducing traffic congestion, fighting crime, fostering economic growth, managing the effects of a changing climate, and improving the delivery of city services. The new initiative is part of this Administration’s overall commitment to target federal resources to meet local needs and support community-led solutions.
Over the past six years, the Administration has pursued a place-based approach to working with communities as they tackle a wide range of challenges, from investing in infrastructure and filling open technology jobs to bolstering community policing. Advances in science and technology have the potential to accelerate these efforts. An emerging community of civic leaders, data scientists, technologists, and companies are joining forces to build “Smart Cities” – communities that are building an infrastructure to continuously improve the collection, aggregation, and use of data to improve the life of their residents – by harnessing the growing data revolution, low-cost sensors, and research collaborations, and doing so securely to protect safety and privacy.
As part of the initiative, the Administration is announcing:
- More than $35 million in new grants and over $10 million in proposed investments to build a research infrastructure for Smart Cities by the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Standards and Technology.
- Nearly $70 million in new spending and over $45 million in proposed investments to unlock new solutions in safety, energy, climate preparedness, transportation, health and more, by the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Transportation, Department of Energy, Department of Commerce, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
- More than 20 cities participating in major new multi-city collaborations that will help city leaders effectively collaborate with universities and industry.
Today, the Administration is also hosting a White House Smart Cities Forum, coinciding with Smart Cities Week hosted by the Smart Cities Council, to highlight new steps and brainstorm additional ways that science and technology can support municipal efforts.
The Administration’s Smart Cities Initiative will begin with a focus on key strategies:
- Creating test beds for “Internet of Things” applications and developing new multi-sector collaborative models: Technological advancements and the diminishing cost of IT infrastructure have created the potential for an “Internet of Things,” a ubiquitous network of connected devices, smart sensors, and big data analytics. The United States has the opportunity to be a global leader in this field, and cities represent strong potential test beds for development and deployment of Internet of Things applications. Successfully deploying these and other new approaches often depends on new regional collaborations among a diverse array of public and private actors, including industry, academia, and various public entities.
- Collaborating with the civic tech movement and forging intercity collaborations: There is a growing community of individuals, entrepreneurs, and nonprofits interested in harnessing IT to tackle local problems and work directly with city governments. These efforts can help cities leverage their data to develop new capabilities. Collaborations across communities are likewise indispensable for replicating what works in new places.
- Leveraging existing Federal activity: From research on sensor networks and cybersecurity to investments in broadband infrastructure and intelligent transportation systems, the Federal government has an existing portfolio of activities that can provide a strong foundation for a Smart Cities effort.
- Pursuing international collaboration: Fifty-four percent of the world’s population live in urban areas. Continued population growth and urbanization will add 2.5 billion people to the world’s urban population by 2050. The associated climate and resource challenges demand innovative approaches. Products and services associated with this market present a significant export opportunity for the U.S., since almost 90 percent of this increase will occur in Africa and Asia.
Complementing this effort, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology is examining how a variety of technologies can enhance the future of cities and the quality of life for urban residents. The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program is also announcing the release of a new framework to help coordinate Federal agency investments and outside collaborations that will guide foundational research and accelerate the transition into scalable and replicable Smart City approaches. Finally, the Administration’s growing work in this area is reflected in the Science and Technology Priorities Memo, issued by the Office of Management and Budget and Office of Science and Technology Policy in preparation for the President’s 2017 budget proposal, which includes a focus on cyber-physical systems and Smart Cities….(More)”
Civic Jazz in the New Maker Cities
Peter Hirshberg at Techonomy: “Our civic innovation movement is about 6 years old. It began when cities started opening up data to citizens, journalists, public-sector companies, non-profits, and government agencies. Open data is an invitation: it’s something to go to work on— both to innovate and to create a more transparent environment about what works and what doesn’t. I remember when we first opened data in SF and began holding conferences and hackathons. In short order we saw a community emerge with remarkable capacity to contribute to, tinker with, hack, explore and improve the city.
Early on this took the form of visualizing data, like crime patterns in Oakland. This was followed by engagement: “Look, the police are skating by and not enforcing prostitution laws. Lets call them on it!” Civic hackathons brought together journalists, software developers, hardware people, and urbanists. I recall when artists teamed with the Arup engineering firm to build noise sensors and deployed them in the Tenderloin neighborhood (with absolutely no permission from anybody). Noise was an issue. How could you understand the problem unless you measured it?
Something as wonky as an API invited people in, at which point a sense of civic possibility and wonder set in. Suddenly whole swaths of the city were working on the city. During the SF elections four years ago Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (which I chair) led a project with candidates, bureaucrats, and hundreds of volunteers for a summer-long set of hackathons and projects. We were stunned so many people would come together and collaborate so broadly. It was a movement, fueled by a sense of agency and informed by social media. Today cities are competing on innovation. It has become a movement.
All this has been accelerated by startups, incubators, and the economy’s whole open innovation conversation. Remarkably, we now see capital from flowing in to support urban and social ventures where we saw none just a few years ago. The accelerator Tumml in SF is a premier example, but there are similar efforts in many cities.
This initial civic innovation movement was focused on apps and data, a relatively easy place to start. With such an approach you’re not contending for real estate or creating something that might gentrify neighborhoods. Today this movement is at work on how we design the city itself. As millennials pour in and cities are where most of us live, enormous experimentation is at play. Ours is a highly interdisciplinary age, mixing new forms of software code and various physical materials, using all sorts of new manufacturing techniques.
Brooklyn is a great example. A few weeks ago I met with Bob Bland, CEO of Manufacture New York. This ambitious 160,000 square foot public/private partnership is reimagining the New York fashion business. In one place it co-locates contract manufacturers, emerging fashion brands and advanced fashion research. Think wearables, sensors, smart fabrics, and the application of advanced manufacturing to fashion. By bringing all these elements under one roof, the supply chain can be compressed, sped-up, and products made more innovative.
New York City’s Economic Development office envisions a local urban supply chain that can offer a scalable alternative to the giant extended global one. In fashion it makes more and more sense for brands to be located near their suppliers. Social media speeds up fashion cycles, so we’re moving beyond predictable seasons and looks specified ahead of time. Manufacturers want to place smaller orders more frequently, so they can take less inventory risk and keep current with trends.
When you put so much talent in one space, creativity flourishes. In fashion, unlike tech, there isn’t a lot of IP protection. So designers can riff off each other’s idea and incorporate influences as artists do. What might be called stealing ideas in the software business is seen in fashion as jazz and a way to create a more interesting work environment.
A few blocks away is the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a mammoth facility at the center of New York’s emerging maker economy. …In San Francisco this urban innovation movement is working on the form of the city itself. Our main boulevard, Market Street, is to be reimagined, repaved, and made greener with far fewer private vehicles over the next two years. Our planning department, in concert with art organizations here, has made citizen-led urban prototyping the centerpiece of the planning process….(More)”
5 tech trends that will transform governments
Zac Bookman at the World Economic Forum: “…The public sector today looks a bit like the consumer industry of 1995 and the enterprise space in 2005: it is at the beginning of a large-scale digital metamorphosis. The net result will be years of saved time, better decisions and stronger communities.
Here are five trends that will define this transformation in the coming decade:
- Real-time operations
Many industries in the global economy already operate in real time. ….
Governments are different. They often access accurate data only on a monthly or quarterly basis, even though they make critical decisions every day. This will change with software deployments that help governments unleash and use current data to make more informed decisions about how they can allocate public resources effectively.
- Smarter cities
Studies on human migration patterns indicate that more people are moving to cities. By 2025, an estimated 60% of the world’s population will live in an urban centre. High rates of urbanization will force cities to use their existing resources more efficiently. Networked infrastructures – including roads, phone lines, cable networks, satellites and the internet – will be important parts of the solution to this challenge….For example, MIT and Copenhagen recently collaborated on an electric-hybrid bike wheel that monitors pollution, road conditions and traffic. The wheel allows cities to monitor their environments at a level that was previously unfeasible with cheap sensors and manual labour, offering a quantum leap in networking capability without using further human or capital resources.
- Increased citizen engagement
Smart networks are wonderful things, but cities need to guard themselves against making efficiency a sacred cow. There is inherent tension between the ideals of democracy and efficiency, between the openness of platforms that encourage engagement and centralized systems. Rather than focus solely on making everything smart, cities will have to focus on slowing down and improving the quality of life.
These considerations will cause cities to increase citizen engagement. Transparency is a subset of this goal. Open data platforms, such as data.gov and data.gov.uk, host troves of machine-readable government information that allow communities to target and solve problems for which governments do not have the bandwidth. Crowdfunding platforms, such as neighbor.ly, allow citizens to participate in the civic process by enabling them to invest in local capital projects. These types of civic tech platforms will continue to grow, and they will be vital to the health of future democracies.
- 21st-century reporting software for governments
The information technology that powers government is notoriously antiquated. …
New reporting technology, such as the system from OpenGov, will automatically pull and display data from governments’ accounting systems. These capabilities empower employees to find information in seconds that would have previously taken hours, days or even weeks to find. They will expand inter-departmental collaboration on core functions, such as budgeting. And they will also allow governments to compare themselves with other governments. In the next decade, advanced reporting software will save billions of dollars by streamlining processes, improving decisions and offering intelligent insights across the expenditure spectrum.
- Inter-governmental communication
The internet was conceived as a knowledge-sharing platform. Over the past few decades, technologists have developed tools such as Google and Wikipedia to aid the flow of information on the web and enable ever greater knowledge sharing. Today, you can find nearly any piece of information in a matter of seconds. Governments, however, have not benefited from the rapid development of such tools for their industry, and most information sharing still occurs offline, over email, or on small chat forums. Tools designed specifically for government data will allow governments to embrace the inherent knowledge-sharing infrastructure of the internet….(More)”
Harnessing the Internet of Everything to Serve the Public Good
Brian Gill at Socrata: “…Thanks to sensor-based objects, big data is getting bigger, and that presents opportunities — and considerations — for government organizations.
Picture this: It’s a sunny summer’s day a few years from now, plants are in full bloom, and you’re strolling through a major city park. Unfortunately, your eyes are watering as the itchy beginnings of a pollen-induced allergy attack begin to compromise the experience.
Pulling out your phone, you consult a data visualization showing the park’s hour-by-hour pollen count densities. You then choose a new path, one with different vegetation and lighter pollen counts, and go about your way, barely noticing the egg-shaped nodes in the canopy monitoring everything from pollen to air quality to foot-traffic trends.
Welcome to the Internet of Everything, city edition.
….tapping into, and especially generating, IoT data streams is a natural fit for larger municipal governments who not only have the fiscal resources needed to put IoT data to work, they have an innate motivator: improving citizens’ lives.
Consider Chicago’s Array of Things project, an experimental network of modular sensor boxes installed around the city’s core. Think of it as an urban fitness-data tracker: The nodes collect real-time data on the city’s environment and infrastructure for research and public use, with the first units focusing on atmosphere, air quality, and environmental factors such as temperature, humidity, and light.
From this data alone, the potential applications are exciting, such as using air, sound, and vibration data to monitor vehicle traffic, or infrared sensors to measure street temperature to guide salting responses during winter storms. The thinkers behind Array of Things can even envision a downtown where street lamp poles alert pedestrians to icy sidewalk patches and apps guide people to safe nocturnal walking routes.
This is all cool stuff, but “outcome” is the key word here, says McInnis, who recommends a bottom-up approach when assessing IoT opportunities. Instead of worrying whether you currently possess the technical infrastructure to harness IoT data, he says, first determine what you want to achieve, be it water quality monitoring or winter sidewalk safety, and then work from there — you may even already have IoT data streams that can be redeployed.
And as cities like Chicago are demonstrating, the Internet of Things not only has the potential to reshape how municipalities can harness a world of increasing object-driven data; it’s helping reshape how cities think about the nature of usable data.
In other words, all these new IoT data streams are actually like water, a natural resource. And just as water flows from many sources, government IoT data can also be collected, channeled, and processed like any utility — and serve as a powerful public good. …(More)”
How Startups Are Transforming the Smart City Movement
Jason Shueh at GovTech: “Remember the 1990s visions of the future? Those first incantations of the sweeping “smart city,” so technologically utopian and Tomorrowland-ish in design? The concept and solutions were pitched by tech titans like IBM and Cisco, cost obscene amounts of money, and promised equally outlandish levels of innovation.
It was a drive — as idealistic as it was expedient — to spark a new industry that infused cities with data, analytics, sensors and clean energy. Two-and-a-half decades later, the smart city market has evolved. Its solutions are more pragmatic and its benefits more potent. Evidence brims inSingapore, where officials boast that they can predict traffic congestion an hour in advance with 90 percent accuracy. Similarly, in Chicago, the city has embraced analytics to estimate rodent infestations and prioritizerestaurant inspections. These of course are a few standouts, but as many know, the movement is highly diverse and runs its fingers through cities and across continents.
And yet what’s not as well-known is what’s happened in the last few years. The industry appears to be undergoing another metamorphosis, one that takes the ingenuity inspired by its beginnings and reimagines it with the help of do-it-yourself entrepreneurs….
Asked for a definition, Abrahamson centered his interpretation on tech that enhances quality of life. With the possible exception of health care, finance and education — systems large enough to merit their own categories, Abrahamson explains smart cities by highlighting investment areas at Urban.us. Specific areas are packaged as follows:
Mobility and Logistics: How cities move people and things to, from and within cities.
Built Environment: The public and private spaces in which citizens work and live.
Utilities: Critical resources including water, waste and energy.
Service Delivery: How local governments provide services ranging from public works to law enforcement….
Who’s Investing?
….Here is a sampling of a few types, with examples of their startup investments.
General Venture Capitalists
a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) – Mapillary and Moovit
Specialty Venture Capitalists
Fontinalis – Lyft, ParkMe, LocoMobi
Black Coral Capital – Digital Lumens, Clean Energy Collective, newterra
Govtech Fund – AmigoCloud, Mark43, MindMixer
Corporate Venture Capitalists
Google Ventures – Uber, Skycatch, Nest
Motorola Solutions Venture Capital – CyPhy Works and SceneDoc
BMW i Ventures – Life360 and ChargePoint
Impact/Social Investors
Omidyar Network – SeeClickFix and Nationbuilder
Knight Foundation – Public Stuff, Captricity
Kapor Capital – Uber, Via, Blocpower
Inside the fascinating, bizarre world of ‘Prepper Pinterest’
Caitlin Dewey in the Washington Post: “Pinterest, the aspirational candyland of women everywhere, has long been beloved by homebuyers, wedding-planners, moms, narcissists, and people who spend too much time on their hair.
Now you can add another, odder demographic to the list: “doomsday” preppers, whose rabid interest in all things DIY actually makes for a pretty comfortable cultural fit.
Prepper Pinterest has exploded in the past year, according to the site itself: The total volume of prepper pins is up 87 percent, and repins of prepping posts have nearly tripled. Leading preppers on the platform, like Angela Paskett, Damian Brindle and Glenn Levy, have racked up tens of thousands of followers.
It’s the conclusive sign, perhaps, that the much-maligned prepper movement has finally gone mainstream — or that a particularly precious branch of it has, at least. One popular infographic, currently circulating among Pinterest’s prepper ranks, depicts a “luxury bomb shelter” complete with self-filtering bathtubs and scented oxygen tanks….
It may help that mainstream culture has, in the past 10 years, become more hospitable to the prepper ethic — thanks, in large part, to a trend that Jessica Grose once dubbed “the Pinterest effect.” Young women have revitalized the $29 billion craft industry, prodded along by ideas on Etsy, Pinterest and lifestyle blogs. Concerns about the origins of our food gave us farmers’ markets, first — followed by urban farms and “Modern Farmers” and backyard chicken coops….(More)”
Crowdsourced app helps the visually impaired cross the road
Springwise: “Out of New York’s 12,000 intersections, less than 100 offer navigation tools to help visually impaired residents cross safely. Audible sign technology is available but the process of installing it across cities is slow — most only have it at about 10 percent of crossings. Offering an alternative,SeeLight is a crowdsourced app that makes all the necessary information about urban crossings available to blind and visually impaired users.
The app collates data from government agencies and uses crowdsourced information to fill in the existing gap. Users can help by timing the length of any walk signal and recording the direction of the crossing using the app, which will then store that information along with a GPS tag. They can also add a brief description, noting whether the intersection has tactile paving or a pedestrian crossing light. When a visually impaired person approaches a crossing, they can then use the app to assist them through voice navigation.
SeeLight is not the first app to crowdsource accessibility data — we recently wrote about AXS Map, which collects user reviews about how accessible places around the world are for users in wheelchairs. SeeLight is currently crowdfunding on Indiegogo to finance improvements to the current app, which is available now for free. …(More)