IBM Unveils CityForward.org Data Site for Urban Planners Source: Wall St. Journal IBM on Wednesday introduced CityForward.org, a new free website intended to provide more complete data to city planners, as well as community groups and individuals. The site doesn’t actually create data, but aggregates data sets from various agencies in more than 50 cities around the world, with data from another 30 cities being added soon. According to John Tolva, IBM’s director of citizenship and technology, city data such as traffic patterns, crime statistics, or consumer spending are already available to planners, but “fairly opaque” and difficult to access because it’s published in PDFs and spreadsheets, and often requires even government employees to navigate complex inter-agency bureaucracies. Tolva said that putting the data online makes it easier to read, chart, and correlate with data from other agencies or localities. For example, he told Digits, a researcher in San Francisco was able to compare calls from a given neighborhood to the city’s 311 hot line with 911 calls from the same neighborhood, and then correlate vagrancy with a particular type of drug use. “It’s a more nuanced version of the broken window theory” (which posits that vandalism leads to additional criminal behavior), he said. Tolva said he hopes that the site will contribute to a “renaissance in the profession of urban planning,” which has often had to rely more on anecdotes than data. He pointed to a chart evaluating the impact on traffic of increased tolls on bridges and tunnels in New York City as an example of how this kind of data could be used to influence public debate on topics like congestion pricing — a failed 2008 proposal to limit automobile traffic in Manhattan during the week. “The discussion [in 2008] wasn’t exactly data-driven,” Tolva noted.

IBM Unveils CityForward.org Data Site for Urban Planners

Source: Wall St. Journal

IBM on Wednesday introduced CityForward.org, a new free website intended to provide more complete data to city planners, as well as community groups and individuals. The site doesn’t actually create data, but aggregates data sets from various agencies in more than 50 cities around the world, with data from another 30 cities being added soon.

According to John Tolva, IBM’s director of citizenship and technology, city data such as traffic patterns, crime statistics, or consumer spending are already available to planners, but “fairly opaque” and difficult to access because it’s published in PDFs and spreadsheets, and often requires even government employees to navigate complex inter-agency bureaucracies. Tolva said that putting the data online makes it easier to read, chart, and correlate with data from other agencies or localities.

For example, he told Digits, a researcher in San Francisco was able to compare calls from a given neighborhood to the city’s 311 hot line with 911 calls from the same neighborhood, and then correlate vagrancy with a particular type of drug use. “It’s a more nuanced version of the broken window theory” (which posits that vandalism leads to additional criminal behavior), he said.

Tolva said he hopes that the site will contribute to a “renaissance in the profession of urban planning,” which has often had to rely more on anecdotes than data. He pointed to a chart evaluating the impact on traffic of increased tolls on bridges and tunnels in New York City as an example of how this kind of data could be used to influence public debate on topics like congestion pricing — a failed 2008 proposal to limit automobile traffic in Manhattan during the week. “The discussion [in 2008] wasn’t exactly data-driven,” Tolva noted.

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IBM said on Thursday it will open three analytics centers in Europe, part of its growing business analytics business highlighted by its $1.7 billion offer earlier this week for vendor Netezza.

The centers will be in Zurich, Budapest and Vienna, IBM said. Zurich will focus on financial analytics and “Smarter Cities,” an IBM program that uses its technologies to help government improve their city infrastructures. The Budapest center will work on green infrastructure and transportation, while Vienna will focus on energy grids, supply chain optimization and Smarter Cities, IBM said.

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IBM to Open Three Analytics Centers in Europe - PCWorld Business Center

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Staying Healthy In Big Cities - Forbes.com The core systems on which cities are based are becoming instrumented and interconnected, enabling new levels of intelligence. What if our newly technology-empowered cities could use better connections and advanced analytics to create “smarter health care”? A smarter health care system will improve connections across our urban networks of providers, patients, payers and researchers. It can generate richer sets of data, including integrated records for each patient to enable personalized health care. It can connect vast amounts of information to improve research, diagnosis and treatment of diseases like cancer, diabetes and hypertension—diseases that compromise the quality of life for citizens and pose a major strain on the economy. Rob Merkel is the Global HealthCare Service Line Leader for IBM Global Business Services. For 19 years he has helped many of the world’s leading health care brands, governments and institutions tackle their complex challenges.

Staying Healthy In Big Cities - Forbes.com

The core systems on which cities are based are becoming instrumented and interconnected, enabling new levels of intelligence. What if our newly technology-empowered cities could use better connections and advanced analytics to create “smarter health care”? A smarter health care system will improve connections across our urban networks of providers, patients, payers and researchers. It can generate richer sets of data, including integrated records for each patient to enable personalized health care. It can connect vast amounts of information to improve research, diagnosis and treatment of diseases like cancer, diabetes and hypertension—diseases that compromise the quality of life for citizens and pose a major strain on the economy.

Rob Merkel is the Global HealthCare Service Line Leader for IBM Global Business Services. For 19 years he has helped many of the world’s leading health care brands, governments and institutions tackle their complex challenges.

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