There’s a growing (renewed?) interest in the Internet of Things around the benefits for a more instrumented and connected city. IBM organized a session at SXSW in Austin that took place this morning titled, “City as Platform.” The objectives of the session was to discuss the role of information architects, the interface of systems with the built world, the steps needed to transform the thinking of planners and builders toward viewing the city as a platform, and the role of citizens  in the design.

Participants include an impressive array of technologists, city advocates, and planners/designers. The session is certainly an important one for wider advocacy of this “system of systems” thinking. The makeup of the panel and the objectives of the session are fully outlined on this Blog post from the Smarter Planet blog, with promises for a recap post and podcast to follow.

The following video from IBM was posted today to YouTube, and it provides a great overview of IBM’s view of “The Internet of Things.”

Researchers from Stanford and the University of California, Riverside are working to harness the power of accelerometers to build a seismic detecting network out of ordinary computers. Accelerometers detect movement and are increasingly being used in devices such as iPhones to flip from vertical to horizontal and Wii controllers. Many of today’s laptop computers already have accelerometers installed, and thanks to their high use they are a low-cost (under $50) item to add if the computer doesn’t have one.

The idea is to have a geographically distributed network of computers, and one or more computer in large buildings, that each send readings automatically to a central database. The amount of data that would be collected would far surpass what’s available today. The network is coming together now as the Quake Catchers Network, with more than a thousand computers already signed on.

Read more about this concept in this feature from the Los Angeles Times.

After the successful and ongoing largely-volunteer mapping efforts to respond to the Haiti earthquake, it’s heartening to see that there’s momentum for this approach in response to the massive earthquake that struck Chile. There are Crisis Camps this weekend and stretching into the future for both Haiti and Chile that are viewable at this page of the Crisis Commons website. There also appears to be growing cultural awareness and celebration of the concept, with a planned event at the SXSW technology, music and film gathering in Austin, Texas in a few weeks.

With just one crisis response, the advent of the geek relief response squads of Crisis Commons would have just been a fad. Now that there’s ongoing commitment, and increased tool refinement, this idea of Crisis Camps is becoming a movement that has the potential to influence policy direction and to speed thoughtful responses to crisis situations. Crisis Commons adds transparency, social networking, interactive assessments, global outreach and a rich communication medium to what has long been disparate mapping efforts.

We’ve seen growing interest in opportunities to showcase innovation that have largely been competitive affairs such as robot wars, and other contests. What the world needs are more opportunities for geeks to show their stuff in a collective and innovative fashion, and the Crisis Commons points the way. The Crisis Commons has a bright future in aiding the world, and particularly the developing world where technology capacity is lacking, while also providing a platform for technology development and STEM education.

The Ushahidi blog has a nice summary of the first week of activities responding to the earthquake in Chile. Students at Colombia University’s School of International and Public Affairs have been responsible for setting up the Ushahidi-Chile platform, and they’ve mapped more than 800 incidents in the first week of response.

Canada’s 2010 Federal Budget was announced yesterday, including a five-year, $397 Million investment in the Canadian Space Agency’s RADARSAT Constellation Mission. This group of three satellites will provide complete coverage of Canada’s land and oceans with daily revisits as well as coverage of 95% of the world for international users. The satellites are planned for launch in 2014 and 2015.

Given the state of the economy, any announcement of jobs provides reason for celebration. Today’s front page of the Denver Post was jubilant about the U.S. Air Force six-year contract with Raytheon Co. for GPS-related work worth $886.5 million that is set to bring more than 300 high-paying jobs to Colorado. The contract is to modernize the ground control segment of the Next Generation GPS Control Segment (OCX).

Intelligent infrastructure combines sensors, network connectivity and software to monitor and analyze complex systems to uncover inefficiency and inform optimal operations. The sensor component collects operational detail over time as well as providing real-time inputs on current conditions. The network connectivity ensures the flow of information between systems, other sensors, and practitioners. The software component provides oversight and analysis, integrating insight from various systems and personnel. The approach incorporates the management of multiple processes for more collaborative and multidisciplinary workflows. Intelligence is constantly improving from such a system through incremental improvements that are informed through constant monitoring and analysis.

The idea of intelligent infrastructure has been around for a long time in one form or another. Early forays into real-time monitoring of systems include industrial control systems such as SCADA. What largely sets the newer concept of intelligent infrastructure apart is an advancement in sensors, systems and networks that enable us to go beyond simply monitoring. Instead of the more passive alarms when inputs exceed accepted norms, intelligent infrastructure is a more holistic approach that aims to model and manage with a greater understanding of the interconnectivity of systems and the implications of events.

Big Blue Leads the Way

IBM is well out in front of publicizing and practicing the concept of intelligent infrastructure with their Smarter Planet campaign and their SmarterCity initiative. The company trades on their large-scale integration work and their understanding of complex systems to promote this idea of instrumented, interconnected, and then intelligent systems.

At the core of this concept is the idea of a system of systems approach. In the complex urban core, it’s a combination of transportation, healthcare, economic development, public safety, energy and utilities, and education systems. Each of these individual systems is in themselves a system of multiple inputs from multiple sensors and systems. IBM asserts that it’s largely an issue of constant data collection and open data exchanges that yield smarts for these systems. The resulting repository yields the ability to see how things are performing and a clear picture on how to redeploy resources quickly in advance of any problems or failures.

IBM takes a partnership approach toward achieving their Smarter Planet goals, working with a number of geospatial players to map assets and analyze details geographically. IBM’s Maximo Spatial Asset Management system integrates with ESRI’s ArcGIS Server to incorporate the GIS view, display map content, provide geospatial querying capability, and read data direct from multiple geodatabases. The geospatial component is clearly needed, particularly in the complex environments of an urban setting, and location often acts as the glue to integrate disparate data and systems together.

Flexible and Responsive

Given the changes of rapid urbanization and the pressures to adapt to climate change, it’s imperative that we fine tune our systems to be more flexible and responsive. The concept of intelligent infrastructure is also strategically timed for great demographic shifts that will leave many high-level jobs vacant due to retirements. These systems can bridge the knowledge gap by recording and modeling best business practice and process in advance of losing legacy operational knowledge.

Examples of industry approaches that might qualify as “intelligent infrastructure” in my mind are:

• the skeletonization of water networks for better understanding of full-network issues
• intelligent traffic systems and sensors on bridges to measure and monitor performance
• the detailed use of spatial analysis for renewable energy siting and ongoing monitoring of in situ conditions for optimal energy generation
• more efficient building heating, cooling and lighting systems for energy conservation
• detailed underground models for more informed oil and gas extraction

In all the above examples, there is a considerable increase in infrastructure and mapping efforts, but the payoffs can also be huge. An energy savings of 40 percent translates into a lower energy bill, less of a dependence on foreign energy sources, and reduced emissions. Intelligent traffic can dramatically reduce drive times and congestion, while cutting down on carbon emissions. While the solutions themselves are smart, the investment is also smart because the benefits far outweigh the costs.

Unleashing Creativity

Given the cross-cutting nature of intelligent infrastructure, where operational data from multiple separate operations are combined, there’s a great deal of opportunity for creative approaches to problem solving. Instead of being constrained by traditional business silos, these new systems will unlock cross-organization information to reveal the inefficiencies that exist between different systems.

As the systems mature and much more is known about operations, solutions to problems can be tested almost as in a laboratory setting. With the sensor-based feedback, and the growing knowledge base, pilot projects can be tested and the great deal of data that is generated can be analyzed to determine any performance improvements.

Through the application of intelligent infrastructure, we can gain a much better handle on the materials and resources that our systems consume. This conservation-first approach will go a long way toward improving our efficiency for a more sustainable approach, and will greatly improve the way we manage and construct our built world.

Get Involved: The Geospatial Information & Technology Association will be exploring the geospatial dimension of intelligent infrastructure at their upcoming annual meeting in Phoenix in April. I’ll be acting as facilitator for discussions with the Industry Trends Analysis Group (ITAG) on Monday morning of the event. If this topic is of interest to you, be sure to become involved.

Additional Resources

IBM – A Smarter Planet Initiative

Intelligent Infrastructure Definition – University of Toronto, Dept. of Civil Engineering

Intelligent Infrastructure – Water Matters Blog at the Earth Institute at Columbia University

SEED Magazine has an in-depth story about resilience science and the contribution that its making to understanding and managing of our cities. Following is a description of resilience theory that points out the need to quantify and understand the natural states and the tipping points that put our systems at odds with livability and sustainability.

“Resilience theory, first introduced by Canadian ecologist C.S. “Buzz” Holling in 1973, begins with two radical premises. The first is that humans and nature are strongly coupled and co-evolving, and should therefore be conceived of as one “social-ecological” system. The second is that the long-held assumption that systems respond to change in a linear, predictable fashion is simply wrong. According to resilience thinking, systems are in constant flux; they are highly unpredictable and self-organizing, with feedbacks across time and space. In the jargon of theorists, they are complex adaptive systems, exhibiting the hallmarks of complexity.”

This feature is certainly worth a read for all of those that are involved in managing our urban systems and infrastructure. The feature states that there is no balance but constant flux that must be adapted to. It speaks to the need to monitor and manage with constant imbalance in mind. All the more reason to apply geospatial technologies and sensor networks for the constant monitoring and analysis of change.

The concept of Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) is really quite simple as it involves the capability to tune the wavelength, pulse width and frequency of laser light, bounce that light off objects, and capture returning light over time to measure X,Y, and Z dimensions as well as the returning light’s intensity. The technology has proven to be quite useful for capturing 3D terrain and features, and is being used extensively to map infrastructure and natural resources.

Since the technology’s first inception in the late 1960s, LIDAR has been applied to atmospheric studies of air quality, marine and hydrographic studies, for bathymetric studies and water quality issues, surveying and mapping, as well as positioning and guidance. The technology has been tweaked and fine tuned for each subsequent application area, lending improvements back to the technology development as a whole. While all of these applications and their insight have been impressive, we’re still just scratching the surface with the capabilities of this technology.

Intensity Returns

The ability to measure and classify different intensities of the light returns means that LIDAR can be tuned to capture and record a variety of different phenomenon, both visible and invisible. The intensity can be customised for atmospheric research to pick up different signatures from molecules to understand what elements are present in our air, and can do the same in water. The signatures of the elements can then be monitored to understand changes in the atmosphere and the makeup and changes in the composition of our water bodies.

Seeing what can’t be seen by the naked eye is a key application of this technology. Coupling measurements with composition also lends itself to detect environmental changes in terms of soil composition, as well as changes in vegetation. The technology is being applied to monitor variations in how soil is compacted from as far away as a kilometer and to detect how soils have been disturbed to understand if they are polluted. The technology is also being applied in forestry to assess the overall health of forests and to detect susceptibility of forest fires.

The number of applications for LIDAR sensing of various environmental change are nearly limitless. To date, a number of different LIDAR instruments have been developed to monitor specific phenomenon. There will come a time in the development of this technology where we’ll see a highly dynamic LIDAR sensor to measure a myriad of different intensity signatures to gather far more information about how our planet is constantly changing around us.

Fusing Other Sensors

The combination of high-resolution color images on both aerial and terrestrial applications of LIDAR have provided very interesting and quick captures of reality that can be rather easily deployed in models in order to represent a virtual reality. The applications of this technology are as diverse as informing engineering and design projects to incorporation in the entertainment and game industries to inform storytelling.

The addition of other sensor on the aerial platform such as hyperspectral or thermal imaging provides even greater sensing synergy to detect a myriad of environmental measurements. Hyperspectral imaging provides a means to add to the topographic information of the 3D scan with measurements that help identify the types of vegetation with a resolution that’s only available through the assessment of the various color bands of the image independently. Through the application of thermal sensors on active fires, fire managers can get a much better understanding of fire behavior on different fuel types, informing mitigation approaches.

Multi-sensor confirgurations are proving to be a very interesting technology for scientific and surveillance use. The types of sensors and various applications will continue to proliferate, and will be an important tool in our increasing interest to monitor and understand change on our planet.

The Proliferation of the Technology

Just as video cameras were once too expensive to mount and leave connected, so too will LIDAR sensors come down in price to proliferate in areas that need constant measurement. The idea of a LIDAR surveillance system isn’t too far fetched, with the ability to measure distance, motion and composition. A LIDAR system could be used for virtual fence creation, alerting a central system when encroaching object pass a certain distance threshold. The ability of LIDAR to measure and classify would provide a means to quickly understand the makeup of the objects and would send an alert based on certain profiled compositions, such as metals or other detectable elements such as explosives.

We now have constant measurement from space with LIDAR deployed on satellites. These instruments provide fairly regular measurements on a global scale that needs to be augmented with both aerial and terrestrial sensors in order to get a wide scale of measurements. With decreasing costs of components, and more capable systems, we’ll see a proliferation of LIDAR sensors that will greatly inform us.

With increasing speed of data classifcation and analysis, we’ll gain a much greater understanding of change. And with increasing overlap of sensors at various scales, we’ll be able to aggregate these different measurements for a much greater understanding of the whole from the region and country scale all the way down to millimeters of accuracy on the ground.

Overcoming Data Limitations

One of the biggest technological hurdles for greater LIDAR utility has been the issues faces with the amount of digital storage space that is required to house the measurements, and the computing power that is needed to visualize and analyze these returns. The rapidly dropping prices in computer storage and capacity is easing some of these burdens, and the advent of cloud computing is providing whole new ways to deal with the data and visualization limitations.

By harnessing large arrays of computers, analysts are much easily enabled to dive into the details of the data. The ability to store the large amounts of data on shared machines also eases some of the burden of storage management, and makes the data much more readily and speedily accessible.

With easier data storage, analysis and integration capabilities in the cloud, the burden of collection is eased in order to proliferate more sensors. With greater capacity to utilize the data, more of the data will be looked at, which will lead to whole new application areas.

The future of LIDAR is quite bright in a myriad of ways, because of the uniqueness of its sensing capability. In a time when we need more and better means to measure and analyze our world, LIDAR technology will certainly shine in the coming decades.

REFERENCES

• Proposed NASA LIDAR Surface Topography Mission [PDF background]
• Quantifying Structural Physical Habitat Attributes using LIDAR and Hyperspectral Imagery, Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, Volume 159, Dec. 2009
• Extracting Wildfire Characteristics Using Hyperspectral, LIDAR, and Thermal IR Remote Sensing Systems, Christos Koulas, Proceedings of the SPIE, Vol 7298, 2009

Jane Lubchenco, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), expressed an interest in creating a National Climate Service when she took office nearly a year ago, and this week that plan moved closer to reality with the formal outline of the Climate Service and the launch of a new Climate.gov website.The site contains a ClimateWatch magazine with features that describe the impact of climate change, a global climate dashboard and educational materials that are designed to help citizens understand climate.

The proposed climate service would model the Weather Service, and would bring together hundreds of scientists and analysts that are now spread throughout NOAA. Administration officials said they hope to have the climate service up and running by Oct. 1, the start of the 2011 fiscal year. But meeting that deadline will require negotiating with Congress, employee groups and the Office of Management and Budget to work out the details.

Fusion Core, the mapping system that combines Microsoft’s SharePoint Server with ESRI’s ArcGIS Server, is at the center of the security system developed for Super Bowl XLIV. The system brings together various data streams into one system and allows users to exchange documents, information and alerts.

The system, called Project Dolphin, enables multi-agency collaboration for situation response.

Read this story in Information Week for more details.