Seems everyone and “E”verything wants to get smart.  I am not referring to Maxwell Smart of the hit 1960s television show. From smart grids to smart cities who knew becoming intelligent would be cool and that being smart both personally and electronically could be so rewarding and compelling.   

There was interesting news recently regarding the leveraging electronic smarts to improve things on two somewhat related fronts in just the past few days. 

1.       New York City Mayor and billionaire extraordinaire Michael Bloomberg (News - Alert) announced he is sponsoring a contest called the “Mayors Challenge” under the auspices of his private charity Bloomberg Philanthropies. A total of $9 million will be given to the top five winning ideas —$5 million to the winner and $1 million each to the four runner-up who come up with the best ideas for making government more efficient and effective. Creative application of smart city technology is expected to permeate the submissions.

2.       Computer scientists at the University of Glasgow revealed that they are participating in a new project to develop a search engine which will draw its results from sensors located in the physical world.

The good mayor

Mayor Bloomberg certainly knows how to generate buzz and excitement. Starting right now, Bloomberg Philanthropies is sending invitations to compete for the prizes to 1,300 mayors of U.S. cities with more than 30,000 residents. They have until Sept. 14 to enter their submissions. The top 20 finalists will visit New York at the philanthropy’s expense. They will then participate in “ideas camp,” two days of mingling with foundation-selected experts to refine proposals on:  affordable housing, health, money and management. The winner, to be announced next year, will receive $5 million, and four runners-up will each get $1 million. New York City is not eligible, but the Mayor expects to it to reap big rewards from the ideas generated in the contest.

This is not a publicity stunt by any means. Mayor Bloomberg’s foundation distributed over $330 million worldwide in 2011 to a variety of causes. These included distributions of $24 million to Chicago, New Orleans, Atlanta, Louisville and Memphis,” so that they can go out and hire somebody to really spearhead innovation with the support of the mayor,” Bloomberg says on a video posted on the philanthropy’s website.  

James Anderson, director of the charity’s government-innovation program in an interview noted that the foundation has twice flown and housed groups of mayors and representatives for New York conferences, at which they discussed strategies to deal with issues such as poverty, health care, public safety, economic development and the streamlining of services. He stated that, “Prizes will be awarded for ideas that show “bold and innovating thinking, a solid implementation plan, high likelihood of creating a measurable impact” and an ability to replicate the program in other cities.” Mayor Bloomberg said, “Our cities are uniquely positioned to inspire and foster the innovation, creativity and solutions needed to improve people’s lives…The Mayors Challenge creates an opportunity for mayors to champion their boldest ideas -- and to have them take root locally and perhaps spread nationally.”  

A SMART move

Forget about prize money, computer scientists at the University of Glasgow are participating in a new project to develop a search engine which will draw its results from the increasing population of communications-enabled sensors.  The European-funded project, known as SMART, for ‘Search engine for Multimedia Environment generated content’, seeks to develop and implement a system to allow internet users to search and analyze data from these sensors.

The idea behind all of this is to make SEARCH a whole lot smarter, and able to answer complex questions. It will match search queries with information from sensors and cross-reference it with data from social networks. The press release from the University says, “Users will be able to receive detailed responses to questions such as ‘What part of the city hosts live music events which my friends have been to recently?’ or ‘How busy is the city centre?’ Currently, standard search engines such as Google (News - Alert) are not able to answer search queries of this type.”

The SMART project is a joint research initiative of: Atos, Athens Information Technology, IBM’s (News - Alert) Haifa Research Lab, Imperial College London, City of Santander, PRISA Digital, Telesto and Consorzio S3 Log.

Dr Iadh Ounis, of the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science, made a series of comments about goals and objectives: “The SMART project will be built upon an open-source search engine technology known as Terrier we have been developing at the University since 2004, and we’re pleased to be involved in this innovative research initiative.” 

He added that, “The SMART engine will be able to answer high-level queries by automatically identifying cameras, microphones and other sensors that can contribute to the query, then synthesizing results stemming from distributed sources in an intelligent way... SMART builds upon the existing concept of ‘smart cities’, physical spaces which are covered in an array of intelligent sensors which communicate with each other and can be searched for information. The search results sourced from these smart cities can be reused across multiple applications, making the system more effective.

As a bit of an FYI, it was also noted that this is not some pie-in-the-sky futurist project. The expectation is that SMART will be ready for testing in a real city by 2014.”

While this is a European project, it is interesting that with the exception of IBM most of the big players in the smart city space have not signed up to participate yet. Indeed, notable by their absence are communications service providers who one would have thought would like to be in on the ground floor along with Google, Microsoft and now Apple (News - Alert) who is using its sharp elbows with its just announced Apple Maps capability.  

Given all of the smart grid implementations in the U.S., it might not be a bad idea for the cities looking to win Mayor Bloomberg’s contest to have a chat with the folks in Scotland. It seems like that might learn a thing or two that could give them an edge in the competition. In fact, as a public services here are links to more information on SMART: www.smartfp7.eu, and on the Scottish Sensor Systems Centre: sensorsystems.org.uk.

It is nice to see that it is going to pay to be SMART. Too bad the University of Glasgow is not eligible for the Mayors Challenge. Theirs is a really smart for using big data for the public good. Maybe Mayor Bloomberg will fly them in for the ideas camp.