Invited Technical Speaker Josephine Cheng: Building a Smarter Planet
From Anita Borg Institute Wiki
Josephine Cheng, IBM Fellow & VP
Josephine Cheng, IBM Fellow and Vice President, IBM Almaden Research Center
We are at an extraordinary moment in history: a major political transition in the United States, the global economy in flux, our financial markets restructuring themselves – and an acutely felt need for leadership. Our political leaders aren’t the only ones who’ve been handed a mandate for change. Leaders of businesses and institutions everywhere confront a unique opportunity to transform the way the world works.
• In the last few years, our eyes have been opened to global climate change, and to the environmental and geopolitical issues surrounding energy. • We have been made aware of global supply chains for food and medicine. • And, of course, we entered the new century with the shock to our sense of security delivered by the attacks on 9/11.
These collective realization has reminded us that we are all now connected – economically, technically and socially. Free trade agreements, the Internet and the arrival of globalization are making the world simultaneously smaller and flatter. In this presentation, I shall discuss the research activities at IBM Almaden Research to support a smarter planet by providing: smart energy and water, smart healthcare, smart business and smart workforce.
Shannon Madison, GHC 2009 Live Notetaker.
Contents |
How our interconnected technologies are changing the world we live in.
Impact of congested roadways:
- 3.7 billion lost hours
- 2.3 billion gallons of gas
Everytime there's problems, there's always opportunity.
- Stockholm, Sweden cut traffic by 20%, lowered emissions by 12% and reported 40k additional daily users of public transportation. How'd they do this?
- They imposed fees for people passing through the most congested areas. People opted instead to either bypass congested/fee areas, or take public transportation.
- Also worked with Singapore to install sensors for real-time analyisis to predict congestion, feed this information back to the citizenry so they can make an informed decision
Need for progress:
- 85% idle computing capacity
- $40b (3.5% of sales) loss due to supply chain inefficiencies
(more)
Opportunity:
- Retooled microchips result in 27% water use reduction
- Smart system, continuous link settlement risk reduced to zero
- Yansha dynamic supply chain improvements resulted in 93% faster delivery
How is the world becoming SMARTER?
World is becoming INSTRUMENTED: supply chains, healthcare, cities, even ecosystems, instruments measure, sense, and see exact condition of everything
- 1billion transistors per person on the planet.
- by 2010, 30 billion RFID tags will be embedded into our world
World is becoming INTERCONNECTED: Objects and systems can speak with eachother. The internet of things (cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, pipeline, etc) is headed to one TRILLION
- Almost 1/3 of the world's population will be online by 2011
- Nearly 4 billion mobile phone subscribers by 2008 (predicted, should verify)
Josephine's experience in China:
- Why are China's farmers so poor? Raise livestock, but need middle-man to sell. Working with gov't, embed all livestock with RFID to track. Buyers can see info, bid higher for healthier livestock. All info live, eliminate middle-men, farmers reap benefit
World is becoming more INTELLIGENT
- Can respond to changes quickly, accurately, get better results. Predict & optimize for future events. Collect & analyze data from end-user devices.
- 15 petabytes of new information generated daily (8x all U.S. libraries)
With information explosion, need more power. IBM releasing petaflop processor. It's super fast.
Cloud computing facilitates the real-time computing and analaysis of all of this information.
A smarter planet is the sum of 3 factors: Instrumented, Interconnected, Intelligent. Creates opportunity to think & act differently: economically, socially, and technically
New Intelligence
Information Explosion:
- Volume:
- 15 petabytes of new info ea day
- 200 billion emails sent daily
- 988 exabytes of digital info
- Diversity:
- 80% of new data is unstructured-docs, images, video, audio
- 30 billion RFID tags embedded in everything: even animals, building, ecosystems, products
- $5.7 billion spent by companies trying to make sense of internal data
Need to employ predictive models
Instrumented Planet: External Events > sensing/metering and data acquisition > real world aware data processing > data colleciton & distribution combined with historical data > predictive models
Green & Beyond
Systemic view of value chain > benefits of going green
Areas of cost: 10k liters of water req to produce one pair of jeans, 6.6 billion trees needed to clear CO2 emitted by datacenters
Address three critical resource impacts: carbon, water, energy
- Energy production > carbon emissions, water needed to generate energy/energy needed to clean & transport water, carbon emissions > climate change/disrupt water systems
Carbon Management: "SNOW" Supply-chain network optimization workbench
- Core functionality: supply chain network design, strategy evaluation, tactical transportation analysis.
- IBM's first web-based logistics carbon management solution is complete and ready for deployment. Enables the analysis of complete carbon costs
Energy management: Pac NW GridWise testbed projects
- Each home had a thermostat, immediate feedback on energy consumption led to reduction on power load
- Improvements to solar efficiencies
Smart Healthcare: using data to provide clinical analysis. Make db queries easier, integrate into diagnosistic practice
