Author: Jonny Hankins

Jonathan's Author Bio: Co Editor of the International Handbook on Responsible Innovation, and author of Responsible Innovation, A Narrative Approach, Jonny works for the Bassetti Foundation in Milan publishing articles on innovation and responsibility on their website and in academic and trade journals and also blogging about his interests. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Responsible Innovation and member of the the Virtual Institute of Responsible Innovation

Smarter Cities

2 Replies Jonny Hankins

Following on from my post last week about Apps and Christopher’s post about smart skies on Tuesday of this week I would like to introduce smart cities. Harvard University graduate School of Design run a course that they describe as Urban Cybernetics, called in fact Smart Cities. It is taught by Nashid Nabian, and the aim is to design urban projects that use technology to improve urban life.

The final projects are available to browse online through the course website, and many are very interesting. Cameras and sensors are some of the tools of the trade, used to measure pedestrian or cyclist use of the city, to improve traffic flow or better understand the mechanics of the city from a host of other points of view.

One of my favourite projects is called The Listening City and was written by Carolina Soto within the Real-time Cities course in autumn 2011 as part of the Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab. Her project involves the use of QR codes that can be scanned using a smartphone. The codes are attached to street furniture, dustbins and all types of functional objects for the running of the city. If a passer by wants to report a problem with any of the objects, they just have to scan it with their smartphone.

 

An example of a QR code in use

A QR code on a traffic signal in Cambridge MA

Once scanned, the user is lead to a website where they complete a questionnaire related to the functionality of the object (in the case of a dustbin if it is full or empty etc, or for a pedestrian crossing light if it works or not).

As the position of each code is known the problem can then be signaled on an interactive map, with the data centrally collected so that it can be analyzed and patterns discovered that may help in improving services.

Take a further look and watch her slide presentation here.

Design and designers affect almost everything in our lives, and working towards improving city life through technology seems like a great idea to me. We are talking about real life improvement that can be seen and measured, information about which bins fill and overflow first is important, the city can be redesigned to confront the problems caused. It might also create solidarity within the residents, more participation in civic life and resolve some of the niggly issues that urban living throws up.

Citizens connect!

1 Reply Jonny Hankins

This week I would like to take a look at a couple of technological and social systems that use Apps and are designed to improve urban living in cities. If you have ever asked yourself how technology can improve our lives then the following might be of interest to you.

The first thing I would like to look at is called Citizens Connect, a system that operates in Boston in the USA (where I currently live). According to the website “Citizens Connect enables real-time collaboration with citizens, “deputizing” mobile users to become the city’s eyes and ears. Citizens report potholes, graffiti, and other issues from anywhere in the city using their mobile phone”

And this is how it works, and it is a simple system if you have a reasonably good mobile phone. While walking or driving through the city you see something that you feel should be reported to the City Council, an abandoned car, vomit on the pavement, water gushing from a hole in the road, cat stuck up a tree, that kind of thing. You take a photo of it, upload it on the City of Boston website, they show it on a public map and (hopefully) send somebody out to fix the problem.

A map showing reported problems on Citizens Connect

I personally believe that a person is much more likely to report something if they can take a photo and send it off in real time than if they have to go home, look up a phone number and make a call. Could this be a fist step in making the citizen and the state more communicative and more responsible?

The City of Boston also offers another App called Street Bump. This is even simpler to use, you download it into your phone and it monitors your movement as you drive round the city. When you near a hole in the road you slow down, as does everyone else passing that spot, and this information is used to determine the quality of the road surface.

If you think your local council should try such a scheme, you can direct them towards Click Fix, a commercial system that is currently on sale and operated by several cities and other organizations. This is not a recommendation however, but their work does look very interesting.

Next week I will continue this theme with a look at an interesting university course all about “Urban Cybernetics” that is run at Harvard University. Some of the projects may offer great things for the future.

BitTorrent Monitoring Report

3 Replies Jonny Hankins

On Tuesday the web was overrun with reports that BitTorrent users are being monitored by a host of different (and in some cases unknown) organizations. I would like to take a quick look at the actual document that spawned these headlines.

BitTorrent logoThe news is takes from a paper presented this week at the SecureComm conference in Italy by Tom Chothia and colleagues at the University of Birmingham.

The paper is free to read here.

All alarmism aside the paper looks at both indirect and direct monitoring techniques, the indirect being the type that is typically used to “catch” people who are illegally downloading films, music and other copyrighted materials, and the more expensive but precise direct means that various companies are employing.

In the paper the authors state that their contribution to the argument can be summed up as follows:

We determine that indirect monitoring is still in use against BitTorrent users and devise more effective techniques to detect peers engaging in it;

We find indications that certain entities engage in direct monitoring of BitTorrent users and provide features to detect such peers;

We also notice that direct monitoring, in its current form, falls short of providing conclusive evidence of copyright infringement.

This is a complex and technical paper, but certain things are noteworthy. The direct monitoring consists in creating false peers that connect to your IP address and monitor its use, be that downloading updates for Linux or watching War Horse.

A user is much more likely to be directly monitored if they are partaking in one of the top 100 objects for download, and in 40% of cases monitoring began within 3 hours of connection. The less popular the object for download, the longer it takes to become monitored. This suggests that those doing the monitoring (be they copyright authorities or private data collecting companies) spend more resources on popular downloads.

One thing I can take from this paper is that somebody is collecting an awful lot of data about a lot of people and their downloading habits, and I wonder why? And also what do they intend to do with it? Particularly as many lawyers deem the data collected as not strong enough evidence to use in a court of law.