Hi,
I'm in Ian and I work in BT Applied Research.
I've mainly worked on developing new and emerging technologies, that today we all take for granted
like WiFi before it had the fi.
Currently,
I'm investigating how we can use the Internet of Things to make smart cities
with a focus on air quality.
It's the 21st century,
but today over half our population now live in cities.
As cities have grown,
we get the advantages from economies of scale.
But as the cities have grown larger than ever imagined, from when they were planned,
we can start to have new problems,
but this isn't new!
At the end of the 19th century,
the large cities of the world like London,
Paris and New York had pollution problems caused by all the horses.
Horses were needed for the transport of people and goods, into and around the city.
So as the cities grew, so more horses were needed and as each horse produced up to
20 kilogrammes of waste
per day the streets were rapidly filling up.
It was predicted that the city's would soon drown in waste if a solution could not be found.
The best minds of the day worked on a problem,
which was eventually overcome by the invention of the automobile.
Seen as a clean solution at the time as the waste they produced,
wasn't seen or quite fully understood.
Today,
modern cities use information gathered from a wide variety of data sources to make
the most efficient use of resources.
But as cities grow,
they can start to suffer, as actions in different places add up
and can have a bigger impact.
As an example,
every piece of green we cover up with pavement, road or buildings
changes how rain makes its way to the sea.
If we're not careful, then rainfall,
that was OK before could start to increase the chance of flooding,
which can lead to damage and loss of life.
Cities used drains to channel the rainfall,
but drains are very expensive so we can further reduce the risk of flooding by using sensors
in the drains to work out if the drains are working as expected,
or if their performance has been reduced, by blockages.
So if we detect these problems early enough,
we can schedule repairs before the drains fail.
Water is essential for life,
but it's not distributed evenly across the UK.
Where I live is actually one of the driest places in the UK,
but we all need to ensure we don't waste water as it takes energy to process and distribute.
Sensors around the water pipe network and drones,
can both be used to detect underground leaks by measuring flow,
listening for leaks and using machine vision to look for differences in vegetation
or soil colour along the pipe roots.
Allowing leaks to be fixed faster,
saving both water and energy.
Going back to the automobile,
which saved cities from pollution at the end of the 19th century.
Soon we expect electric cars, micro generation and renewable sources to act
together to make the national grid smarter,
soaking up excess energy and providing local capacity,
to keep our lights on.
We're also using air quality sensors in our next generation pay phones to provide real time
information on pollution,
allowing us to take actions like changing the traffic lights to keep traffic flowing.
We are checking how effective other air quality initiatives are in reducing air pollution.
In all those examples,
the central part of the solution has been Data Exchange,
which allows data from multiple sources on providers to be aggregated
and exposed in an uniform way.
This approach means that smart city apps can be created to get at actionable information and
share it with other apps or people, lowering the barrier to participation in the
ecosystem and fostering innovation.
Smart cities are crucial to get the benefit from economies of scale, without the problems.
It's communications for good.