BBVA Innovation Center to Host Beyond Smart Cities Jan. 18
CREDIT: Jim Trodel (CC)
What makes a city more livable, sustainable and efficient and how can technology make this happen? This Wednesday, the BBVA Innovation Center in Madrid will host “Beyond Smart Cities” to talk about these important questions among others with leading experts in the field.
While many cities now incorporate various sensors to monitor such things as traffic and pollution, only about 5% of the data is used (according to the Economist). Practical solutions must be found to use all the data currently available efficiently and also discover new solutions to manage the burgeoning growth of cities. This will become more and more important as an urbanized world population swells beyond 7 billion.
Elena Alfaro Martinez, BBVA Innovation’s Smart Cities expert and event organizer sees a synergy between today’s technologies and cities.
“… the pillars of a Smart City are, broadly, quality of life, efficiency and sustainability,” she said. This can only be achieved if we develop the capacity to adequately use information to make decisions. Today’s technology lets the kind of information that we count on take a qualitative leap, in that in one hand we can know what will be the impact or consequences of our actions, and in the other, it enables self-management across many elements of a city– all based on this information.”
The speakers at the event will be Kevin Slavin, Adam Greenfield and Nicolas Nova.
A consultant and design and communications professor, Slavin is interested in databases and algorithms. He was the founder of Area Code which was purchased by Zynga.
Greenfield is the founder and director of Urbanscale, based in New York. His work includes developing urban interfaces that revolve around the user. He is also the author of Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing, which ties in closely with the concept of a sensor net which ensures the smooth functioning of a city.
As an investigator at the Near Future Laboratory, Nova is committed to innovation. He will be speaking about the needs, motivations and contexts in which people live in order to stake out where we need to be going in the future.
Smart Cities was a topic at 2011’s EmTech Spain. There, speakers gave their thoughts about different aspects of a smart city, such as the need to make transport within them more efficient.
“Almost 40% of the fuel utilized in the city goes towards looking for a parking space,” said MIT’s Ryan Chin at EmTech.
Challenges such as these are what brings out the best in human ingenuity and, when speaking about the concept of a “smart city,” there is plenty of both.
Beyond Smart Cities will be held from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 18 at BBVA’s Innovation Center at 2, Plaza Santa Barbara in Madrid. The event is free, but attendees must register to attend.
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