Rodger Lea

Rodger Lea

Currently Chief Scientists of an IoT focused startup, Sense Tecnic Systems Inc, Dr. Lea brings to bear over 20 years experience in industrial research at companies such as Sony and HP. He's passionate about new technologies, Smart Cities and building thriving innovation ecosystems. Follow him on twitter @rodgerlea

Smart City Datahubs – an innovation ecosystem enabler

Follow @rodgerlea One of the most significant issues facing Smart Cities is how to use OpenData and City Data, especially citizen contributed data, to facilitate new innovative city services. Pushing Opendata to city websites has certainly opened up data for access, but it’s still the case that most Open Data is hard to use – partly because of data formats and partly because of the lack of consistent access. These issues become even worse when you want to add in data…

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House prices in Vancouver – what can you afford?

One the the biggest issues facing Metro Vancouver is housing affordability. We have some of the most expensive housing in the world and we are low on any of the affordability measures used worldwide. A lovely visualization I cam across recently, by Chad Skelton of the Vancouver Sun, shows how you can take a public data set – in this case the National Household survey of 2011, and use a free data viz tool – in this case Tableau public,…

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Smart Cities: technology challenges

 As part of our recent hackathon, a series of questions were asked to the local organizers of the cities involved in the Global Urban Datafest. The questions and answers give some useful insight into the main issues we are trying to address and my thoughts on how we at Urban Opus can tackle those issues. —- As a faculty member at the University of British Columbia and President and CEO of Internet of Things platform company Sense Tecnic, you spend…

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Hackathon results

Results from the March Smart City Hackathon We had  a fantastic turn out for our Smart City hackathon – 45 people and 9 teams competed for our local prizes (6 Pi’s, 6 lego kits and 6 gift cards) as well as the larger Global Urban Datafest prizes. A full list of the projects and teams can be found here: http://www.global.datafest.net/projects     –     Look for the Vancouver projects. Some thoughts about Smart Cities and technologies arising from the Hackathon…

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