News related to the Urban Opus Project or open data in general.
My local public library has a door slot for returning books after hours. You can see the growing pile of books through the window, and on some weekends the pile gets so tall, reaching back up to the slot, that you can imagine a fantasy scenario where the books inside have crawled to the door and climbed on top of one another to try to get out through the slot, perhaps to search for readers… A similar ‘social life of…
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One of our partner companies, Sense Tecnic Systems Inc, was recently invited to participate in a Canadian trade mission to Europe representing Canada’s Smart City technology companies. The trade mission, involving 15 Canadian companies first visited the UK for a 1 day smart city workshop. This was well attended by UK companies and innovation groups including: Future Cities Catapult: UK’s innovation hub for Smart Cities: video link, seek to 15 minutes in Bristol is Open: Smart City platform and projects from…
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Canada’s National Research Council (NRC) has today announced that the Future of Cities is the first of a series of high-priority innovation drivers for the Canadian economy. The Future of Cities priority was distilled from a program of national consultations resulting in the NRC Gamechanging Technologies Initiative.
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Smart Cities on the Pathway to Net-Zero – 2015 Power Smart Forum – October 27, 2015 Vancouver BC Hydro hosts an annual Power Smart Forum for its major customers, and this year a keynote panel will address “Smart City” opportunities globally, and in Canada, with specific focus on smart grids and energy-related innovations. Smart cities are about open data, open infrastructure, and open innovation. Digital technologies and innovative design are changing the way citizens use resources and are affecting how…
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Panel Session Summary by @rodgerlea Panelists Levent Gurgen. CEA-LETI France. Naonori Ueda. NTT Communication Science Labs, Japan. Daniel Gooch. Open University, UK. Salvatore Longo. NEC Europe Ltd. Germany. Masahiro Mochizuki. Ritsumeikan University, Japan. Rodger Lea. University of British Columbia, Canada. (Moderator) Background As part of the 1 day Smart Cities workshop held at the 2015 UbiComp conference in Osaka, Japan, a panel session was organized to discuss some of the key issues that had been raised in the workshop papers (See:…
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Update May 16: We’ve added a new lecture covering Dashboards/UI techniques to the lecture series on Node-RED – check it out at: http://noderedguide.com/. They complement the tutorials described below and offer a step by step guide to learning how to program using Node-RED. Roberto Calderon over at Sense Tecnic (www.sensetecnic.com) has been busy over the summer creating some excellent tutorials for Node-RED as well as for the WoTKit which is the IoT platform sitting underneath the Urban Opus data hub.…
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Follow @rodgerlea We’ve been building Smart City applications and services for a number of years – most notably via Urban Opus in Canada and Smart Streets in the UK. During that time we’ve been exploring how best to foster a vibrant Smart City ecosystem. In particular we’ve seen time after time how Smart City projects get started in a burst of enthusiasm, and then wither when something new comes along. They wither because they are not self sustaining, perhaps because…
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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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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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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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