Sunday, April 5, 2015

Hoboken to be the next smart city

Recently, the concept of "smart cities" has come into discussion with the growing popularity of things such as cloud computing, the Internet of Things, smartphones, smart meters, and real world-user interfaces. Basically, a smart city (in my definition, which is similar to most common definitions) is a city that uses these technologies in order to monitor things like infrastructure (traffic, people congestion at a train/bus station, provide alerts to citizens about potential related issues, send data to the city government about the same. In fewer words, a smart city integrates the people, the government, and the physical city itself with a collection of digital networks.

This idea seems like it could be very useful. Imagine getting a notification on your phone or email or what have you telling you to wait an extra few minutes/leave a few minutes early for you train because there are so many people at the station that you wouldn't be able to get your usual train. Or that Washington Street is so backed up that you should take an alternate route to work. Seems pretty cool. Smart cities could also use things like motion sensitive lights in public places in order to reduce electricity consumption (recently I saw these same type of lights in target freezer sections that turn off when the freezer door is not open, just like your home fridge, and I wondered what it would be like if all stores were like that, but with their entire lighting system). It could also monitor things like water pressure in various manes to alert the city to potential breaks, really anything you can think of could probably be incorporated into the capabilities of a smart city.

Now, despite how cool and useful I thought all of this sounded, I couldn't help but think it's also a little strange. Yeah, at first the motion sensor technology would just sense edge flow and use an algorithm to convert that data into a rough number of people present in a certain area (that's how the current technology actually works). But how long would it take before the potential case of the city/tech companies/whoever to try to integrate personal devices like a smartphone gps or a fitbit into the system, which would allow for the smart city to know where individual people are as opposed to just a person density in a given area? Would it then just be impossible to be totally off the grid? I'm sure Ron Swanson would be pretty upset about this.




So I bring this up because one of my roommates, an Art&Tech here, recently gave a presentation (along with the rest of his group) to the mayor about this edge flow technology which Stevens students recently helped Bell Labs integrate into an interactive ad at the W hotel. They gave this presentation because the Mayor (and her people) are interested in using the technology to make Hoboken a smart city, as was made apparent in her address prior to their presentation.

So what do you guys think? Smart cities: Kosher? Not so much? Would it be weird/exciting/invasive feeling to live in one? Is the government going to take over like in '1984'? Did I use a solid gif? Find out next time on DragonBall-Z.

...but no, comment below iff'n ya like.

3 comments:

  1. Would it be possible to effectively "croudssource" some of this as a way to test the waters to see if it might make sense on a larger scale? Something like the app Waze, which drivers can use to send information about the traffic situation where they are and see report from other users. This would make it opt-in as well- in order to receive the benefits, you would also have to contribute. A system similar to this could be used to provide real-time info about at least public transit.

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  2. Integrating some of what I watched on the PBS documentary "United States of Secrets", I would not be surprised one bit if at some point Hoboken and other smart cities had to divulge certain information to the NSA or other government agencies. Of course, the concept is very cool to save power, detect traffic congestion, etc., but eventually someone will exploit this.
    Take for example the ThinThread program in the documentary. It was initially developed to read foreign communications and all domestic communications would be encrypted so that the NSA couldn't interpret it. They took this program and modified it so that all communications could be read, regardless of territory. When integrating technologies into Hoboken or any other city, I would not be surprised to see targeted advertisements from Google or Facebook depending on your location within the smart city, or some sort of surveilling from the government or NSA.
    I enjoy new ideas and integrating technologies into society to improve everyday life, but there are certain things that end up facilitating the surveillance and tracking of certain things that shouldn’t be tracked. I really think the idea could work if I trusted the government and other corporations such as Google and Facebook to not track us. And as seen in the documentary, they can essentially tell you what you want to hear and do the opposite, so I’d say “nay” to this concept.

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  3. Honestly, I usually wouldn't be a huge fan of this, but this sounds pretty great. While with all technology there are risks that are involved, "smart cities" sound pretty cool. I think Hoboken would be a great place to try and integrate this type of technology especially since it is such a young and trendy place. As for the technology itself, I am sort of curious as to how it would all actually work. While in theory it sounds great, putting it to practical use is another story. If they can get it to work however, I think many people (myself included) would benefit and enjoy living in a smart city. The final thing I will say is that, if they really want this to work, they should stay away from whatever technology systems Stevens uses because our network never seems to be working properly. Other than that, I think they should go for it and see how it turns out.

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