Between the Poles

Geodesign Summit: Yellowstone the first benchmark ecosystem

In the medical profession we have reference standards for things like blood cholesterol level, triglyseride, blood pressure, and heart rate that define what is normal or acceptable and allow us identify extreme values that may be symptomatic of a problem.

Jen Sheldon is an ecologist who has spent a lot of time in Yellostone National Park.  Her idea is to develop benchmark metrics for ecological systems using an intact ecological system like Yellostone as a benchmark that would allow us to measure the properties of any ecosystem and compare the observations to the standards and objectively assess the health of the ecosystem.

Animals are good proxies for the health of ecosystems.  Animals concentrate information about an ecosystem because they are at the top of the food chain.   In the example, Jen used antelope densities and modeled the ecosystem with a stack of layers.   BY punching through at various locations she could create a table or spreadsheet of layer properties at that point.  Compiling all these data points allows high and low points to be computed and correlated with observed animal densities.  Essentially it makes it possible determine where it's good to be an antelope.

If you run a road through the ecosystem, you can now objectively quantify the impact.  In other words you now have a quantifative impact model.

Yellowstone is the first benchmark ecosystem.  Yellowstone is a good place to use to create these reference standards because it is an intact ecosytem that has been relatively untouched  by human development..

Geodesign Summit: A new innovative planning protocol that incentivizes conservation

Al Reynolds presented a new and innovative schme for Rural Land Stewardship (RLS) that challenges the traditional paradigms of regulation (e.g. zoning) or land acquisition (e.g. Nature Conservancy) by incentivizing the protection of the habitat without public funding or regulation.  Rural land stewardship is a private/public process based on scientific data and market-driven incentivization.

The area where this has been applied is in southwest Florida on the edge of the western Everglades.  It is 300 sq miles of primarily agricultural land and is home to some of the few remaining Florida panthers as well as other endangered species.

The Florida 2060 project aimed at painting a picture of what Florida is expected to look like in 2060 given current trends.  This particular part of Florida was projected to be overrun by urban sprawl - almost 70% of the study area is projected to have been developed by 2060.

• 135 000 acres - Developed lands
• 16 000 acres - Public land
• 44 000 acres - Agricultural/natural lands

Rural Land Stewardship

The currency in this program is a stewardship credit.  It's calculated using a multi-layered suitability analysis.  It is based on a Natural resource index system which gives a higher score for land that is ecologically good for endangered species.

In the past land that hosted endangered species was not considered to be finacially as valuable as much as land that did not host endangered species, because of the risk of regualtion. The Rural Land Stewardship program reverses this.  Land is more valuable if it hosts or provides good habitat for endangered species.  Endangered species become an asset instead of a liability.

Al described an example, the new town of Ave Maria, home to 5 000 people.  The town was deveeloped under the Rural Land Stewardship program and is 1/10 the size that a town with a similar population would have had if developed under a tradtional development paradigm.  

• 45 000 acres - SRA development
• 16 000 acres - Public land
• 40 000 acres - Agriculture preservation
• 94 000 acres - Natural resource conservation

In additon to reducing urban sprawl the RLS program protected several panther corridors.  And what absolutely distinguishes the development of Ave Maria is that the process managed to keep both developers and environmentalists happy.

One of the key enablers is the availability of geospatial data.  In fact Al said that there was a proverbial firehose of data and the real problem was data management and the analytics required to make sense of the data and provide actionable information. 

Transparency for all stakeholders into the process of analyzing the data and computing the indexes which determine the value of land (in stwewardship credits) is essential in developing trust among all stakeholders.

Based on his experience in this bit of Florida Al argued that traditional zoning doesn't make sense in the modern world.  We need to replace regulatory regimes like zoning with processes like the Rural Land Stewardship program that are based on scientific data.

Geodesign Summit: Changing how we manage our built environment

David Bartlett, who leads IBM's Smarter Planet initiative, believes there is an " immediate requirement to significantly and urgently change the way our built environment is managed."  And he is very sanquine about the capacity of our evolving technology to do this.  The Internet of Things is approaching a trillion objects.   Moore's law conrtinues to operate so we have incredible processing power.  The cloud is enablng us to make this processing power available to just about anybody with any type of device any where. Big data technology is enablng analytics in real-time.  We are rapidly approaching havng enough computing capacity to capture digitally, visualize and model our entire built environment.  IBM's Smarter Planet initiative is aimed at helping to make this happen.  According to David 42% of the world's energy goes to buildings so improving the efficiency of buildings is a primary focus of the Smarter Planet intiiative.

In October 2009 President Obama signed a directive calling for a more sustainable operations  strategy across the federal government. Commercial buildings use roughly 40 percent of the energy in the United States and the federal government owns approximately 182 million square feet of office space nationwide.  The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has a goal of reducing energy usage across federal buildings at least 30 % by 2015.                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
The GSA has contracted IBM to create a cloud-based centralized system that will monitor building performance and feed information into a central building management dashboard. It is expected that better analytics will help the government automate building controls to help property managers take more active control over building performance.

The initial focus during the first year of the smart building initiative will be 50 buildings (including the White House) that have already been identified as energy inefficient. It is estimated that the project could save approximately $15 million in operational costs annually.

Where do we start ?

A frequent question that David often gets after an organization buys into the smarter planet vision is where do we start.  IBM has developed a capability maturity model that offers a roadmap for organizations to use to assess their current situation to determine at what stage they are and then provides guidance to what they should prioritize to get to the next stage.

Motivating change

One of the most important tools in motivating change is transparency.  The internet faciliates transparency.  President Obama's administration has made government transparency using the internet a top priority.  David has found that transparency and gamification is extremely powerful in motivating change and in overcoming institutionalized inefficiencies ("but we have always done it this way").

Crowdsourcing green at the Los Angeles Unified School District

IBM has found that educational institutions and defense departments are the most receptive to the Smarter Planet vision. 

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is an interesting example.  LAUSD, which is the second largest school district in the country, decided it wanted to be the nation's greenest school district..  LAUSD has 700,000 students and more than 14,000 buildings spread out over 710 square miles.  But they had no budget for doing the green initative.  What they did have was an IBM asset management system and a lot of students with mobile phones.

Students, teachers and staff became part of the solution.  A mobile app developed by an IBM partenr was installed on students and others' mobile phones that made them all green monitors and reporters identifying maintenance issues such as leaky faucets and broken air conditioning units by sending text messages and photos through their mobile phones. The mobile app sends the photos and texts for analysis to the server where a GIS shows staff where the problem is located and records the problem in the asset management system.  Gamification was used to encourage compeitition, for example, for who is the best green reporter.  Within the first eight months of implementing the program LAUSD responded to more than 750 maintenance requests. Things are getting fixed and students and others feel like active participants in the program to make the schools greener. 

IBM plans to announce the next three school districts to participate in the Smarter Planet program.

Geodesign Summit: Creating 3D BIM models for the entire LA community college system

Michael Rendler is the Director of e7 Architectural Studio which is a non-profit organization working with the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD).  Its goals are to assist in designing environmentally sound and sustainable additions to current and future campuses.  Michael gave a fascinating overview of how 3D models for all the buildings on LACCD's mulitple campuses were developed.

The LACCD is the largest community college district in the United States and serves more than 250,000 students annually at nine colleges, spread throughout 36 cities in the greater Los Angeles area.  About eight years ago it was decided to initiate a project ro create 3D BIM models of all the buildings on the LACCD  campuses.  One of the most important motivations for creating these models was that BIM models would faciliate energy performance analyses of LACCD buildings. 

There are several very interesting and unique aspects to the development of these models.  First of all the models were created entirely by LACCD students.  Existing structures were laser scanned and BM models were developed from the point clouds. 

Secondly, to ensure a uniform representation of all the buildings across all of the campuses, it was decided to adopt standards wherever possible.  The standards used include IFC, SDSFIE, OMNIClass, and COBIE.

Thirdly, the BIM models were stored in a geospatial database (Oracle Spatial) using real world coordinates.  Real world coordinates enabled the models to be easily integrated with geospatial data from a variety of sources.

The models could then be used for a variety of purposes including visualization, energy performance modeling, predictive maintenance,  and safety and security simulations.

For the safety and security simulation the models were brought into a gaming environment to allow  gamification of safety procedures.

Geodesign Summit: What is geodesign and why geodesign ?

For over half the nearly 300 people in the audience at the fourth Geodesign Summit in Redlands this was their first Summit.  So there was a serious effort by several speakers including the MC Tom Fisher to define what geodesign is. 

Geodesign is an invented word,  The first use of the word has been traced to 1993, and picked up by ESRI in 2005.   Some of the definitions of the term that I heard at the conference include

Geodesign is a method which tightly couples the creating of design proposals with impact simulations informed by geographic contexts and systems thinking and (normally) supported by digital technology. Mike Flaxman, amended by Steve Ervin

Geodesign makes design decisions data rich.

Geodesign takes GIS analysis into the future.

Geodesign is design in a geographic space.  Bill Miller

Geodesign is a vision for using geographic knowledge to actively and thoughtfully design.  Jack Dangermond

Perhaps the most concise and the most comprehensive are from Carl Steinitz

Geodesign changes geography by design.

It is clear that for serious societal and environmental issues, designing for change cannot be a solitary activity.  Rather, it is inevitably a collaborative endeavor, wth participants from various design professions and geographic sciences, linked by technology from several locations for rapid communication and feedback, and  reliant on transparent communication with the people of the place who are also direct participants.

To understand what geodesign means in practice, the best way is to look at specific projects.  At the conference there were a number of interesting  presentations about diverse projects all of which reference geodesign and which provide examples of what people mean by geodesign in practice.  I plan to blog about several of these.

Why geodesign ?

A common theme in a number of speakers' presentations is that the effects of population growth, urbanization and climate change have reached the point where we urgently need a serious change, this change will require new tools, and geodesign could be one of them.

For example, Tom Fisher offered some pretty frightening statistics which are not hard to find these days.  There was a pervasive sense at the conference that the planet is on the brink and we have to change.  And if we don't change, the implications will be dire.  Bran Ferren put it this way (paraphrased) - this is that moment in the history of the US and of the world when we need to have a new and unfashionable conversation, a long term conversation on a complex topic where there are no simple, short answers.  David Bartlett (IBM Smarter Planet) was more specific.  "It is clear that there is an immediate requirement to significantly and urgently change the way our built environment is managed."

Geodesign Summit: Carl Steinitz on the early days of geodesign and organizing education for geodesign

Last night Carl Steinitz, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, gave two presentations.  The first addressed the queston of how to organize education in geosdesign and was the result of Carl being invited to advise a specific university (which remained nameless).  Last night's talk was the actual presentation he gave at the university at the culmination of a week's visit to the university.  The second was a personal history of the early days in the development of geodesign, primarily in the 60s.

Organizing education in geodesign

Geodesign involves bringing together the design professions (architecture and engineering), technology, the geographic sciences, and wha Carl calls the people of the place, the folks that are going to live in the result of a "geodesigned" environment.   A major challenge arises from scale.  Scientists approaach things from the universal anf global, designers from the local, even at the level of  one building or one parcel. 

Carl made the case that the most important thing that all students of geodesign, regardless of their background, need to learn is how to collaborate in a multi-disciplinary project environment involving architects, engineers, IT folks, and folks from geographically-oriented sciences.  He made specific recommendations on how to do this, not generally applicable to all unversities but tailored to the specific unnamed univesity he had been asked to advise.

Early days of geodesign

There is a fascinating book by Nick Chrisman called How computer mapping at Harvard became GIS that describes the early days in the development of geospatial technology and science. 

Carl Steinitz was part of these early developments.  Last night he gave a personal perspective on the early days of geodesign. 

From a technical perspective the developments I found most fascinating were the first computer geographic computer graphics that was created by hooking an IBM Selectric typewriter to a computer and using overprinting to create an approximation of grey scale thematic maps. The program to do this, SYMAP,  was developed by Howard Fisher in 1963.  When the Harvard Lab for Computer Graphics was founded in 1966, Howard Fisher was its first director.  Carl also described some of the ways colour printing was simulated in these early days, and early 3D imagery.

An interesting recollection in this fascinating talk was that computing was introduced into the design course via tutorials as and when needed, not as a separate course.

Carl described the development of geodesign methodogies such as moving from traditional programming languages in the direction of what became map algebra, spatial analysis, automating aspects of design and using linear programming to optimize design.  As Carl said they did it all, though some of it was too expensive at that time to be of practical use.

A Lean approach to streamlining utility business processes

I have blogged on many occasions about pathological business processes for designing, building and operating and maintaining infrastructure that plague many utilities. Some of these processes don't seem to have changed since Edison and Tesla's time and result in redundant data, wasted effort, backlogs, and poor data quality.

At the EDIST 2013 Conference in Toronto, Ottawa Hydro described how they used a Lean Process to address this problem specifically in the capital execution (design and build) process.

Ottawa Hydro spends $90 million every year on capital projects and this is forecasted to increase, because of aging infrastructure and the transformation to the new smart grid.  But in this time of aging and shrinking workforces at utiities, they have found that while capital expenditures are going up, they have less staff to manage the process.  The result has been frustrated staff and delays in construction because designs are not getting completed in time, increasing spend on overtime, and most importantly a significant carryover of capital, and worst of all and unhappy regulator (the Ontario Energy Board).

The Lean Process involved convening a team of 10 grass roots people  from all divisions of the company who spent 5 days identifying the the current state and the issues associated with it.  66 issues were identified.   They took a break for 2 weeks and then got together for 5 days of brainstorming resulting in a set of recommendations to upper management.  They prioritized the recommendations based on their projected impact and size.  They moved first with simple processes involving one department with immediate payback.  After successfully completing a few of these, they moved on to more complex processes involving multiple departments.

The results speak for themselves.  Even though the capital budget has increased they are getting the work done and have reduced overtime by 35%.

The state of malware on the internet or why utilities need to prioritize cyber security

In its essence smart grid is about turning the power grid into an internet of intelligent devices.  That means that the next generation  power grid will be susceptible to all the cybersecurity issues that affect the internet.   This makes cybersecurity a priority for every utility that is implementing some form of a smart grid.

At the EDIST 2013 Conference in Toronto, the keynote speaker was Mikko Hypponen of F-Secure, who has been chasing cybersecurity problems since the 1990's and has been responsoble for taking down a number of internet malware exploits.  He gave a very current assessment of today's cybercrime. 

Cybercrime on the internet today is very different from a decade ago  when it involved "kids" with no real motive, who just did it because they could. 

Now there are three categories of people who indulge in cyber expolits and they all have motives.

1. Criminals - organized crime groups (in MiKko's experience primarily in Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, China, but all over the world) whose motive is money
2. Hacktivists - groups with a political agenda and whose motive is protest
3. Governments - both totalitarian and democratic governments are involved in offensive malware with a variety of motives, espionage and military are obvious ones, but governments also target malware on their own citizens

Criminals

Mikko gave an example of a criminal cyber exploit involving credit card theft but with a wrinkle.    Typically when this activity is tracked to a particular account, the ISP is notified and will shutdown the account.  But in this case the ISP was owned by a criminal.  When notified he would promise to would look into the problem, but wouldn't take any action except charging the account owner more for hosting.  Hosting would get to be very expensive for an account holder if it got a lot of attention from the credit card companies.  The ISP owner bought a lot of real estate with the money he made - 155 properties have been identified.  He is currently awaiting trial.

Another example of a criminal exploit is banking trojans.  The best known is called "Zero-access" and has infected 9 million computers.  The way it generates revenue is by interrupting your on-line banking session and displaying what appears to be a message from your national police force ( it is a different "police force" depending on the country where you are using your computer) telling you that illegal financial acitivities have been traced to your account and your access the the account has been disabled.  This all sounds legit, until it goes on to say that if you pay a $100 fine, access will be restored.  And it provides a legitimate way for you to transfer the money.

One of the surprising changes in cyber crime is that until recently it has involved exploits targetting computers running Windows.  Millions of Windows machines are infected every year.  But the 75 % of the world's servers that run Linux have not been affected. (Last quarter for the first time Linux passed Windows in number of new installations.)

But now Linux, in the form of Android on smart phones, has a malware problem.  The number of devices affected by attacks currently number in the thousands, but this is increasing rapidly and involves mostly criminals, not hacktivists or governments.

Hacktivists

One of the best known hacking by hacktivists involves a programmer who wanted to customize his Playstation software.  Unwisely Sony sent its lawyers after him, which immediately became known and had the effect that Sony became a favourite target of the hacker community.

In an interesting contrast, a programmer who wanted to customize his IPhone, was hired by Apple.

Governments

The best known is the stuxnet worm that targeted Iran's uranium centrifuge equipment running Siemens Step7 software.  The source of this exploit is suspected to be a Western government.  Mikko presented a fascinating story about how this exploit was traced and identified from public TV broadcasts.

ARAMCO, the largest company in the world, was attacked by an expoit that shut down 75% of its computers.  A Middle Eastern government is the prime suspect.

The "red october" exploit has just been identified by Kapersky and the source is suspected to be the government in the Far East.  This exploit involves sending what looks like innocuous official and academic articles to government officials which then infects their computer with a trojan.

But governments also use malware against their own citizens.  Mikko mentioned Syria, the previous regime in Egypt, but also the US, Germany and the UK.

In the latter cases, this typically involves trojans that are used during criminal investigation to track the communications of suspects and is similar to telephone tapping.  Mikko described a fascinating example where a person suspected of criminal activity was separated from his luggage and questioned by Customs and Immigration at an airport.  The questioning was bogus, but while he was being questioned, officials went through his luggage, found his computer and installed a trojan on it.  He was subsequently found to be innocent. The officials then had to stage the same airport exercise to get the trojan off of his computer.

This was a fascinating presentation which I suspect created in the utilities folks in the audience a significantly heightened awareness of how seriously the cybersecurity challenge to the electirc power grid must be treated.

Utilities need to develop a social media strategy

I have blogged before about the use of social media by utilties to communicate with the public.  Colorado Springs Utilties used Facebook during the Colorado forest fires to keep people apprised of the status of the fires.  As another example, Southern California Edison (@socaledison) uses Twitter to report extreme weather alerts, outages, and restoration progress.

At the EDIST 2013 Conference in Toronto there were two presentation that focussed on social media, primarily for customer interaction management.  But utilities are just beginning scratch the surface in this area, so the talks were intended to make the audience aware of just how pervasive social media has become.

Facebook
FB has a billion users. If it were a country, FB would be the third largest. Half of the users use mobile devices.  The average user spends 5 hours a week on FB.  FB supports 70 languages.  FB users used to be primarily a younger crowd, but the older age groups are now growing faster.  There are about an equal number of male and female users.  For the Canadians out there, apparently Tim Hortons has 2 million "friends" on FB.

Twitter
140 million active users, 55% of them women. 41% of users use smartphones to tweet.

Youtube
Youtube has become the 2nd largest search engine, after Google.

Pinterest
25 million users, 72% of them women. 

These are very  impressive statistics, and the clear message is that in this time of the smart grid and in that context the much greater importance of the customer relationship utilities need to prioritize the development of a social media strategy.

Moving from 2D design to 3D design standards in electricity distribution

The Utilities Standards Forum (USF) is an organization representing about 50 Ontario electricity distribution companies.  Its goal is collaboratively to define standards for its members to reduce duplication of effort.  

The USF has developed design standards for electricity distribution that meet the requirements of Ontario Regulation 22/04 under the Electricity Act of 1998.  Currently these are in the form of paper or PDF documents containing 2D isometric views of the components used in electricity distribution such as insulators, clamps, surge arrestors, fuse-cutouts, terminations, cross arms, cable guards, and other types of equipment.

There is pressure to move to 3D design standards.  There are several motivations for this.  In this time of the challenge of an aging workforce in the utility industry, increasing the efficiency of engineers and designers is an important motivator.  But another equally important one is the increasing number of younger designers and engineers that have been brought up in  3D digital world and want to work in a modern 3D environment.

At the EDIST 2013 Conference in Toronto an overview of the new 3D design standards was presented by Ron Lapier and Lori Gallauger of the USF.  The new 3D standard is a major step forward in two ways.  First of all the components required for electricity distribution design are now 3D so that electricity distribution design can be performed in a 3D environment.  But equally important USF intends to make them available digitally in the form of a library of DWG files containing 3D objects that can be brought into a 3D CAD environment and integrated with other components to create a completely 3D representation of an  electricity distribution design.  The design can be viewed and manipulated in 3D.  As well 2D drawings for construction can be generated from the 3d model.  The components have real world coordinates so that clearances and dimensions can be directly measured from the 3D model.