Smart Cities-Smart Futures Competitors

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected and technology-dependent, a new wave of smart applications is changing how we approach everyday activities. Utility appliances such as intelligent fridges (yes, you read that right), personal assistants like Amazon’s Alexa or smart home security applications create opportunities for more efficient living. While the ideas of “Smart Cities” has been proposed as the future of urbanism, the question remains: how do we connecy this new technology for the ultimately “efficient” society?

Cities Of The Future

Smart cities bring together infrastructure and technology to improve the quality of life of citizens and enhance their interactions with the urban environment. But how can data from areas such as public transport, air quality meters and energy production be integrated and effectively used?

By rendering more technology capable of communicating across platforms, IoT generates more data that can help improve various aspects of daily life. Cities can identify both opportunities and challenges in real-time, reducing costs by pinpointing issues prior to their emergence and allocating resources more accurately to maximize impact.

Efficiency And Flexibility

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When most people speak about smart cities, they often imagine a futuristic metropolis, as depicted in movies and television. In reality, smart cities will be the product of the ongoing and gradual evolution of information technologies — with which we’re already familiar in our everyday lives — and will not look much different than they do today.

The smart city market is projected to grow from $81 billion globally in 2018 to over $158 billion in 2022, according to IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Smart Cities Spending Guide. In a smart city, internet of things (IoT) networks can be deployed to create applications that will change the manner in which residents coexist with technology. Soon, parking structures will tell drivers which spots are open, smart outdoor lamps will automatically adjust for weather and climate conditions and green buildings will be able to monitor air quality and optimize energy consumption. The IoT will enable us to constantly sense and process information from the outside world in an effort to bring efficiency to everyday life in a city.

However, these advancements aren’t possible without the adequate wireless connectivity that evolves with these technologies to meet escalating bandwidth demands.

Smart Cities Are Already On Their Way

A 2016 survey by the United States Conference of Mayors demonstrated that smart city IoT projects in cities of every size are well underway in key areas, including transportation, energy efficiency, government services and health care. For an example, look no further than Los Angeles. The city is installing new LEDs in 4,500 miles of streetlights. This will increase visibility in those areas, leading to safer roads and areas surrounding them. These bulbs will also tap into an interconnected system that reports any malfunctions that may arise, speeding up the replacement process. Overseas, Nanjing, China, installed sensors in 10,000 taxis, 7,000 buses and 1 million private cars to help track and monitor traffic patterns.

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Milwaukee, May 2, 2019 – Last week, the Medical College of Wisconsin learned that three MCW teams were recognized among 12 winners in a statewide innovation competition, Smart Cities – Smart Futures, sponsored by Foxconn Technology Group. Foxconn’s goal for this grant competition is to invest in a broad spectrum of new ideas generated by college and university teams throughout the state to improve the health and quality of life of Wisconsin communities.

Foxconn announced Smart Cities – Smart Futures in August, stating it would award up to $1 million over the next three years. The competition focuses on various themes, such as smart mobility, smart buildings, smart homes, smart energy and smart health, as well as efficiency, productivity and the management of resources. More than 300 teams entered the contest, including several dozen from MCW. On April 25, at an event at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, Smart Cities – Smart Futures representatives announced that 12 teams had been selected to receive $5,000 each to support their ideas.

Teams from MCW comprised exactly one-fourth of the winners and are led by faculty, staff and students.

“It was a privilege for me to attend the announcement of the contest winners and celebrate alongside three of our outstanding teams,” says Joseph E. Kerschner, MD, Dean of the Medical College of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Provost and Executive Vice President of the Medical College of Wisconsin. “They represent MCW’s ‘can do’ attitude which makes us such a wonderful asset to our communities and a vital part of tomorrow’s smart cities.”

MCW’s Smart Cities – Smart Futures winning teams are:

Michelle Botts, Devashish Joshi and Adhitya Ramamurthi, students, School of Medicine

Project Summary: Project aims to bring virtual reality modules to medical students and residents to assist in learning and medical exposure. Additionally, the project would target medical employees to train for emergency protocols and patients to ease anxiety about certain procedures.

Zak Sharif-Sidi, student, School of Medicine

Project Summary: Project focuses on the development of web-based technology that attempts to the close the gap between doctors and the organizations in our community. The solution solves this problem by integrating into the clinical workflow to algorithmically run community-level data against clinical data in order to identify and refer patients to specific resources in the community. The result is early risk identification with actionable next steps, identifying resources in the community and facilitating logical connections for patients to stay healthy.

Other Team Members: Bradley Crotty, MD; Mike Anderes, PT, MBA

Brandon Tefft, PhD, Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering

Project Summary: Project focuses on the development of a modern, computerized stethoscope that can produce 4-dimensional (4D) sound maps from a patient over space and time, which can be used to diagnose diseases of the heart, lungs, respiratory tract, gastrointestinal tract and joints. Furthermore, the system can be deployed into the community by using a smartphone app to capture the sound data and transmit the results to a physician, allowing for more frequent screening and earlier diagnosis and treatment.

Other Team Members: Shayan Shafiee

MCW’s Smart Cities – Smart Futures honorable mention teams are:

Jennifer Lindner, Project Manager, Information Services

Project Summary: Product is a Technology Integrated Home System that connects people with advanced technologies like augmented reality, mixed reality, artificial intelligence, internet of things, and smart devices to improve the quality of life, productivity, efficiency and convenience to all people without compromising efforts and achievements of future generations.

Anna Palatnik, MD, Assistant Professor, Obstetrics and Gynecology (Maternal Fetal Medicine)

Project Summary: Project focuses on the use of artificial intelligence technology and machine learning to reduce the risks of sudden infant death syndrome.

Shayan Shafiee, student, Graduate School, Biomedical Engineering

Project Summary: Project involves the development of a non-invasive means of detecting biomarkers in circulating blood or other bodily fluids that would enable earlier detection of diseases such as cancer and better management of diseases such as diabetes.

Other Team Members: Brandon Tefft, PhD

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YOU MAY NOT REALIZE IT, but you’ve probably already used machine learning technology in your journalism. Perhaps you used a service like Trint to transcribe your interviews, punched in some text for Google to translate, or converted the Mueller Report into readable text. And if you haven’t used it yourself, machine learning is probably at work in the bowels of your news organization, tagging text or photos so they can be found more easily, recommending articles on the company website or social media to optimize their reach or stickiness, or trying to predict who to target for subscription discounts.

Machine learning has already infiltrated some of the most prosaic tasks in journalism, speeding up and making possible stories that might otherwise have been too onerous to report. We’re already living the machine-learning future. But, particularly on the editorial side, we’ve only begun to scratch the surface.

To be clear: I’m not here to hype you on a fabulous new technology. Sorry, machine learning is probably not going to save the news industry from its financial woes. But there’s nonetheless a lot of utility for journalists to discover within it. What else can machine learning do for the newsroom? How can journalists use it to enhance their editorial work in new ways? And what should they be wary of as they take up these powerful new tools?

The phrase “machine learning” describes a kind of finely crafted and engineered tool. Trint, for example, is able to transcribe an audio clip because its algorithm has learned how patterns of sound correspond to patterns of letters and words. Such algorithms are trained on many hours of manually transcribed audio. The algorithm learns the ways that patterns in audio translate into patterns of text, and can then perform transcription on new samples of audio.

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