Inference, people and the Internet of Things

Last week I attended Urban Prototyping London, a festival held at Imperial College. I wanted to share a few of my thoughts inspired by the Internet of Things session. This included presentations from Mischa Dohler, Duncan Wilson, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino and Ian Brown.

The key change happening because of the Internet of Things is the move towards an actuated internet, one in which the data we collect is used to make changes in the physical world. This most-commonly comes with the tag “cyber-physical systems” but it seems that the focus is usually on the ‘things’ – buildings, heating systems, transportation networks – infrastructure generally. But there is clearly a human side of this that is just as important – perhaps more so.

Some research at Cambridge, which made the news recently, looked at correlation between what we ‘like’ on Facebook and likelihood of sexual preference, participation in illegal activities etc. We are not yet at the point where this inferred information is being used against us, but there are examples where similar inference is being used and there is nothing to stop this happening more and more. In some ways it’s the modern equivalent of how our credit rating is built up. In the future what will be acceptable for people to infer from our online behaviour and use against us? Would it be okay if we could infer from seemingly un-connected information who was going to commit crimes and take action before they did? This risks sounding a bit like the plot of Minority Report, but surely something similar can’t be too far away.

Up until now the link between what information is available and what is being inferred has always been transparent – or at least fairly easy to work out. If you don’t want pictures on Facebook to be seen by your employers then all you need to do is set your privacy appropriately. The recent case of Paris Brown’s past activity on Twitter coming back to damage her career is in some ways no different to a tabloid expose on a politician’s past misdemeanor. The same arguments about whether it is appropriate to expose elements of someone’s private life are similar in both cases.

I guess what this post is about is not the Internet of Things, it is still the Internet of People. The same tools which actuate/control our infrastructure can be used to take action when the data comes from us. But as systems become more and more capable of taking decisions automatically based on what they infer about us, the more we’ll need to be careful about the assumptions they are allowed to make.

Prospecting for cities – when does a smart city become worth the price?

A distinction is often drawn between new-build and retrofit when talking about smart cities. New-build is touted as the dream scenario. Chance for a fresh start; to kit out infrastructure with the latest technology right from the start. Global population trends reinforce this. If our society is urbanising and whole new cities are being built then we need to make sure we get it right first time rather than adding them to the retrofit list a few years down the line.

Retrofit is painted as the more difficult problem. Ageing infrastructure that would be costly and disruptive to replace or upgrade – both as a direct cost and because of huge disruption. I was fascinated recently in Boris Johnson’s book about influential figures that made London the city it is to read about when London’s sewers were put in. Even at the time the work must have required huge disruption, even if with obvious benefit. Someone, somewhere made the decision that the cost was justified by the benefit. Nowadays we focus on the disruption as an almost insurmountable barrier, but the question of balancing costs against benefits is still a valid one.

Of course cities seem more complicated nowadays. It’s not just a sewage pipe, it’s the water, gas, phone lines and underground lines all sharing the same physical space – more or less. When a water pipe bursts it can flood underground stations. Digging up a gas main can knock out your phone and internet connections. And any work whatsoever causes pain to the people in our ever congested cities. To make things more complicated, we often don’t know exactly what’s out there. We may have a fair idea from original plans but the older they are the more there is uncertainty about what has happened over the years. It’s possible to create amazing fly-throughs of cities using building information modelling but uncertainty is always there. In a world where each of our infrastructures is owned and maintained by a different private organisation things can quickly fall into the too difficult category.

Yet, when you ask people how a smart city should operate, you quite often hear people imagining a world where the phone company coordinates digging up your road with the electricity and the gas company. The benefits are obvious; less disruption to you from closed roads; more efficient use of man-power and materials. So why doesn’t it happen?

One fact from the Olympics that I thought was really interesting was the introduction of a charge for digging up the street – even if only temporarily. London obviously didn’t want bad press from delays caused by roadworks. I suspect that the effect of this was to defer non essential work. But if it was permanent, large enough and reduced or even removed if companies coordinated work, wouldn’t the effect be realisation of this smart city example?

To change tack slightly (and explain the title of this post), isn’t the retrofitting of our cities to make them smart exactly the same as the decision process an oil or gas company uses when discovering a new field and deciding when it is the right time to exploit them? You invest in creating the map of what’s under there and what you would have to invest to get it out. And you know what you need to sell it at to make money. You still carry risk; if you start to exploit a field that needs to be sold at $100 a barrel and the price drops then you lose money. The same could be true for smart city services. If the incentives are right, and there is money to be made, why wouldn’t a company prospect our cities and benefit from the rewards of investing in smart?

Maybe our cities need a nudge to incentivise? Or maybe someone needs to work out the real benefits of joining up? Or maybe it’s just not worth it? It would certainly be good to know.

Simplicity = Simple City

Cities want to be smart. As a marketing brand, the term Smart Cities is difficult to say no to. Who wants to live in a Dumb City? But what does Smart really mean? There’s a danger that it is just becoming the latest must-have prefix, hot on the heels of e-something or i-something. When I was at the Smart Cities Europe conference the other week, there was a challenge to provide a definition of what smart is, and to reclaim its true meaning in order to make being a Smart City mean something. And perhaps more importantly to know when you have achieved it.

The one that resonated with me most was ‘Simple.’

It struck a chord because I had also been at the launch a few weeks prior of Ken Segall’s book ‘Insanely Simple.’ In a nutshell Ken’s book is about the rules he observed in Apple that make up its culture of simplicity. How focusing intently on the simple solution can drive you to great things.

Why can’t these principles be applied to our cities? It’s easy to think of plenty of reasons why not. Sure, we’d all like our cities be focused on making our lives easier. Most of the reasons why cities are a pain are because of the complications. The delays on the trains. Long waits for a bus connection. Long and confusing hunts to find the best deals from our utilities suppliers. The list goes on and on. And of course we would like simple solutions to our problems but they seem just too complex to be solved that way.

A key reason why I can see that Apple could realise a simple service and a city could not is authority. A company can control all the pieces it needs, focus on a clear end goal and have the drive to realise it. A city has so many things to try and deliver, and so many different organisations trying to realise their competing goals that the result is confusion.

But is this giving up too easily? Is the problem that we are trying to focus on too many things? Do we need to re-boot the city itself and re-design things from first principles?

This is much easier said than done. It is far too easy to end up cutting people out when you simplify. What is of great consequence to you might not matter at all to me. So trying to please everyone becomes an almost impossible task and inevitably it will be those people who are least able to shout out who end up being the victims of simplicity.

But I don’t think this means we have to give up on the goal. At the heart of the Simple City is making something that is extremely complex look easy, seamless and, yes, simple. Perhaps we don’t have to re-boot the entire city at once, but to start by thinking about what we are trying to achieve, how that is done and then making the reality appear as simple as possible from the surface. If we can galvanise different groups of people around a shared goal and instill the passion needed to solve the problems of our cities then, yes, I think we will be making our cities a little smarter, one step at a time. And at the heart of that approach needs to be a drive towards simplicity – creating the Simple City.

The art of conversation

I’ve been banging the drum for a while now with some of my colleagues about Twitter. In particular why I personally find it a useful service, why I think it can be beneficial professionally and why I think they should join and make use of it.

I originally joined Twitter at the suggestion of colleague. Given that I work in areas related to ‘Digital’ and to ‘Tech City’ he thought it would look odd if I didn’t have a presence myself. He was definitely right. I have found it useful, starting out by being an observer of others tweet and now joining in myself.

Observation is definitely a useful part of the Twitter experience. I follow people who say things that I am interested in both personally and professionally. The result is that I hear useful things much quicker than I did before. It also helps me to understand people in my professional sphere much better. These two things are at the heart of what makes me an advocate of Twitter, but I feel they are often mis-understood by the Twitter sceptics who often view it as a place where people talk about what they had for lunch (having said that, we’ve seen that something like that can hold a huge amount of interest for people some of the time).

My colleageus often seem worried that Twitter will be a time waster – that they will need to dedicate extra time they don’t have maintaining their Twitter presence. But I think this misses the point. The art of a good conversation is being interested in what the other party has to say. So it is also with Twitter. Yes, if you’re already a well-known individual then there is a high chance that people will want to use Twitter to engage with you. You have to see value for yourself in that conversation to also see Twitter as being worth the time. I think that more people need to be more open to listening to what other people have to say about their own area of interest/expertise. If we close down our channels to allow only those people we already know, or those who we actively choose  to connect with us then our own pool of ideas and influences will be much poorer as a result.

Of course, the other side to having a good conversation is making sure you say some interesting and useful things yourself. This doesn’t have to be a constant stream of profound statements and original thought. It can be an interesting link or article, or something someone else has said that you found thought-provoking. Having said that, your own ideas and insights are what makes a tweet unique to you. It makes sense that the people you’d find most useful to engage in conversation with on Twitter are the same ones who’d only want to bother talking to you if you were saying interesting things yourself.

What makes a good conversation? Interested parties on both sides. Why should you spend time starting new conversations? Because you see the value in deepening your own understanding and thought process. Why do it on Twitter? Because it means you can reach out to people you never thought possible before, and they can reach out to you.