In Boston I met with Joe Paradiso of the MIT Media Lab. Joe thinks that the concept of the Sensing City is “intriguing.”  He sees that it’s a given that this concept will make it’s way into the fabric of cities in the future, but at the moment most of the data is locked down and proprietary.  For the concept to work well it must be the opposite.

In addition he noted that for the concept to work well, the data from the city must be of use to the people that live in the city.

The new MIT Media Lab building is layered with sensors, and the data from these is visualised here (note – plugin required).  This uses a game engine to create the graphics that allow you to fly through the building and interact with the data. You can get a better idea of that in this short video.

This video is fascinating as it hints at the potential of what you could do if you had similar visualisations of an entire city.

However Joe deals mainly with smart buildings, and recommended talking with his colleague Kent Larson who deals with the city side of the Media Labs work.  I’ll be following up with Kent to get his thoughts.

While at the Media Lab I also met with Wei Pan, who updated me on the MIT City Science Initiative. The background for this states:

We are seeking strategic partners from industry and government to develop targeted research projects and living lab deployments around the themes of urban design, mobility-on-demand, energy, big data, responsive technologies, and integrated live-work environments. Our mission is to develop urban strategies that can result in:

• 100x Reduction in CO2 emissions
• 10x Reduction in traffic congestion
• 5x Improvement in livability
• 2x Improvement in creativity

This feels like there’s a place for Christchurch in this somewhere…