Blog posts

Agent Technology for Energy Systems (ATES2012) workshop

Tuesday 5 June 2012, Valencia, Spain

By Koen van Dam

The Agents and Autonomous Multi-Agent Systems conference (AAMAS) is one of the leading events for those interested in everything that is agent. Since 2010, Alex Rogers and his colleagues from Southampton University organise a workshop at the AAMAS conference focused solely on applications in the energy domain: Agent Technology for Energy Systems (ATES).

ATES2012, held on the 5th of June 2012 in Valencia, Spain, was an excellent opportunity to present the Digital City Exchange (DCE) programme to a community of modellers and domain experts. While we only just got started with the project and it was too early to present detailed outcomes, a short paper was accepted for the workshop after review and feedback from the workshop participants on the initial stages was positive.

Internet of Things Tech Meetup 8 #iotlondon

Tuesday 22 May 2012, Crayon London

By Koen van Dam

After previously attending the Internet of Things Meetup Meetup #6, it was only a matter of time before DCE would return to another edition of this informal get-together of a community focused on machine to machine communication, open data and trying to change the world. For IoT Meetup #8 the talks had a smart city/smart home/energy focus.

Before the three speakers gave their short presentation sparking off some interesting debates, Owen Davies explained the recent rebranding of Pachube to Cosm. In addition to providing a fresh new design and a name which is easier to pronounce (no more feeling smug hearing other people struggle with this after finally getting it right yourself), the new website wants to offer users more than just a place to store their data to be processed elsewhere.

CASA Smart Cities: Bridging physical and digital #casaconf

Friday 20 April 2012, Senate House, University of London

By Koen van Dam

CASA, the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at UCL chose “Smart Cities: bridging physical and digital” [pdf] as the theme of their conference held at the Senate House in Central London on the 20th of April 2012. Smart cities and digital… of course DCE had to be there.

Prof Michael Batty, chair of the management board of CASA, opened the conference by going back 40 years in the past to highlight the many advances of the digital age, most notably the rise of the internet, and how they have changed life in cities.

Software engineering and the digital economy

Tuesday 6th March, Imperial College Business School

By Antoine Vernet

Anthony Finkelstein, dean of the Faculty of Engineering Sciences at UCL and a professor of Computer Science was at Imperial College Business School on March 6, to give a talk entitled “Engineering Challenges of the Digital Economy”. His talk addressed discrepancies between technical issues of software development and the necessity to address consumer demand and to build sustainable business models for software companies.

The discipline of software engineering needs to rise to the challenges presented by the digital economy. In his talk, Anthony Finkelstein addressed 10 challenges facing software engineering in the digital economy.

The future of IT

Wednesday 8th March, Imperial College Business School

By Richard Foulsham

Lem Lasher, as Group President of Global Business Solutions and Chief Innovation Officer of CSC is in a unique position to assess the influences upon and potential future direction of the digital economy, having both the analytical capabilities of a leading edge consultancy and a business that’s involved in the day to deployment of IT around the world within his remit.

During this lecture he shared with us some of the “points of view” that his organisation has developed around “next practice”, likely developments that clever players in the IT market can use to gain an advantage, and identified some of the areas that he thinks will grow and become important as the digital revolution gets underway.

Open Data: Powering the Information Age

Technology Visionaries RAEng lecture series

Wednesday 22 February 2012, the Royal Society, London

By Claire Thorne and Koen van Dam Unsure of how many notable FREng’s to expect in the audience, we arrived at the Royal Society (the current base for the RAEng during their refurbishment). With twenty-four FREng’s on the delegate list, including one on stage, we weren’t disappointed (but possibly just a little underdressed!).

The lecture by Prof Nigel Shadbolt FREng (Prof of Artificial Intelligence, University of Southampton) was part of the RAEng’s Technology Visionaries series and promised a whistle-stop tour through the vast topic that is Open Data.

Smart City Expo 2012: debating future cities and innovation models

29th November – 2nd December 2011, Barcelona, Spain

by Francesca Bria

The first Smart City Expo hosted more than 50 cities around the world, 118 businesses, over 6000 participants and 2000 panellists. The Expo announced the creation of a global Network of Smart Cities coordinated by the City of Barcelona, encompassing cities and businesses around the world. The objective is to promote policy actions and activities in this new field, by creating global common standards and criteria for the effective implementation of smart cities at a global level. The Expo was a meeting point for professionals active in the field of digital future cities, including heads of public administrations, practitioners and academics.

The LERU Research Seminar – JPI Urban Europe

Thursday 24th – Friday 25th November 2011, Utrecht, the Netherlands

By Koen van Dam

The University of Utrecht organised and hosted a LERU Research Seminar and invited researchers of members of LERU, the League of European Research Universities, to discuss a proposal of a Joint Programme Initiative (JPI) on dimensions for new research under the Urban Europe research programme. Participants came from the Netherlands (Utrecht, Amsterdam and Leiden) as well as France, Germany and Belgium (Paris Sud, Munich and Leuven). The United Kingdom was represented by Professor Phil Allmendinger from Cambridge and Dr Koen van Dam from Imperial College London.

Who is the innovator?

Driving New Business Development: From Insights to Innovation

18:30-19:30, 22nd November 2011, Imperial College Business School

Blog by Richard Foulsham

The world has changed. A company like Ericsson cannot rely on developing its current technology to generate income in the future. That was the message that Magnus Karlsson, Director, New Business Development & Innovation at Ericsson left us with when he came to deliver a distinguished guest lecture at Imperial College Business School. We are moving towards a networked society. It is becoming cheaper and cheaper to connect ‘things’ to the internet and along with this diversity of things come a far wider number of participants and a consequent breakdown of traditional industry boundaries.