Transportation expert Bob McQueen, consultant to Teradata and other vendors, suggests that transit operators offer riders a deal: their data for use of their location, speed, and other details. But at first it’s only for an in-house experiment. First question: How much would it cost the transit operator?
Cities with data
Teradata’s Customer Journey in smart cities: still beta
Is Teradata’s Customer Journey headed for any smart city near you? Yes, but not soon, if senior marketing VP Chris Twogood’s reply to my question is any guide.
Teradata’s Customer Journey has potentially enormous reach across all kinds of applications. It ingests all kinds of data, dives deep for meaning, and then springs tailored, real-time messaging on whoever needs it. It’s been put to use so far in retail, finance, life science, and medicine.
It’s a force that Teradata itself is still learning to apply — which helps explain Chris’s encouraging but vague answer to my question during his presentation last Friday on Boulder BI Brain Trust.… Read the rest “Teradata’s Customer Journey in smart cities: still beta”
Algorithmic city, Sicilian style
I’m all for making data work for San Francisco, a city I know well and which strives to be “smart.” But then I think of Palermo, Sicily, a city I know a little bit. It has similar aspirations, but they start from a much different place — with a warm, rich indigenous culture that’s not so easily handled by algorithms.
A few years back at my relative’s house in Sicily just west of Palermo, eleven people crowded around her kitchen table about 9 on a Wednesday night. They joked, talked, nibbled, drank a little bit of my cousin’s white table wine.… Read the rest “Algorithmic city, Sicilian style”
Cities / Too much “smart” can make you dumb
Richard Sennett’s new book, Buildings and Dwellings, has a new variety of ambivalence about so-called “smart cities.” It’s one I hadn’t heard.
From the Los Angeles Review of Books’ review:
Referring to smart cities that use technology to dictate city life and surveil citizens, he warns, “By using machines, people would stop learning. They would become stupefied. The prescriptive smart city is a site for this stupefaction.”
But there might be a kind of “smart” that actually makes people, not machines, smarter.
… Read the rest “Cities / Too much “smart” can make you dumb”Sennett, though, holds out hope for technology that can “coordinate” urban life, by exposing citizens to new ideas and enabling them to understand their worlds and voice their opinions more clearly than they currently can.
Don’t just sit there waiting for the bus, tutor a machine
I can’t help but think of the street person with a sign saying, “Will work for food” when I read about an experiment conducted at bus stops in Finland.
Vassilis Kostakos at the University of Oulu in Finland and colleagues put up four large LCD touchscreens in bus stops and other busy public areas. A sign invited passersby to touch — and to help train malaria-detecting software.
Was it worthwhile? Apparently it was.
… Read the rest “Don’t just sit there waiting for the bus, tutor a machine”They got 1200 answers over 25 days and found the accuracy of the results was comparable to those of paid workers on Mechanical Turk. Lone users were the most active, perhaps because they were free from peer pressure or distraction.