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Dreamit UrbanTech Summit; Reshaping Cities

Be among the first to get a look at the city of the future at the Dreamit UrbanTech Summit to be held in Tampa, FL, on Tuesday, December 5th. It’s your chance to meet and mingle with the government officials, innovators and entrepreneurs who are going to be reshaping cities from the ground up.

The intersection of Urban development and Industrial IoT will be discussed by Dan Doctoroff, CEO of Sidewalk Labs in one of the four keynote presentations. He’ll outline how his company and others like it are improving life in cities for everyone through the application of technology to solve urban problems. Commercial real estate professionals will also be able to learn how new tech is reducing operating costs and increasing efficiencies in their space. An additional 35 speakers will fill in details through presentations and panel discussions.

The entrepreneurs in the Dreamit 2017 class (the first to call Tampa home) will also be on hand to provide demos of their products and discuss the many ways they will be changing your definition of “city” as well. Networking opportunities through official and unofficial sessions will allow you to meet with the venture capitalists, construction professionals and city Economic Opportunity officials who are making it all a reality today.

The event will be held at the Tampa Marriott Waterside Hotel and Marina, 700 South Florida Ave, Tampa, FL. Doors open at 8:00am for breakfast and networking. End the day with more networking and cocktails between 3:30 and 5:00pm.

Dreamit Summit registration link

If you can’t make it to the Summit, you can still get a behind the scenes glimpse at what’s in store for Tampa and the country through Dreamit and Bold Business. As media partner for the summit, we will be featuring videos from the event as well as in-depth video interviews with the founders of the 2017 Dreamit class beginning with Daniel Farb, Founder of Flower Turbines (coming soon).

Integrated Health Model Initiative by the AMA, IBM, and Stakeholders

The American Medical Association (AMA) started a bold initiative. It is for the development of an integrated health model initiative for big data analytics. If successful, this helps standardize healthcare with a common data model for different organizations to access.

Integrated Health Model Initiative Includes Integrated Data Sharing

Sharing data between various organizations was never easy, even with today’s many modern advances. There has also not been any impetus nor any motivation to have a common data model in the industry for its many different organizations. These groups include hospitals, insurance companies, health care providers, clinics, and government agencies. These same organizations had no reason to share data from the bottom up; at least, not until now.

Without the patient goals, the data consists only of the history, latest conditions and the medication or treatment. Setting goals will greatly improve the health care delivery, and the data stored becomes more informative.

One of the problems with an integrated health care program is that the data does not travel well. Different insurance providers have their own data models. Hospitals have different data requirements from insurance providers, and they may also have different data models from other hospitals. The same is true for other stakeholders. This has led to a mountain of data. Unfortunately, that data is not easily accessible due to the fragmentation inherent from the diverse sources.

Collaboration Towards Integration

The Integrated Health Model Initiative (IHMI) hopes to address the data sharing problem by starting from scratch with a dedicated platform. This is a physician-led undertaking, with IBM, Cerner Corporation, American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), SNOMED Clinical Terms, Intermountain Healthcare, and Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) as its partners.

integrated health model initiative, doctor selecting icons
Integrated health model initiative aims to address data sharing problems.

The goal of IHMI, therefore, is to improve chronic disease care and population health management via a collaborative effort between the partners. This collaborative approach will look at data collection, organization, and exchange, and how to mold it to a patient-centered data model containing important information for improved health care and long-term wellness. The transformation and subsequent massaging of the enormous amount of raw data will result in an informative stream of information accessible and actionable by the people who require it.

To make this happen, it is necessary to draw up standards for key data elements focusing on high-cost and high-impact practice areas like hypertension management and diabetes prevention. These data elements will support the patient-centered care and decision-making platform. There are a lot of comments about the data that is currently available. Specifically, clinical and health systems are not well-organized, resulting in hard-to-extract data. With key IHMI, health record data elements are centered around disease states, making extraction easier.

Data Standards

As much as possible, the IHMI data will make use of existing data standards that’s already in use. Clinicians, and health IT developers will be familiar with these standards. Additionally, IHMI will extend the capability to include information not represented in standardized systems.

The data is incomplete in its current state because it does not include items like patient goals, function, and state. However, without the patient goals, the data consists only of the history, latest conditions and the medication or treatment. Setting goals, therefore, will greatly improve the health care delivery, and the data stored becomes more informative.

With the aim of providing close coordination with physicians, IHMI will try to create data models which encode the necessary information and validate these with proposed relationships between other data elements with the aim of a clear clinical pathway or patient care suggestion.

Urban Tech Movement: The Next American Dream

“Urban Tech,” a relatively new bold idea, is the growing sector of innovation that makes cities and urban areas livable, efficient and connected. Even though it is a still-emerging field, even major companies are pitching in to make cities all over America more exciting to live in. Using a blend of bold ideas from both private entrepreneurship and the community itself, urban tech helps unleash a city’s creative energy and potential.

Many experts and tech leaders are already anticipating how the people of tomorrow will live. With the world rapidly urbanizing, it is predicted that 70% of the world’s population – over 6 billion people – will live in cities within the next three decades. About 1 million people are already moving to urban centers every week, which is an equivalent of an entire medium-sized city.

For centuries, cities have powered the world economy, and that is still an ongoing trend. Large cities are expected to generate about 86% of the worldwide GDP growth between 2015 to 2030.

The Role of Urban Tech

Because of the many aspects, this type of urbanization effects, including infrastructure and business, soon enough it will sweep the technology industry – with technology in itself as the means to an end instead of the term itself. It is a fact that over half of the world’s total population reside in cities, and that is expected to rise to 66% by the year 2050. What’s more, in most regions around the world, a whopping 80% to 90% of people live in cities or moved to one. This mass migration can do one of two things: either it leads to cities bombarded with transportation, water, and housing issues, or to a more promising future that is properly planned and funded.

This explosive growth over the past few decades, even though it puts a lot of pressure on city infrastructure, is a positive pressure nonetheless. When people migrate into a city, they bring with them all the talent and creativity they have, regardless of what industry they are experts in. Many of them are part of a group of smart, highly-educated, and creative class of people – people who bring a refreshing new outlook to city living. They collaborate and willingly share ideas to have a better city living experience, and as such, amazing things happen to both the city and its people.

The urban tech movement seeks to build smarter cities – cities that overcome today’s challenges by proactively finding new solutions for real problems like transportation, water, energy, housing, public spaces, air quality, digital infrastructure, and construction. It’s a new way of thinking about city life, business, and creative class. Urban tech is the art and technology that makes cities more exciting, stimulating, functional, and livable.

Major Infrastructure Overview

Infrastructure helps a city and nation be a stable foundation for everything that happens so that positive and desirable outcomes can occur. It can be divided into two major groups: connectivity and resource distribution.
Logos of companies in Urban Tech

On the one hand, connectivity is the field that focuses on bringing proximity to human interactions. This includes air, sea, and land, in the respective forms of aviation, ports, and roads as well as the public transport system. On the other hand, resource distribution is the infrastructure spanning the entire supply chain for a specific type of resource, including energy and water.

Cities often go hand-in-hand with a dense population, but using tech to optimize these cities makes these places livable and exciting to belong in. When creative minds enter a city and either create or contribute to an urban tech hub, their ideas turn into actions and tangible solutions to many problems affecting the community.

Many names are already helping the urban tech movement fall into place. Sidewalk Labs (an Alphabet, Inc. subsidiary), Urban Tech NYC, Dreamit, Gehl Institute, Civic Hall, Newlab, Urban-X Urban US, Future Labs, and Maker City, are just some of the names collaborating with countless others who are focused on creating an innovative, high-tech, and livable world for the current and future generations.

Examples of Urban Tech Already in Place

As previously mentioned, one of the fortunate things about massive population migration into cities is having a pool of talent and bold ideas. A collaboration between the public and private sectors, including Private-Public Partnerships (PPPs) gets the best of both worlds, allowing such partnerships to solve the community’s day-to-day problems. Such issues include housing, transportation, energy, water, public spaces, and even air quality. Here are some examples of urban tech already in place, thanks to groundbreaking ideas and systems:

Connectivity

Connectivity includes not just communication, but also various forms of aviation, ports, roads, mass transit, and any other technology that allows people to interact and come into contact with one another.

  • Ride-hailing and ride-sharing. Many popular apps like Uber, Lyft, and Via allow people to book rides and carpool for reasonable fees easily. As a bonus for saving money and time, they also help save on gas and emissions while easing traffic flow.
  • Parking apps. Similar to the above in advantages, apps like BestParking and PrimoSpot show drivers the nearest available parking spot.
  • Parking payment systems. Rather than paper receipts or time-limited parking meters that use physical coins, alternatives include paying for and adding money to a meter via an app such as PayByPhone.
  • City guides. These obtain local information on museums, parks, landmarks, restaurants, public art, and real-time traffic.  Apps like these help both tourists and citizens improve their experience in a city.
  • Wi-Fi. On trains, subway stations help to provide updates on news, weather, local traffic, etc.
  • Social media-based crisis response and emergency alert systems. Warnings and alerts regarding traffic accidents, weather events, and other potential emergencies can be delivered rapidly through social media systems.
  • Bike-sharing. Cities like New York, Portland (Oregon), and Washington DC allow people to rent bikes using their credit or debit cards.

Resource Distribution

Population in Smart City: Urban Tech
Resource distribution includes energy and drinking water, among many others. Here are some urban tech examples currently available in many smart cities:

  • Open-data initiatives, Open-data initiatives, such as hackathons. Examples include BigApps, a New York City competition allowing people to create resource-saving apps that help improve the city including restaurant sanitation and building inspection scores, air quality, and even impending legislation that citizens need to be aware of.
  • Pay As You Throw (PAYT) or trash metering. PAYT charges citizens a rate based on how much waste local authorities collect from them, allowing people to look for alternatives such as recycling and composting, to minimize waste.
  • Energy-efficient and sustainable housing. Sites like BedandBreakfast.com focus on eco-friendly houses and B&B businesses, so guests are sure the place they’re staying in sustainable environments.
  • Carbon monoxide detection. Several people have unfortunately experienced carbon monoxide poisoning as it is an odorless gas, but technology has given birth to smart detectors similar to how smoke alarms work.
  • Water-recycling systems. Some cities have public bathrooms which recycle tap water, either re-filtering them or using them for non-human consumption (such as watering plants).

Other Major Investments

Bold leaders and global businesses are recognizing the urbanization trend and dedicating significant resources to its cause:

  • Tampa Water Street. Cascade Investment, LLC and Jeff Vinik have joined forces on a $3 billion project in Florida is the second-largest development project in the United States and the first of its kind in North America.
  • Belmont. Cascade Investment, LLC is investing in a new smart city in Arizona, called “Belmont.” They just bought 25,000 acres of land near Phoenix for $80 million. The tech and business magnate is visualizing a forward-thinking community supported by modern infrastructure, high-tech transport system with autonomous vehicles, and new manufacturing hubs for data centers.
  • Sidewalk Toronto. Google’s parent company Alphabet plans to build a city in Toronto from the internet up. Alphabet’s urban tech unit envisions cities based on sensors, unlimited broadband connectivity, and big data collection.

In Conclusion

The new urban tech movement recognizes that something special is going on around the world. More startups joining the urban tech trend are also operating outside North America and Western Europe. In 2016, Venture Capital also invested $2.7 billion into urban tech in support of these startups. That number is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years. As urbanization increases, and entrepreneurs and technology accelerators like Dreamit focus on urban tech, magical things begin to happen. Companies like GiFly and Flower Turbines, LLC are funded and build revolutionary products. Problems get solved, entertainment and original experiences spring up on every corner, and education, as well as health, improve for everyone in the entire city.

The above are just a few examples of how urban tech affects cities today and how cities should always look forward and ahead. Some of these technologies arose from previous problems, while some came in light of brilliant foresight. Either way, allowing an urban tech to help improve a city affects not only its current residents but allows future generations to experience these luxuries and add on to them as well.

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