The International Space Apps Challenge attracted over 9,000 participants in 75 locations in 50 countries on 20-21 April. On Campus Lindholmen in Gothenburg more than 100 people gathered for a weekend dedicated to problem solving, programming and creativity.

The purpose of the NASA-staged the event – which was organized for the second time – was to develop solutions to challenges within well specified areas such as robotics, geographic analysis, meteorology, visualization, 3D technology and wireless communication. All solutions were submitted as open source, and are now available to solve global social problems.13 teams were formed and took on the task of developing their concepts during an intense weekend. Nico Boh, Patrik Bäckström and James Omoya teamed up with Allen Smith from Ericsson and Marcus Hedenström from Wireless Car, decided on the challenge “Smart Cities, Smart Climate” and proceeded into a two-three hour long brainstorming session that led to the concept of “Greener Cities”.

The work over the weekend continued with developing a prototype to demonstrate the vision. Primarily for the jury, but the group went to work with the aim of a concept that could, in the longer term, be presented to the public.
– So basically what we came up with is a garden monitoring sensor, that can do a lot of things. It can monitor your plants and tell you if they need water, and it registers the quality of the air around your garden, says James Omoya.

“Street view” of the air quality
Data from the sensors that people keep in their garden will be crowd sourced in order to provide a holistic picture of, for example, the air quality throughout Gothenburg. The group also sees that it would be possible to to mount sensors on buses and trams, to collect information about for example the emission along the routes.
– The idea is that the city itself has an urge to be as climate friendly as possible, it doesn’t have to be each individual, says Patrik Bäckström.

One of the objectives is to offer a “street view” over the air quality in the absolute vicinity. Areas with low emissions are indicated by green circles, and areas with poor air quality are highlighted in red.
– Environmental data today is available for countries, or maybe bigger cities, but you will never get it for certain areas, neighborhoods or even streets. Our idea is to say “wouldn’t it be nice to see how the air quality of your neighborhood is”, says Nico Boh.

Fuglesang and Coquand in the jury
The concept appealed to the local jury, which featured names such as Swedish astronaut Christer Fuglesang, Olle Norberg, chairman of the Swedish National Sapceboard and former CSE Head of Department Catarina Coquand, and “Greener Cities” was selected for global judging. An international jury will select the four best entries in the world. There will also be a public vote on the website spaceappschallenge.org – the winner of the vote will receive a special “public award”.

For the international assessment, the winning team from Gothenburg has produced a two-minute video presentation.
– We are delighted to be part of the competition. It has been a great experience, but really, it’s not so much about competing. The basic idea behind the challenge is to get as many people as possible from as many different countries as possible to come together and develop something great together. It’s about collaboration, says James Omoya.

See the promotion video for “Greener Cities” here

Source: Chalmers University

The agreement, called a consent decree, will force the county to upgrade its leaky sewage system following violations of laws such as the federal Clean Water Act.

In addition to the $1.6 billion in repairs, the county will have to incur other expenses, including $15 million to cover maintenance and management costs, $2 million over five years from general-obligation bond funds to install sewers in an industrial and commercial area north of the Miami River to reduce water pollution, a one-time $978,100 civil fine and $825,000 to hire an outside monitor to oversee the decree’s implementation.

Read more via the Miami Herald

“On behalf of our employees worldwide – we are delighted to accept this Geospatial World Leadership Award as the top geospatial solutions company for 2012. We are indeed very proud of what we have accomplished over the past few years in developing and delivering unique high value business solutions via geospatial data correlation and presentation. We are especially pleased that such efforts are recognized and valued on a global basis,” said Jim Eberle, Critigen CEO.

In the last year, Critigen has completed major milestones in GIS, including deployment of one of the largest ever implementations of Esri ArcGIS Server, major enterprise integrations of SAP and GIS, large-scale enterprise deployments, and several significant geospatial applications deployed in support of defense, local and state governments, transportation authorities and energy companies in the US, UK and the Middle East.

About Critigen
Critigen is a full-lifecycle spatial systems integrator driving government and private-sector performance through spatial IT solutions and managed IT services. With global reach and top-tier partnerships Critigen delivers all components of a geospatial program: data collection, spatial processing, analytics and intelligence, application development, mobile solution development, hosting and Cloud services. http://www.critigen.com/gis.

Read more via TakePart

As architect Galina Tachieva notes in her foreword, “Whether they are downtown redevelopments, new greenfield villages, retrofits or ambitious sustainability experiments, the projects in this book demonstrate the long-needed revival of our thinking about urbanism.”

Read more via Planetizen

Efficient project collaboration and communication to the public is fundamental in building and managing sustainable cities. Leveraging the benefits of clarity of 3D in illustrating projects, visualization tools provided as an internet service enable easy distribution of information and collaborative work in projects teams, Including external architects, experts, builders and stakeholders involved in the project.

Norrköping’s objective with the project was to increase the dialogue with the citizens and to invite citizens to participate in the development of a sensitive area of the city with many historical buildings. The city published a virtual interactive 3D model of the area on its web page and invited citizens to explore the city interactively and to read about the vision for its development. Over 450 citizens submitted comments and suggestions into the 3D model as input to the planning department.

“We regard the award as a confirmation of our effort to establish an appealing method for increased dialogue with citizens in urban development. We will continue to work with the citizens to develop the city of Norrköping using 3D visualization, says Hans Revenhorn City Planning director in Norrköping.”

Agency9 CityPlanner is a service on internet to support cities and local authorities in the urban planning. Planners and project team members can from a web browser easily access tools and 3D city models and relevant planning data. Projects can by non-CAD experts be illustrated and share to other project team members for review. From the communication central can interactive 3D illustration by published by a click to the web or selected exhibition devices and displays.

“We are overwhelmed that we together with Norrköping receives this international award based on our cloud service CityPlanner. This encourages us in the work to create viable web based 3D solutions based on our leading 3DMaps platform. We are committed to continue evolving our CityPlanner to provide organizations easy access to 3D data and tools for efficiency in work and communication.” says Håkan Engman CEO Agency9.

About Agency9
Agency9 is the leading supplier of software of web-based 3D visualization of geographic information and maps for collaboration and communication in the infrastructure-, construction- and public sector. Agency9’s product portfolio includes 3DMaps, CityPlanner and other web based 3D Geographical Information Solutions.  The company was established 2003 and have several international cities as customers such as Gothenburg, Oslo and Berlin. www.agency9.com

About Geospatial Award
Geospatial World – The Geospatial Industry Magazine is encouraging and recognizing excellence in the various projects, innovations and policies that have helped shape the future of the geospatial industry. Geospatial World Awards were born in order to promote and recognize such excellence thus bringing out and highlighting the best practices and innovations in the global geospatial industry. http://www.geospatialworldforum.org/2013/

On display at the 2013 International Parking Institute Conference and Expo in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., Merge is built on an open architecture platform that enables cities to “plug and play” any field technology or software system that manages parking operations – from parking space sensors and meters to handheld devices as well as the Internet, smart phones, and dynamic message signs for real-time parking guidance.

“For the first time, parking managers have immediate visibility into what is happening on their streets,” said David Cummins, senior vice president of Parking and Justice Solutions, Xerox Transportation. “Now municipalities can make data-driven decisions on everything from meter collections to rate structures – improving performance and creating additional revenues.”

In Los Angeles, Merge is deployed as part of the City’s LA Express Park™ program, where Xerox’s algorithm-driven pricing model sets parking prices based on supply and demand, helping improve parking turn over and space availability and provide a better experience for drivers.

“Merge integrates both our back-end parking systems and in-field parking technology,” said Dan Mitchell, senior transportation engineer, City of Los Angeles,overseeing LA Express Park. “The central management capabilities provide valuable insight into our total parking environment and the open platform allows us to be flexible in sourcing suppliers.”

Merge processes instant information for on-street and off-street parking spaces and provides system occupancy, maintenance, payment and collection status, and customer service response data. Merge is also equipped with Xerox’s proprietary dynamic pricing engine that can be used to recommend parking rates based on historical data as well as adjust parking prices by predicting demand using data from current conditions.

Xerox is the leader in smart parking solutions, processing over 16 million tickets annually and supporting more than 150,000 meters worldwide for clients.

About Xerox

Since the invention of Xerography 75 years ago, the people of Xerox (NYSE: XRX) have helped businesses simplify the way work gets done. Today, we are the global leader in business process and document management, helping people be more efficient so they can focus on their real business. Headquartered in Norwalk, Conn., more than 140,000 Xerox employees serve clients in 160 countries, providing business services, printing equipment and software for commercial and government organizations. Learn more at www.xerox.com.

One of the most comprehensive efforts currently underway is in Wellington, New Zealand, where the largest unit of that city’s emergency management office is the Community Resilience Team (CRT). Dedicated solely to equipping and empowering informal networks to respond when disaster strikes, the CRT trains “Community-Driven Emergency Management” (CDEM) volunteers in how to promote preparedness among their own networks, as well as to respond as a community or plug into the official government response. Community response plans are facilitated by the CRT to guide planning at the local level to coordinate activities and manage resources like food and fuel. “Our whole model is getting normal people involved,” says Dan Neely, senior adviser for emergency preparedness at the Wellington Emergency Management Office. “People who are capable in their daily lives will be capable during an event. We’re trying to get to those people now… so that when a large-scale event happens, John Doe can tap into the wider community response plan.”

Read more via The Next City

That’s because Kennecott employees expected a slide months in advance. For years, the mine has used sensors embedded in its walls to detect stress in rock, and lasers perched on the pit rim to measure the position of hundreds of reflectors mounted to the mine face. New radar technology allows the company to detect changes as small as 1/100th of an inch in the distance between monitoring stations inside the pit and large areas of the mine wall every six to eight minutes.

Read more via High Country News

Below is a YouTube video of the text of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash being read where a crude avatar copies the head and mouth movements of someone at High Fidelity.

Source: MIT Technology Review