It is only the first year of IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge and Canada already has a spot on the esteemed list, with Edmonton earning a spot with its proposal to apply business intelligence to its open data initiative in order to make better decisions to support transportation infrastructure.
Related Story: ‘Smart City’ of Edmonton wins $400k gift from IBM
The program was borne out of IBM’s Executive Service Corps, a program that sees senior executives deployed in metropolitan areas around the globe to help make world-class cities. The executives in that program are deployed to selected cities in groups of five or so, and spend three weeks on location. The Smarter Cities challenge seeks to deploy IBM employees to 100 cities around the world over three years – half of them in developed cities and half in emerging markets.
The Smarter Cities initiative isn’t the only progressive program from Big Blue. It’s E.X.I.T.E Camp brings girls into the IBM building to conduct experiments and have fun, in a bid to get them interested in the fields of science and technology. It’s a response to the low female enrolment in post-secondary programs in these fields.
This video from our sister publication Computerworld takes a look at the program in August 2009.
